es. The operation is gradual, and
seems to give but little pain; but if it produces headache, the poor
infant has no means of making its sufferings known. The head, when
released from its bandage, Captain Clarke says, is not more than two
inches thick, about the upper part of the forehead; and still thinner
above. Nothing can appear more wonderful, than that the brain should
have its shape thus altered, without any apparent injury to its
functions.

There is an extensive trade carried on upon the Columbia, which must
have existed before the coast was frequented by foreign traders; but to
which the foreign trade has given a new impulse. The great emporium of
this trade is at the falls, the _Shilloots_ being the carriers between
the inhabitants above and below. The Indians of the Rocky Mountains
bring down bear's-grease, horses, and a few skins, which they exchange
for beads, pounded fish, and the roots of a kind of water-plant, which
are produced, in great abundance, in a tract of land between the
Multomah and a branch of the Columbia. The mode of obtaining these roots
is curious. A woman carries a canoe, large enough to contain herself,
and several bushels of them, to one of the ponds where the plants grow;
she goes into the water breast high, feels out the roots with her feet,
and separates the bulbs from them with her toes. These, on being freed
from the mud, float. The women often continue in the water at this
employment for many successive hours, even in the depth of winter. The
bulbs are about the size of a small potato, and, when roasted in wood
ashes, constitute a palatable food.

These Indians are a very ingenious race. Even with their own imperfect
tools, they make, in a few weeks, a canoe, which, with such implements,
might be thought the work of years. A canoe, however, is very highly
prized: it is considered of equal value with a wife, and is what the
lover generally gives a father in exchange for his daughter. The bow and
stern are ornamented with a sort of comb, and with grotesque figures of
men or animals, sometimes five feet high, composed of small pieces of
wood, skilfully inlaid and morticed, without a spike of any kind. Their
bowls or troughs are scooped out of a block of wood; in these they boil
their food. Their best manufacture is a sort of basket, of straw-work or
cedar bark, and bear-grass, so closely interwoven as to be water-tight.
Further south the natives roast their corn and pulse over a sl