The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark
XVII
_DOWN THE COLUMBIA_
The arrival at the Columbia was followed by days of councils, withgifts and speeches and smoking. Two Nez Perce chiefs, Twisted Hair theTewat and Tetoh, introduced the explorers from tribe to tribe, bearingon and on the good words of Wat-ku-ese: "They are crowned ones. Do notbe afraid. Go near to them."
All the Indian world seemed camped on the Columbia. Everywhere andeverywhere were "inconceivable multitudes of salmon." They could beseen twenty feet deep in the water, they lay on the surface, andfloated ashore. Hundreds of Indians were splitting and spreading themon 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 sovaluable that Clark afterwards transferred it to paper. That map onthe robe was carried home to Jefferson and hung up by him inMonticello. Every trail was marked by moccasin tracks, every villageby a cluster of teepees.
In the "high countrey" of the Walla Walla they caught sight of "theMt. 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 clifftwo hundred feet above the water and spied St. Helens. Very well Clarkremembered Lord St. Helens from whom this peak was named. The veryname to him was linked with those old days when "Detroit must betaken," for Lord St. Helens and John Jay drew up the treaty thatevacuated Detroit.
Captain Clark and a few of the men still continued in advance walkingalong the shore.
Near the beautiful Umatilla a white crane rose over the Columbia.Clark fired. A village of Indians heard the report and marvelled atthe sudden descent of the bird. As with outspread, fluttering wings ittouched the ground the white men came into view.
One moment of transfixed horror, and the Indians fled. Captain Clarkpromptly 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 hispipestone calumet lit it, as was his wont, with a sunglass.
As the fire kindled from the rays through the open roof, again thepeople shrieked. In vain Drouillard tried to pacify them. Not onewould touch the pipe lit by the sun. Clark went out and sat on a rockand smoked until the boats arrived.
"Do not be afraid. Go to them," began the Nez Perce chiefs.
"They are not men," hurriedly whispered the frightened Indians. "Wesaw them fall from heaven with great thunder. They bring fire from thesky."
Not until Sacajawea landed with her baby was tranquillity restored.
"No squaw travels with a war party," that must be admitted, and soonthey 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 andcached in cellars in the sand. Making a portage around the Falls, theboats slid down.
"De rapide! de rapide! before we spik some prayer we come on de beegrock!" screamed Cruzatte, the bowman.
Apparently a black wall stretched across the river, but as theyneared, a rift appeared where the mighty channel of the Columbianarrows to forty-five yards at the Dalles. Crowds of Indians gatheredas Clark and Cruzatte stopped to examine the pass.
"By good steering!" said Cruzatte. Shaping up his canoe, it dartedthrough the hissing and curling waters like a racehorse.
Close behind, the other boats shot the boiling caldron, to the greatastonishment of Indian villagers watching from above.
At the Warm Springs Reservation there are Indians yet who remember theold dip-net fishing days and the stories of "Billy Chinook," who thensaw York, the black man. "I was a boy of twelve. When the black manturned and looked at us, we children fled behind the rocks."
Here at the Dalles were wooden houses, the first that Lewis and Clarkhad seen since leaving the Illinois country, with roofs, doors, andgables like frontier cabins,--and still more stacks of salmon. "Tenthousand pounds," said Clark, "dried, baled, and bound for trafficdown the river."
The ancient Indian village of Wishram stands on that spot still, withthe same strong smell of salmon. The houses are much the same, andamong 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 burialplaces of the savage dead, to the wild-rushing Cascades. Past theseCascades, five miles of continuous rapids, white with sheets of foam."We mak' portage," said Cruzatte, his bow grating on the narrow shelfof shore.
On either side, rocky palisades, "green-mossed and dripping," reachedthe skies. Tiny waterfalls, leaping from the clouds, fell in rainbowmist 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 softwest 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, thehome 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 scatteredinnumerable images of wood and stone or of burnt clay, household godsof the Columbian Indian.
Flat and flatter grew the heads. Up in the Bitter Root, women alonewore this badge of distinction. Here, every infant lay strapped like amummy with a padded board across its forehead.
A new sort of boats now glided alongside the flotilla, great seacanoes manned with Chinook paddles. They were long and light, taperingat the ends, wide in the middle and lifting stern and prow into beakslike a Roman galley. And every canoe was laden with salmon, going downriver to trade for beads and wapato.
Traces of white men began to appear,--blue and scarlet blankets, brasstea-kettles, and beads. One Indian, with a round hat and asailor-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 ofiron and other goods that Mr. Haley had given him. "And this is hissquaw in the canoe."
More and more fertile and delightful grew the country, shaded by thickgroves of tall timber and watered by streams, fair as lay unpeopledKentucky thirty years before. Scarce could Clark repress therecollection of the tales his brother brought home of that first tripto Boonsboro in 1775.
Nothing surprised them more than the tropic luxuriance of vegetation.The moist Japan wind nurtured the trees to mammoths, six, eight, andten feet through. Shrubbery like the hazel grew to be trees. The maplespread its leaves like palm fans; dogwood of magnolian beauty, wildcherry, crab-apple, interlaced with Oregon grape, blackberries, wildroses, vines of every sort and description, and ferns, ferns, fernsfilled the canyons like the jungles of Orinoco.
On November 4, nearly opposite the present Vancouver, they landed at avillage on the left side of the river where a fleet of over fiftycanoes was drawn up on shore, gathering wapato.
"Wapato? Wapato?" An Indian treated them to the queen root of theColumbia, 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, pointingbeyond some islands at the mouth of the Willamette. He was finelydressed and wore a round hat.
Yes, it might be, villages, villages everywhere, but ships--s
hipsbelow! They had no time for villages now. Long into the darkness ofnight the boats sped on, on, past dim forests bending to the wave,past shadowy heights receding into sunset, past campfires on the hillswhere naked Indians walked between them and the light.
At a late hour they camped. November rains were setting in, the nightwas noisy with wild fowl coming up the Columbia to escape the stormsof ocean. Trumpeter swans blew their shrill clarions, and whistlingswans, geese, and other birds in flights of hundreds swept past innoisy 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 scantgarments watched from a rock and told the tale in after years.
"We had been watching for days," she said. "News had come by Indianpost of the strangers from the east. They came in the afternoon andwere met by our canoes and brought to the village." "There," Clarksays 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. Evenat Cathlamet they heard the surge of ocean rolling on the rocks fortymiles away. Before night the fog lifted and they beheld "theocean!--that ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of allour anxieties. Ocean in view! O! the joy."
Struggling with their unwieldy canoes the landsmen grew seasick inthe rising swells of the up-river tide. For miles they could not finda place to camp, so wild and rocky were the shores.
At last, exhausted, they threw their mats on the beautiful pebblybeach and slept in the rain.
Everything was wet, soaked through, bedding, stores, clothing. And allthe 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 exposureand improper food.
"'T is the divil's own weather," said Pat, coming in from areconnoitre with his wet hunting shirt glued fast to his skin. Patcould see the "waves loike small mountains rolling out in the ocean,"but just now he, like all the rest, preferred a dry corner by achimney 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 towhat he ate, caught himself pondering on bread and buns. With thepeculiar half laugh of the squaw, Sacajawea brought a morsel that shehad saved for the child all the way from the Mandan towns, but now itwas wet and beginning to sour. Clark took it and remarked in hisjournal, "This bread I ate with great satisfaction, it being the onlymouthful I had tasted for several months."
Chinook Indians pilfered around the camp. "If any one of your nationsteals anything from us, I will have you shot," said CaptainClark,--"which they understand very well," he remarked to the camp asthe troublers slunk away. A sentinel stood on constant watch.
Captain Lewis and eleven of the men went around the bay and foundwhere white people had been camped all summer, but naught remainedsave the cold white beach and the Indians camping there. The ships hadsailed.
Down there near the Chinook town, facing the ocean, Captain Lewisbranded a tree with his name and the date, and a few days laterCaptain Clark says, "I marked my name on a large pine tree immediatelyon the isthmus, at Clatsop."
It was two hundred years since Captain John Smith sailed up theChickahominy in Virginia in search of the South Sea. At last, farbeyond the Chickahominy, Lewis and Clark sailed up the Missouri anddown the Columbia in search of the same South Sea. And here at themouth of the Oregon they found it, stretching away to China.
Balboa, Magellan, Cortez, Mackenzie,--Lewis and Clark had joined theimmortals.