[19] Le Prince Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, _Voyage dans l’Intérieur de l’Amérique du Nord_, ii. 371, 372 (Paris, 1843). When Captains Lewis and Clark visited the Mandans in 1804, they found them in two villages, with about three hundred and fifty warriors. They report that, about forty years before, they lived in nine villages, the ruins of which the explorers saw about eighty miles below the two villages then occupied by the tribe. The Mandans had moved up the river in consequence of the persecutions of the Sioux and the small-pox, which had made great havoc among them. _Expedition of Lewis and Clark_, i. 129 (ed. Philadelphia, 1814). These nine villages seem to have been above Cannon-ball River, a tributary of the Missouri. [20] _Journal du Sieur de la Vérendrye_, 1740, in Archives de la Marine. [21] _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye, joint à sa lettre du 31 Octobre, 1744._ [22] Prince Maximilian spent the winter of 1832-33 near the Mandan villages. His artist, with the instinct of genius, seized the characteristics of the wild life before him, and rendered them with admirable vigor and truth. Catlin spent a considerable time among the Mandans soon after the visit of Prince Maximilian, and had unusual opportunities of studying them. He was an indifferent painter, a shallow observer, and a garrulous and windy writer; yet his enthusiastic industry is beyond praise, and his pictures are invaluable as faithful reflections of aspects of Indian life which are gone forever. Beauharnois calls the Mandans _Blancs Barbus_, and says that they have been hitherto unknown. _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14 Août, 1739._ The name Mantannes, or Mandans, is that given them by the Assiniboins. [23] The Minnetarees and other tribes of the Missouri built their lodges in a similar way. [24] The Cheyennes have a tradition that they were the first tribe of this region to have horses. This may perhaps justify a conjecture that the northern division of this brave and warlike people were the Horse Indians of La Vérendrye; though an Indian tradition, unless backed by well-established facts, can never be accepted as substantial evidence. [25] A similar phenomenon occurs farther west on the face of the perpendicular bluffs that, in one place, border the valley of the river Rosebud. [26] _Journal du Voyage fait par le Chevalier de la Vérendrye en 1742._ The copy before me is from the original in the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine. A duplicate, in the Archives des Affaires Étrangères, is printed by Margry. It gives the above date as November 9 instead of October 9. The context shows the latter to be correct.