tstretched hand the Indian closed his eyes and shook his head,—evidently he had never been so far to the south.
Back around Warrior's Point Clark came, whence the Multnomahs were wont to issue to battle in their huge war canoes. An old Indian trail led up into the interior, where for ages the lordly Multnomahs had held their councils. Many houses had fallen entirely to ruin.
Clark inquired the cause of decay. An aged Indian pointed to a woman deeply pitted with the smallpox.
"All died of that. Ahn-cutty! Long time ago!"
The Multnomahs lived on Wapato Island. A dozen nations gave fealty to Multnomah. All had symbolic totems, carved and painted on door and bedstead, and at every bedhead hung a war club and a Moorish scimitar of iron, thin and sharp, rude relic of Ko-na-pe's workshop.
Having now dried sufficient meat to last to the Nez Percés, Lewis and Clark set out for the Dalles, that tragical valley, racked and battered, where the devils held their tourneys when the world was shaped by flood and flame.
Through the sheeny brown basaltic rock, three rifts let through the river, where, in fishing time, salmon leaped in prodigious numbers, filling the Indians' baskets, tons and tons a day. But the salmon had not yet come.
At this season the upper tribes came down to the Dalles to traffic robes and silk grass for sea-shells and wapato. Fish was money. After the traders came, beads, beads, became the Indian's one ambition. For beads he would sacrifice his only garment and his last morsel of food.
In this annual traffic of east and west, the Dalles Indians had become traders, robbers, pirates. No canoe passed that way without toll. Dressed in deerskin, elk, bighorn, wolf, and buffalo, these savages lay now in wait for Lewis and Clark, portaging up the long narrows.
Tugging, sweating, paddling, poling, pulling by cords, it was difficult work hauling canoes up the narrow way.
Crowds of Indians pressed in.
"Six tomahawks and a knife are gone!"
"Another tomahawk gone!"
