until we got to Grand Ronde. At Fort Boise, we mustered enough silver money to purchase 20 pounds of Oregon flour, but a duck at Willow Springs, a prairie chicken while descending the hill into the Grand Ronde valley and a ruffled grouse at the foot of it, a cotton tail rabbit on Burnt river and a few pounds of buffalo pemmican was all the meat we tasted between the 17th of September and the nth of October, when we met General M. M. McCarver on the Umatilla, about a day's ride from where Pendleton now is.
We had met Major James Waters, Wm. C. Dement and —— Rice, from Oregon City, in the Grand Ronde, and on their invitation stopped to camp with them. We had put our birds to cook with some rice given us by our Oregon friends when a cavalcade of Indan women returning from their camas flats with their horses loaded with the fresh-dug edibles, stopped to inspect us. We began by signs to ask if they had any food to barter and found they had several cakes of camas bread, not unlike the Scotch "bannock," made of barley meal. (This suggests that the name "Bannock" may have been given the Indians of the Boise valley from their custom of making camas and kouse roots and pounded choke cherry and haw seeds into sun-baked cakes like "bannocks.") They readily traded us all the bread they had for fish hooks.
Next morning where the trail took the Blue Mountains we found ourselves surrounded by a party of Indians, all men but one—a girl of 18, perhaps, mounted on as fine a steed as I have ever seen carry the name of Arabia. She kept beside an elderly man who seemed proud of her, and neither offered to trade. Indeed the men seemed only to make believe, one with a quart of peas, another with shelled corn. They were evidently inspecting us. The rest of the boys, seeing this, called to me to mount, but, still looking at the fine-looking father and daughter, I said: "There's the only Indian girl I have seen that approaches my idea of how Pocahontas looked, and she never was on such a splendid horse. I'm going to give her a salute before we take the hill," and drawing a pistol of the old style
