month, and difficulties in navigating the Ohio during low water, wore away the summer. Clark joined him in Kentucky, and at several of the western posts soldiers were enlisted for the journey. Of these there were four sergeants and twenty-three privates, including nine Kentucky hunters. Two French interpreters, the Indian wife of one of these (Sacajawea), and Clark's burly negro, York, completed the party. Sixteen additional soldiers and water men were engaged to accompany the expedition as far as the villages of Mandan Indians.^
The first winter. The winter of 1 803-1 804 was passed in camp at the mouth of the river Du Bois, opposite the Missouri. Captain Clark spent most of his time in drilling the men, building boats, and making other necessary arrangements about the establishment; while Lewis purchased supplies at St. Louis, and gathered information concerning the route from traders who thus early were familiar with the river as far as the Mandan villages. He frequently visited the American officers, and other persons of note in the little French hamlet, so soon to become an important American town. On the 9th of March he witnessed the ceremony of lowering the foreign flag and raising the emblem of our own country over the territory of upper Louisiana.
iThe muster roll of the party, on leaving Fort Mandan, is given in Coues's "Lewis and Clark Expedition," New York, 1891, I. P- 253, note. Much interesting matter on the persons composing the party is contained in Eva Emery Dye's "Conquest," Chicago, 1902.
