Crossing the Mountains.

Fall had nearly come when they reached the head-waters of the Missouri.  The end of the holiday-time was at hand, for they had before them the labor of crossing the great mountains so as to strike the head-waters of the Columbia.  Their success at this point depended somewhat upon the Indian wife of the Frenchman who had joined them at Mandan.  She had been captured from one of the Rocky Mountains tribes and they relied on her as interpreter.  Partly through her aid, and partly by their own exertions, they were able to find, and make friends with, a band of wandering Shoshones, from whom they got horses.  Having cached their boats and most of their goods they started westward through the forest-clad passes of the Rockies; before this they had wandered and explored in several directions through the mountains and the foot-hills.  The open country had been left behind, and with it the time of plenty.  In the mountain forests the game was far less abundant than on the plains and far harder to kill; though on the tops of the high peaks there was one new game animal, the white antelope-goat, which they did not see, though the Indians brought them hides.  The work was hard, and the party suffered much from toil and hunger, living largely on their horses, before they struck one of the tributaries of the Snake sufficiently low down to enable them once more to go by boat.

    The Indians they Met.

They now met many Indians of various tribes, all of them very different from the Indians of the Western Plains.  At this time the Indians both east and west of the Rockies, already owned numbers of horses.  Although they had a few guns, they relied mainly on the spears and tomahawks, and bows and arrows with which they had warred and hunted from time immemorial; for only the tribes on the outer edges had come in contact with the whites, whether with occasional French and English traders who brought them goods, or with the mixed bloods of the northern Spanish settlements, upon which they raided.  Around the mouth of the Columbia, however, the Indians knew a good deal about the whites; the river had been discovered by Captain Gray of Boston thirteen years before, and ships came there continually, while some of the Indian tribes were occasionally visited by traders from the British fur companies.

With one or two of these tribes the explorers had some difficulty, and owed their safety to their unceasing vigilance, and to the prompt decision with which they gave the Indians to understand that they would tolerate no bad treatment; while yet themselves refraining carefully from committing any wrong.  By most of the tribes they were well received, and obtained from them not only information of the route, but also a welcome supply of food.  At first they rather shrank from eating the dogs which formed the favorite dish of the Indians; but after a while they grew quite reconciled to dog’s flesh; and in their journals noted that they preferred it to lean elk and deer meat, and were much more healthy while eating it.