Crossing to the north bank

Gass opens May 14 with frost and labor:

white frost. Three hunters went over very early to the north side of the river. All the rest of the men were employed in collecting our horses and taking over the baggage.

By noon the horses and baggage were across, and the party camped at

the remains of an ancient village on the north side of the Koos-koos-ke river

. Clark and Lewis give the same move with surveyor’s measures: the river about 150 yards wide and extremely rapid; the old habitation a circle some 30 feet across, sunk about four feet, with an earthen wall. Ordway is the enlisted confirmation:

we took our baggage and Swam our horses across the river to the N. Side and mooved a Short distance down the river and Encamped in a Smooth bottom partly covred with young pitch pine in order to stay untill we can cross the mountains

They were settling in to wait out Bitterroot snow. Gass on the 15th says they expected to remain a month.

Bears, and who counted them

Ordway names the hunters: Collins two bear “of the white kind,” Labiche three. Gass, not naming them, reports two at midday and three more by evening,

all of the grizly kind

. Lewis and Clark have Collins’s pair in the morning — one fat male, one lean female with cubs — and Labiche later with a female and two cubs. Lewis uses the mixed colors (black, bay, white-tipped) to argue that the “variagated bear” here is one species, not twenty. Clark adds the Chopunnish valuation: killing one of those animals ranks with killing an enemy in the field. The claws of Collins’s bears went to Hohastillpilp.

Gelding, two methods

Gass records the operation without naming a surgeon:

In the afternoon we had an operation performed on seven of our horses, to render them more peaceable; which was done by one of the natives upon all but one.

Lewis and Clark explain why. The stallions would not trade even at two for one, “Cut each other very much,” and had to be castrated. A Chopunnish man present offered to cut them without tying the cord, scraping it clean first; Drewyer gelded two in the usual way. The next day Clark found those cut by Drewyer the most swollen. That is not Gass noticing a craft the captains ignored — the captains wrote the method; Gass wrote the count.

Stone and pine boughs

They gave bear meat to about fifteen Chopunnish at camp. Gass describes layered hot stones, meat, and brush, covered like a small coal pit, needing about an hour and a half. Clark and Lewis give the fuller procedure: river stones on a brisk fire, pine boughs, flitches of bear, more boughs, a little water, earth four inches deep, about three hours. Lewis tasted it and found it more tender than roast or boiled meat, “but the strong flavor of the pine distroyed it for my pallate.” Ordway’s comparison is the enlisted key:

they cooked it in the Same manner as they Swet their commass roots

The six-thumbed scalp, May 15

The trophy is Gass’s May 15, not May 14. While the party put up sail-cloth and grass shelters, a visitor

had round his neck the scalp of an Indian, with six thumbs and four fingers of the other Indians he had killed in battle, of the Sho-sho-ne, or Snake nation.

Gass adds that the Chopunnish and Shoshone “have been long at war and destroyed a great many of each other in a few years past,” then describes the war-mallet — a club with a wooden or stone head, the stone heads covered with leather and sinew. A printer’s footnote in the 1807 Pittsburgh edition (David McKeehan) compares a similar stone head later seen near the Allegheny; that note is McKeehan’s, not a field sentence. Ordway on the 15th does not mention the scalp. He has a white bear chased on horseback and not killed, a shelter over the old cellar “so as in case of an alarm we can jump in the celler and defend ourSelves,” a bowery for the officers to write in, and five gallons of bear oil kegged for the mountains. Lewis that day is still on bear species, deer-head decoys, and the swollen geldings.

Read across four pens, these two days are the making of Camp Chopunnish: a defensive hollow on the Clearwater, horses cut so they would travel, bear oil for the snow, and one ethnographic page in Gass that the captains, busy with chiefs, species, and surgery, did not write.

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When Clark’s advance party stumbled out of the Bitterroot Mountains in late September 1805 — half-starved, exhausted, and unsure whether they would survive the descent — they encountered the Nez Perce on the Weippe Prairie. Clark, 20 September 1805:

The Plains appeared covered with Spectators viewing the white men.

The Nez Perce, identified by Clark and Lewis throughout the journals as the Chopunnish or Pierced Noses, fed the famished men dried salmon and camas roots. The sudden change of diet sickened many of the party, but the encounter fed a starving party. Nez Perce oral tradition, recorded later and not in the captains’ journals, holds that a woman named Watkuweis, who had previously been treated kindly by Euro-Americans, urged her people not to harm the strangers. What the journals themselves record is food on the prairie, pasture for the horses through the winter, and a welcome back the following spring.

Naming and Identification on the Columbia

Clark formally distinguished the Nez Perce from neighboring nations during the descent of the Snake (Lewis’s) and Columbia rivers. On 18 October 1805 he recorded the geography of the forks and the peoples living along them:

Names of this nation above the mouth of the Ki-moo-e-nim is So-Kulk Perced noses The Names of the nation on the Kimoenim River is Chopun-nish Piercd noses

The captains’ Chopunnish became the standard journal designation. Lewis would later note (20 April 1806) that some Chopunnish men wore shirts of the same form with those of the Shoshone Chopunnish &c highly ornamented with porcupine quills.

Early Reputation Among the Western Nations

Even before the Corps reached Nez Perce country, the nation’s reputation had reached the captains. Offers for Seaman appear in Lewis’s record as individual bargains, not as a roll-call of Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Plains nations on 18 April 1805. That grouping is later commentary. Lewis did refuse to sell the dog. The Nez Perce’s wide-ranging horse herds and their connections eastward across the Bitterroots placed them at the center of an interior trading network the Corps would come to depend on.

The Long Winter Apart and a Honeysuckle on the Kooskooske

While wintering at Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark made repeated reference to the Chopunnish in their natural-history compilations, using the people’s territory as a geographic anchor for the plants and animals of the interior. On 7 February 1806 both captains wrote nearly identical passages:

I first met with it on the waters of the Kooskooske near the Chopunnish Nation, and again below the grand rapids in the Columbian Vally on tide water.

Similar references appear on 15 February 1806 (the common red deer under the rocky mts. in the neighbourhood of the Chopunnish) and in entries of 6–7 March 1806. The Chopunnish country had become, in the captains’ mental map, the threshold between the Columbian lowlands and the Rockies.

The Spring Return: Re-engaging the Chopunnish

The expedition’s planning in early April 1806 was organized entirely around reaching the Nez Perce. On 2 April 1806 Clark and Lewis recorded a joint resolution:

to remain at our present encampment or Some where in this neighbourhood untill we had obtained as much dried meat as would be necessary for our voyage as far as the Chopunnish.

They intended to barter canoes for horses on the way up, sending an advance party from the enterance of Lewis’s River to gather the horses left with the Nez Perce the previous fall. Lewis added that they viewed horses as our only Certain resource for food for the mountain crossing.

A Chopunnish Traveling Companion

From mid-April onward, a Chopunnish man and his family traveled with the Corps eastward across the Columbia plain. He served as guide, advisor, and sometimes horse-trader. On 24 April 1806 Clark noted that they hired 3 others of the Chopunnish man who accompanies us with his family. On 30 April Clark and Lewis both recorded an ethnographic detail learned from this family:

this man has a doughter now arived at the age of puberty who being in a certain Situation-is not permited to acoiate with the family but Sleeps at a distance from her father’s Camp… in this State I am informed that the female is not permited to eat, nor to touch any article of a culinary nature or manly occupation.

The same man’s counsel proved decisive on 1 May 1806, when he and the expedition’s guide debated which fork of the trail to follow; the captains, persuaded by the guide, kept to the creek route.

Reunion at the Kooskooske

Re-entering Nez Perce country in early May 1806, the Corps was met with extraordinary generosity. On 5 May Clark recorded a gift that recalled an act of medical kindness from the previous fall:

he brought foward a very eligant Gray mare and gave her to me, requesting Some eye water… While we were encamped last fall at the enterance of Chopunnish river, I gave an Indian man some volitile leniment to rub his knee and thye for a pain of which he Complained. the fellow Soon after recovered and have never Seased to extol the virtue of our medicines.

Lewis’s parallel entry confirms that Clark’s reputation as a physician — the skill of my friend Capt C. as a phisician — had spread among the Chopunnish, producing a steady traffic of patients who sought eye-water and liniments and who often paid in horses, dogs, and bread.

On 6 May the husband of a sick woman, as Clark wrote, was as good as his word. he produced us a young horse in tolerable order which we imedeately had killed and butchered. A second horse was given for treatment of a girl with rheumatism. The same day, Lewis exchanged horses with the Chopunnish leader We-ark-koomt, gaining what he called an eligant strong active well broke horse perfictly calculated for my purposes.

The Chopunnish Chiefs

By 11 May 1806, after several days of councils, Lewis had identified the leadership structure of the nation:

we now pretty fully informed ourselves that Tunnachemootoolt, Neeshneparkkeeook, Yoomparkkartim and Hohastillpilp were the principal Cheif of the Chopunnish nation and ranked in the order here mentioned

The captains gave Yoom-park-kar-tim — a stout fellow of good countenance about 40 years of age who had lost his left eye — a medal of the small size, reserving the last large Jefferson medal for some great Cheif on the Yellow rock river. A young man, son of a chief recently killed by enemies from the northeast, presented the captains with a mare and colt as a pledge of friendship. Twisted Hair, who had cared for the expedition’s horses through the winter, brought in six of them all in fine order (Clark, 11 May 1806).

Healers and Patients

The Chopunnish encampment of May 1806 became something close to a clinic. Clark wrote on 11 May:

Great numbers of Indians apply to us for medical aide which we gave them Cherfully So far as our Skill and Store of Medicine would enable us. Schrofla, ulsers, rhumitism, Sore eyes, and the loss of the use of their Limbs are the most common cases among them.

Lewis confirmed on 6 May that sore eyes is an universal complaint with all the natives we have seen on the west side of the Rocky mountains. The exchange of medicine for horses, dogs, bread, and roots sustained the Corps during the long wait for the Bitterroot snows to melt.

Manner and Material Culture

Lewis’s 20 April 1806 entry — though made among the Eneshur and Skillute — explicitly compares the dress of those peoples to that of the Chopunnish, with whom the captains were now intimately familiar. Chopunnish men wore leggings, moccasins, and large robes, with porcupine-quill-ornamented shirts. Their horses were numerous and good; their plains were extensive; their hospitality, as the entries of May 1806 repeatedly attest, was unfailing.

Significance in the Expedition Record

No nation west of the Mandan villages appears more often or more sympathetically in the journals than the Nez Perce. They fed the starving party on Weippe Prairie in September 1805, wintered its horses, supplied food and guides on the spring 1806 return, and accepted Clark’s medical services in lieu of trade goods the captains no longer possessed. The captains’ shorthand — as far as the Chopunnish — became, in the spring of 1806, the destination they organized the homeward Columbia climb around.

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