Free Lewis and Clark by Ralph K. Andrist Page A

noted in his journal. “The men, women & children ran meeting us & Seemed rejoiced to See us.” The Indians offered them dried salmon and pounded camass root, which promptly made the white men terribly sick. The Nez Percé chief was Walammottinin, meaning “Hair Bunched and Tied;” Clark called him Twisted Hair. The chief drew a map for Clark on a white elk skin, showing their location on the Clearwater River, with the Columbia seven days’ journey away. Clark considered the chief “a cheerful man with apparent sincerity.”
    On September 22, Lewis’s exhausted party arrived, and like Clark’s, fell ill. It took Lewis nearly two weeks to recover.
    As the men grew able, Clark put them to work making canoes. Twisted Hair showed them to a grove of ponderosa pine trees along the Clearwater and taught the tired men a method of using fire to hollow out the thick trunks. By October 6, they had completed four large dugouts and one small one.
    They branded their thirty-eight horses with “U.S., Capt. M. Lewis,” and turned them over to some of Twisted Hair’s relations, who promised to take care of them. Twisted Hair and a lesser chief named Tetoharsky volunteered to guide them to the Columbia, and on October 7, they set off down the Clearwater. A day later, their Shoshone guides, intimidated by the Nez Percés in the party, vanished.
    The current, for the first time, was at their backs, but they were rocked by rapids that kept their progress to twenty or thirty miles a day. On October 8, one of their canoes was tossed against the rocks and sank. “The waves roared over the rocks and Some of the men could not Swim,” wrote Private John Ordway. There “they stayed in this doleful Situation untill we unloaded one of the other canoes and went and released them. 2 Indians went in a canoe to their assistance also.”
    The loss in supplies was considerable, according to Clark: “All our roots was in the Canoe that Sunk. . . . Our loose powder was also in the Canoe. . . .” The explorers were forced to break an unwritten rule: “We have made it a point at all times not to take any thing belonging to the Indians, even their wood,” Clark wrote. Timber that the Indians had split to construct a house was taken for firewood, “as no other is to be found in any direction.”
    On October 10, the expedition rode the waters of the Clearwater to the larger Snake River, which came up from the south and swung to the northwest, crossing from the future state of Idaho into Washington. On October 16, they passed from the Snake River into the Columbia.
    The party camped at the confluence of the rivers and was soon joined by 200 Indians from a nearby village, singing and beating drums. Chanting, they formed a semicircle while their chief smoked a ceremonial pipe with the captains and their Nez Percé guides. Indicating that they wanted to be friends, the captains passed out medals and what gifts they could spare from their dwindling supply of trading goods.
    Like all the Indians living on the great Columbia and its tributaries, these people, the Sokulks, depended on the salmon that came up the river in incredible numbers. But at that season, the salmon had stopped running, and the river was filled with dead and dying fish. Clark recorded: “those which was offerd to us we had every reason to believe was taken up on the shore dead [so] we thought proper not to purchase any, we purchased forty dogs [to eat] for which we gave articles of little value, such as beeds, bells & thimbles.”
    Travel became increasingly perilous as the icy, swift-flowing river began hurtling through a long series of canyons. On October 22, reaching the rapids above the Great Falls of the Columbia, known afterward as Celilo Falls, they were forced to portage their canoes and stores separately and to lower the canoes on ropes made of elk hide.
    Reconnoitering two days later, Clark encountered new difficulties. A couple of miles downstream was what he called “The