XXIII Camp Chopunnish
As Lewis and Clark with twenty-three horses set out over the camas meadows that April morning a hundred years ago, the world seemed brighter for the kindness of the Walla Wallas.
At the Dalles the forest had ended. Now they were on the great Columbian plains that stretch to the Rockies, the northwest granary of to-day. The dry exhilarating air billowed the verdure like a sea.
Meadow larks sang and flitted. Dove-coloured sage hens, the cock of the plains, two-thirds the size of a turkey, cackled like domestic fowl before the advancing cavalcade. Spotted black-and-white pheasants pecked in the grass like the little topknot “Dominicks” the men had known around their boyhood homes.
And everywhere were horses.
“More hor-r-ses between th’ Gr-reat Falls av th’ Columby and th’ Nez Percés than I iver saw in th’ same space uv countery in me loife before,” said Patrick Gass. “They are not th’ lar-r-gest soize but very good an’ active.”
“Of an excellent race, lofty, elegantly formed, and durable,” those Cayuse horses are described by Lewis and Clark. “Many of them appear like fine English coursers, and resemble in fleetness and bottom, as well as in form and colour, the best blooded horses of Virginia.”
A hundred years ago, the Cayuse of the Columbian plains was a recent importation from the bluest blooded Arabian stock of Spain. White-starred, white-footed, he was of noble pedigree. Traded or stolen from tribe to tribe, these Spanish horses found a home on the Columbia. All winter these wild horses fattened on the plain; madly their Indian owners rode them; and when they grew old, stiff, and blind, they went, so the Indians said, to Horse Heaven on the Des Chutes to die.
Following the old Nez Percés trail, that became a stage road in the days of gold, and then a railroad, Lewis and Clark came to the land of the Nez Percés,—Chopunnish.
Thirty-one years later the missionary Spalding planted an apple-tree where Lewis and Clark reached the Snake at the mouth of Alpowa creek, May 4, 1806.
We-ark-koompt, the Indian express, came out to meet them. Over the camp of Black Eagle the American flag was flying. Chiefs vied with one another to do them honour. Tunnachemootoolt, Black Eagle, spread his leather tent and laid a parcel of wood at the door. “Make this your lodge while you remain with me.” Hohastilpilp, Red Wolf, came riding over the hills with fifty people.
The Captains had a fire lighted, and all night in the leather tent on the banks of the Kooskooske the chiefs smoked and pondered on the journey of the white men.
Lewis and Clark drew maps and pointed out the far-away land of the President. Sacajawea and the Shoshone boy interpreted until worn out, and then fell asleep. And ever within Black Eagle’s village was heard the dull “thud, thud, thud,” of Nez Percé women pounding the camas and the kouse, “with noise like a nail-factory,” said Lewis. All night long their outdoor ovens were baking the bread of kouse, and the kettles of camas mush, flavoured with yamp, simmered and sweetened over the dull red Indian fires. The hungry men were not disposed to criticise the cuisine of the savage, not even when they were offered the dainty flesh of dried rattlesnake!
Labiche killed a bear. In amazement the redmen gathered round.
“These bears are tremendous animals to the Indians,—kill all you can,” said Captain Lewis. Elated, every hunter went bear-hunting.
“Wonderful men that live on bears!” exclaimed the Indians.
Again the council was renewed, and they talked of wars. Bloody Chief, fond of war, showed wounds received in battle with the Snakes.
“It is not good,” said Clark. “It is better to be at peace. Here is a white flag. When you hold it up it means peace. We have given such flags to your enemies, the Shoshones. They will not fight you now.”
Fifty years later, that chief, tottering to his grave, said, “I held that flag. I held it up high. We met and talked, but never fought again.”
“We have confided in the white men. We shall follow their advice,” Black Eagle went proclaiming through the village.
All the kettles of soup were boiling. From kettle to kettle Black Eagle sprinkled in the flour of kouse. “We have confided in the white men. Those who are to ratify this council, come and eat. All others stay away.”
The mush was done, the feast was served; a new dawn had arisen on the Nez Percés.
Finding it impossible to cross the mountains, a camp was established at Kamiah Creek, on a part of the present Nez Percé reservation in Idaho county, Idaho, where for a month they studied this amiable and gentle people. Games were played and races run, Coalter outspeeding all. Frazer, who had been a fencing master in Rutland, back in Vermont, taught tricks, and the music of the fiddles delighted them.
Stout, portly, good-looking men were the Nez Percés, and better dressed than most savages, in their whitened tunics and leggings of deerskin and buffalo, moccasins and robes and breastplates of otter, and bandeaus of fox-skins like a turban on the brow. The women were small, of good features and generally handsome, in neatly woven tight-fitting grass caps and long buckskin skirts whitened with clay.
Upon the Missouri the eagle was domesticated. Here, too, the Nez Percé had his wicker coop of young eaglets to raise for their tail feathers. Any Rocky Mountain Indian would give a good horse for the black-and-white tail feather of a golden eagle. They fluttered from the calumet and hung in cascades from head to foot on the sacred war bonnet.
A May snowstorm whitened the camas meadows and melted again. Thick black loam invited the plough, but thirty Springs should pass before Spalding established his mission and gave ploughs to the redmen. Twisted Hair saw the advent of civilisation. Red Wolf planted an orchard. Black Eagle went to see Clark at St. Louis and died there.
Captain Lewis held councils, instructing, educating, enlightening the Kamiahs, so that to this day they are among the most advanced of Indian tribes.
Captain Clark, with simple remedies and some knowledge of medicine, became a mighty “tomanowos” among the ailing. With basilicons of pitch and oil, wax and resins, a sovereign remedy for skin eruptions, with horse-mint teas and doses of sulphur and cream-of-tartar, with eye-water, laudanum, and liniment, he treated all sorts of ills. Fifty patients a day crowded to the tent of the Red Head. Women suffering from rheumatism, the result of toil and exposure in the damp camas fields, came dejected and hysterical. They went back shouting, “The Red Head chief has made me well.”
The wife of a chief had an abscess. Clark lanced it, and she slept for the first time in days. The grateful chief brought him a horse that was immediately slaughtered for supper. A father gave a horse in exchange for remedies for his little crippled daughter.
With exposure to winds, alkali sand, and the smoke of chimneyless fires, few Indians survived to old age without blindness.
“Eye-water! Eye-water!” They reached for it as for a gift from the gods. Clark understood such eyes, for the smoke of the pioneer cabin had made affections of the eye a curse of the frontier.
But affairs were now at their lowest. Even the medicines were exhausted, and the last awl, needle, and skein of thread had gone. Off their shabby old United States uniforms the soldiers cut the last buttons to trade for bread. But instead of trinkets the sensible Nez Percés desired knives, buttons, awls for making moccasins, blankets, kettles. Shields the gunsmith ingeniously hammered links of Drouillard’s trap into awls to exchange for bread.
The tireless hunters scoured the country. Farther and farther had scattered the game. Even the bears had departed. Thirty-three people ate a deer and an elk, or four deer a day. There was no commissariat for this little army but its own rifles. And yet, supplies must be laid in for crossing the mountains.
Every day Captain Lewis looked at the rising river and the melting snows of the Idaho Alps.
“That icy barrier, which separates me from my friends and my country, from all which makes life estimable—patience—patience—”
“The snow is yet deep on the mountains. You will not be able to pass them until the next full moon, or about the first of June,” said the Indians.
“Unwelcome intelligence to men confined to a diet of horse meat and roots!” exclaimed Captain Lewis.
Finally even horse-flesh failed. Suspecting the situation, Chief Red Wolf came and said, “The horses on these hills are ours. Take what you need.”
He wore a tippet of human scalps, but, says Lewis, “we have, indeed, on more than one occasion, had to admire the generosity of this Indian, whose conduct presents a model of what is due to strangers in distress.”
Gradually the snows melted, and the high water subsided.
“The doves are cooing. The salmon will come,” said the Indians. Blue flowers of the blooming camas covered the prairies like a lake of silver. With sixty-five horses and all the dried horse meat they could carry, on June 16, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back over the Bitter Root Range on the Lolo trail by which they had entered.