beneath their first
burdens, while mongrel curs ran barking at their heels. Here and there
unskilful hands were throwing the lasso amid the jeers and laughter of
the spectators. All was tumult and excitement.

At length they were under way. First rode the squaws, driving before
them pack-horses and ponies, for the herds and entire movable property
of the tribe accompanied it in all its marches. The squaws rode
astride, like men, in the rude wooden saddles that one yet sees used
by the wilder Indians of eastern Oregon and Idaho,--very high, both
before and behind, looking like exaggerated pack-saddles. A hair rope,
tied around the lower jaw of the horse, answered for a bridle. To this
must be added the quirt, a short double-lashed whip fastened into a
hollow and curiously carved handle. The application of this whip was
so constant as to keep the right arm in continual motion; so that even
to-day on the frontier an Indian rider can be distinguished from a
white man, at a distance, by the constant rising and falling of the
whip arm. With the squaws were the children, some of whom, not over
four, five, and six years of age, rode alone on horseback, tied in the
high saddles; managing their steeds with instinctive skill, and when
the journey became fatiguing, going to sleep, secured by their
fastenings from falling off.

Next came the men, on the best horses, unencumbered by weight of any
kind and armed with bow and arrow. Here and there a lance pointed with
flint, a stone knife or hatchet, or a heavy war-club, hung at the
saddle; but the bow and arrow constituted their chief weapon.

The men formed a kind of rear-guard, protecting the migrating tribe
from any sudden assault on the part of the Bannocks. There were
perhaps two hundred fighting-men in all. Snoqualmie was at their head,
and beside him rode the young Willamette runner who had brought the
summons from Multnomah the day before. The Willamette was on horseback
for the first time in his life. The inland or prairie tribes of
eastern Oregon, coming as they did in contact with tribes whose
neighbors bordered on Mexico, had owned horses for perhaps a
generation; but the sea-board tribes owned very few, and there were
tribes on Puget Sound and at the mouth of the Columbia who had never
seen them. Even the Willamettes, sovereign tribe of the confederacy
though they were, had but few horses.

This morning the young Willamette had bought a colt, giving for it a
whole st