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.