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30 contrived to pass the winter without actual starvation, though they were often threatened with it, from the difficulty of obtaining food at this season of the year. Game was scarce, except in the coast mountains, which are very rugged and thickly wooded; while fishing could not be carried on successfully except with other boats than their slight canoes, which were entirely unfit for the winter winds and waves of the lower Columbia. The Indians, among whom they wintered, called themselves "Clatsops," and were sufficiently friendly, but had no food to spare save at the very highest prices. The Chinooks on the north side of the Columbia, the same people Captain Gray had traded with thirteen years before, were equally exorbitant in their prices, and exercised a monopoly of the necessaries of life quite equal to that of the most practiced extortionists.

Nothing could be effected in the way of explorations of the country during the winter of 1805–6, on account of the rains, which were constant and excessive; and the party, however unwillingly, remained at Fort Clatsop until the middle of March, going no farther away than to Cape Lookout, about fifty miles down the coast. As soon as the rainy season had closed, Lewis and Clarke re-embarked their men, and returned up the river, surveying the shores in their voyage. In this passage they discovered the Cowlitz River, the principal tributary emptying into the Columbia from the north side anywhere west of the Cascades. The Wallamet River was also discovered, but remained unexplored, from the anxiety of the expedition to return to the United States.

By the middle of April, the party had abandoned their canoes at the gap in the Cascade Mountains, where the river forms dangerous rapids; and, pur-