We Rather Incline
To The Opinion That The Highest Peak Is Further To The Northward,
And Is The Same Measured
By Mr. Thompson, surveyor to the
Northwest Company; who, by the joint means of the barometer and
trigonometric measurement, ascertained
It to be twenty-five
thousand feet above the level of the sea; an elevation only
inferior to that of the Himalayas.
For a long time, Captain Bonneville remained gazing around him
with wonder and enthusiasm; at length the chill and wintry winds,
whirling about the snow-clad height, admonished him to descend.
He soon regained the spot where he and his companions [companion]
had thrown off their coats, which were now gladly resumed, and,
retracing their course down the peak, they safely rejoined their
companions on the border of the lake.
Notwithstanding the savage and almost inaccessible nature of
these mountains, they have their inhabitants. As one of the party
was out hunting, he came upon the solitary track of a man in a
lonely valley. Following it up, he reached the brow of a cliff,
whence he beheld three savages running across the valley below
him. He fired his gun to call their attention, hoping to induce
them to turn back. They only fled the faster, and disappeared
among the rocks. The hunter returned and reported what he had
seen. Captain Bonneville at once concluded that these belonged to
a kind of hermit race, scanty in number, that inhabit the highest
and most inaccessible fastnesses. They speak the Shoshonie
language, and probably are offsets from that tribe, though they
have peculiarities of their own, which distinguish them from all
other Indians. They are miserably poor; own no horses, and are
destitute of every convenience to be derived from an intercourse
with the whites. Their weapons are bows and stone-pointed arrows,
with which they hunt the deer, the elk, and the mountain sheep.
They are to be found scattered about the countries of the
Shoshonie, Flathead, Crow, and Blackfeet tribes; but their
residences are always in lonely places, and the clefts of the
rocks.
Their footsteps are often seen by the trappers in the high and
solitary valleys among the mountains, and the smokes of their
fires descried among the precipices, but they themselves are
rarely met with, and still more rarely brought to a parley, so
great is their shyness, and their dread of strangers.
As their poverty offers no temptation to the marauder, and as
they are inoffensive in their habits, they are never the objects
of warfare: should one of them, however, fall into the hands of a
war party, he is sure to be made a sacrifice, for the sake of
that savage trophy, a scalp, and that barbarous ceremony, a scalp
dance. These forlorn beings, forming a mere link between human
nature and the brute, have been looked down upon with pity and
contempt by the creole trappers, who have given them the
appellation of "les dignes de pitie," or "the objects of pity.";
They appear more worthy to be called the wild men of the
mountains.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 114 of 230
Words from 58610 to 59123
of 118673
