The Chilwitz

Previously:

The Nez Perce produced the wisest Indian who ever lived.

Chapter 29

I went to Oregon, but I didn't stay long. Oregon had the ugliest people I ever saw, bar none. The men didn't wear any clothes at all. They said it chafed their skin. They smeared themselves with so much bear grease that their skin looked like it could benefit from some chafing. I guess it kept them warm. I don't see what they had against putting on a pair of pants. The women didn't wear much more. Just a skirt made out of tree bark. There were plenty of bears in Oregon, but not enough to make clothes out of, I reckon. The Indians smeared themselves with black grease and dirt until you couldn't tell their skin was red.

The Chilwitz were short and squat. With their dirty, little bodies, it looked like God had squished them into the mud, so He wouldn't have to look at them. Another thing that bothered me was they had the smallest teeth I ever saw. I don't know how they managed to eat with them. They pierced themselves and hung all manner of things in the holes. They hung things from their nose, their ears, their lips, and God knows where else.

The things they did to their young 'uns was barbaric. They somehow got the notion that a flat head was a thing of beauty, so they would tie boards to their babies' foreheads. They may have been beautiful to them, but they looked downright strange to me. Their children all looked like they had been running into trees. How those Indians ever made babies was a mystery. I tried to put it out of my head, but I kept getting these terrible images. All that flattening must have squeezed their brains. That tribe was the laziest Indians I met on my journey. If a bear ever came after one of them, he would rather get eaten than go to the trouble to run away.

The Indians told me about a couple of white men named Lewis and Clark that came through these parts a long time ago. They wrote everything down and drew pictures of everything they saw like they wouldn't be able to remember it when they got back to where they came from. They told me that old Lewis and Clark were nearly starving when they passed through. They wouldn't eat salmon because it tasted funny to them. They wouldn't eat bear because it was too greasy. They stayed away from berries because they might be poison. They had to be pickiest eaters God ever put on earth. They would rather go hungry than eat something they didn't like. One of the Chilowitz that I called Ugly Dog said, “The explorers went without food in a land full of things, they wouldn't eat. None of these things harmed the Indians, but Lewis and Clark weren't sure. Everywhere they had traveled they left behind sickness. Something had to have caused it.” The Chilwitz were fat and lazy, while Lewis and Clark were skinny and starved.

I asked a Chilwitz once why he was so lazy. He said, “A lazy man is not likely to be envious. He doesn't want to work for what his neighbor has.”

I didn't know how much of what they told me about Lewis and Clark was true. It was always hard to separate facts from Indian legends. They liked to stretch things to make them more interesting. When they told me that the white men were guided by an Indian woman, I knew they were drifting off into Indian tales. They always wanted to have an Indian outsmarting a white man.

Oregon had the biggest trees that I ever saw. The trees grew so tall that you could sit in their branches and grab pieces of clouds as they drifted by. The Indians told me the trees I was looking at were just saplings compared to the trees of their ancestors. In those days, the trees were so big that it would take a man two days to walk around one. They said sometimes the trees caught fire when they were hit by a star. I didn't believe them until one night I saw a shooting star crash into one with my own eyes.

The Indians invited me to eat with them while I was there. The Nez Perce had strawberries. The Chilwitz gave me a bowl of something that tasted like the stuff you scrape out of horses' hooves. I couldn't get past the smell. I went to bed hungry, and woke up in the morning, and scrounged for berries. I sure would have liked to find some strawberries. I decided that if I found any I wouldn't share them with the Chilwitz. I remembered what Jesus said about casting your pearls before swine. With the food those Indians were used to they probably wouldn't appreciate strawberries.

I had a dream one night that I woke up with a flat head. I got up the following morning and left. I decided it was time to put some distance between me and the ugliest Indians I had ever seen.

To be continued . . .