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. Being checked in this sly business,
they became ill-humored and returned, angry, down the river.
The explorers noticed here that the Indians flattened the heads
of males as well as females. Higher up the river, only the women
and female children had flat heads. The custom of artificially
flattening the heads of both men and women, in infancy,
was formerly practised by nearly all the tribes of the Chinook family
along the Columbia River. Various means are used to accomplish
this purpose, the most common and most cruel being to bind a flat
board on the forehead of an infant in such a way that it presses
on the skull and forces the forehead up on to the top of the head.
As a man whose head has been flattened in infancy grows older,
the deformity partly disappears; but the flatness of the head
is always regarded as a tribal badge of great merit.
"On the morning of the twenty-eighth," says the journal, having dried
our goods, we were about setting out, when three canoes came from above
to visit us, and at the same time two others from below arrived for the
same purpose. Among these last was an Indian who wore his hair in a que,
and had on a round hat and a sailor's jacket, which he said he had obtained
from the people below the great rapids, who bought them from the whites.
This interview detained us till nine o'clock, when we proceeded down
the river, which is now bordered with cliffs of loose dark colored rocks
about ninety feet high, with a thin covering of pines and other small trees.
At the distance of four miles we reached a small village of eight houses
under some high rocks on the right with a small creek on the opposite side
of the river.
"We landed and found the houses similar to those we had seen at the
great narrows; on entering one of them we saw a British musket, a cutlass,
and several brass tea-kettles, of which they seemed to be very fond.
There were figures of men, birds, and different animals, which were cut
and painted on the boards which form the sides of the room; though the
workmanship of these uncouth figures was very rough, they were highly
esteemed by the Indians as the finest frescos of more civilized people.
This tribe is called the Chilluckittequaw; their language, though somewhat
different from that of the Echeloots, has many of the same words,
and is sufficiently intelligible to the neighboring Indians. We procured
from them a vocabulary, and then, after buying five small dogs,
some dried berries, and a white bread or cake made of roots, we left them.
The wind, however, rose so high that we were obliged, after going one mile,
to land on the left side, opposite a rocky island, and pass the day."
On the same day the white chiefs visited one of the most prominent
of the native houses built along the river.
"This," says the journal, "was the residence of the principal chief
of the Chilluckittequaw nation, who we found was the same between whom
and our two chiefs we had made a peace at the Echeloot village.
He received us, very kindly, and set before us pounded fish,
filberts, nuts, the berries of the sacacommis, and white bread
made of roots. We gave, in return, a bracelet of ribbon to each
of the women of the house, with which they were very much pleased.
The chief had several articles, such as scarlet and blue cloth, a sword,
a jacket, and a hat, which must have been procured from the whites,
and on one side of the room were two wide, split boards, placed together
so as to make space for a rude figure of a man cut and painted on them.
On pointing to this, and asking him what it meant, he said something,
of which all that we understood was `good,' and then stepped up
to the painting, and took out his bow and quiver, which, with some
other warlike instruments, were kept behind it.
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