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During the next day or two, Captain Lewis kept on the same general course through a well-watered country, the ground gradually rising as he approached the base of the mountains. Tracks of Indians, supposed to be Pahkees, became more numerous and fresh.
"The chiefs and warriors then came in a body to visit us as we were seated near our tent; and at their instance, two young men, one of whom was a son of Tunnachemootoolt, and the other the youth whose father had been killed by the Pahkees, presented to us each a fine horse.
But such is their terror of the Pahkees, that, so long as they can obtain the scantiest subsistence, they do not leave the interior of the mountains; and, as soon as they have collected a large stock of dried meat, they again retreat, thus alternately obtaining their food at the hazard of their lives, and hiding themselves to consume it.
"We now smoked a farewell pipe with our estimable companions, who expressed every emotion of regret at parting with us; which they felt the more, because they did not conceal their fears of our being cut off by the Pahkees. We also gave them a shirt, a handkerchief, and a small quantity of ammunition.
From the middle of May to the beginning of September they reside on the headwaters of the Columbia, where they consider themselves perfectly secure from the Pahkees, who have never yet found their way to that retreat. During this time they subsist chiefly on salmon, and, as that fish disappears on the approach of autumn, they are driven to seek subsistence elsewhere.
Here they were forced to part from their good friends and allies, the Indians, who had crossed the range with them. These men were afraid that they would be cut off by their foes, the Pahkees, and they wanted to find and join some band of the Indian nation with whom they were on terms of friendship. The journal gives this account of the parting:
I at length asked the reason and he told me that some foolish persons among them had suggested the idea that we were in league with the Pahkees and had come on in order to decoy them into an ambuscade where their enimies were waiting to receive them. but that for his part he did not believe it.
This route is also used by all the nations whom we know west of the mountains who are in the habit of visiting the plains of the Missouri; while on the other side, all the war-paths of the Pahkees which fall into this valley of Clark's River concentre at Traveller's-rest, beyond which these people have never ventured to the west."
Within their own recollection they formerly lived in the plains, but they have been driven into the mountains by the Pahkees, or the roving Indians of the Sascatchawan, and are now obliged to visit occasionally, and by stealth, the country of their ancestors. Their lives, indeed, are migratory.
On the twenty-ninth of June the party were well out of the snows in which they had been imprisoned, although they were by no means over the mountain barrier that had been climbed so painfully during the past few days. Here they observed the tracks of two barefooted Indians who had evidently been fleeing from their enemies, the Pahkees.
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