On August 11, 1804, Clark recorded that after a hard wind and rain from the southeast, Captain Lewis, Clark, and 10 men climbed a hill on the larboard side, where fine springs lay below a high point where the Maha leader Black Bird had been buried four years earlier. His grave was marked by a mound of earth about 12 feet in diameter at the base and 6 feet high, turfed over, with a pole 8 feet high in the center, on which they fixed a white flag bound with red, blue, and white. Legend held that Chief Blackbird was buried sitting erect on his horse so he could watch traders ascending the Missouri River. After returning to the river and continuing upstream, the party passed a creek in a deep bend on the larboard side called by the Mahars Wau can di Peeche, meaning Great Spirit is bad; on this creek and the nearby hills about 400 of the Mahar had died with smallpox. That night the expedition camped after traveling 17 miles on the north side of the river, near the northeast corner of present-day Badger Lake.