BUSHNELL] VILLAGES WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI 20 
on the Porcupine river was established about 1733 or a little earlier, 
perhaps 1730; they fix the date as about one hundred years before 
the stars fell, 1833. It was a large village and was occupied for fifty 
years or more and then the people abandoned it and moved over to a 
point on Grand river twenty miles above its mouth. The date of the 
removal is given as about the time of a great flood at this point, which, 
it is said, took place about 1784.” (Grinnell, op. cit.) This later 
village existed until about 1840 and appears to have been composed of 
skin lodges, not the permanent earth structures. Sioux tradition 
also places the earlier home of the people who erected the village on 
the Porcupine at some point in the Valley of the Minnesota. 
The second of the two sites mentioned stood some 2 miles below 
Porcupine Creek, and it is the belief of Dr. Grinnell that these were 
the villages to which Lewis and Clark referred in their journals as 
having been passed by the expedition on the 15th and 16th of Oc- 
tober, 1804. At that time game was abundant and several hunting 
parties of the Arikara were encountered, and an entry in the journal 
dated October 15, 1804, reads: “ We stopped at three miles on the 
north a little above a camp of Ricaras who are hunting, where we 
were visited by about thirty Indians. They came over in their skin 
canoes, bringing us meat, for which we returned them beads and 
fishhooks. About a mile higher we found another encampment of 
Ricaras on the south, consisting of eight lodges: here we again ate 
and exchanged a few presents. As we went we discerned numbers 
of other Indians on both sides of the river; and at about nine miles 
we came to a creek on the south, where we saw many high hills re- 
sembling a house with a slanting roof; and a little below the creek 
an old village of the Sharha or Cheyenne Indians . . . At sunset we 
halted, after coming ten miles over several sandbars and points, 
above a camp of ten Ricara lodges on the north side.” (Lewis and 
Clark, (1), pp. 108-109.) Such was the nature of the country a 
little more than a century ago. 
Another ancient village site presenting many interesting features 
stands on the bank of an old bed of the Sheyenne River, near Lis- 
bon, Ransom County, N. Dak. This would have been about midway 
between the Minnesota River and the village on the Missouri near 
Porcupine Creek. A plan of this village made a few years ago is 
now preserved in the Historical Society of North Dakota and was 
reproduced by Dr. Grinnell in the article cited. It shows a large 
number—70 or more—earth-lodge sites, varying in size, but closely 
grouped, and protected by a ditch except on the river side. There 
is a remarkable similarity between this site and others east of the 
Mississippi, where structures of a like form evidently stood in the 
centuries before the coming of Europeans. The ditch may have 
71934°—22——3 
