A brass tablet marks her grave. A mountain peak in Montana has been named Sacagawea Peak. A bronze statue of her has been erected in the City Park of Portland, Oregon. Another statue has been erected in the state capitol at Bismarck, North Dakota. So, although all the wages went to her husband, she knows that the white people of the great United States remember the loving services of the brave little Bird-woman, who without the promise of pay, helped carry the Flag to the Pacific. CHAPTER XVII THE LANCE OF MAHTOTOHPA (1822-1837) HERO TALES BY FOUR BEARS THE MANDAN While the United States was getting acquainted with the Western Indians, there lived among the Mandans in the north a most noted hero--the chief Mah-to-toh-pa, or Four Bears. Young Captain Lewis the Long Knife Chief, and stout Captain Clark the Red Head, who with their exploring party wintered among the Mandans in 1804-1805, and enlisted the Snake Bird-woman as guide, were the first white men to write a clear account of the curious Mandans; but they did not tell the half. For a curious people indeed were these Mandans, dwelling in two villages on the Missouri River above present Washburn in central North Dakota. They were polite, hospitable, and brave. Their towns were defended by ditches and loose timber palisades, not tight like those of the Iroquois and Hurons. Their houses were circular; of an earthern floor sunk two feet, and heavy six-foot logs set on end inside the edge of it, with a roof of timbers, woven willow, and thick mud-plaster; with a sunken fire-place under a hole in the center of the roof, and with bunks, screened by elk-hides or buffalo-robes, along the walls. These houses were large enough to shelter twenty to forty persons; the roofs were favorite loafing spots, for men, women, and dogs. The Mandans formed a happy, talkative people, of strange appearance, but exceedingly clean, fond of bathing, either in the river or in wicker tubs. Their hair was heavy, sometimes reached to the ground, and was black, brown, and frequently gray or pure white even on the young. Their eyes were likely to be hazel, blue or gray, instead of black; their skin almost white. They made glassy clay vases and bowls, and remarkable blue glass beads. In fact, they seemed to have white manners, white arts, and white blood. Rumor asserted that they were partly Welsh, descended from the lost colony of the Welsh prince, Madoc. Now this Madoc, a prince of the early Welsh people, set sail about the year 1180, with ten ships, to found a colony in a new Western continent that he claimed to have discovered. He never was heard from. He and his ten shiploads vanished. But if he reached North America, and traveled inland, to be swallowed up amidst the red blood, the strange Mandans may have been the proof of his arrival.