Fifty years later, that chief, tottering to his grave, said, "I held that flag. I held it up high. We met and talked, but never fought again."
"We have confided in the white men. We shall follow their advice," Black Eagle went proclaiming through the village.
All the kettles of soup were boiling. From kettle to kettle Black Eagle sprinkled in the flour of kouse. "We have confided in the white men. Those who are to ratify this council, come and eat. All others stay away."
The mush was done, the feast was served; a new dawn had arisen on the Nez Percés.
Finding it impossible to cross the mountains, a camp was established at Kamiah Creek, on a part of the present Nez Percé reservation in Idaho county, Idaho, where for a month they studied this amiable and gentle people. Games were played and races run, Coalter outspeeding all. Frazer, who had been a fencing master in Rutland, back in Vermont, taught tricks, and the music of the fiddles delighted them.
Stout, portly, good-looking men were the Nez Percés, and better dressed than most savages, in their whitened tunics and leggings of deerskin and buffalo, moccasins and robes and breastplates of otter, and bandeaus of fox-skins like a turban on the brow. The women were small, of good features and generally handsome, in neatly woven tight-fitting grass caps and long buckskin skirts whitened with clay.
Upon the Missouri the eagle was domesticated. Here, too, the Nez Percé had his wicker coop of young eaglets to raise for their tail feathers. Any Rocky Mountain Indian would give a good horse for the black-and-white tail feather of a golden eagle. They fluttered from the calumet and hung in cascades from head to foot on the sacred war bonnet.
A May snowstorm whitened the camas meadows and melted again. Thick black loam invited the plough, but thirty Springs should pass before Spalding established his mission and gave ploughs to the redmen. Twisted Hair saw the advent of civilisation. Red Wolf planted an orchard. Black Eagle went to see Clark at St. Louis and died there.
Captain Lewis held councils, instructing, educating, enlightening the Kamiahs, so that to this day they are among the most advanced of Indian tribes.
Captain Clark, with simple remedies and some knowledge of medicine, became a mighty "tomanowos" among the ailing. With basilicons of pitch and oil, wax and resins, a sovereign remedy for skin eruptions, with horse-mint teas and doses of sulphur and cream-of-tartar, with eye-water, laudanum, and liniment, he treated all sorts of ills. Fifty patients a day crowded to the tent of the Red Head. Women suffering from rheumatism, the result of toil and exposure in the damp camas fields, came dejected and hysterical. They went back shouting, "The Red Head chief has made me well."