they climbed Tillamook Head, about thirty miles south of Cape Disappointment. Upon this promontory, Clark's Point of View, they paused before the boisterous Pacific, breaking with fury and flinging its waves above the Rock of Tillamook.
On one side the blue Columbia widened into bays studded with Chinook and Clatsop villages; on the other stretched rich prairies, enlivened by beautiful streams and lakes at the foot of the hills. Behind, in serried rank, the Douglas spruce—"the tree of Turner's dreams," the king of conifers,—stood monarch of the hills. Two hundred, three hundred feet in air they towered, a hundred feet without a limb, so dense that not a ray of sun could reach the ground beneath.
Sacajawea, save Pocahontas the most travelled Indian Princess in our history, spoke not a word, but looked with calm and shining eye upon the fruition of her hopes. Now she could go back to the Mandan towns and speak of things that Madame Jussaume had never seen, and of the Big Water beyond the Shining Mountains.
Down the steep and ragged rocks that overhung the sea, they clambered to a Tillamook village, where lay the great whale, stranded on the shore. Nothing was left but a skeleton, for from every Indian village within travelling distance, men and women were working like bees upon the huge carcass. Then home they went, trailing over the mountains, every squaw with a load of whale blubber on her back, to be for many a month the dainty of an Indian lodge.
These Indian lodges or houses were a source of great interest to Lewis and Clark. Sunk four feet into the ground and rising well above, like an out-door cellar, they were covered with ridgepoles and low sloping roofs. The sides were boarded with puncheons of cedar, laboriously split with elkhorn wedges and stone hammers.
A door in the gable admitted to this half-underground home by means of a ladder. Around the inner walls, beds of mats were raised on scaffolds two or three feet high, and under the beds were deposited winter stores of dried berries, roots, nuts, and fish.
