bonnet.
A May snowstorm whitened the camas meadows and
melted again. Thick black loam invited the plough, but
thirty Springs should pass before Spalding established
his mission and gave ploughs to the redmen. Twisted
Hair saw the advent of civilisation. Red Wolf planted
an orchard. Black Eagle went to see Clark at St. Louis
and died there.
Captain Lewis held councils, instructing, educating, enlightening the Kamiahs, so that to this day they are among the most advanced of Indian tribes.
Captain Clark, with simple remedies and some knowledge of medicine, became a mighty "tomanowos" among the ailing. With basilicons of pitch and oil, wax and resins, a sovereign remedy for skin eruptions, with horse-mint teas and doses of sulphur and cream-of-tartar, with eye-water, laudanum, and liniment, he treated all sorts of ills. Fifty patients a day crowded to the tent of the Red Head. Women suffering from rheumatism, the result of toil and exposure in the damp camas fields, came dejected and hysterical. They went back shouting, "The Red Head chief has made me well."
The wife of a chief had an abscess. Clark lanced it, and she slept for the first time in days. The grateful chief brought him a horse that was immediately slaughtered for supper. A father gave a horse in exchange for remedies for his little crippled daughter.
With exposure to winds, alkali sand, and the smoke of chimneyless fires, few Indians survived to old age without blindness.
"Eye-water! Eye-water!" They reached for it as for a gift from the gods. Clark understood such eyes, for the smoke of the pioneer cabin had made affections of the eye a curse of the frontier.
But affairs were now at their lowest. Even the medicines were exhausted, and the last awl, needle, and skein of thread had gone. Off their shabby old United States uniforms the soldiers cut the last buttons to trade for bread. But instead of trinkets the sensible Nez Percés desired knives, buttons, awls for making moccasins, blankets, kettles. Shields the gunsmith ingeniously
