He wore a tippet of human scalps, but, says Lewis, "we have, indeed, on more than one occasion, had to admire the generosity of this Indian, whose conduct presents a model of what is due to strangers in distress."
Gradually the snows melted, and the high water subsided.
"The doves are cooing. The salmon will come," said the Indians. Blue flowers of the blooming camas covered the prairies like a lake of silver. With sixty-five horses and all the dried horse meat they could carry, on June 16, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back over the Bitter Root Range on the Lolo trail by which they had entered.
XXIV
OVER THE BITTER ROOT RANGE
Dog-tooth violets, roses, and strawberry blossoms covered the plain of Weippe without end, but the Lolo trail was deep with snow. Deep and deeper grew the drifts, twelve and fifteen feet. The air was keen and cold with winter rigours. To go on in those grassless valleys meant certain death to all their horses, and so, for the first time, they fell back to wait yet other days for the snows to melt upon the mountains.
"We must have experienced guides." Drouillard and Shannon were dispatched once more to the old camp, and lo! the salmon had come, in schools and shoals, reddening the Kooskooskee with their flickering fins.
Again they faced the snowy barrier with guides who traversed the trackless region with instinctive sureness.
"They never hesitate," said Lewis. "They are never embarrassed. So undeviating is their step that whenever the snow has disappeared, even for a hundred paces, we find the summer road."
Up in the Bitter Root peaks, like the chamois of the Alps, the Oregon mazama, the mountain goat, frolicked amid inaccessible rocks. And there, in the snows of the mountain pass, most significant of all, were found the tracks of barefooted Indians, supposed to have been Flatheads, fleeing in distress from pursuing Blackfeet. Such was the battle of primitive man.
The Indians regarded the journey of the white men into the country of their hereditary foes as a venture to certain death.