This Mirth Was The More Welcome
Because Our Situation Was Not Precisely That Which Would Most Dispose Us
To Gayety;
For we have only a little parched corn to eat, and our means
of subsistence or of success depend on
The wavering temper of the natives,
who may change their minds to-morrow. . . .
"The Shoshonees are a small tribe of the nation called the Snake Indians,
a vague appellation, which embraces at once the inhabitants of the southern
parts of the Rocky Mountains and of the plains on either side.
The Shoshonees with whom we now were amount to about one hundred warriors,
and three times that number of women and children. Within their own
recollection they formerly lived in the plains, but they have been
driven into the mountains by the Pahkees, or the roving Indians of
the Sascatchawan, and are now obliged to visit occasionally, and by stealth,
the country of their ancestors. Their lives, indeed, are migratory.
From the middle of May to the beginning of September they reside on
the headwaters of the Columbia, where they consider themselves perfectly
secure from the Pahkees, who have never yet found their way to that retreat.
During this time they subsist chiefly on salmon, and, as that fish disappears
on the approach of autumn, they are driven to seek subsistence elsewhere.
They then cross the ridge to the waters of the Missouri, down which they
proceed slowly and cautiously, till they are joined near the Three Forks
by other bands, either of their own nation or of the Flatheads, with whom
they associate against the common enemy.
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