XXIV
_OVER THE BITTER ROOT RANGE_
Dog-tooth violets, roses, and strawberry blossoms covered the plain ofWeippe without end, but the Lolo trail was deep with snow. Deep anddeeper grew the drifts, twelve and fifteen feet. The air was keen andcold with winter rigours. To go on in those grassless valleys meantcertain death to all their horses, and so, for the first time, theyfell back to wait yet other days for the snows to melt upon themountains.
"We must have experienced guides." Drouillard and Shannon weredispatched once more to the old camp, and lo! the salmon had come, inschools and shoals, reddening the Kooskooskee with their flickeringfins.
Again they faced the snowy barrier with guides who traversed thetrackless region with instinctive sureness.
"They never hesitate," said Lewis. "They are never embarrassed. Soundeviating is their step that whenever the snow has disappeared, evenfor a hundred paces, we find the summer road."
Up in the Bitter Root peaks, like the chamois of the Alps, the Oregonmazama, the mountain goat, frolicked amid inaccessible rocks. Andthere, in the snows of the mountain pass, most significant of all,were found the tracks of barefooted Indians, supposed to have beenFlatheads, fleeing in distress from pursuing Blackfeet. Such was thebattle of primitive man.
The Indians regarded the journey of the white men into the country oftheir hereditary foes as a venture to certain death.
"Danger!" whispered the guides, significantly rapping on their heads,drawing their knives across their throats, and pointing far ahead.
Every year the Nez Perces followed the Lolo trail, stony and steep andridgy with rocks and crossed with fallen trees, into the BuffaloIllahee, the buffalo country of the Missouri. And for this theBlackfeet fought them.
The Blackfeet, too, had been from time immemorial the deadly foe ofthe Flatheads, their bone of contention for ever the buffalo. TheBlackfeet claimed as their own all the country lying east of the mainrange, and looked upon the Flatheads who went there to hunt asintruders.
The Flathead country was west and at the base of the main Rockies,along the Missoula and Clark's Fork and northward to the Fraser. Withtheir sole weapon, the arrow, and their own undaunted audacity, twicea year occurred the buffalo chase, once in Summer and once in Winter.But "the ungodly Blackfeet," scourge of the mountains, lay in wait totrap and destroy the Flatheads as they would a herd of buffalo.
And so it had been war, bitter war, for ages. But a new force hadgiven to the Blackfeet at the west and the Sioux at the east supremacyover the rest of the tribes,--that was the white man's gun from theBritish forts on the Saskatchewan.
For spoils and scalps the Blackfeet, Arabs of the North, raided fromthe Saskatchewan to Mexico. They besieged Fort Edmonton at the north,and left their tomahawk mark on the Digger Indian's grave at thesouth. The Shoshone-Snakes, too, were immemorial and implacableenemies of both the Blackfeet and the Columbia tribes. They fought tothe Dalles and Walla Walla and up through the Nez Perces to Spokane.Their mad raiders threw up the dust of the Utah desert, and chased thelone Aztec to his last refuge in Arizona cliffs.
The Blackfeet fought the Shoshones, the Crows, by superior cunning,fought the Blackfeet, the Assiniboines fought the Crows, and theSioux, the lordly Sioux, fought all.
It was time for the white man's hand to stay the diabolical dance ofdeath.