will never wear again. We have to depend entirely upon this meagre
outfit for the purchase of such horses and provisions as it will be in
our power to obtain,--a scant dependence, indeed, for such a journey as
is before us."

It was hard to persuade the coast Indians to sell the canoes that were
necessary for the first part of the trip. The canoe afforded these
people their chief means for getting a livelihood, and was valued
accordingly. A boat and a woman were, by common consent, placed upon an
equality of value,--certainly not an overestimate of the worth of the
canoe, if one laid aside chivalry and regarded the squaws
dispassionately. When Captain Lewis was compelled to give a half-carrot
of tobacco and a laced coat in exchange for one of the little craft, he
observed that he considered himself defrauded of the coat. No doubt he
had in mind the native scale of values.

"Many reasons had determined us to remain at Fort Clatsop until the
first of April," says the journal entry of March 22d. "Besides the want
of fuel in the Columbian plains, and the impracticability of passing
the mountains before the beginning of June, we were anxious to see some
of the foreign traders, from whom, by means of our ample letters of
credit, we might have recruited our exhausted stores of merchandise.
About the middle of March, however, we had become seriously alarmed for
the want of food; the elk, our chief dependence, had at length deserted
their usual haunts in our neighborhood and retreated to the mountains.
We were too poor to purchase other food from the Indians, so that we
were sometimes reduced, notwithstanding all the exertions of our
hunters, to a single day's provisions in advance. The men, too, whom
the constant rains and confinement had rendered unhealthy, might, we
hoped, be benefited by leaving the coast and resuming the exercise of
travel. We therefore determined to leave Fort Clatsop, ascend the river
slowly, consume the month of March in the woody country, where we hoped
to find subsistence, and in this way reach the plains about the first
of April, before which time it will be impossible to attempt to cross
them."

The next day the canoes were loaded, and in the afternoon the party
took leave of Fort Clatsop.

Though the return along the Columbia was less fraught with danger than
the descent, it was much more toilsome. Going down, the men had taken
large chances in shooting the rapids; but coming back, portage had