Page:Wishram by Henry J. Biddle.djvu/21

Rh A photograph of Spedis is shown opposite page 129 There are probably about ten inhabited houses there at present, and some dome shaped structures in which salmon are dried. The population is probably less than one hundred individuals, but there are many more of their own tribe, as well as visitors of other tribes, stopping there during the fishing season. The houses are mostly unpainted shacks of sawn lumber.

The mound still stands beside the village, as when Lewis and Clark saw it. During the summers of 1924 and 1925, W. D. Strong and W. Egbert Schenck, students of anthropology at the University of California, made a careful investigation of this mound. The writer assisted in this work. Trenches were sunk to the bottom, and from the bedrock, at about thirteen feet depth, to the surface, the mound was found to be composed largely of charcoal, ashes, fish and animal bones, rocks broken by fire, and implements of stone and bone. In short, the mound from the bottom represents the accumulations, perhaps of thousands of years, of a camp site. Lewis and Clark showed their remarkable powers of observation when they said this mound had "every appearance of being artificial." The knowledge of pre-historic Wishram gained from this work will be published in due time.

Another feature of interest in this neighborhood is the abundance of pictures incised in the faces of the cliffs, (Petroglyphs), or painted on them, (Pictographs). The former are most abundant. A high water channel of the river, about three-quarters of a mile above Spedis, has so many of these Petroglyphs that Mr. Strong christened it Petroglyph Canyon. Its location is shown on the map opposite page 115. The largest of these pictures is a face, about six feet in diameter, on a smooth pillar of the cliff immediately above Spedis. It is incised in the rock, and hence a Petroglyph, but it also shows traces of former coloring. The Indians call it Tsa-gig-la'-lal, and give a