their famous trip across the continent in
1804-05, when all the Rocky Mountain region was wild, as well as the
Pacific Slope, they did not lose a single man by wild animals, nor,
though frequently attacked, especially by the grizzlies of the Rocky
Mountains, were any of them wounded seriously. Captain Clark was bitten
on the hand by a wolf as he lay asleep; that was one bite among more
than a hundred men while traveling through eight to nine thousand miles
of savage wilderness. They could hardly have been so fortunate had they
stayed at home. They wintered on the edge of the Clatsop plains, on the
south side of the Columbia River near its mouth. In the woods on that
side they found game abundant, especially elk, and with the aid of
the friendly Indians who furnished salmon and "wapatoo" (the tubers of
Sagittaria variabilis), they were in no danger of starving.

But on the return trip in the spring they reached the base of the Rocky
Mountains when the range was yet too heavily snow-laden to be crossed
with horses. Therefore they had to wait some weeks. This was at the head
of one of the northern branches of the Snake River, and, their scanty
stock of provisions being nearly exhausted, the whole party was
compelled to live mostly on bears and dogs; deer, antelope, and elk,
usually abundant, were now scarce because the region had been closely
hunted over by the Indians before their arrival.

Lewis and Clark had killed a number of bears and saved the skins of the
more interesting specimens, and the variations they found in size, color
of the hair, etc., made great difficulty in classification. Wishing to
get the opinion of the Chopumish Indians, near one of whose villages
they were encamped, concerning the various species, the explorers
unpacked their bundles and spread out for examination all the skins they
had taken. The Indian hunters immediately classed the white, the deep
and the pale grizzly red, the grizzly dark-brown--in short, all those
with the extremities of the hair of a white or frosty color without
regard to the color of the ground or foil--under the name of hoh-host.
The Indians assured them that these were all of the same species as the
white bear, that they associated together, had longer nails than the
others, and never climbed trees. On the other hand, the black skins,
those that were black with white hairs intermixed or with a white
breast, the uniform bay, the brown, and the light reddish-brown, were