Page:A Brief History of South Dakota.djvu/41

Rh On the 1st of September the party again embarked and proceeded up the stream. The next day they stopped to explore the embankment at Bon Homme Island, which they believed to be a prehistoric fort, but which has since been shown to have been but a bank of sand thrown up by the winds and floods. On the 8th they passed the Pawnee or Trudeau House which was established in 1797, and there was no other event of note for several days.

While Lewis and Clark were at the Vermilion River, their two horses had strayed away, and George Shannon, the youngest man in the party, had been sent out to hunt them up. Sixteen days had since elapsed, during part of which the captains had enjoyed their council and carousal with the Yanktons, and no word of the boy had come to them. They admit, in their journal, that they were becoming uneasy about him. Shannon had found the horses and set off up the river. During the first four days he used all his bullets and then he nearly starved, being obliged to subsist for twelve days on a few grapes and a rabbit, which he killed by making use of a hard piece of stick for a bullet. One of the horses gave out and was left behind; the other he kept as a last resource for food. Despairing of overtaking the party, he was returning down the river in hopes of meeting some other boat, and was on the point of killing his horse when he was so fortunate as to meet his friends, on the 11th of September.

The party now made their way up the stream, meeting no Indians, until the night of the 21st, when they were camped on the north side of the Big Bend, having almost