By the time Lewis and Clark began their journey, the Ward Indian Village site, renamed Chief Looking's Village in 2003, had already been abandoned, and the Mandan and Hidatsa had been displaced north and reduced in number by smallpox and warfare. Their journals recorded abandoned sites from the mouth of the Heart River up to Fort Mandan. On October 20, 1804, William Clark wrote that after setting out early and walking on the left side of the river, he saw the old remains of a village covering six or eight acres on the side of a hill. The chief traveling with them told him that the Mandan had lived in a number of villages on each side of the river, but troubles with the Sioux caused them to move about forty miles higher upstream, where they remained a few years before moving again to the place where they then lived. Clark also noted nearby creeks, an island covered with willows in the middle of the river, and a camp above a bluff containing coal of inferior quality immediately above the old Mandan village.