XXIII
CAMP CHOPUNNISH
As Lewis and Clark with twenty-three horses set out over the camas meadows that April morning a hundred years ago, the world seemed brighter for the kindness of the Walla Wallas.
At the Dalles the forest had ended. Now they were on the great Columbian plains that stretch to the Rockies, the northwest granary of to-day. The dry exhilarating air billowed the verdure like a sea.
Meadow larks sang and flitted. Dove-coloured sage hens, the cock of the plains, two-thirds the size of a turkey, cackled like domestic fowl before the advancing cavalcade. Spotted black-and-white pheasants pecked in the grass like the little topknot "Dominicks" the men had known around their boyhood homes.
And everywhere were horses.
"More hor-r-ses between th' Gr-reat Falls av th' Columby and th' Nez Percés than I iver saw in th' same space uv countery in me loife before," said Patrick Gass. "They are not th' lar-r-gest soize but very good an' active."
"Of an excellent race, lofty, elegantly formed, and durable," those Cayuse horses are described by Lewis and Clark. "Many of them appear like fine English coursers, and resemble in fleetness and bottom, as well as in form and colour, the best blooded horses of Virginia."
A hundred years ago, the Cayuse of the Columbian plains was a recent importation from the bluest blooded Arabian stock of Spain. White-starred, white-footed, he was of noble pedigree. Traded or stolen from tribe to tribe, these Spanish horses found a home on the Columbia. All winter these wild horses fattened on the plain; madly their Indian owners rode them; and when they grew old, stiff, and blind, they went, so the Indians said, to Horse Heaven on the Des Chute
