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.