360 The Winning of the West 



goat, which they did not see, though the Indians 

 brought them hides. The work was hard, and the 

 party suffered much from toil and hunger, living 

 largely on their horses, before they struck one of the 

 tributaries of the Snake sufficiently low down to en- 

 able them once more to go by boat. 



They now met many Indians of various tribes, 

 all of them very different from the Indians of the 

 Western Plains. At this time the Indians, both 

 east and west of the Rockies, already owned num- 

 bers of horses. Although they had a few guns, 

 they relied mainly on the spears and tomahawks, 

 and bows and arrows with which they had warred 

 and hunted from time immemorial; for only the 

 tribes on the outer edges had come in contact with 

 the whites, whether with occasional French and En- 

 glish traders who brought them goods, or with the 

 mixed bloods of the Northern Spanish settlements, 

 upon which they raided. Around the mouth of the 

 Columbia, however, the Indians knew a good deal 

 about the whites; the river had been discovered by 

 Captain Gray of Boston thirteen years before, and 

 ships came there continually, while some of the In- 

 dian tribes were occasionally visited by traders from 

 the British fur companies. 



With one or two of these tribes the explorers had 

 some difficulty, and owed their safety to their un- 

 ceasing vigilance, and to the prompt decision with 

 which they gave the Indians to understand that they 

 would tolerate no bad treatment, while yet them- 

 selves refraining carefully from .committing any 



