Lyman's History of old Walla Walla County, Vol. 1 / Embracing Walla Walla, Columbia, Garfield and Asotin counties

by William Denison Lyman

The scope of our book does not permit any detailed account of the preparations or of the personnel of the party. Suffice it to say that the leader, Meriwether Lewis, and his lieutenant, William Clark, were men of energy, discretion, courage, and the other necessary qualities for such an undertaking. While not men of education or general culture (Clark could not even spell or compose English correctly) they both had an abundance of common sense and in preparation for their mission gained a hurried preparation in the essentials of botany, zoology, and astronomy such as might enable them to observe and report intelligently upon the various objects of discovery and the distances and directions traversed.

Jefferson's instructions to Captain Lewis give one an added respect for the intelligence and broad humanity of the great democrat. Particularly did he enjoin upon the leader of the party the wisdom of amicable relations with the natives. The benevolent spirit of the President appears in his direction that kine-pox matter be taken and that its use for preventing smallpox be explained to the Indians. All readers of American history should read these instructions, both for an estimate of Jefferson personally, and for light they throw on the conditions and viewpoints of the times.

The number in the party leaving St. Louis was forty-five. But one death occurred upon the whole journey, which lasted from May 14, 1804, to September 23, 1806. Never perhaps did so extended and difficult an expedition suffer no little. And this was the more remarkable from the fact that there was no physician nor scientific man with the party and that whatever was needed in the way of treating the occasional sicknesses or accidents must be done by the captains. While to their natural force and intelligence the party owed a large share of its immunity from disaster, good fortune surely attended them. This seems the more noticeable when we reflect that this was the first journey across a wilderness afterwards accentuated with every species of suffering and calamity.

The members of the party were encouraged to preserve journals and records to the fullest degree, and from this resulted a fullness of detail by a number of the men as well as the leaders which has delighted generations of readers ever since. And in spite of the fact that none of the writers had any literary genius, these journals are fascinating on account of the nature of the undertaking and a certain glow of enthusiasm which invested with a charm even the plain and homely details of the long journey.

The first stage of the expedition was from St. Louis, May 14, 1804, to a point 1,600 miles up the Missouri, reached November 2. There the party wintered in a structure which they called Fort Mandan. The location was on the west bank of the Missouri, opposite the present City of Pierre. The journey had been made by boats at an average advance of ten miles a day. The river, though swift and with frequent shoals, offered no serious impediments, even for a long distance above Fort Mandan.

After a long, cold winter in the country of the Mandans, the expedition resumed their journey up the Missouri on April 7, 1805. Of the interesting details of this part of their course we cannot speak. Reaching the headwaters of the Missouri on August 12, they crossed that most significant spot, the Great Divide. A quotation from the journal of Captain Lewis indicates the lively sentiments with which they passed from the Missouri waters to those of the Columbia: "As they proceeded, their hope of seeing the waters of the Columbia rose to almost painful anxiety; when at the distance of four miles from the last abrupt turn of the stream, they reached a small gap formed by the high mountains which recede on either side, leaving room for the Indian road. From the foot of one of the lowest of these mountains, which rises with a gentle ascent for about half a mile, issued the remotest water of the Missouri. They had now reached the hidden sources of that river which had never before been seen by civilized man; and as they quenched their thirst at the chaste and icy fountain—as they sat down by the brink of the little rivulet which yielded its distant and modest tribute to the parent ocean—they felt themselves rewarded for all their labors and difficulties. * * * They found the descent much steeper than on the eastern side, and at the distance of three-quarters of a mile, reached a handsome, bold creek of cold, clear water running to the westward. They stopped to taste for the first time the waters of the Columbia."

After some very harassing and toilsome movements in that vast cordon of peaks in which lie the cradles of the Missouri, Yellowstone, Snake, Clearwater, and Bitterroot rivers—more early reaching starvation point than at any time on the trip—the party emerged upon a lofty height from which their vision swept over a vast expanse of open prairie, in which it became evident that there were many natives and, as they judged, the near vicinity of the great river, which, as they thought, would carry them in short order to the Western Ocean of their quest. They little realized that they were yet more than six hundred miles from the edge of the continent. Descending upon the plain, they made their way to the Kooskooskie, now known as the Clearwater River. As judged by Olin D. Wheeler in his invaluable book, "On The Trail of Lewis and Clark," the explorers crossed from what is now Montana into the present Idaho at the Lolo Pass, and proceeded thence down the broken country between the north and middle forks of the Kooskooskie, reaching the junction on September 26. The camp at that spot was called Canoe Camp. There they remained nearly two weeks, most of them sick through overeating after they had sustained so severe a fast in the savage defiles of the Bitter Roots, and from the effects of the very great change in temperature from the snowy heights to the hot valley below. At Canoe Camp they constructed boats for the further prosecution of their journey. They left their thirty-eight horses with three Indians of the Chopunnish or Pierced-Nose tribe, or Nez Percé as we now know them.

With their canoes they entered upon a new stage of their journey, one easy and pleasant after the hardships of the mountains. Down the beautiful Kooskooskie, then low in its autumn stage, they swept gaily, finding frequent rapids, though none serious. The pleasant-sounding name Kooskooskie, which ought to be preserved (though Clearwater is appropriate and sonorous), was supposed by the explorers to be the name of the river. This it appears was a misapprehension. The author has been told by a very intelligent Indian named Luke, living at Kamiah, that the Indians doubtless meant to tell the white men that the stream was Koos, koos, or water, water. Koos was and still is the Nez Percé word for water. Luke stated that the Indians did not regularly have names for streams, but only for localities, and referred to rivers as the water or koos belonging to some certain locality.

After a prosperous descent of the beautiful and impetuous stream for a distance estimated by them at fifty-nine miles (considerably overestimated) the party entered a much larger stream coming from the south. This they understood the Indians to call the Kimooenim. They named it the Lewis in honor of Captain Lewis. It was the great Snake River of our present maps. The writer has been told by Mr. Thomas Beall of Lewiston that the true Indian name is Twelka. Still another native name is Shahaptin. The party was now at the present location of Lewiston and Clarkston, one of the most notable regions in the Northwest for beauty, fertility, and all the essentials of capacity for sustaining a high type of civilized existence. The land adjoining Snake River on the west is Asotin County, one of the components of our history. The party camped on the right bank just below the junction, and that first camp of white men was nearly opposite both Lewiston and Clarkston of today. They say that the Indians flocked from all directions to see them. The scantiness of their fare had brought them to the stage of eating dog-meat, which they say excited the ridicule of the natives. The Indians gave them to understand that the southern branch was navigable up about sixty miles; that not far from its mouth it received a branch from the south, and at two days' march up a larger branch called Pawnashte, on which a chief resided who had more horses than he could count.

The first of these must be the Asotin Creek, unless indeed they referred to the Grande Ronde, which is the first large stream, but is considerable distance from the junction. The Pawnashte must have been the Salmon, the largest tributary of the Snake. The Snake at the point of the camp of the explorers was discovered to be about three hundred yards wide. The party noticed the greenish blue color of the Snake, while the Kooskooskie was as clear as crystal. The Indians at this point are described as of the Chopunnish or Pierced-Nose nations, the latter of those names translated by the French voyageurs into the present Nez Percé. According to the observations of the party, the men were in person stout, portly, well-looking men; the women small, with good features and generally handsome. The chief article of dress of the men was a "buffalo or elk-skin robe decorated with beads, sea-shells, chiefly mother-of-pearl, attached to an otter-skin collar and hung in the hair, which falls in front in two queues; feathers, paints of different kinds, principally white, green, and light blue, all of which they find in their own country. The dress of the women is more simple, consisting of a long skirt of argalia or ibex-skin, reaching down to the ankles without a girdle; to this are tied little pieces of brass and shells and other small articles." Further on the journal states again: "The Chopunnish have few amusements, for their life is painful and laborious; and all their exertions are necessary to earn even their precarious subsistence. During the summer and autumn they are busily occupied in fishing for salmon and collecting their winter store of roots. In the winter they hunt the deer on snow-shoes over the plains, and towards spring cross the mountains to the Missouri for the purpose of trafficking for buffalo robes." It may be remarked here parenthetically that there is every indication that buffalo formerly inhabited the Snake and Columbia plains. In fact, buffalo bones have been found in recent years in street excavations at Spokane. What cataclysm may have led to their extermination is hidden in obscurity. But at the first coming of the whites it was discovered that one of the regular occupations of the natives was crossing the Rocky Mountains to hunt or trade for buffalo.