Attracting more of the expedition's attention were the graveyards prominently located in many villages. Winter lodges made with split pine rails wore a more permanent face. In the summer, lodges were built with willows and rushes in a style that may have reminded the explorers of Those villages, typically containing four brush lodges, were located about eight to ten miles apart at good fishing runs. During the six days before coming to the Columbia, the party passed dozens of fishing villages. If hints of coming changes in land and climate in land and climate were overlooked, it was harder to miss the human clues pointing to a life where salmon replaced buffalo. Guides for permission to take and burn some of the Indians' wood. On October 14, at Pinetree Rapids on the Snake some thirty miles below the Palouse River, the Americans were so short of wood that they asked their two The Indians who lived along the Clearwater and upper Snake very carefully gathered and stacked whatever wood was available. One indication they did record was the growing scarcity of firewood. Fully occupied in navigating through the many Snake River rapids, the explorers perhaps missed the subtle signs that they were approaching the eastern edge of the great Columbia Plain. As Lewis and Clark neared the Columbia- Snake confluence, they constantly had to deal with dangerous rocks, capsized canoes, and wet gear. For nearly a week the expedition struggled with the twists, turns, and rapids of the Clearwater and Snake. An unfamiliar material culture coupled with hard bargaining methods a bit too close to home hinted that relations with the Indians in the Pacific Northwest were going to be distant at best and troubled at worst.īut much if not all of this was unimagined during the first days of travel beyond Canoe Camp. In those transactions it was the Indian middleman-whether Wishram or Chinook-who expected to set the price, while outsiders of whatever cultural stripe were to pay or go without. The Columbia River Sahaptians and Chinookans could outbargain the sharpest Yankee in dealing for dog meat or precious firewood. In flea-infested plank houses or at hastily made camps along the river, Lewis and Clark contended with Indians long accustomed to dealing with English, American, and native traders. To these sights were added the strange clucking sounds of the Chinookan speakers and the smells of tons of stacked salmon drying in warm winds blowing up the Columbia gorge. Large houses with wooden frames, clothing a strange admixture of native and European fashions, graceful canoes with "curious images" at their bows, and practices like head-flattening-all pointed to a native environment dominated by Pacific ways. On the Columbia, salmon was king and fishing the enterprise that gave shape to native life. At the confluence of the Snake and the Columbia, Lewis and Clark entered an Indian world increasingly distant from the plains traditions that had been so much a part of expedition-Indian relations since those early days along the Missouri. But even more striking were the physical and cultural differences among the Indians down the river and toward the coast. Moving through climates and landforms striking for their abrupt changes tested the expedition's endurance, as did the Columbia itself. Days marked by high winds, terrifying storms, monotonous meals of pounded salmon, and a damp that rotted clothing and tents pointed to what lay ahead during the winter at Fort Clatsop. They were in territory that received more than sixty inches of rain annually, more than six times the amount that fell on the land they had seen around The Dalles. Rain, fog, and dense ground cover all signaled that Lewis and Clark had at last reached a marine environment. "The face of the Countrey on both Side of the river above and about the falls," wrote the captain, "is Steep ruged and rockey open and contain but a Small preportion of herbage, no timber a fiew bushes excepted." But below the Cascades of the Columbia the terrain and climate once again changed dramatically. But in one memorable passage, Clark tried to capture something of the strange landscape. Driven to reach the western sea before winter and challenged by treacherous white water, Lewis and Clark had little time to describe the dark-walled canyons and treeless plains around them. Navigating hazardous rivers, the Corps of Discovery paddled the Clearwater to the Snake and on at last to the Columbia. In the next two months the expedition left the mountains and ponderosa pines of the plateau and sailed through the awesome and seemingly desolate Columbia Plain. Nez Perce Clearwater villages in boats in early October, they were moving toward worlds wholly unlike any they had yet experienced.
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