Page:Weird Tales Volume 2 Number 2 (1923-09).djvu/40

 Startling Indeed Were the Ghostly Night Riders That Haunted



ISTORICALLY speaking, the Clearwater River, in the Western part of the state of Idaho, has never been anything more important than a rather indefinite location, with a name attached.

That is to say, its basin has never been developed; for the Gods who made the mountains left it lying helpless between the various, main-traveled roads to the Pacific. A generation ago the Oregon Short Line, thrusting a covetous arm of steel along the Snake River, en route to Portland, Oregon, veered off suddenly and passed it a hundred miles to southward. Later the N. P., hurrying across the summit of the Bitter Roots, on its journey to Seattle, left it isolated, fifty miles to the North.

Thus civilization slipped by on either side and left the Clearwater inviolate. No white man set his cabin on its river bank; no woman rocked a baby cradle anywhere beneath its whispering trees.

The distant hoot of a flat-bottomed stern-wheeler, creeping along the Snake, might startle the black-tails, grazing on the lower bottom; or the bark of a trapper's rifle hasten the cougar into the tall trees along the upper reaches. These, however, would be the extent of the local disturbance; for the Clearwater Valley had no transportation; so it remained a wilderness; an extremely lonesome and isolated wilderness.

And now I must withdraw a statement of a moment ago. Because, after all, the Clearwater was something more than a place with a name attached; it was the last retreat of the Kennisau Tribe of Indians—the very last retreat, of the very last of the tribe.

You, no doubt, remember the Kennisaus yourself, at least by reputation. They turned out to be a blood-thirsty lot, worse even than the Apaches, if possible.

They held to a theory that the white man was coming into the country at a rate of speed not at all commensurate with the facts, taking over the Indians' land and converting it to his own, and baser, uses—which may have been the truth.

In any event, the Kennisaus became greatly agitated over the situation. No less a personage than Old Chief Pohontihac himself, who started out with the intention of becoming, and remaining, a Christian—went to the extremity of a trip to Washington, D. C., to tell his 39