is the fire, or sometimes two or three fires, when, as is
usually the case, the house contains three families."

Houses very like these are built by the Ahts or Nootkas, a tribe of
Indians inhabiting parts of Vancouver Island and the adjacent mainland.
A Nootka calls his house an ourt.

The good offices of Lewis and Clark, who were always ready to make
peace between hostile tribes, were again successful here. The Echeloots
received the white men with much kindness, invited them to their houses,
and returned their visits after the explorers had camped. Lewis and
Clark told the Echeloot chiefs that the war was destroying them and
their industries, bringing want and privation upon them. The Indians
listened with attention to what was said, and after some talk they
agreed to make peace with their ancient enemies. Impressed with the
sincerity of this agreement, the captains of the expedition invested the
principal chief with a medal and some small articles of clothing.
The two faithful chiefs who had accompanied the white men from the
headwaters of the streams now bade farewell to their friends and allies,
the explorers. They bought horses of the Echeloots and returned to their
distant homes by land.

Game here became more abundant, and on the twenty-sixth of October the
journal records the fact that they received from the Indians a present
of deer-meat, and on that day their hunters found plenty of tracks of
elk and deer in the mountains, and they brought in five deer, four very
large gray squirrels, and a grouse. Besides these delicacies, one of
the men killed in the river a salmon-trout which was fried in bear's oil
and, according to the journal, "furnished a dish of a very delightful
flavor," doubtless a pleasing change from the diet of dog's flesh with
which they had so recently been regaled.

Two of the Echeloot chiefs remained with the white men to guide them
on their way down the river. These were joined by seven others of their
tribe, to whom the explorers were kind and attentive. But the visitors
could not resist the temptation to pilfer from the goods exposed to dry
in the sun. Being checked in this sly business, they became ill-humored
and returned, angry, down the river.

The explorers noticed here that the Indians flattened the heads of
males as well as females. Higher up the river, only the women and female
children had flat heads. The custom of artificially flattening the heads
of both men and women, in