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grants, invited Tom McKay to go up with him to quiet the Indians. Cornelius Rogers accompanied them. Chief Trader McKinley joined them at Fort Walla Walla. They rode out to Waiilatpu it was deserted. The charred mill lay on the river bank. One hundred miles northeast they galloped through a beautiful, undulating country, to the lodge of Red Wolf on the Snake.
"See my trees," said the chief. By a creek at his door grew a tiny orchard, planted by his own hands. Mr. Spalding had presented the sets that blossomed into the first fruit raised by an Oregon Indian. Following the great Nez Perce trails that terraced the hillsides for hundreds of miles, they spied across the Clearwater River a low, irregular roof, with wings, sheltering an establishment of eleven fireplaces. It was Spalding's mission at Lapwai.
In the schoolroom two hundred children were busy with books and pens, printing like copper-plate in the Nez Perce tongue. In the weaving and spinning room, Nez Perce girls were knitting and making cloth. In the kitchen, Nez Perce women were cooking and sewing and shelling peas. In the fields one chief had just harvested one hundred and seventy-six bushels of beans, one hundred bushels of corn, and four hundred bushels of potatoes. Forty others had raised grain, eight had ploughs. Several exhibited with pride a few cows, some pigs and sheep and poultry.
Early in the morning the Indian children ran to the mission, and without being called, began teaching one another, and continued so until dark. The chiefs governed the school; taking the books home at night, every lodge became a schoolroom.
"Yonder sits my most promising pupil and our first
