90 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BULL. 7 
small fort, built by the French on an elevation. There are now no 
traces of the village, but the situation of the fort may be recognized 
by some remains of chimnies, and the general outline of the fortifi- 
cation, as well as by the fine spring which supplied it with water.” 
Three days later, July 5, 1804, while on the right bank of the Missouri, 
they “came along the bank of an extensive and beautiful prairie, 
interspersed with copses of timber, and watered by Indepandence 
creek. On this bank formerly stood the second village of the Kanzas; 
from the remains it must have been once a large town.” (Op. cit., 
pp. 21-22.) 
The village mentioned by Lewis and Clark as standing on the 
banks of the Kansas River some 40 league above its confluence with 
the Missouri may have been the one visited and described by Maj. 
George C. Sibley during the summer of 1811. Sibley wrote in his 
journal: “ The Konsee town is seated immediately on the north bank 
of the Konsee River, about one hundred miles by its course above 
its junction with the Missouri; in a beautiful prairie of moderate 
extent, which is nearly encircled by the River; one of its Northern 
branches (commonly called the Republican fork, which falls in a 
few hundred paces above the village) and a small creek that flows 
into the north branch. On the north and southwest it is overhung 
by a chain of high prairie hills which give a very pleasing effect to 
the whole scene. s . 
“The town contains one hundred and twenty-eight houses or 
lodges which are generally about 60 feet long and 25 feet wide, 
constructed of stout poles and saplings arranged in form of an 
arbour and covered with skins, bark and mats; they are commodious 
and quite comfortable. The place for fire is simply a hole in the 
earth, under the ridge pole of the roof, where an opening is left 
for the smoke to pass off. All the larger lodges have two, some- 
times three, fire places; one for each family dwelling in it. The 
town is built without much regard to order; there are no regular 
streets or avenues. The lodges are erected pretty compactly to- 
gether in crooked rows, allowing barely. space sufficient to admit a 
man to pass between them. The avenues between these crooked rows 
are kept in tolerable decent order and the village is on the whole 
rather neat and cleanly than otherwise. Their little fields or patches 
of corn, beans and pumpkins, which they had just finished planting, 
and which constitute their whole variety, are seen in various direc- 
tions. at convenient distances around the village. The prairie was 
covered with their horses and mules (they have no other domestic 
animals except dogs).” 
The manuscript journal from which the preceding quotation is 
made is now in the possession of Lindenwood College, St. Charles, 
Mo., the copy having been made by Mrs. N. H. Beauregard. 
