In late November of 1833 Maximilian and Bodmer made a cold, tiring, nine-hour trek from Fort Clark to one of the Hidatsa winter villages to observe a ceremony. They stayed for several days, and this sketch may have been done at that time. Composed of about eighty households, the village is most probably Eláh-sa, the largest of the Hidatsa settlements on the Knife River. Maximilian remarked on the dense arrangement of lodges in the winter villages, where the dwellings were of necessity packed closely together amid the thick, sheltering timber.

Although the scene is sketchy, this drawing is apparently the one Bodmer is known to have done on April 2, 1834, of the women's corn ceremony at Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch. The principal Mandan crops were symbolized by migratory waterfowl. The goose represented corn, the swan stood for pumpkins or squashes, the duck for beans. Each spring when these birds returned northward they were seen as messengers from the Old Woman Who Never Dies. Their arrival was a signal to consecrate the seed for the summer crops.

This scene shows the interior of the Mandan lodge that was the home of Dipauch, an old and respected man who told Maximilian much about the history and beliefs of his people. Portions of the picture were sketched over a period of several months at Mih-Tutta-Hang-Kusch from early December, 1833, until mid-April of the following year.

Today the city of Cairo, Illinois, stands at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers near the site where Fort Defiance once commanded a view of the surrounding wilderness. In Bodmer's day a small settlement existed at the mouth of the Ohio, as evidenced in this sketch made in the early part of 1833.

When Bodmer passed by Smithland in January, 1833, he noted that large areas of the adjoining forest had already been cleared for agriculture. About three miles below Smithland on the left bank of the Ohio stood the remains of the original settlement; this had been abandoned in favor of the site at the mouth of the Cumberland, which was more elevated and less subject to flooding

Having explored Indian burial sites on the islands of the river and inspected local artifacts collected by Dutot and others, Maximilian and Bodmer left Dutotsburgh on the morning of August 25, arriving at Sach's public house that same evening. Nearby was an older building, the first to have been occupied by the man whose father had come to North America from Saxony. Sometime on the 25th or 26th, Bodmer made a sketch of Sach's first dwelling, no longer in use when Bodmer saw it.

On September ro, Maximilian began the supervision of the packing of five large cases of natural history specimens at Bethlehem for shipment abroad. The next day Bodmer arrived from Mauch Chunk with additional studies of that area, including a watercolor describing the location in the Mahoning Valley of the former Moravian settlement of Gnadenhutten. Maximilian had earlier visited this site, referring to it in his journal on August 31 as having been settled by a group of religious brethren from Herrenhut in the middle of the eighteenth century.