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.
"We landed and found the houses similar to those we had seen at the
great narrows; on entering one of them we saw a British musket, a cutlass,
and several brass tea-kettles, of which they seemed to be very fond.
There were figures of men, birds, and different animals, which were cut
and painted on the boards which form the sides of the room; though the
workmanship of these uncouth figures was very rough, they were highly
esteemed by the Indians as the finest frescos of more civilized people.
This tribe is called the Chilluckittequaw; their language, though somewhat
different from that of the Echeloots, has many of the same words,
and is sufficiently intelligible to the neighboring Indians. We procured
from them a vocabulary, and then, after buying five small dogs,
some dried berries, and a white bread or cake made of roots, we left them.
The wind, however, rose so high that we were obliged, after going one mile,
to land on the left side, opposite a rocky island, and pass the day."
On the same day the white chiefs visited one of the most prominent
of the native houses built along the river.
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