tnut, whom
they had named Bighorn from the fact that he wore a horn of that animal
suspended from his left arm. This man was the first chief of a large
band of Chopunnish, and when the expedition passed that way, on their
path to the Pacific, the last autumn, he was very obliging and useful to
them, guiding them down the Snake, or Lewis River. He had now heard
that the white men were on their return, and he had come over across the
hills to meet them. As we may suppose, the meeting was very cordial, and
Weahkootnut turned back with his white friends and accompanied them to
the mouth of the Kooskooskee, a stream of which our readers have heard
before; it is now known as the Clearwater.

Captain Lewis told Weahkootnut that his people were hungry, their
slender stock of provisions being about exhausted. The chief told them
that they would soon come to a Chopunnish house where they could get
food. But the journal has this entry:--

"We found the house which Weahkootnut had mentioned, where we halted
for breakfast. It contained six families, so miserably poor that all
we could obtain from them were two lean dogs and a few large cakes of
half-cured bread, made of a root resembling the sweet potato, of all
which we contrived to form a kind of soup. The soil of the plain is
good, but it has no timber. The range of southwest mountains is about
fifteen miles above us, but continues to lower, and is still covered
with snow to its base. After giving passage to Lewis' (Snake) River,
near their northeastern extremity, they terminate in a high level plain
between that river and the Kooskooskee. The salmon not having yet called
them to the rivers, the greater part of the Chopunnish are now dispersed
in villages through this plain, for the purpose of collecting quamash
and cows, which here grow in great abundance, the soil being extremely
fertile, in many places covered with long-leaved pine, larch, and
balsam-fir, which contribute to render it less thirsty than the open,
unsheltered plains."

By the word "cows," in this sentence, we must understand that the
story-teller meant cowas, a root eaten by the Indians and white
explorers in that distant region. It is a knobbed, irregular root, and
when cooked resembles the ginseng. At this place the party met some of
the Indians whom Captain Clark had treated for slight diseases, when
they passed that way, the previous autumn. They bad sounded the praises
of the white men and their medicine