Jan. 21.—Two of the hunters came back with three elks, which form a timely addition to our stock of provision. The Indian visitors left us at twelve o'clock.
The Clatsops and other nations have visited us with great freedom. Having acquired much of their language, we are enabled, with the assistance of gestures, to hold conversations with great ease. We find them inquisitive and loquacious; by no means deficient in acuteness. They are generally cheerful, but seldom gay. Every thing they see excites their attention and inquiries.
Their treatment of women and old men depends very much on the usefulness of these classes. Thus, among the Clatsops and Chinooks, who live upon fish and roots, which the women are equally expert with the men in procuring, the women have a rank and influence far greater than they have among the hunting tribes. On many subjects their judgments and opinions are respected; and, in matters of trade, their advice is generally asked and followed. So with the old men: when one is unable to pursue the chase, his counsels may compensate for his want of activity; but in the next state of infirmity, when he can no longer travel from camp to camp as the tribe roams about for subsistence, he is found to be a burden. In this condition they are abandoned among the Sioux and other hunting-tribes of the Missouri. As the tribe are setting out for some new excursion where the old man is unable to follow, his children or nearest relations place before him a piece of meat and some water; and telling him that he has lived long enough, that it is now time for him to go home to his relations, who can take better care of him than his friends on earth, they leave him without remorse to perish, when his little supply is exhausted.
Though this is doubtless true as a general rule, yet, in the villages of the Minnetarees and Ricaras, we saw no want of kindness to old men: on the contrary, probably because in villages the more abundant means of subsistence renders such cruelty unnecessary, the old people appeared to be treated with attention; and some of their feasts, particularly the buffalo-dances, were intended chiefly as an occasion of contribution for the old and infirm.
FLATHEAD INDIANS.
The custom of flattening the head by artificial pressure during infancy prevails among all the nations we have seen west of the Rocky Mountains. To the east of that barrier the fashion is so perfectly unused, that they designate the western Indians, of whatever tribe, by the common name of Flatheads. The practice is universal among the Killimucks, Clatsops, Chinooks, and Cathlamahs,—the four nations with whom we have had most intercourse. Soon after the birth of her child, the mother places it in the compressing-frame, where it is kept for ten or twelve months. The operation is so gradual, that it is not attended with pain. The heads of the children, when they are released from the bandage, are not more than two inches thick about the upper edge of the forehead: nor, with all its efforts, can nature ever restore their shape; the heads of grown persons being often in a straight line from the tip of the nose to the top of the forehead.
TEMPERANCE.—GAMBLING.
Their houses usually contain several families, consisting of parents, sons and daughters, daughters-in-law and grand-children, among whom the provisions are in common, and harmony seldom interrupted. As these families gradually expand into tribes, or nations, the paternal authority is represented by the chief of each association. The chieftainship is not hereditary: the chief's ability to render service to his neighbors, and the popularity which follows it, is the foundation of his authority, which does not extend beyond the measure of his personal influence.
The harmony of their private life is protected by their ignorance of spirituous liquors. Although the tribes near the coast have had so much intercourse with the whites, they do not appear to possess any knowledge of those dangerous luxuries; at least, they have never inquired of us for them. Indeed, we have not observed any liquor of an intoxicating quality used among any Indians west of the Rocky Mountains; the universal beverage being pure water. They, however, almost intoxicate themselves by smoking tobacco, of which they are excessively fond. But the common vice of all these people is an attachment to games of chance, which they pursue with a ruinous avidity. The game of the pebble has already been described. Another game is something like the play of ninepins. Two pins are placed on the floor, about the distance of a foot from each other, and a small hole made in the earth behind them. The players then go about ten feet from the hole, into which they try to roll a small piece resembling the men used at checkers. If they succeed in putting it into the hole, they win the stake. If the piece rolls between the pins, but does not go into the hole, nothing is won or lost; but the wager is lost if the checker rolls outside the pins. Entire days are wasted at these games, which are often continued through the night round the blaze of their fires, till the last article of clothing or the last blue bead is lost and won.