alighted, and he pointed out the location of the fort. I signed that I would wait for my friend before going on, and gave him my thanks; so we parted, he entering the Indian camp a few yards away. As I sat there with my face towards the road we had come, a young girl came to me bringing the new lid of a gallon tin pail heaped with luscious, ripe blackberries. It was a great treat to me. I felt mean at the idea of offering compensation, but ventured to present her a few fishhooks as a means of thanks, and am sure I noted a flash of the eyes denoting pleasure.
CHAPTER VII.
THE GATEWAY TO OREGON—SIX HUNDRED MILES OF HUNGRY LAND.
Such was the treatment received from the first Oregon Indians seen by the writer.
Fort Hall had been built as a trading post, and the American flag unfurled over it first by N. J. Wyeth in 1834. But Wyeth had been crushed out by competition with the Hudson's Bay Company, and was compelled to sell after a few years of desperate struggle, and the post was now in control of Alexander Grant as chief trader for that company. It was at this date the trade center of a hungry land. Its supplies of breadstuffs came from Western Oregon, six hundred miles west, and its meats from the buffalo country about as far east. It was in the natural passway of native tribes to and from the hunting grounds, and west of it had been the land of privation from prior to its first traversing by white men in 1811.
Clark arriving soon after I had disposed of the luscious treat of berries, we went together to the fort. As
