One of the most interesting and vivid passages in Catlin's writings is his description of this village as it impressed him. To quote (Op. cit., pp. 88-89): "In ranging the eye over the village from where I am writing, there is presented to the view the strangest mixture and medley of unintelligible trash (independent of the living beings that are in motion), that can possibly be imagined. On the roofs of the lodges, besides the groups of living, are buffaloes' skulls, skin canoes, pots and pottery; sleds and sledges--and suspended on poles, erected some twenty feet above the doors of their wigwams, are displayed in a pleasant day, the scalps of warriors, preserved as trophies; and thus proudly exposed as evidence of their warlike deeds. In other parts are raised on poles the warriors' pure and whitened shields and quivers, with medicine-bags attached; and here and there a sacrifice of red cloth, or other costly stuff, offered up to the Great Spirit, over the door of some benignant chief, in humble gratitude for the blessings which he is enjoying. Such is a part of the strange medley that is before and around me; and amidst them ... can be seen in distance, the green and boundless, treeless, bushless prairie; and on it, and contiguous to the piquet which encloses the village, a hundred scaffolds on which their 'dead live,' as they term it." Such was the appearance of the great Mandan town in the year 1832, and this description would probably have applied to many of the ruined villages which stood on the banks of the Missouri farther down the river, which were occupied during past generations by the ancestors of those whom Catlin met and whose portraits have been preserved.