they agreed to make peace with their ancient enemies.  Impressed with the sincerity of this agreement, the captains of the expedition invested the principal chief with a medal and some small articles of clothing.  The two faithful chiefs who had accompanied the white men from the headwaters of the streams now bade farewell to their friends and allies, the explorers.  They bought horses of the Echeloots and returned to their distant homes by land.

Game here became more abundant, and on the twenty-sixth of October the journal records the fact that they received from the Indians a present of deer-meat, and on that day their hunters found plenty of tracks of elk and deer in the mountains, and they brought in five deer, four very large gray squirrels, and a grouse.  Besides these delicacies, one of the men killed in the river a salmon-trout which was fried in bear’s oil and, according to the journal, “furnished a dish of a very delightful flavor,” doubtless a pleasing change from the diet of dog’s flesh with which they had so recently been regaled.

Two of the Echeloot chiefs remained with the white men to guide them on their way down the river.  These were joined by seven others of their tribe, to whom the explorers were kind and attentive.  But the visitors could not resist the temptation to pilfer from the goods exposed to dry in the sun.  Being checked in this sly business, they became ill-humored and returned, angry, down the river.

The explorers noticed here that the Indians flattened the heads of males as well as females.  Higher up the river, only the women and female children had flat heads.  The custom of artificially flattening the heads of both men and women, in infancy, was formerly practised by nearly all the tribes of the Chinook family along the Columbia River.  Various means are used to accomplish this purpose, the most common and most cruel being to bind a flat board on the forehead of an infant in such a way that it presses on the skull and forces the forehead up on to the top of the head.  As a man whose head has been flattened in infancy grows older, the deformity partly disappears; but the flatness of the head is always regarded as a tribal badge of great merit.

“On the morning of the twenty-eighth,” says the journal, having dried our goods, we were about setting out, when three canoes came from above to visit us, and at the same time two others from below arrived for the same purpose.  Among these last was an Indian who wore his hair in a que, and had on a round hat and a sailor’s jacket, which he said he had obtained from the people below the great rapids, who bought them from the whites.  This interview detained us till nine o’clock, when we proceeded down the river, which is now bordered with cliffs of loose dark colored rocks about ninety feet high, with a thin covering of pines and other small trees.  At the distance of four miles we reached a small village of eight houses under some high rocks on the right with a small creek on the opposite side of the river.