The Beasts of the Plains

Lewis/Clark Expedition Journals · Story 5 By Clio Walker. This is an AI-assisted third-person historical narrative based on public-domain expedition journals, not a submission by a member of the Corps.

The hunter returned to the boat with news before he returned with meat: he had killed a buffalo on the plain ahead.

On August 23, 1804, Joseph Field went out hunting and came back to report his success. The animal lay on land; the boats and most of the party remained on the river. Lewis took men ashore to bring the buffalo to the next bend. Clark’s two accounts give the working party as eight or twelve men. Either way, this was no small catch that one hunter could carry back.

The buffalo entered the expedition first as the weight of food. It was more than an animal whose name could be added to a journal: it had to be found, killed, butchered, and carried from the plain to the boats. The Missouri enabled the company to move, while also leaving a distance between an animal ashore and provisions aboard that someone had to cross.

That day, two elk swam past, and men fired from the boat. One Clark entry says neither was killed. Later they saw an elk on a sandbar, and Shields shot it through the neck. Animals passed on shore, in the channel, and along the bars. The same gun did not produce the same result under different conditions of distance and water.

Clark killed a deer ashore. Reubin Field rejoined with the horses and two deer. The country was supplying more food, but the people carrying it still had to meet the boats. Men who had failed to arrive the previous night complicated the morning’s departure. Where the boats went, hunters and horses also had to arrive. Their coordination was remade day by day.

Then wind lifted fine sand from the bars. Clark compared it to clouds of smoke and said it adhered to whatever it touched. Grass in the plain where he had walked lay coated with pale dust. More animals did not make the land an easy place for a stroll. Reward and discomfort occurred together, and a larger animal made the labor of taking it away more conspicuous.

Rain continued the following day. Clark went ashore with York and a French youth to hunt again. York was enslaved by Clark, rather than a soldier who had freely joined and enjoyed equal rights. The journal calls him Clark’s servant and records him carrying a deer. Some of the expedition’s food came back on the shoulders of a man denied freedom.

Clark’s accounts of the twenty-fourth differ in their totals. One mentions two bull elk, other animals wounded but not recovered, and additional shooting; another is more abbreviated. The shared action is clear: Clark intercepted the boat and sent men to bring in meat. Rain wet the hunters and carriers. The day’s kill also required further work before it could be kept.

There was another difficulty aboard in the rain. On the twenty-fourth Lewis wound the chronometer, only for it to stop again. He did not know why and feared a defect beyond his power to repair. Observing the sun and determining position required reliable timing. An instrument could fail, just as a hunter could not guarantee a result from every shot.

Hunting, carrying meat, and checking equipment thus sat beside one another in the record. Stores could not simply be counted at departure and assumed serviceable forever. New problems required attention. Before the decision to walk inland, the captains were already carrying difficulties they had not fully resolved.

During these days they heard of an isolated hill north of the river. White Stone River entered the Missouri nearby. Clark recorded local accounts of small beings with large heads and dangerous arrows who attacked people approaching the hill. This was a report of a tradition, not the expedition’s sighting of such figures.

The captains decided to visit the hill, now generally called Spirit Mound, near Vermillion, South Dakota. Its small size was deceptive: modest height did not mean a short walk from the river. At eight on the morning of the twenty-fifth, they left with selected members of the party and York, heading inland.

Their first miles included crossing White Stone River and entering open prairie with little timber or water. Lewis’s dog became so affected by heat and fatigue that it was sent back to the creek. Boats could carry heavy stores along a waterway. Walkers had to support the distance with their own bodies. Leaving the boat also meant leaving the most accessible water behind.

Around noon they reached the mound. Clark estimated its height at sixty-five or seventy feet and described a narrow top with steep slopes on either side. Standing alone on open country, it was more conspicuous than a similar rise within a range of hills. Four hours on foot had brought river travellers to an outlook over the plain.

The mound’s regular shape led them to consider whether people had made it. Its soil, pebbles, and other materials resembled those along the nearby creek, however, so they concluded that it was more probably a natural formation. They did not settle the question with a bare yes or no: observations altered their judgment.

The first striking sight was a gathering of birds around the hill. They stayed until the men approached. Clark then noticed numerous flying ants that the birds were catching. Insects also settled on hats and necks; he recorded painful bites. A place described as dangerous in the stories now presented birds, insects, and people interfering with one another at close quarters.

Clark proposed an explanation. With little woodland to break the wind, insects were driven toward the mound or sought its sheltered side, attracting birds that fed on them. He speculated that the birds’ presence might help account for the stories told about the hill. Seeing birds and explaining the origins of another society’s tradition are separate kinds of claim. The latter remained his conjecture.

The men encountered none of the little people. That did not reduce the hill’s significance in local life to a mistaken observation of animals. The American writer organized other people’s accounts through words such as devils and fable. What survives is chiefly a version selected through his perspective. The mound had a climbable slope and a cultural place the visitors had not fully understood.

From the summit, large animals changed from nearby quarry into distant herds. Buffalo and elk grazed in several directions. One Clark entry estimates more than eight hundred altogether. This was a visual estimate from a height, not a count of individual animals. The plain extended beyond them, and the herds did not stop at a picture’s edge because someone had entered them in a notebook.

The height offered distance of sight but no escape from thirst. Lewis was exhausted and several men complained of lack of water. Clark linked Lewis’s weakened condition to his contact with mineral material two days earlier; the evidence does not allow an exact chemical diagnosis. The immediate decision was practical: make for water.

They changed direction toward the nearest visible creek, reaching it after about three miles, above a beaver dam. Water rather than their original destination now governed their route. They had seen what they had walked out to inspect. Before returning, they needed to recover bodies that had been overtaxed. They rested about an hour and a half before setting out again.

The return followed the creek valley and involved several crossings waist deep. A landscape that had deprived them of water during the morning now required them to wade through it. Clark described the broad bottom and bordering higher ground. They worked back toward their earlier path and paused in a small grove. Animals were visible in great numbers, while human progress was divided into shorter stages by drinking, resting, and finding a crossing.

There were grapes, berries, and plums near the resting place. Clark particularly liked the grapes and distinguished ordinary wild plums from a larger yellow kind. For men who had gone out to investigate an unusual tradition and then been reduced by heat and thirst, fruit was no decorative detail. It was something the country could actually provide. Attention descended from the mound to branches within reach.

At sunset they regained the small boat left for them. York was nearly exhausted by heat, thirst, and fatigue. Clark attributed this to his size and unfamiliarity with the captain’s pace. That is the master’s explanation. The entry also exposes the exertion demanded of a man who had carried a kill the previous day and now had to keep up with a speed set by someone else.

They did not catch the main boat that night. Darkness and rain led them to stay at the previous night’s camp. Men prepared dried meat and two prairie birds for supper, and the walkers slept on a buffalo robe. The herds seen from the hill and the hide beneath their bodies belonged to one day: animals were objects of observation and material support for travel.

On the return Lewis also noted bats, the first he had observed since beginning the ascent of the Missouri. He saw a large heron-like bird with long legs, a short tail, and copper-brown back and wings shaded with red. They did not kill it, and he therefore stopped short of a more particular description. A specimen not obtained left an explicitly limited observation.

Meanwhile Sergeant Pryor had brought the main boat about six miles farther upstream. The men aboard first dried goods that had become wet and prepared the elk meat from the previous day. Reubin Field brought five deer, and George Shannon killed an elk. While the walking party searched the hill, the river party continued the work of feeding, drying, and moving the expedition.

The walkers set prairie fires as a signal to Sioux people, and the boat party answered with a fire near its position. Fire was a means of communication over distance. It does not establish that invited people arrived or that local groups accepted the Americans’ demands. What the entries directly connect is the expedition’s temporarily separated parties.

They reunited on the morning of the twenty-sixth. Meat had to be dried, and elk skins were prepared as material for a towing rope. Climbing the mound, viewing herds, and coming back had not confined buffalo and elk to the phrase natural spectacle. Hide and flesh entered tools, meals, and working procedures, determining what the men could eat and do.

Their route already belonged to buffalo hunters, relations among villages, and traditions about the hill. Learning a name, killing an animal, or describing a herd did not erase those prior lives. The American journals show how the expedition entered the plains. They cannot speak for everyone who lived there.

The days reached a modest resolution. The captains’ party returned to the boats, the mound retained a recognizable outline, meat was prepared, and the journey continued. Its weight lies in more than the estimate of eight hundred distant animals: it also lies in the men carrying one buffalo, York carrying deer, a captain diverting toward water, and a dog that could walk no farther and was sent back to the creek.

They took away more words about the plains. The plains had not grown smaller. The human scale had become clearer: a person might see far from a summit and still become thirsty enough to change course on the way back to the river.

Sources and editorial boundary

The principal source actually read is Project Gutenberg ebook 8419, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8419 ; full transcription https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8419/pg8419.txt . The entries used are Clark’s August 23–26, 1804, and Lewis’s August 24–25. This version omits many courses, astronomical records, and older notes, and warns of OCR errors; it does not support a fabricated complete route.

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln project was cross-read for August 25, including Clark, Ordway, Gass, and Whitehouse, https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1804-08-25 ; and the reunion and preparation of meat and hides on August 26, https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1804-08-26 . Published transcriptions were examined, not original manuscripts. Gass’s text was edited for early publication, and different versions by one author are not independent witnesses.

The mound’s geography, the August 25 visit, and modern location were checked against https://www.nps.gov/places/spirit-mound.htm and https://www.nps.gov/lecl/learn/historyculture/spirit-mound.htm . A regional summit reference was cross-checked against USGS-derived place information at https://www.topozone.com/south-dakota/clay-sd/summit/spirit-mound/ . Only the August 25 ascent is paired with that place, not the August 23 buffalo kill, August 24 hunting, creek-water stop, or August 26 reunion. White Stone River is generally identified with today’s Vermillion River; changes in mouth and banks preclude a precise track here.

The carrying-party total, hunting totals on August 24, walking-party lists, and some times vary between entries. Supported shared actions are retained without forcing uniform figures. More than eight hundred is an observer’s estimate. The insect mechanism and explanation of the tradition are Clark’s interpretation, not a verified origin of Indigenous belief. The little-people narrative is reported tradition, not confirmed historical persons or events. York’s enslavement is not softened into free service; comments about his body and pace belong to Clark. Mineral exposure is not converted into a precise toxicological diagnosis. No dialogue, mental states, smells, or exact route were invented. The journals are public domain in the United States, and both texts are original AI-assisted narratives. Modern annotations were consulted without reproducing their full text. The poster route remains decorative.