Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 15.djvu/58



50 T. C. ELLIOTT

beginning with a speech from the Chief alone and ending with a kind of prayer for our safety, all turning their faces up the river and quickly lifting their hands high and strik- ing their palms together then letting them fall quickly and bringing them to the same action till the kind of prayer was done, which lasted about \ l /2 minutes or two. The men are slightly ornamented with shells etc. but the women more profusely especially about their hair and their faces daubed with paint. Some few of them have copper ornaments hanging either to their girdle or the upper part of their petticoat. The women appeared of all sizes, but none corpulent, none hand- some but one young woman, the men though many quite ordinary, yet several were well looking men and almost all well made, though not one lusty. We gave them a few pipes to smoke and they went to their tents, having brought us a good salmon for which I paid them about six In. of tobacco, with what I have given, and they have smoked the amount is five feet of it. They tell me they now intend to pull up a little of their own tobacco for smoking, though not yet ripe. The land to us appears to be very poor white grey earth of a kind of impalpable powder mixed with stones, bear- ing grass in tufts of a round hard kind and two kinds of strong scented shrubs whose white leaves proceed directly either from the stem or the branch. I may here remark that all their dances are a kind of religious prayer for some end. They in their dance never assume a gay, joyous countenance, but always one of a serious turn, with often a trait of enthus- iasm. The step is almost always the semblance of running, as of people pursuing and being pursued. Though a dialect of the Saleesh my interpreter could not understand them, though they understood him. My Simpoil who spoke both dialects here was of service, these at the end of each sentence of the Chief's speech always called Oy if possible louder than the Simpoils. The women were tolerably well clothed, the men rather slightly, their blankets of bear, muskrat and black tailed deer skins, their ornaments of shells, whether in bracelets, arm bands, often their hair, on their garments or