They used canoes, but they used horses more. Horses were their wealth. They raised horses by the thousand, and the finest of horses these were. A fat colt was good meat, but without horses they could not hunt the buffalo and the buffalo supplied stronger meat. Once a year, when the grass had greened in the spring, they traveled eastward, across the Rocky Mountains by the Pierced Nose Trail-to-the-buffalo, and hunted upon the Missouri River plains, in the country of their enemies the Blackfeet. The Blackfeet, in turn, sought them out, west of the mountains, to steal their horses. With the Blackfeet and the Sioux, and sometimes with the Snakes, they fought many a battle; and when they had anything of a show, they won out. It took numbers to whip a Pierced Nose warrior. Like most peace-lovers, he made the hardest kind of a fighter. The early whites in the Northwest had nothing but praise for the Pierced Nose Indians. The trapper who married a Pierced Nose woman thought that he was lucky. She would be a good wife for him--gentle, neat and always busy. Besides, as a rule the Nez Perces women were better looking than the general run of Indian women. The early fur-hunters and explorers found that the Pierced Noses were very religious, in a way akin to the Christian way. They did not eat, drink nor sleep without first giving thanks to God. They had one day each week, like Sunday, when they did not hunt or fish or work, but listened to talks by their priests or medicine-men. It was said that they had been taught first by a Christian Iroquois Indian, who in 1816 came in from Canada and told them the things that he had been told by the French priests. At any rate, when the Roman Catholic priests themselves arrived to live among them, these Pierced Noses already had learned a great deal. They were anxious to learn more. However, before the missionaries of any church visited them, the Pierced Noses tried to learn more, by themselves. In particular, they wanted a copy of the Book of Heaven. And what started them on the trail of the Book of Heaven, was this: Among the leaders of white fur-hunters in beaver-trapping days in the west, there was Trapper-Captain Jedediah S. Smith--the Knight in Buckskin. This Captain Jedediah Smith was fearless and upright. Hunting beaver, he traveled far and wide, from the Missouri River to California, and from New Mexico to the Columbia, protected only by his rifle and his Bible. Wherever he carried his rifle, he carried his Bible; used them both, and no man but that respected him. The Comanches of the Southwest finally killed him, in 1831, when fighting alone against great odds he died a real hero's death.