After leaving the Ootlashoots, the explorers endured the extremities of famine, and were compelled first to kill and eat their horses, and then to purchase for food the dogs of wandering Indians met with on their painful way to the coast. At length, on the 13th September, the lower course of the upper branch of the Columbia, to which the name of Lewis was given, was reached, and from Twisted Hair, a chief of the Nez Percés, or Pierced-nosed Indians, another inland Columbian tribe, the joyful news was heard that the ocean was not far distant. Twisted Hair and his subjects, who received their peculiar appellation of Nez Percés account of some of them wearing a white shell suspended from their noses, assisted their white visitors in building canoes, in which the explorers floated easily down the now wide and rapid Columbia to the home of the Sokulks, belonging to the same great family as the Ootlashoots and Nez Percés, a wild but peaceable people, living in well-built huts, and clothing themselves in the skins of elk, deer, and other trophies of the chase. Below the Sokulks dwelt the Pishquitpaws, who had never seen a white man, and were proportionately astonished at the sudden appearance among them of the Americans. Except that they wore scarcely any clothing at all, the Pishquitpaws differed but little from the other inland Columbian tribes visited; and when their terror at the arrival of their strange guests――who they thought had fallen straight from the sky――was somewhat subsided, they were ready enough to give information and show hospitality. Illustration: BASALTIC PINNACLES ON THE COLUMBIA RIVER.