Page:The Columbia River - Its History, Its Myths, Its Scenery Its Commerce.djvu/259

Rh the Nez Percés. He had made a desperate ride of three hundred miles in seven days, following a buffalo hunt and a raid against the Blackfeet, and as he now burst into the midst, there dangled from his belt the scalps of several slaughtered Blackfeet. As quoted in Hazard Stevens's Life of Governor Stevens, he began his harangue thus: "My people, what have you done? While I was gone you sold my country. I have come home and there is not left me a place on which to pitch my lodge. Go home to your lodges. I will talk with you." Lieutenant Kip declares that though he could understand nothing of the speech of Looking Glass to his own tribe, which followed, the effect was tremendous. All the evidence showed that Looking Glass was a veritable Demosthenes. The work of Governor Stevens was all undone.

But later the Governor and Lawyer succeeded in rallying their forces and gaining the acquiescence of the Indians to the setting aside of three great reservations, one on the Umatilla, one on the Yakima, and the third on the Clearwater and the Snake. These reservations still exist, imperial domains in themselves, though now divided into individual allotments. The acquiescence of the Indians in this treaty, as the sequel proved, was feigned by a number of them, but for the time it seemed a great triumph for Governor Stevens. From Walla Walla the Governor departed to the Cœur d'Alene, the Pend Oreille, and the Missoula regions to continue his arduous task of negotiating treaties.

This great Walla Walla Council cannot be dismissed without brief reference to an event, not fully known at the time, but which subsequent investiga-