If they had not had so much to do in exploring and making friends with the redskins, the party might have moaned, like the Indian in “Hiawatha,” “O the long and dreary winter!” But Lewis and Clark found plenty for one and all to do. They met the chiefs of the neighboring tribes around their council fires. They told all about the “Great Father” in Washington who loved the red men as his own children, and showed them a portrait of kindly, gray-haired President Jefferson. At these love-feasts the savages rubbed cheeks with the white men. Of course, the greasy red paint rubbed off, and the explorers must have laughed at one another in secret, for they did look funny with their faces all smeared and mottled. But the Indians were so in earnest that they would have been deeply offended if a white man had dared to smile. After a love-feast they had another kind of feast, on buffalo meat, venison, and wild duck. Then they exchanged presents. The white men gave the Indians beads--blue and white were the colors the red men liked best--with knives, guns, pewter mirrors, and trinkets. And the Indians made return presents of ponies, and of Indian corn and other food-stuffs. Then the travelers showed the Indians how white people danced, and the red braves gravely performed their war, peace, scalp, and snake dances for their guests. Big Indians solemnly played a game in which one side passed around a piece of bone while the rest tried to guess where it was, as in the children’s game of “Button, button, who’s got the button?” The Mandan tribe told the strangers about the fierce Sioux, the Shoshones, the Blackfeet, and other tribes farther west. As the great river grew shallower and was obstructed by falls and rapids, Lewis and Clark tried to buy Indian ponies for the trip over the mountains. At Fort Mandan they found a French scout whom they engaged as their guide and interpreter for the rest of the way. He had a young Indian wife, Sacajawea, or Bird Woman, who insisted on going with him. She had a funny little papoose, only two months old, that could not be left behind, of course. Absurd as it seemed to take a weak woman with a little baby on such a hard and dangerous journey, the party soon found that they could not have gone much farther without her. She was most useful as an interpreter. In some places, for example, Captain Clark would say in English what he wished to tell a certain chief. One of the other men would repeat this in French. The Indian woman’s French husband would translate that into an Indian dialect she spoke. She would then repeat it in another language which an Indian in the strange chief’s party understood; and he, in turn, would translate into the dialect of the chief to whom Captain Clark had addressed his original remark. Roundabout as this method was, it was far better than not to be able to talk at all and make friends of the red strangers.