Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/179

128 same Captain Stuart who had travelled in company with the Lees to the Rocky Mountains in 1834.

Stuart had for a companion a young English gentleman and a few servants. Another, not belonging to either the fur company or missionary party, was a gentleman called Major Pilcher, of St Louis, Indian agent to the Yankton Sioux, whom Parker having met him the year before, calls intelligent and candid, and well disposed toward mission enterprises, but who by his foppish dress excited the remarks of at least one of the mission party, who perhaps fancied that he occupied too much of the attention of the two ladies, whom he was good-naturedly desirous of amusing. According to Gray, he wore a suit of fine buckskin trimmed with red cloth and porcupine quills, fine scarlet shirt, and elaborately ornamented moccasons; and he must have made a conspicuous figure in any company. Major Pilcher was one day showing the ladies some singular salt clay-pits, when going too near the edge it gave way, immersing his fine white mule, himself, and his elegant Indian costume in a bath of sticky liquid clay. It was with difficulty he was extricated, when he joined heartily in the merriment his predicament occasioned.

Aside from the occasional storms to which the travellers were exposed, and the meat diet to which in a short time all were restricted, a summer's journey under the protection of so varied a company was most interesting to the two untravelled women from central New York. Fifty years at Pittsburg, or at the Osage Mission, would not have afforded the opportunities for expansion of thought, or the accumula-