Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/453

 sionaries," where it was stated that Willis T. Hawley and George Charles Kastner have written poetical accounts of it. The following selection from The Conquest gives Mrs. Dye's fictionized version of it in prose:

Clark was busily making contracts for saw-mills and cornmills on the Platte and Kansas. . . when one day four strange Indians, worn and bewildered, arrived at St. Louis, out of that West. Some kind hand guided them to the Indian office.

That tunic, that bandeau of fox skins,—Clark recalled it as the tribal dress of a nation beyond the Rocky Mountains. With an expression of exquisite joy, old Tunnachemootoolt, for it was he, the Black Eagle, recognised the Red Head of a quarter of a century before. Clark could scarcely believe that those Indians had traveled on foot nearly two thousand miles to see him at St. Louis. . ..

It did not take long to discover their story. Some winters before an American trapper (in Oregon tradition reputed to have been Jedediah Smith), watched the Nez Perce's dance around the sun-pole on the present site of Walla Walla. "It is not good," said the trapper, "such worship is not acceptable to the Great Spirit. You should get the white man's Book of Heaven."

Voyageurs and Iroquois trappers from the Jesuit schools of Canada said the same. Then Elice, a chief's son, came back from the Red River country whither the Hudson's Bay Company had sent him to be educated. From several sources at once they learned that the white men had a Book that taught of God.

"If this be true it is certainly high time that we had the Book." The chiefs called a national council. "If our mode of worship is wrong we must lay it aside. We must know about this. It cannot be put off." . ..

And so, four chiefs were deputed for that wonderful jour-