Free Lewis and Clark by Ralph K. Andrist

the thick brush to have time to hunt. The weather was miserable: rain, snow, and sleet sent the men to bed at night weary, hungry, and cold.
    On September 4, they came down into a wide valley. There, they met a friendly band of Indians, the Salish, who shared their food - berries and roots - and sold them fresh horses. “These natives are well dressed, decent looking Indians; light complectioned,” noted Private John Ordway. “. . . They have the most curious language of any we have seen before. They talk as though they lisped or have a bur on their tongue. . . .”
    The party continued north along the Bitterroot River, a little east of the present Montana-Idaho boundary, and a week after meeting with the Salish, stopped for a day on a creek, which they named Traveler’s Rest. There, the hunters stocked up on food before attempting the worst part of the trail, where their guides warned them no game could be found.
    Then they turned west and for ten miserable days followed the difficult Lolo Trail over the Bitterroot Mountains – “the most terrible mountains that I ever beheld,” according to Gass. Their Shoshone guide, Old Toby, had told them that the crossing would take five days, but he lost the trail, and the party wandered for two days before he regained his bearings.
    The ground, already strewn with fallen timber, was covered with snow; several horses were hurt by rolling down steep slopes. They managed to shoot a few pheasant, but when their food gave out, they killed and ate first one colt, then a second, then a third, “which we all Suped hartily on and thought it fine meat.” A nearby stream was named “Colt killed Creek.”
    The men woke on September 16 to two inches of snow, which had all but obscured the trail, noted Whitehouse. “We mended up our mockasons,” he noted. “Some of the men without Socks, wrapped rags on their feet, and loaded up our horses and Set out without anything to eat.” Captain Clark had spotted a deer off the trail and shot, but failed to kill it.
    By September 18, the last colt was gone, and supplies were reduced to “a skant proportion of portable soupe [a kind of instant broth that Lewis had purchased in Philadelphia] . . . a little bears oil and about 20 lbs. of candles.” In desperation, Clark and six men went ahead to try to kill some game while the rest of the party struggled on, growing weaker each day. They camped by a stream that Clark named “Hungery Creek, as at that place we had nothing to eate.”
    On September 20, Clark’s party came to more level country, where there was a village of Nez Percé Indians. They called themselves the Nimipu, which meant “the people,” but in sign language their name was indicated by a motion that Clark interpreted as “pierced nose.”
    Tribal legends later suggested that the natives’ first instinct was to kill the Europeans and take their weapons and supplies. To Lewis and Clark, they seemed frightened; like the Shoshone, most had never encountered white men before. But a woman in the tribe called Watkuweis – meaning “Returned from a Far-away Country” – had been captured as a young girl by a rival tribe on the Great Plains. She was sold to another tribe farther east, and eventually befriended by white people in Canada before escaping and making her way back. Now she was old and dying, but she came to the explorers’ defense, saying, “These are the people who helped me. Do them no harm.” A Nez Percé Indian called Many Wounds later recounted: “She told history about the whites and every Nez Percé listened . . . told how the white people were good to her, treated her with kindness. That is why the Nez Percés never made harm to the Lewis and Clark people. . . . We ought to have a monument to her in this far West. She saved much for the white race.”
    The men of the expedition seem to have had no notion of the danger they had faced. “These Savages were verry glad to see us,” Private Joseph Whitehouse