On the hot day of August 25, 1804, captains Lewis and Clark and several of their men walked from the river to explore Spirit Mound after hearing that little people with deadly arrows inhabited it. They did not find little people, but they saw big herds of buffalo as well as elk, burrows of either badgers or "Prairie Wolves" (coyotes), meadowlarks, swallows, and the first bat they had seen on the expedition. Suffering from heat and thirst, they walked back to the river, and from the top of the mound William Clark recorded that they beheld a most beautiful landscape with numerous herds of buffalo feeding in various directions; that same day George Shannon killed an elk buck.