Here we parted from our companions, who were going to the Columbia, and who returned hence to the Forks with the goods and ammunition for thier trip, while we, the homeward bound, continued our course down the river in the canoes and the boats they had left, to the Fort on the Big Horn. We remained here several days, repairing a keel boat left by Manuel two years before, which we loaded with the goods from the canoes, and then recommenced our descent of the Yellow Stone with the canoes and two boats. Col. Menard accompanied us in one of the boats, and I with two companions kept to our canoe in advance of the others for the purpose of killing game. On reaching the place cacheing the goods and leaving the boats, on account of the ice the year before, Menard verified his suspicions of the Gros Ventres whom he met on the Twenty-five Yard river. The pit containing the goods and effects of the men had been opened and forty trunks robbed of their contents. Another pit containing the company's goods had also been opened, and the most valuable of its store left by Menard, was taken off by the Gros Ventres. They had also cut up and nearly destroyed the boats. We repaired one with the fragments of the other, and then passed down

the river with three boats. I kept ahead as before in my skin canoe. This river is very rapid throughout its whole course, and very shallow. We were now near the Falls which are difficult and dangerous of navigation. In the morning I killed two buffalo with my pistol and rifle, and my two companions killed two more, which we cut up and stowed away. We approached the Falls sooner than we expected, and were directing our course to the left side among the sunken rocks and breakers, where we would certainly have been lost, when we heard a gun behind and saw the men on the boats waving us with handkerchiefs to the right. We were barely able to gain the channel, when the canoe shot down the descent with wonderful rapidity. We flew along the water like a sledge down an icy hill. My two companions lay in the bottom of the canoe, which frequently rebounded from the waves made by the rocks under the water and stood nearly upright. The waves washed over us and nearly filled the canoe with water. The boats behind commenced the descent soon after we had ended it in safety. They several times struck and one of them hung fast on a concealed rock. We hauled our canoe ashore, carried it above, and coming down to the foundered boat and lighting it of part of its load, we got it off the rocks. We now passed rapidly down to the Missouri river, where I left my friendly canoe and went aboard one one the boats. Here my spirits were cheered with the near prospect of home. I longed to see the familiar faces of kindred and friends with a yearning

of the heart, which few can realize who have not wandered as I had done, among savages and wild beasts and made the earth my bed and the sky my canopy for more than a year. My way homeward was clear and comparatively safe; the tribes along the river being friendly, or if hostile, unable to annoy us as the Blackfeet had done so long in the prairies.

In my wanderings in this expedition I saw much of the Indians and their manner of living. Those in this region were then more savage, less degraded, and more virtuous than they are at the present time. The white man and his "fire water" have sadly demoralized them, thinned their numbers, and will soon sink them into oblivion. They are no longer the proud, haughty, simple minded warriors and orators that I found so many of them to be in 1809- '10. Sunk in poverty and intemperance, they are fast dwindling away. I have seen some of the finest specimens of men among our North American Indians. I have seen Chiefs with the dignity of real Princes and the eloquence of real orators, and Braves with the valor of the ancient Spartans. Their manner of speaking is extremely dignified and energetic. They gesticulate with infinite grace, freedom and animation. Their words flow deliberately, conveying their ideas with great force and vividness of expression, deep into the hearts of their hearers. Among their speakers I recognized all the essentials in manner of consumate orators. I shall have occasion, in the following chapters to bring out some

of their nobler qualities In bolder relief than was possible In the preceding, on account of the more intimate relations I afterwards formed with these children of nature and the prairies.

In five days after entering the Missouri, we descended to the Gros Ventres village and our Fort, and were there joyfully received by our old companions. Whiskey flowed like milk and honey in the land of Canaan, being sold to the men by the disinterested and benevolent gentlemen of the Missouri Fur Company, for the moderate sum of twelve dollars per gallon,' they taking in payment beaver skins at one dollar and a half each, which were worth in St. Louis, six. Their prices for every thing else were in about the same proportion. Even at this price some of the men bought whiskey by the bucket full, and drank

" 'Till they forgot their loves and debts And cared for grief na main"

During the carousal an incident occurred that nearly brought ruin upon us all. Three Shawnese Indians in the company from Kaskaskia, had started from the Upper Yellow Stone In a skin canoe, in advance, and had arrived a day or two before us. In their way down, one of them named Placota had wantonly killed a Crow Indian on the Yellow Stone, and a Gros Ventre on the Missouri, about sixty miles above the village, and taken their scalps. In his drunken fit Placota brought out one of these scalps

15 "Mountain prices," of which those here mentioned are not unusual, prevailed in the Upper Missouri Country for many years. See Schultz's My Life as an Indian, Chapter i ; Wislizenus, A Journey to the Rocky Mountains in 1839, p. 87, and Townsend's Narrati<ve (Thwaites' Early Western Travels), p. 193.

in full view of the friendly Gros Ventres. Menard caught it out of his hand and hid it from view. The Indians became greatly excited, crowded around us and demanded to know whose scalp it was. Menard then produced to them the scalp of the Indian whom Cheek had killed and which they had seen before. They said this was a "dry" and the other a "green" scalp. We at last, and with great difficulty, pacified them and quieted their suspicions. Placota, who was raging mad, by Menard's orders was tied behind the trading house till he became sober, when I released him on his promise of good behavior.

This tribe was then very powerful, having in all five villages, and mustering, in case of emergency, as many as three thousand warriors. I have already noticed their character and warlike qualities. A singular custom prevails among them in cutting off a finger or inflicting a severe wound in remembrance of any severe misfortune. Few of the men thirty years of age, were without the marks of these wounds, made on the death of some near relation, or on occasion of a defeat of the nation in war. Some I saw with three and one with four fingers cut off. I saw a young man bewailing the death of his father in a battle with the Blackfeet. He had compelled his friends to draw leather cords through the flesh under his arms and on his back, and attaching three Buffalo skulls, weighing at least twenty-five pounds, to the ends of the cords he dragged them over the ground after him through the village, moaning and lamenting in great distress. At their meals, the Indians on the Missouri, throw the first piece of

meat in the direction of an absent friend. In smoking they send the first whiff upwards in honor of the Great Spirit, the second downward as a tribute to their great mother, the third to the right and the fourth to the left, in thanks to the Great Spirit for the game He sends them so abundantly on the bosom of the earth. Their name for Chief is Inca the same as that of the South American and Mexican Indians.' For knife they say messa; for horses, cowalla. A comparison of their languages will show an identity in their origin and race. They secure their dead by setting four poles, forked at the top, and about twenty-five feet in height, in the ground. On these they put a scaffold of buffalo skin, fastened to the poles, and on this the corpse is placed, covered by a buffalo skin bound around it very tightly. In this way the corpse is protected from from the birds and beasts, and this it remains till the scaffold falls by decay. The bones are then gathered by the relatives and put into a common heap. I saw in the rear of the Gros Ventre village an immense extent of ground covered by these tombs in the air, and near by was a heap of skulls and bones which had fallen to the earth from these air graves. After a few day's stay at the Fort and village, we again started down the river with Col. Menard and two boats. We arrived at St. Louis in the month of

August, A. D. 1 8 10, without any occurrence of Interest on the voyage. We never got our dues or any thing of the least sImlHtude to justice from the company. They brought me in their debt two hundred dollars, and some of the other Americans, for still larger sums. The reader may ask how this could be. He can easily imagine the process when he is told that the company charged us six dollars per pound for powder, three dollars for lead, six dollars for coarse calico shirts, one dollar and a half per yard for coarse tow linen for tents, the same for a common butcher knife, and so on, and allowed us only what I have mentioned for our beaver skins, our only means of payment. Capt. Lewis told me not to lay In any suppHes in St. Louis, as the Company had plenty and would sell them to me as cheaply as I could get them in St. Louis, or nearly so, allowing only for a reasonable profit. Lewis did not intend to deceive us and was chagrined at the villanous conduct of the Company afterwards. This, with the fraudulent violation of their contracts and promises in the Indian country, by this concern, makes up a piece of extortion, fraud and swindling, that ought to consign the parties engaged in It to eternal infamy. The heaviest blame must rest on the unprincipled Liza; but the rest of the company must suffer the stigma of having connived at and profited by the villany. If they did not actually originate and urge it onward. I sued them on my contract," and was the

only one who did so. After many delays and continuances from term to term, I was glad to get rid of the suits and them, by giving my note for one hundred dollars to the Company. This, with my debt to Colter, made me a loser to the amount of three hundred dollars by one years trapping on the head water of the Missouri. Some of the Americans, however, fared much worse, and were deterred from returning to the settlement at all, by their debts to the Company, which they were hopeless of discharging by any ordinary business in which they could engage. Such is one instance of the kind and considerate justice of wealth to defenceless poverty, beautifully illustrating the truth of the sentiment uttered by somebody, "take care of the rich and the rich will take care of the poor."