FOUR BEARS PENINSULA The rain showed up like a best friend at a family reunion " so good to see, but the timing could have been better.

Day two of the weekend-long Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was damp but not dampened by the chilly August rain. Folks simply put up umbrellas and picked their way past mud puddles, never minding muddy pant hems, and looked for dry events, if they could find them. Vendors at the trade show in the casino events center were happy for the rain and the buzz of people it sent inside.

The celebration continues today, when the sun is expected to shine, and Sunday, with events both at the Four Bears Peninsula behind the casino and across the bridge in New Town.

There were dry events Friday, but only if the word applies to lack of raindrops falling on one's head, not content.

Amy Mossett, a historian and Hidatsa woman, brought a crowd to its feet with her presentation on Sakakawea, the woman especially honored during the celebration.

Sakakawea accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, providing cultural information and knowledge that was critical to the expedition's success.

She was gone nearly two years and for all those months, life on the trail was all her infant son knew. This bicentennial signature event is timed with her historical return 200 years ago.

Mossett has been on the trail herself, at events around the country and world, telling Sakakawea's story and spreading knowledge all this time. Like the woman of her story, she has learned so much and been forever changed. Mossett said her trip through the bicentennial celebration, as Sakakawea, has been very personal and very spiritual.

"She went on a journey beyond her wildest imagining, and the same thing has happened to me," Mossett said.

Mossett has come into her own, as a woman and as a historian, at the same time a different legend of Sakakawea is being told with increasing frequency. The other legend is called "Bull's Eye Story," and tribal historical Calvin Grinnell will tell it at 6 p.m. today at the Three Tribes Museum. The legend is quite different from the more widely known story and says that Sakakawea was always a Hidatsa, born along the Missouri River here. Mossett believes the legend is the result of Sakakawea's husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, having married at least six Plains Indian women, from three different tribes.

"It's a case of mistaken identity," Mossett said.

She makes a strong historical case, and among the most compelling parts of her story are those about her boy, who learned to walk and say his first words with the Corps of Discovery somewhere out in America's wilderness. His life, too, was forever changed.

Still, people who attend Grinnell's presentation tonight can hear a separate legend of Sakakawea's origins, her life and even where she died and was buried.

Friday was the day of the woman on the Four Bears Peninsula.

The women's endurance races were Friday. The men's are today at the earthlodge village site.

In the evening, Bobbi Rae Sage sang her heart out in the Arbor, her white pants suit highlighting the stream of black hair cascading down her back.

"Thank you, Mama," she sang, a tribute to her own mother and to the influence of tribal women.

Hers was another strong voice of another strong tribal woman an ancient world apart from the Plains Indian lullaby sung in crooning Hidatsa by Nellie Boyd earlier in the day.

The bicentennial signature event is a chance to be part of the Plains Indian world Lewis and Clark saw and experienced. If they came back, they would know the great hills, the shadowy buttes, the people. The great river might be flooded, but the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara of Fort Berthold still remember who they were.

Highlights for today's schedule include a historical and contemporary perspective on Sakakawea by Gerard Baker at the Arbor, a second presentation by Mossett at 4 p.m. at the Arbor and the evening powwow and dancing, also at the Arbor.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)