The second of the two sites mentioned stood some 2 miles below Porcupine Creek, and it is the belief of Dr. Grinnell that these were the villages to which Lewis and Clark referred in their journals as having been passed by the expedition on the 15th and 16th of October, 1804. At that time game was abundant and several hunting parties of the Arikara were encountered, and an entry in the journal dated October 15, 1804, reads: "We stopped at three miles on the north a little above a camp of Ricaras who are hunting, where we were visited by about thirty Indians. They came over in their skin canoes, bringing us meat, for which we returned them beads and fishhooks. About a mile higher we found another encampment of Ricaras on the south, consisting of eight lodges: here we again ate and exchanged a few presents. As we went we discerned numbers of other Indians on both sides of the river; and at about nine miles we came to a creek on the south, where we saw many high hills resembling a house with a slanting roof; and a little below the creek an old village of the Sharha or Cheyenne Indians.... At sunset we halted, after coming ten miles over several sandbars and points, above a camp of ten Ricara lodges on the north side." (Lewis and Clark, (1), pp. 108-109.) Such was the nature of the country a little more than a century ago.
Another ancient village site presenting many interesting features stands on the bank of an old bed of the Sheyenne River, near Lisbon, Ransom County, N. Dak. This would have been about midway between the Minnesota River and the village on the Missouri near Porcupine Creek. A plan of this village made a few years ago is now preserved in the Historical Society of North Dakota and was reproduced by Dr. Grinnell in the article cited. It shows a large number--70 or more--earth-lodge sites, varying in size, but closely grouped, and protected by a ditch except on the river side. There is a remarkable similarity between this site and others east of the Mississippi, where structures of a like form evidently stood in the centuries before the coming of Europeans. The ditch may have been accompanied by an embankment, in turn surmounted by palisades. The river served to protect the settlement on the north, the encircling embankment and ditch reaching the bank of the stream both above and below the occupied area.