females will remain in the water for several hours, even in the dead of winter."[1]
This first party of the white race, thirty-six in number, were thus detained eight days gathering a sufficiency of food to make it prudent to risk a journey of ten days through the heart of the great and fertile Columbia Valley, then so devoid of large game as to make it reasonable to assume that at some period not very remote from the time of their visit the population had slaughtered the elk, deer, and antelope, and driven the buffalo to the east side of the Rockies. The practice of large parties of the strongest tribes passing that backbone of the continent every summer to hunt this noblest of North American game is good presumptive evidence that it had at no remote period ranged in the valley of the Columbia. In 1806, then, we have the fact of a population, roughly estimated at forty thousand, ekeing out a hand-to-mouth living, from salmon chiefly, with the additions of wokas kouse (wapato and camas), the latter much the more generally distributed from the Pacific Ocean to the summit flats of the Rocky Mountains by going across those mountains annually for game. They had, of course, to go in parties sufficiently strong for defense against the hated, dreaded and destructive Blackfeet. The taking of such journeys proves their necessity. The tribes unable through weakness or situation to make such expeditions, as were all those of Western and Southwestern Oregon, had to gather their precarious living from the plants mentioned, grass seeds, the small native fruits, of crab apple, haw, huckleberries, cranberries, etc. Looking over a recent report of the Division of Botany, United
- ↑ This extract illustrates the condition of womanhood. Lewis and Clark write of the production of wapato in this locality as though it grew nowhere else; but it grew yet grows on the margins of ponds and bayous of most of the streams flowing into the Columbia west of the Cascades.
