had stood sullenly back, giving
assistance to neither side. It was evident, however, that a spirit of
angry discontent was rife among them. Threatening language had been
used by the restless chiefs beyond the mountains; braves had talked
around the camp-fire of the freedom of the days before the yoke of the
confederacy was known; and the gray old dreamers, with whom the
_mimaluse tillicums_ [dead people] talked, had said that the fall of
the Willamettes was near at hand.

The sachems of the Willamettes, advised of everything, were met in
council in the soft Oregon spring-tide. They were gathered under the
cottonwood trees, not far from the bank of the Columbia. The air was
fresh with the scent of the waters, and the young leaves were just
putting forth on the "trees of council," whose branches swayed gently
in the breeze. Beneath them, their bronze faces more swarthy still as
the dancing sunbeams fell upon them through the moving boughs, thirty
sachems sat in close semi-circle before their great war-chief,
Multnomah.

It was a strange, a sombre assembly. The chiefs were for the most part
tall, well-built men, warriors and hunters from their youth up. There
was something fierce and haughty in their bearing, something menacing,
violent, and lawless in their saturnine faces and black, glittering
eyes. Most of them wore their hair long; some plaited, others flowing
loosely over their shoulders. Their ears were loaded with _hiagua_
shells; their dress was composed of buckskin leggings and moccasins,
and a short robe of dressed skin that came from the shoulders to the
knees, to which was added a kind of blanket woven of the wool of the
mountain sheep, or an outer robe of skins or furs, stained various
colors and always drawn close around the body when sitting or
standing. Seated on rude mats of rushes, wrapped each in his outer
blanket and doubly wrapped in Indian stoicism, the warriors were
ranged before their chief.

His garb did not differ from that of the others, except that his
blanket was of the richest fur known to the Indians, so doubled that
the fur showed on either side. His bare arms were clasped each with a
rough band of gold; his hair was cut short, in sign of mourning for
his favorite wife, and his neck was adorned with a collar of large
bear-claws, showing he had accomplished that proudest of all
achievements for the Indian,--the killing of a grizzly.

Until the last chief had entered the grove and taken