The White Goat 255 



ness of mine, and I did not correct him. But 

 how inveterate and singular was the confusion ! 

 for these two wild animals do not resemble each 

 other a particle more than do their domestic 

 namesakes. In the hall of the club that day I 

 did not know that, ninety years before, the self- 

 same blunder had been made and written down 

 for the first time, and that we were still inherit- 

 ing its consequences. 



On September twenty-six, 1805, Meriwether 

 Lewis, quite inconveniently sick, was, with his 

 equally inconveniently sick comrades, camped for 

 the purpose of building canoes. They lay at the 

 confluence of the north fork with the main stream 

 of that river which Idaho now most often calls the 

 Clearwater, and which the Indians then called 

 the Kooskooskee. They had come overland a 

 great way — two thousand miles — walking and 

 riding. They had lately been high among the 

 cold snows, and they were now abruptly plunged 

 in the flat climate of the plains. Heat and the 

 copious new food made every mother's son of 

 them ill. But a few days before this, and they 

 had been sparingly serving out rations of horse 

 flesh to keep together soul and body; now the 

 Indians have given them all the salmon they can 



