y thirty-one remained alive; of
all the Mandan nation there were scarce above one hundred; and today
they number about one hundred and fifty.

CHAPTER XVIII

A SEARCH FOR THE BOOK OF HEAVEN (1832)

THE LONG TRAIL OF THE PIERCED NOSES

The Nez Perces or "Pierced Noses" really were not Pierced Noses any
more than any other Indians; for the North American red men, the
country over, wore ornaments in their noses when they chose to.

But as the Pierced Noses this nation in the far Northwest was known.
They were members of the Sha-hap-ti-an family of North Americans--a
family not so large as the Algonquian, Siouan, Shoshonean and several
other families, yet important.

Their home was the valley and river country of western Idaho, and the
near sections of Oregon and Washington. The two captains, Lewis and
Clark, were well treated by them along the great Snake River, above the
entrance to the greater Columbia.

They were a small Indian; a horse Indian who lived on buffalo as well
as fish, and scorned to eat dog like the Sioux; a brave fighting
Indian; and withal a very honest, wise-minded Indian, whose boast, up
to 1877, was that they had never shed the white man's blood.

They used canoes, but they used horses more. Horses were their wealth.
They raised horses by the thousand, and the finest of horses these
were. A fat colt was good meat, but without horses they could not hunt
the buffalo and the buffalo supplied stronger meat.

Once a year, when the grass had greened in the spring, they traveled
eastward, across the Rocky Mountains by the Pierced Nose
Trail-to-the-buffalo, and hunted upon the Missouri River plains, in the
country of their enemies the Blackfeet.

The Blackfeet, in turn, sought them out, west of the mountains, to
steal their horses. With the Blackfeet and the Sioux, and sometimes
with the Snakes, they fought many a battle; and when they had anything
of a show, they won out. It took numbers to whip a Pierced Nose
warrior. Like most peace-lovers, he made the hardest kind of a fighter.

The early whites in the Northwest had nothing but praise for the
Pierced Nose Indians. The trapper who married a Pierced Nose woman
thought that he was lucky. She would be a good wife for him--gentle,
neat and always busy. Besides, as a rule the Nez Perces women were
better looking than the general run of Indian women.

The early fur-hunters and explorers found that the Pierced Noses were
very religiou