The Magnificent Adventure

The old Indians still made maps on the sand for them, showing them how they would come to the great river where the salmon came. They were now among yet another people--the Nez Percés. With these also they smoked and counciled, and learned that it would be easy for boats to go all the way down to the great river which ran to the sea.

"We will leave our horses here," said Lewis. "We will take to the boats once more."

So Gass and Bratton and Shields and all the other artisans fell to fashioning dugouts from the tall pines and cedars, hewing and burning and shaping, until at length they had transports for their scanty store of goods. By the first week of October they were at the junction of their river with the Snake. An old medicine man of the Nez Percés, Twisted Hair, a man who also could make maps, had drawn them charts on a white skin with a bit of charcoal. And on ahead, mounted runners of the Indians rushed down to inform the tribes of the coming of these strange people.

It was no longer an exploration, but a reception for them now. Bands of red men, who welcomed them, had heard of white men coming up from the sea. White men had once lived by the Tim-Tim water, on the great river of the salmon--so they had been told; but never had any living Indian heard of white men coming across the great mountains from the sunrise.

"Will," said Lewis, "it is done--we are safe now! We shall be first across to the Columbia. This--" he shook the Nez Percés' scrawled hide--"is the map of a new world!"