Chapter XIII: Book II: Into the West (4)

For days the swift current had required the utmost exertion. The men complained of fatigue and excessive heat.

"You push a tolerable good pole," said the Kentuckians, when Lewis took a hand.

Captain Clark was worn out. With the thermometer at ninety, for days he had pushed ahead, determined to find the Shoshones.

"Let us rest a day or two," said Captain Lewis. "Here, boys, build a bower for Captain Clark. I'll take a tramp myself in a few days to find these yellow gentlemen if possible."

Camping at the three forks, every man became a leather dresser and tailor, fixing up his buckskin clothes. Leggings and moccasins had been sliced to pieces by the prickly pear.

"What a spot for a trading post!" the Captains agreed.

"Look," said Lewis, "see the rushes in the bottom, high as a man's breast and thick as wheat. This will be much in favour of an establishment here,--the cane is one of the best winter pastures for cows and horses."

From the heights at the three forks, Lewis and Clark looked out upon valleys of perennial green. Birds of beautiful plumage and thrilling song appeared on every hand. Beaver, otter, muskrat, sported in this trapper's paradise. Buffalo-clover, sunflowers and wild rye, buffalo-peas and buffalo-beans blossomed everywhere.

All the Indian trails in the country seemed to converge at this point. Here passed the deadly Blackfoot on his raids against the Shoshones, the Bannocks, and the Crows. Here stole back and forth the timid Shoshone to his annual hunt on the Yellowstone and the Snake River plains. Hither from time immemorial had the Flatheads and Nez Percés resorted for their supplies of robes and meat. Even from the far Saskatchewan came the Piegans and Gros Ventres to this favoured and disputed spot.

The Blackfeet claimed the three forks of the Missouri, no tribe dwelt there permanently. The roads were deep, like trenches, worn by the trailing lodgepoles of many tribes upon this common hunting ground.

The naming of the rivers,--that was an epic by itself.

The gay Cabinet ladies who had fitted him out at Washington flitted through the mind of Meriwether Lewis,--Maria Jefferson, companion of his earliest recollection, Dolly Madison, whose interest never failed in his adventures, Mrs. Gallatin, the queenly dark-haired wife of the scholarly Secretary of the Treasury. With what pleasure had they gathered at the White House to fashion "housewives," full of pins and needles and skeins of thread, for these wanderers of the West. Not a man in the party but bore some souvenir of their thoughtful handiwork.

Clark's earliest memory was of Jefferson, the friend of his father, of his older brothers, and then of himself. "Jimmy" Madison and George Rogers Clark had been schoolmates in the "old field school" of Donald Robertson.

So then and there the Captains agreed that three great statesmen and their wives should be commemorated here by the Madison, the Jefferson, and the Gallatin forks of the Missouri.

"On this very spot my people camped five years ago. Here were their tents," said Sacajawea, pointing out the embers of blackened fires. "The Minnetarees peered over the hills. We ran up this fork and hid in the thick woods."

The boats were reloaded and the party began to ascend the Jefferson on July 30, to its head in the Bitter Root Mountains. At noon they camped for dinner.

"And here was I captured!" cried Sacajawea. "I was made a prisoner. We were too few to fight the Minnetarees. They pursued us. Our men mounted their horses and fled to the mountains. The women and children hid. I ran. I was crossing this river. They caught me and carried me away."

What a realistic glimpse of daily terror! Fighting, hunting, wandering, famishing, in the land of anarchy. Formerly the Shoshones were Indians of the plains. Now they had been driven by their enemies into almost inaccessible fastnesses.

"The Beaver Head! The Beaver Head!"

Sacajawea pointed to a steep, rocky cliff shaped like a beaver's head, one hundred and fifty feet above the water, an Indian landmark from time immemorial.

"This is not far from the summer retreat of my countrymen. We shall meet them soon, on a river beyond the mountains running to the west."

"We must meet those Indians," said Lewis, "it is our only hope for horses to cross the mountains."

Lewis and Clark camped August 7, 1805, at Beaverhead Rock. There, fifty-seven years later, chased by bears, robbed by Indians, unsheltered, unshod, and almost starving, the gold hunter stumbled upon the auriferous bed of an ancient river that made Montana. Gold was discovered at Alder Gulch in 1863, ten miles south of Beaverhead Rock, and the next year mining began in the streets of the present city of Helena. The pick and the shovel in the miner's hand became the lamp and the ring in the grasp of Aladdin.

The next morning after passing Beaverhead Rock, Captain Lewis and three of the men slung their knapsacks over their shoulders and set out for the mountains, determined not to return until they met some nation of Indians.

Two days later, August 11, Lewis with his spyglass espied a lone horseman on the hills. The wild-eyed Shoshone, accustomed to scan the horizon, saw him also.

"He is of a different nation from any we have met," remarked Lewis, watching intently through his glass. "He has a bow and a quiver of arrows, and an elegant horse without a saddle."

Like a lookout on the hills, the Indian stood and waited.

"He is undoubtedly a Shoshone. Much of our success depends on the friendly offices of that nation."

Slowly Lewis advanced. Slowly the Indian came forward, until, within a mile of each other the Indian suddenly stopped. Captain Lewis also stopped, and drawing a three-point blanket from his knapsack held it by the corners above his head, and unfolding brought it to the ground as in the act of spreading. Three times he repeated the Indian signal of hospitality--"Come and sit on the robe with me."

Still the Indian kept his position, viewing with an air of suspicion the hunters with Lewis.

"_Tabba bone, tabba bone_," said Lewis, stripping up the sleeve of his shirt to show the colour of his skin,--"white man, white man," a term learned of Sacajawea.

Paralysed the Indian looked, then fled like a frightened deer. No calls could bring him back.

He said to his people, "I have seen men with faces pale as ashes, who are makers of thunder and lightning."

"He is a dreamer!" exclaimed the incredulous Shoshones. "He makes up tales. He must show us these white men or be put to death," and trembling he started back with a body of warriors.

Lewis, disappointed at the flight of the Shoshone, pressed on. Narrower and narrower grew the river.

"Thank God, I have lived to bestride the Missouri!" exclaimed Hugh McNeil, planting a foot on either side of the mountain rivulet.

Two miles farther up they drank from the ice-cold spring at the river's source, and stood on the summit of the Great Divide. A little creek flowed down the ridge toward the west. Stooping, they drank,--of the waters of the Columbia, and slept that night in Idaho. The next morning, following a well-worn Indian trail, Lewis came upon two women and a child. One fled, the other, an old dame encumbered by the child, sat down and bowed her head as if expecting instant death.

Captain Lewis advanced, lifted her, loaded her with gifts.

"_Tabba bone, tabba bone._" Stripping up his sleeve he showed to the amazed woman the first white skin she had ever seen.

"Call your companion," motioned Lewis toward the fleeing woman.

The old dame raised her voice. As fast as she ran away the young woman came running back, almost out of breath. She, too, was loaded with trinkets, and the cheeks of all were painted with vermilion, the Shoshone emblem of peace.

Without fear now she led him toward sixty mounted warriors, who were advancing at a gallop as to battle.

"_Tabba bone! tabba bone!_" explained the women, introducing the stranger and exhibiting their gifts.

"_Ah hi e! Ah hi e!_"--"I am much pleased! I am much pleased!" exclaimed the warriors, leaping from their horses and embracing Lewis with great cordiality.

Lewis drew forth his imposing calumet of red pipestone and lighted it. This was a sign language of all tribes.

Putting off their moccasins as if to say, "May I walk the forest barefoot forever if I break this pledge of friendship," they sat down and smoked.

The chief, too, brought out a pipe, of the dense transparent green stone of the Bannock Mountains, highly polished. Another led him to a lodge and presented a piece of salmon,--then Lewis no longer doubted that he was on waters flowing to the Pacific.

Slowly, Clark, ill with chills and fever, had been coming forward, urging the canoes up the difficult and narrowing stream.

Sacajawea, the little Bird-woman, could not wait. In her anxiety she begged to walk ahead along shore, and with her husband went dancing up the rivulet of her childhood. She flew ahead. She turned, pirouetting lightly on her beaded moccasins, waving her arms and kissing her fingers. Her long hair flew in the wind and her beaded necklace sparkled.

Yes, there were the Indians, and Lewis among them, dressed like an Indian too. The white men had given everything they had to the Indians, even their cocked hats and red feathers, and taken Indian clothes in exchange, robes of the mountain sheep and goat.

An Indian girl leaned to look at Sacajawea. They flew into each other's arms. They had been children together, had been captured in the same battle, had shared the same captivity. One had escaped to her own people; the other had been sold as a slave in the Land of the Dakotahs. As girls will, with arms around each other they wandered off and talked and talked of the wonderful fortune that had come to Sacajawea, the wife of a white man.

A council was immediately called. The Shoshones spread white robes and hung wampum shells of pearl in the hair of the white men.

"Sacajawea. Bring her hither," called Lewis.

Tripping lightly into the willow lodge, Sacajawea was beginning to interpret, when lifting her eyes to the chief, she recognised her own brother, Cameahwait. She ran to his side, threw her blanket over his head, and wept upon his bosom.

Sacajawea, too, was a Princess, come home now to her Mountain Kingdom.

XVI

_IDAHO_

"We are going through your country to the far ocean," said Captain Lewis. "We are making a trail for the traders who will bring you guns."

"This delights me," answered Cameahwait, with his fierce eyes, and his lank jaws grown meagre for want of food. "We are driven into the mountains, when if we had guns we could meet our enemies in the plains."

All the Shoshone talk was of war, war, war. Their great terror was the roving Indians of the Saskatchewan, who, with guns from the British traders, came down like wolves on the fold. Only flight and wonderful skill with the bow and arrow saved the Shoshones from destruction.

Horses were their wealth. "Most of them would make a figure on the south side of James River," said Lewis, "in the land of fine horses. I saw several with Spanish brands upon them."

Brother to the Comanche, the Shoshone rode his horse over rocks and ravines, up declivitous ways and almost impossible passes. Every warrior had one or two tied to a stake near his willow hut, night and day, ready for action.

"My horse is my friend. He knows my voice. He hears me speak. He warns me of the enemy." Little children played with them, squaws fed them, braves painted them and decorated their manes and tails with eagle-plumes, insignia of the Rocky Mountain Indian. Such horses were a boon to Lewis and Clark, for they were tractable, sure-footed, inured to the saddle and the pack.

A Shoshone found a tomahawk that Lewis had lost in the grass, and returned it,--now a tomahawk was worth a hundred dollars to a Shoshone. They had no knives or hatchets,--all their wood was split with a wedge of elkhorn and a mallet of stone. They started their fires by twirling two dry sticks together.

Through all the valleys the Shoshones sent for their best horses, to trade for knives and tomahawks. Delighted they watched the fall of deer before the guns of white men. The age of stone had met the age of steel.

How to get over the mountains was the daily consultation. Cameahwait pointed out an old man that knew the rivers. Clark engaged him for a guide:

"You shall be called Toby. Be ready to-morrow morning."

Proud of his new name, old Toby packed up his moccasins.

The Indians drew maps: "Seven days over sheer mountains. No game, no fish, nothing but roots."

Captain Clark set out to reconnoitre the Salmon River route.

"A river of high rocks," said Cameahwait, "all a river of foam. No man or horse can cross. No man can walk along the shore. We never travel that way." Nevertheless Clark went on.

For seventy miles, "through mountains almost inaccessible, and subsisting on berries the greater part of the route," as Clark afterward told his brother, they pushed their way, then--"troubles just begun," remarked old Toby.

Checking their horses on the edge of a precipice, Clark and his companions looked down on the foaming Snake, roaring and fretting and lashing the walls of its inky canyon a hundred feet below, savage, tremendous, frightful.

As Cameahwait had said, the way was utterly impracticable.

"I name this great branch of the Columbia for my comrade, Captain Lewis," said Clark.

Back from the Snake River, Clark found Lewis buying horses. The Shoshone women were mending the men's moccasins. The explorers were making pack-saddles of rawhide. For boards they broke up boxes and used the handles of their oars.

"I have ever held this expedition in equal estimation with my own existence," said Lewis, urging on the preparations. "If Indians can pass these mountains, we can."

Haunched around the fires, the forlorn Indians looked and listened and shook their unkempt heads.

"Me know better route," said the friendly old Shoshone guide. "To the north, another great water to the Columbia."

"No! no! no!" shouted all the Shoshones. "No trail that way."

But Clark believed the faithful old Toby. Evidently the Shoshones wished to detain them all winter.

Unseen by the Indians, at night a _cache_ was dug at the head of the Jefferson, for the last of the heavy luggage, leaving out only Indian gifts and absolute necessities to carry on the pack-horses. The canoes were filled with rocks and sunk to the bottom of the river.

August 30, the expedition was ready. Before setting out the violins were brought and the men danced, to the great diversion of the Indians. Then, when they turned their faces to the Bitter Root, with the old guide and his four sons, the Shoshones set out east for their annual hunt on the Missouri.

From May to September the Shoshones lived on salmon that came up the mountain streams. Now that the salmon were gone, necessity compelled them forth. With swift dashes down the Missouri they were wont to kill and dry what buffalo they could, and retreat to consume it in their mountain fastnesses. The whites had surprised them in their very citadel--led by Sacajawea.

Along the difficult Bitter Root Mountains Lewis and Clark journeyed, meeting now and then Indian women digging yamp and pounding sunflower seeds into meal. Food grew scarce and scarcer, now and then a deer, a grouse, or a belated salmon stranded in some mountain pool. Sometimes they had but a bit of parched corn in their wallets, like the Immortals that marched to the conquest of Illinois.

But those snowy peaks that from a distance seemed so vast,--that like the Alps defied approach to any but a Hannibal or a Napoleon--now, as if to meet their conquerors, bent low in many a grassy glade.

In a pocket of the mountains now called Ross Hole, they came upon a camp of Flatheads, with five hundred horses, on their way to the Missouri for the Fall hunt of buffalo.

Unknown to them the Flatheads had been watching from the timber and had reported: "Strangers. Two chiefs riding ahead, looking at the country. One warrior painted black. The rest leading packhorses. Keep quiet. Wait. They are coming."

York's feet had become lame and he was riding with the Captains.

When the white men came in view the Flatheads looked on their faces. They were shocked at the whiteness. Compassion was in every Indian heart.

"These men have no blankets. They have been robbed. See how cold their cheeks are. They are chilled. Bring robes. Build fires."

All the Indians ran for their beautiful white robes, and wrapped them around the shoulders of the white men. Before the blazing fires the white men's cheeks grew red. Perspiration burst from every pore. The robes slipped off, but the solicitous red men kept putting them back and stirring up the fire.

Then the Captains, touched to the heart, spoke to the kind-hearted Flatheads of a great people toward the rising sun, strong and brave and rich.

"Have they wigwams and much buffalo?" inquired the Flatheads.

"Yes. We have been sent by the Great Father, the President, to bring these presents to his children the Flatheads."

The childlike Flatheads were much impressed. Never did they forget the visit of those first white men. Traditions enough to fill a book have been handed down, and to this day they boast, "the Flathead never killed a white man."

The whites listened in amaze to the low guttural clucking of the Flatheads, resembling that of a chicken or parrot. Voice there was none, only a soft crooning to their gentle chatter, interpreted by Sacajawea and the old Shoshone guide.

The women crowded around Sacajawea and untied her baby from its elkskin cradle. They fed it and gave it little garments. That baby was an open sesame touching the hearts of all. Sacajawea, riding on her horse to the Columbia, found friends with every tribe. Others might pay; she, never. The Indian mother-heart opened to Sacajawea. Her very presence was an assurance of pacific intention.

The women brought food, roots, and berries. To a late hour the white men continued smoking and conversing with the chiefs, when more robes were brought, and the weary ones slept with their feet to the fire.

"Those hongry Injin dorgs ate up me moccasins lasht noight," complained Pat in the morning. "But they're the whoitest Injins I iver saw."

More horses were brought and the lame ones exchanged, so now with forty horses and three colts the Captains and their devoted followers struggled on, "Over the warst road I iver saw," said Pat. "Faith! 'tis warse nor the Alleghanies where I rid whin a bye."

One horse loaded with a desk and small trunk rolled down a steep declivity until it was stopped by a tree. The desk was broken. That night they camped at the snow line and more snow began to fall. Wet, cold, hungry, they killed a colt for supper and slept under the stars.

The horses were failing. Some had to be abandoned. One rolled down a mountain into a creek at the bottom. Some strayed or lost their packs, and the worn-out men, ever on the jump, came toiling through the brush, bearing on their own backs the unwieldy pack-saddles. Up here in the Bitter Root Mountains, the last of Dr. Saugrain's thermometers was broken, which accounts for the fact that from this point on they kept no record of temperature.

September 9 the expedition journeyed down the main Bitter Root valley, named Clark's River, and crossing it came to a large creek and camped a day to rest their horses.

"Traveller's Rist, is it?" said Pat. "Me fa-a-ther's inn at Wellsburg was the fir-r-st 'Traveller's Rist' in all Wistern Varginny," and Traveller's Rest it remained until some later explorer renamed it the Lolo fork of the Bitter Root River.

Here the boys mended their garments torn and tattered in the mountains, and the hunters went out for game. They returned with three Flatheads.

"Ay! Ay!" clucked the gentle Flatheads, "the river goes to the great lake. Our relations were there and bought handkerchiefs like these of an old white man that lives by himself."

Lame and weary, straight across Idaho they struggled, over seams and streaks of precious metal that they saw not, the gold of Ophir concealed in the rocky chambers of the Idaho Alps,--struggled into the Lolo trail used by the Indians for ages before any whites ever came into the country.

Over the Lolo trail went the Nez Percés to battle and to hunt buffalo in the Montana country. Down over this trail once came a war party and captured Wat-ku-ese, a Nez Percé girl, and carried her away to the distant land of white men,--_so-yap-po_, "the crowned ones," she called them, because they wore hats.

Still ever Wat-ku-ese dreamed of her Nez Percé home and one day escaped with her infant on her back. Along the way white traders were kind to her. On and on, footsore and weary she journeyed alone. In the Flathead country her baby died and was buried there. One day some Nez Percés came down over the Lolo trail bringing home Wat-ku-ese, weak, sick, dying.

She was with her people at their camas ground, Weippe, when Lewis and Clark came down over the Lolo trail.

"Let us kill them," whispered the frightened Nez Percés.

Wat-ku-ese lay dying in her tent when she heard it. "White men, did you say? No, no, do not harm them. They are the crowned ones who were so good to me. Do not be afraid of them. Go near to them."

Cautiously the Nez Percés approached. The explorers shook their hands. This was to the Indians a new form of greeting.

Everywhere Indian women were digging the camas root, round like an onion, and little heaps lay piled here and there. They paused in their work to watch the strangers. Some screamed and ran and hid. Little girls hid their baby brothers in the brush. Others brought food.

So starved and famished were the men that they ate inordinately of the sweet camas and the kouse, the biscuit root. The sudden change to a warmer climate and laxative roots resulted in sickness, when the expedition might have been easily attacked but for those words of Wat-ku-ese, who now lay dead in her tent.

To this day the Nez Percés rehearse the story of Wat-ku-ese. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the whites, broken only when Chief Joseph fled over the Lolo trail. But even Chief Joseph found he must give up the vast areas over which he was wont to roam, and come under the laws of civilised life.

As fast as their weakness permitted councils were held, when the Captains told the Nez Percés of the Great Father at Washington, who had sent them to visit his children.

Twisted Hair, the Nez Percé Tewat, a great medicine man, dreamer and wizard and wise one, drew on a white elkskin a chart of the rivers. Admiring redmen put their hands over their mouths in amazement.

No one but Twisted Hair could do such things. He was a learned Indian, knew all the trails, even to the Falls of the Columbia.

"White men," said he, "live at the Tim-tim [falls]."

Thus into Idaho had penetrated the story of Ko-na-pe, the wrecked Spaniard, who with his son Soto had set out up the great river to find white people and tarried there until he died. Seven years later Astor's people met Soto, an old man dark as his Indian mother, but still the Indians called him white. Twenty years later Soto's daughter was still living on the Columbia in the days of the Hudson's Bay Company.

To save time and trouble, canoes were burnt out of logs. Leaving their horses with the Nez Percés, on October 4 the explorers were glad to get into their boats with their baggage and float down the clear Kooskooske, into the yellow-green Snake, and on into the blue Columbia.

At the confluence of the rivers medals were given and councils held on the present site of Lewiston. Day by day through wild, romantic scenes where white man's foot had never trod, the exultant young men were gliding to the sea.

Ahead of the boats on horseback galloped We-ark-koompt, an Indian express. Word flew. The tribes were watching. At the dinner camp, October 16, five Indians came up the river on foot in great haste, took a look and started back, running as fast as they could.

That night Lewis and Clark were met at the Columbia by a procession of two hundred Indians with drums, singing, "Ke-hai, ke-hai," the redmen's signal of friendship.

XVII

_DOWN THE COLUMBIA_

The arrival at the Columbia was followed by days of councils, with gifts and speeches and smoking. Two Nez Percé chiefs, Twisted Hair the Tewat and Tetoh, introduced the explorers from tribe to tribe, bearing on and on the good words of Wat-ku-ese: "They are crowned ones. Do not be afraid. Go near to them."

All the Indian world seemed camped on the Columbia. Everywhere and everywhere were "inconceivable multitudes of salmon." They could be seen twenty feet deep in the water, they lay on the surface, and floated ashore. Hundreds of Indians were splitting and spreading them on scaffolds to dry. The inhabitants ate salmon, slept on salmon, burnt dried salmon to cook salmon.

With a coal a Yakima chief drew on a robe a map of the river so valuable that Clark afterwards transferred it to paper. That map on the robe was carried home to Jefferson and hung up by him in Monticello. Every trail was marked by moccasin tracks, every village by a cluster of teepees.

In the "high countrey" of the Walla Walla they caught sight of "the Mt. Hood of Vancouver," and were eager to reach it.

"Tarry with us," begged Yellept, the Walla Walla chief.

"When we return," replied the eager men. Then Clark climbed a cliff two hundred feet above the water and spied St. Helens. Very well Clark remembered Lord St. Helens from whom this peak was named. The very name to him was linked with those old days when "Detroit must be taken," for Lord St. Helens and John Jay drew up the treaty that evacuated Detroit.

Captain Clark and a few of the men still continued in advance walking along the shore.

Near the beautiful Umatilla a white crane rose over the Columbia. Clark fired. A village of Indians heard the report and marvelled at the sudden descent of the bird. As with outspread, fluttering wings it touched the ground the white men came into view.

One moment of transfixed horror, and the Indians fled. Captain Clark promptly followed, opened the mat doors of their huts and entered. With bowed heads, weeping and wringing their hands, a crowd of men, women, and children awaited the blow of death.

Lifting their chins, Clark smiled upon them and offered gifts. Evidently they had not met the Indian express.

"All tribes know the peace-pipe," he remarked, and drawing forth his pipestone calumet lit it, as was his wont, with a sunglass.

As the fire kindled from the rays through the open roof, again the people shrieked. In vain Drouillard tried to pacify them. Not one would touch the pipe lit by the sun. Clark went out and sat on a rock and smoked until the boats arrived.

"Do not be afraid. Go to them," began the Nez Percé chiefs.

"They are not men," hurriedly whispered the frightened Indians. "We saw them fall from heaven with great thunder. They bring fire from the sky."

Not until Sacajawea landed with her baby was tranquillity restored.

"No squaw travels with a war party," that must be admitted, and soon they were smoking with great unanimity.

"Tim-m-m-m;--tim-m-m-m!" hummed the Indians at the Falls, at Celilo, poetically imitating the sound of falling waters.

There was salmon at the Falls of the Columbia, stacks of salmon dried, pounded, packed in baskets, salmon heaped in bales, stored in huts and cached in cellars in the sand. Making a portage around the Falls, the boats slid down.

"De rapide! de rapide! before we spik some prayer we come on de beeg rock!" screamed Cruzatte, the bowman.

Apparently a black wall stretched across the river, but as they neared, a rift appeared where the mighty channel of the Columbia narrows to forty-five yards at the Dalles. Crowds of Indians gathered as Clark and Cruzatte stopped to examine the pass.

"By good steering!" said Cruzatte. Shaping up his canoe, it darted through the hissing and curling waters like a racehorse.

Close behind, the other boats shot the boiling caldron, to the great astonishment of Indian villagers watching from above.

At the Warm Springs Reservation there are Indians yet who remember the old dip-net fishing days and the stories of "Billy Chinook," who then saw York, the black man. "I was a boy of twelve. When the black man turned and looked at us, we children fled behind the rocks."

Here at the Dalles were wooden houses, the first that Lewis and Clark had seen since leaving the Illinois country, with roofs, doors, and gables like frontier cabins,--and still more stacks of salmon. "Ten thousand pounds," said Clark, "dried, baled, and bound for traffic down the river."

The ancient Indian village of Wishram stands on that spot still, with the same strong smell of salmon. The houses are much the same, and among their treasures may be found a coin of 1801, bartered, no doubt, by Lewis and Clark for a bale of salmon.

On sped the boats, through mighty mountains, past ancient burial places of the savage dead, to the wild-rushing Cascades. Past these Cascades, five miles of continuous rapids, white with sheets of foam. "We mak' portage," said Cruzatte, his bow grating on the narrow shelf of shore.

On either side, rocky palisades, "green-mossed and dripping," reached the skies. Tiny waterfalls, leaping from the clouds, fell in rainbow mist a thousand feet below. "Mt. Hood stood white and vast."

Below the Cascades great numbers of hair-seals slept on the rocks. Swarms of swans, geese, ducks, cranes, storks, white gulls, cormorants, plover swept screaming by. The hills were green, the soft west wind was warm with rain.

"What a wild delight
Of space! of room! What a sense of seas!"

They had come into a new world,--the valley of the lower Columbia, the home of the Chinook wind.

At Hood River alarmed Indians, dressed in skins of the mountain goat, the Oregon mazama, peered after the passing white men. At every house, and among mouldering remains of ancient tombs, lay scattered innumerable images of wood and stone or of burnt clay, household gods of the Columbian Indian.

Flat and flatter grew the heads. Up in the Bitter Root, women alone wore this badge of distinction. Here, every infant lay strapped like a mummy with a padded board across its forehead.

A new sort of boats now glided alongside the flotilla, great sea canoes manned with Chinook paddles. They were long and light, tapering at the ends, wide in the middle and lifting stern and prow into beaks like a Roman galley. And every canoe was laden with salmon, going down river to trade for beads and wapato.

Traces of white men began to appear,--blue and scarlet blankets, brass tea-kettles, and beads. One Indian, with a round hat and a sailor-jacket, wore his hair in a queue in imitation of the "Bostons."

"I trade with Mr. Haley," said one in good English, showing the bow of iron and other goods that Mr. Haley had given him. "And this is his squaw in the canoe."

More and more fertile and delightful grew the country, shaded by thick groves of tall timber and watered by streams, fair as lay unpeopled Kentucky thirty years before. Scarce could Clark repress the recollection of the tales his brother brought home of that first trip to Boonsboro in 1775.

Nothing surprised them more than the tropic luxuriance of vegetation. The moist Japan wind nurtured the trees to mammoths, six, eight, and ten feet through. Shrubbery like the hazel grew to be trees. The maple spread its leaves like palm fans; dogwood of magnolian beauty, wild cherry, crab-apple, interlaced with Oregon grape, blackberries, wild roses, vines of every sort and description, and ferns, ferns, ferns filled the canyons like the jungles of Orinoco.

On November 4, nearly opposite the present Vancouver, they landed at a village on the left side of the river where a fleet of over fifty canoes was drawn up on shore, gathering wapato.

"Wapato? Wapato?" An Indian treated them to the queen root of the Columbia, round and white, about the size of a small Irish potato. This, baked, was the bread of the Chinook Indian.

"In two days," said Indians in sailor jackets and trousers, shirts, and hats, "in two days, two ships, white people in them."

"Village there," said an Indian in a magnificent canoe, pointing beyond some islands at the mouth of the Willamette. He was finely dressed and wore a round hat.

Yes, it might be, villages, villages everywhere, but ships--ships below! They had no time for villages now. Long into the darkness of night the boats sped on, on, past dim forests bending to the wave, past shadowy heights receding into sunset, past campfires on the hills where naked Indians walked between them and the light.

At a late hour they camped. November rains were setting in, the night was noisy with wild fowl coming up the Columbia to escape the storms of ocean. Trumpeter swans blew their shrill clarions, and whistling swans, geese, and other birds in flights of hundreds swept past in noisy serenade, dropping from their wings the spray of the sea.

None slept. Toward morning the rain began.

In a wet morning and a rushing wind they bent to the oar, past St. Helens, past Mt. Coffin, past Cathlamet where Queen Sally in scant garments watched from a rock and told the tale in after years.

"We had been watching for days," she said. "News had come by Indian post of the strangers from the east. They came in the afternoon and were met by our canoes and brought to the village." "There," Clark says in his journals, "we dined on November 26."

But Lewis and Clark were tired of Indians by this time, and moreover, ships were waiting below! It was a moment of intense excitement. Even at Cathlamet they heard the surge of ocean rolling on the rocks forty miles away. Before night the fog lifted and they beheld "the ocean!--that ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of all our anxieties. Ocean in view! O! the joy."

Struggling with their unwieldy canoes the landsmen grew seasick in the rising swells of the up-river tide. For miles they could not find a place to camp, so wild and rocky were the shores.

At last, exhausted, they threw their mats on the beautiful pebbly beach and slept in the rain.

Everything was wet, soaked through, bedding, stores, clothing. And all the salt was spoiled. There was nothing to eat but raw dried salmon, wet with sea water, and many of the men began to be ill from exposure and improper food.

"'T is the divil's own weather," said Pat, coming in from a reconnoitre with his wet hunting shirt glued fast to his skin. Pat could see the "waves loike small mountains rolling out in the ocean," but just now he, like all the rest, preferred a dry corner by a chimney fire.

"Une Grande Piqnique!" exclaimed Cruzatte.
"Lak' tonder de ocean roar!
Blow lak' not'ing I never see,
Blow lak' le diable makin' grande tour!
Hear de win' on de beeg pine tree!"

And all were hungry. Even Clark, who claimed to be indifferent as to what he ate, caught himself pondering on bread and buns. With the peculiar half laugh of the squaw, Sacajawea brought a morsel that she had saved for the child all the way from the Mandan towns, but now it was wet and beginning to sour. Clark took it and remarked in his journal, "This bread I ate with great satisfaction, it being the only mouthful I had tasted for several months."

Chinook Indians pilfered around the camp. "If any one of your nation steals anything from us, I will have you shot," said Captain Clark,--"which they understand very well," he remarked to the camp as the troublers slunk away. A sentinel stood on constant watch.

Captain Lewis and eleven of the men went around the bay and found where white people had been camped all summer, but naught remained save the cold white beach and the Indians camping there. The ships had sailed.

Down there near the Chinook town, facing the ocean, Captain Lewis branded a tree with his name and the date, and a few days later Captain Clark says, "I marked my name on a large pine tree immediately on the isthmus, at Clatsop."

It was two hundred years since Captain John Smith sailed up the Chickahominy in Virginia in search of the South Sea. At last, far beyond the Chickahominy, Lewis and Clark sailed up the Missouri and down the Columbia in search of the same South Sea. And here at the mouth of the Oregon they found it, stretching away to China.

Balboa, Magellan, Cortez, Mackenzie,--Lewis and Clark had joined the immortals.

XVIII

_FORT CLATSOP BY THE SEA_

December had now arrived, and southwest storms broke upon the coast with tremendous force. Off Cape Disappointment, the surges dashed to the height of the masthead of a ship, with most terrific roaring. A winter encampment could no longer be delayed.

"Deer, elk, good skin, good meat," said the Chinook Indians, in pantomime, pointing across the bay to the south.

Accordingly, thither the eggshell boats were guided, across the tempestuous Columbia, to the little river Netul, now the Lewis and Clark, ten miles from the ocean.

Beside a spring branch, in a thick grove of lofty firs about two hundred yards from the water, the leather tent was set up and big fires built, while all hands fell to clearing a space for the winter cabins.

In four days the logs were rolled up, Boonsboro fashion, into shelters for the winter. "The foinest puncheons I iver saw," said Patrick Gass, head carpenter, as he set to splitting boards out of the surrounding firs.

By Christmas seven cabins were covered and the floors laid. The chinks were filled with clay, and fir-log fires were set roaring in the capacious chimneys that filled an entire end of each cabin. On Christmas day they moved in, wet blankets and all, with rounds of firearms and Christmas salutes.

The leather tent, soaked for days, fell to pieces. The heavy canisters of powder, every one of which had been under the water in many a recent capsize, were consigned in safety to the powder-house.

On New Year's Eve the palisades were done, and the gates were closed at sunset.

The first winter-home of civilised people on the Columbia has an abiding charm, not unlike that of Plymouth or Jamestown.

Back through the mists of one hundred years we see gangs of elk, chased by hunters through cranberry bogs, "that shook for the space of half an acre."

Their soundless footfalls were lost in beds of brown pine needles and cushions of moss. The firing of guns reverberated through the dim gloom like a piece of ordnance.

It was from such a trip as this that the hunters returned on the 16th of December, reporting elk. All hands set to work carrying up the meat from the loaded boats, skinning and cutting and hanging it up in small pieces in the meathouse, to be smoked by a slow bark fire. But in spite of every precaution, the meat began to spoil.

"We must have salt," said Captain Lewis.

In a few days, five men were dispatched with five kettles to build a cairn for the manufacture of salt from seawater.

Already Clark had examined the coast with this in view, and the salt-makers' camp was established near Tillamook Head, about fifteen miles southwest of the fort where the old cairn stands to this day. Here the men built "a neat, close camp, convenient to wood, salt water and the fresh waters of the Clatsop River, within a hundred paces of the ocean," and kept the kettles boiling day and night.

On that trip to the coast, while the cabins were building, Captain Clark visited the Clatsops, and purchased some rude household furniture, cranberries, mats, and the skin of a panther, seven feet from tip to tip, to cover their puncheon floor.

Other utensils were easily fashioned. Seated on puncheon stools, before the log-fire of the winter night, the men carved cedar cups, spoons, plates, and dreamed of homes across the continent.

In just such a little log cabin as this, Shannon saw his mother in Ohio woods; Patrick Gass pictured his father, with his pipe, at Wellsburg, West Virginia; Sergeant Ordway crossed again the familiar threshold at Hebron, New Hampshire. Clark recalled Mulberry Hill, and Lewis,--his mind was fixed on Charlottesville, or the walls expanded into Monticello and the White House.

"Mak' some pleasurement now," begged the Frenchmen, "w'en Bonhomme Cruzatte tune up hees fidelle for de dance."

Tales were told and plans were made. Toward midnight these Sinbads of the forest fell asleep, on their beds of fir boughs, lulled by the brook, the whispering of the pines, and the falling of the winter rain.

This was not like winter rain in eastern climates, but soft and warm as April. The grass grew green, Spring flowers opened in December. The moist Japan wind gives Oregon the temperature of England.

"I most sincerely regret the loss of my thermometer," said Lewis. "I am confident this climate is much milder than the same latitude on the Atlantic. I never experienced so warm a winter."

But about the last of January there came a snow at Clatsop, four inches thick, and icicles hung from the houses during the day.

"A real touch of winter," said Lewis. "The breath is perceptible in our room by the fire." Like all Oregon snow it disappeared in a week--and then it was Spring.

In the centre of the officer's cabin, a fir stump, sawed off smooth and flat for a table, was covered with maps and papers. Books were written in that winter of 1805-6, voluminous records of Oregon plants and trees, birds, beasts, and fishes. They had named rivers and measured mountains, and after wandering more than Homer's heroes, the explorers were ready now to carry a new geography to the States. And here, as everywhere, Lewis was busy with his vocabularies, learning the Chinook jargon.

As never before, all the men became scientists. Even Captain Clark's black man took an interest and reported some fabulous finds.

The houses were dry and comfortable, and within, they had a plentiful supply of elk and salt, "excellent, white, and fine, but not so strong as the rock salt, or that made in Kentucky."

Meal time was always interesting. Very often the Captains caught themselves asking: "Charboneau, when will dinner be ready?"

All day the firelight flickered on Sacajawea's hair, as she sat making moccasins, crooning a song in her soft Indian monotone. This was, perhaps, the happiest winter Sacajawea ever knew, with baby Touissant toddling around her on the puncheon floor, pulling her shawl around his chubby face, or tumbling over his own cradle. The modest Shoshone princess never dreamed how the presence of her child and herself gave a touch of domesticity to that Oregon winter.

Now and then Indian women came to see Sacajawea, sitting all day without a word, watching her every motion.

Sometimes Sacajawea helped Charboneau, with his spits, turning slowly before the fire, or with his elk's tongues or sausage or beaver's tails. Sometimes she made trapper's butter, boiling up the marrow of the shank bones with a sprinkle of salt.

In the short days darkness came on at four o'clock, and the last of the candles were soon exhausted. Then the moulds were brought and candles were made of elk tallow, until a heap, shining and white, were ready for the winter evenings.

"We have had trouble enough with those thieving Chinooks," said Captain Lewis. "Without a special permit, they are to be excluded from the fort."

The Indians heard it. Did a knock resound at the gate, "No Chinook!" was the quick accompaniment.

"Who, then?" demanded the sentinel, gun in hand.

"Clatsop," answered Coboway's people entering with roots and cranberries.

Or, "Cathlamets," answered an up-river tribe with rush bags of wapato on their backs. Roots of the edible thistle--white and crisp as a carrot, sweet as sugar, the roasted root of the fern, resembling the dough of wheat, and roots of licorice, varied the monotonous fare.

These supplies were very welcome, but the purchase money, that was the problem.

President Jefferson had given to Captain Lewis an unlimited letter of credit on the United States, but such a letter would not buy from these Indians even a bushel of wapato.

The Cathlamets would trade for fishhooks. The Clatsops preferred beads, knives, or an old file.

No wonder they valued an old file: the finest work of their beautiful canoes was often done with a chisel fashioned from an old file. Lewis and Clark had frequent occasion to admire their skill in managing these little boats, often out-riding the waves in the most tumultuous seas.

Ashore, these canoe-Indians waddled and rolled like tipsy sailors. Afloat, straight and trim as horse-Indians of the prairie, each deft Chinook glided to his seat along the unrocking boats, and striking up the paddlers' "Ho-ha-ho-ha-ho-ha-" went rowing all their lives, until their arms grew long and strong, their legs shrunk short and crooked, and their heads became abnormally intelligent.

Nor were these coast Indians lacking in courage,--they sometimes ventured into the sea in their wonderful canoes, and harpooned the great whale and towed him in.

When it came to prices for their beautiful skins of sea-otter, almost nothing would do. Clark offered a watch, a handkerchief, an American dollar, and a bunch of red beads for a single skin.

"No! No!" in stentorian tone--"_Tyee ka-mo-suck,--chief beads_,"--the most common sort of large blue glass beads, the precious money of that country. Chiefs hung them on their bosoms, squaws bound them on their ankles, pretty maidens hung them in their hair. But Lewis and Clark had only a few and must reserve them for most pressing necessity.

Since that May morning when Captain Robert Gray discovered the Columbia River, fourteen years before, the Chinook Indians had learned the value of furs. Once they handed over their skins, and took without a murmur what the Boston skippers chose to give. Now, a hundred ships upon that shore had taught them craft.

One of old King Comcomly's people had a robe of sea-otter, "the fur of which was the most beautiful we had ever seen." In vain Lewis offered everything he had, nothing would purchase the treasured cloak but the belt of blue beads worn by Sacajawea.

On every hand among these coast tribes were blankets, sailor-clothes, guns,--old Revolutionary muskets mended for this trade,--powder and ball, the powder in little japanned tin flasks in which the traders sold it.

In what Clark calls "a guggling kind of language spoken mostly through the throat," with much pantomime and some English, conversation was carried on.

"Who are these traders?" asked Captain Lewis.

Old Comcomly, King of the Chinooks, on the north side, and Tyee Coboway, Chief of the Clatsops, on the south bank of the Columbia, tried to remember, and counted on their fingers,--

"Haley, three masts, stays some time," "Tallamon not a trader," "Callalamet has a wooden leg," "Davidson, no trader, hunts elk," "Skelley, long time ago, only one eye."

And then there were "Youens, Swipton, Mackey, Washington, Mesship, Jackson, Balch," all traders with three-masted ships whose names are not identified by any Atlantic list.

The one translated Washington by Lewis and Clark may have been Ockington of the _Belle Savage_, 1801, or Tawnington, both of whom are known to have been on the coast in those years.

In fact, no complete record was ever kept of the ships that swarmed around the Horn and up the Pacific, in those infant years of our republic, 1787 to 1820. While Europe clustered around the theatre of Napoleonic wars, every harbour of New England had its fur ships and whalers out, flying the Stars and Stripes around the world.

"What do they say?" inquired Lewis, still pressing investigation. Proud of their acquirements, every Chinook and Clatsop in the nation could recall some word or phrase.

"Musket, powder, shot, knife, file, heave the lead, damned rascal!"

No wonder Lewis and Clark laughed, these mother words on the savage tongue were like voices out of the very deep, calling from the ships.

"One hyas tyee ship--great chief ship--Moore, four masts, three cows on board."

"Which way did he go?"

The Indians pantomimed along the northwest coast.

"From which," says Lewis, "I infer there must be settlements in that direction."

The great desire, almost necessity, now, seemed to be to wait until some ship appeared upon the shore from which to replenish their almost exhausted stores.

Whenever the boats went in and out of Meriwether Bay they passed the Memeloose Illahee, the dead country of the Clatsops. Before 1800, as near as Lewis and Clark could ascertain, several hundred of the Clatsops died suddenly of a disease that appeared to be smallpox, the same undoubtedly that cut down Black Bird and his Omahas, rolling on west and north where the Hudson's Bay traders traced it to the borders of the Arctic.

In Haley's Bay one hundred canoes in one place bespoke the decimation of the Chinooks, all slumbering now in that almost priceless carved coffin, the Chinook canoe, with gifts around them and feet to the sunset, ready to drift on an unknown voyage.

There was a time when Indian campfires stretched from Walla Walla to the sea, when fortifications were erected, and when Indian flint factories supplied the weapons of countless warriors. But they are gone. The first settlers found sloughs and bayous lined with burial canoes, until the dead were more than the living. No Indians knew whose bones they were, "those old, old, old people." Red children and white tumbled them out of the cedar coffins and carried away the dead men's treasures.

"There was mourning along the rivers. A quietness came over the land." Stone hammers, flint chips, and arrows lie under the forests, and embers of fires two centuries old.

The native tribes were disappearing before the white man came, and the destruction of property with the dead kept the survivors always impoverished.

XIX

_A WHALE ASHORE_

"A whale! a whale ashore!"

When Chief Coboway brought word there was great excitement at Fort Clatsop. Everybody wanted to see the whale, but few could go. Captain Clark appointed twelve men to be ready at daylight.

Sacajawea, in the privacy of her own room that Sunday evening, spoke to Charboneau. Now Charboneau wanted her to stay and attend to the "l'Apalois"--roasting meats on a stick,--and knowing that the child would have to be looked after, slipped over to the Captains, discussing by the fire.

"Sacajawea t'ink she want to see de whale. She ought not go."

"Very well," answered the Captains, scarce heeding. "She better stay at the fort. It would be a hard jaunt for a woman to go over Tillamook Head."

Charboneau went back. "De Captinne say you cannot go!"

This was a staggering blow to Sacajawea, but her woman's determination had become aroused and she took the rostrum, so to speak. Leaving the baby Touissant with his father, she in turn slipped over to the Captains.

Sacajawea was a born linguist. "Captinne, you remember w'en we reach de rivers and you knew not which to follow? I show de country an' point de stream. Again w'en my husband could not spik, I spik for you.

"Now, Captinne, I travel great way to see de Beeg Water. I climb de mountain an' help de boat on de rapide. An' now dis monstous fish haf come"--Sacajawea could scarce restrain her tears. Sacajawea was only a woman, and a brave little woman at that.

Captain Lewis was moved. "Sacajawea, you are one of those who are born not to die. Of course you can go. Go and be getting ready, and," he added, "if Charboneau wants to go too, he will have to carry the baby!"

They breakfasted by candle-light. Everybody was ready next morning, but Sacajawea was ahead of them all. Charboneau looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing. More than once the Captains had reminded him of his duty.

The sun rose clear and cloudless on a land of springtime, and yet it was only January. Robins sang around the stockade, bluebirds whizzed by, silver in the sunlight. Two canoes proceeded down the Netul into Meriwether Bay, on the way to the Clatsop town.