THE WHITE GOAT IS AN AGILE CLIMBER
In the front hall of a certain club there used to hang—and still hangs, for all I know—the head of a white goat. I stood near it one day in 1894 or 1895, while two gentlemen were looking at it. One had hunted in our West, and was asked by the other what animal this was. He replied with certainty, “A mountain sheep.” It was no business of mine, and I did not correct him. But how inveterate and singular was the confusion! for these two wild animals do not resemble each other a particle more than do their domestic namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I did not know that, ninety years before, the self-same blunder had been made and written down for the first time, and that we were still inheriting its consequences.
On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the confluence of the north fork with the main stream of that river which Idaho now most often calls the Clearwater, and which the Indians then called the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a great way—two thousand miles—walking and riding. They had lately been high among the cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the copious new food made every mother’s son of them ill. But a few days before this, and they had been sparingly serving out rations of horse flesh to keep together soul and body; now the Indians have given them all the salmon they can swallow, and taught them to eat the camass, a precarious vegetable. In the language of Doctor Coues (the admirable annotator of the 1894 edition, one can hardly imagine a better and honester piece of work): “Having been neither frozen nor starved quite to death—having survived camass roots, tartar emetic, and Rush’s pills (the famous Dr. Rush of Philadelphia,) the explorers have reached navigable Columbian waters.…” I could quote from this splendid book forever. It is our American Robinson Crusoe. Somebody, no doubt, will grind it into a historical novel; but no novel, no matter how big a sale it has, can spoil the journal of Lewis and Clark. Well, at this sick camp, while they’re making ready to float to Astoria, enter the white goat. It is his first recorded appearance.
Says Gass: “There appears to be a kind of sheep in this country, besides the ibex or mountain sheep, and which have wool on. I saw some of the skins, which the natives had, with wool four inches long, and as fine, white, and soft as any I had ever seen.”
Here, you perceive, is the error, appearing simultaneously with the goat.
These sheep “live,” says the text in another place, “in greater numbers on that chain of mountains which forms the commencement of the woody country on the coast and passes the Columbia between the falls and rapids.” Accurate in everything save the name.
Next comes the observation (William Dunbar and Dr. Hunter) written on the Columbia River near the Dalles: “We here saw the skin of a mountain sheep, which they say lives among the rocks in the mountains; the skin was covered with white hair; the wool was long, thick, and coarse, with long, coarse hair on the top of the neck and on the back, resembling somewhat the bristles of a goat.”
This time, you see, they are on the very edge of getting the thing straight. But no; they recede again, after the following which seems to promise complete clearing up:—
“A Canadian, who had been much with the Indians to the westward, speaks of a wool-bearing animal larger than a sheep, the wool much mixed with hair, which he had seen in large flocks.”
April ten, 1806, the party is on its return journey. It has successfully wintered on the coast, and has now come up the Columbia again, fifty miles above Vancouver.