Chapter 18
The Nez Perce
Weippe Prairie and Canoe Camp, present-day Idaho
When the starving Corps came out of the Bitterroot Mountains in September 1805, the Nez Perce fed them salmon and camas bread, drew them a map of the rivers to the Pacific, helped them make canoes, and looked after their horses all winter until they came back.
22 September 1805
When Lewis and the rest of the Corps come out of the mountains, the Nez Perce feed them too. The men are so hungry that they eat far too much dried salmon and camas bread, food their stomachs are not used to. Almost everyone falls sick with cramps and diarrhoea. Lewis is so ill he can hardly sit on his horse.
The Nez Perce leader who takes charge of them is called Twisted Hair. Clark asks him about the route to the ocean, and Twisted Hair draws a map of the rivers. Clark writes that he “got the twisted hare to draw the river from his camp down which he did with great cherfullness on a white Elk skin.” The map shows the rivers running west to a great river, and the great river running to the sea.
26 September 1805
Twisted Hair leads the Corps to a place on the Clearwater River where big pine trees grow near the water. Here they can make canoes and go the rest of the way by river.
The men are too weak to chop out canoes the way they did at Fort Mandan, so they use the Nez Perce method. They cut down pines, lay them on the ground, and burn out the insides with small, slow fires, scraping out the charcoal as they go. For almost two weeks the camp is full of smoke, and the men are living on dried fish and roots that, Clark writes, “disagree with us verry much.”
5 October 1805
The horses cannot come down the river, and the Corps will need them again next spring. So on 5 October, Clark writes, they “had all our horses 38 in number Collected and branded Cut off their fore top and delivered them to the 2 brothers and one son of one of the Chiefs.” Each horse is marked with Lewis’s branding iron, and its forelock is cut so it can be recognised.
It is a huge act of trust on both sides. The Corps is handing almost everything it owns on land to people it met two weeks ago. The Nez Perce are agreeing to look after it all winter for strangers who may never come back.
7 October 1805
On 7 October the Corps launches five new canoes into the Clearwater River and heads downstream for the first time in seventeen months. After more than a year of fighting the current, the river is carrying them.
Twisted Hair and another chief, Tetoharsky, come along. They will ride ahead in their own canoe, telling each village downriver that these strangers are friends.