The Only Entrance Was By A Small Door At The Gable End, Cut Out Of The Middle Piece Of Timber, Twenty-Nine And A Half Inches High, Fourteen Inches Broad, And Reaching Only Eighteen Inches Above The Earth.

Before this hole is hung a mat; on pushing it aside and crawling through, the descent is by a

Small wooden ladder, made in the form of those used among us. One-half of the inside is used as a place of deposit for dried fish, of which large quantities are stored away, and with a few baskets of berries form the only family provisions; the other half, adjoining the door, remains for the accommodation of the family. On each side are arranged near the walls small beds of mats placed on little scaffolds or bedsteads, raised from eighteen inches to three feet from the ground; and in the middle of the vacant space is the fire, or sometimes two or three fires, when, as is usually the case, the house contains three families."

Houses very like these are built by the Ahts or Nootkas, a tribe of Indians inhabiting parts of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland. A Nootka calls his house an ourt.

The good offices of Lewis and Clark, who were always ready to make peace between hostile tribes, were again successful here. The Echeloots received the white men with much kindness, invited them to their houses, and returned their visits after the explorers had camped. Lewis and Clark told the Echeloot chiefs that the war was destroying them and their industries, bringing want and privation upon them. The Indians listened with attention to what was said, and after some talk they agreed to make peace with their ancient enemies. Impressed with the sincerity of this agreement, the captains of the expedition invested the principal chief with a medal and some small articles of clothing. The two faithful chiefs who had accompanied the white men from the headwaters of the streams now bade farewell to their friends and allies, the explorers. They bought horses of the Echeloots and returned to their distant homes by land.

Game here became more abundant, and on the twenty-sixth of October the journal records the fact that they received from the Indians a present of deer-meat, and on that day their hunters found plenty of tracks of elk and deer in the mountains, and they brought in five deer, four very large gray squirrels, and a grouse. Besides these delicacies, one of the men killed in the river a salmon-trout which was fried in bear's oil and, according to the journal, "furnished a dish of a very delightful flavor," doubtless a pleasing change from the diet of dog's flesh with which they had so recently been regaled.

Two of the Echeloot chiefs remained with the white men to guide them on their way down the river. These were joined by seven others of their tribe, to whom the explorers were kind and attentive. But the visitors could not resist the temptation to pilfer from the goods exposed to dry in the sun.

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