A party of ninety men in ten canoes left Astoria for up-river points on April 4, 1814. While passing the mouth of the Yakima, about three hundred and fifty miles up the River, the men were surprised to see three canoes putting out from shore and to hear a child's voice calling out, "_Arretez donc! arretez donc!_" Stopping to investigate, the party found in one of the boats the Indian wife of Pierre Dorion, with her children. Dorion, with five other Canadians, had gone the previous summer with a party under command of John Reed of the Astor Company. While trapping and hunting, deep in the mountains of Snake River, the party had been massacred by Indians. The woman and her two boys had alone escaped the massacre. It was the dead of winter and the snows lay deep on the Blue Mountains. But the wife of Dorion found shelter in a remote fastness of the mountains, putting up a bark hut for a shelter and subsisting on the carcasses of some of her horses. In the spring, the pitiful little company of mother and children descended to Walla Walla and found there more kindly disposed natives, who cared for them and turned them over to the protection of the whites. A more thrilling story of suffering and heroism than this of Madame Dorion and her children has never come up from the chronicles of the wild West. Equally illustrative of the life of the fur-traders is the account given by Alexander Ross of one of his many adventures in the Columbia country. In 1814 Ross went from Okanogan to Yakima to secure horses. With him were four other whites and three Indian women. The Yakima Valley was then as now a paradise of the Indians. There the tribes gathered by the thousands in the spring to dig camas, to race horses, and to gamble, as well as to form alliances and make plans for war. When the little company of traders reached the encampment, they discovered to their astonishment that it was a veritable city. Six thousand men, women, and children, with ten thousand horses, and uncounted dogs and many shackled bears and wolves, were strewn across the plain. It was a dangerous situation for the traders, for it became plain to them that the Indians were unfriendly. But assuming an air of careless bravado, Ross proceeded to display his store of trinkets for the purpose of starting a traffic in horses. Assuming a very hilarious manner the Indians would seize and drive away the animals as fast as the white men got them. Then the Indians began to deprive them of clothes and food. Finally they made ready to seize their three women as slaves. Ross managed to have the women escape temporarily, but then the savages were worse than ever. Matters reached a crisis when an obstreperous chief named Yaktana snatched a knife from the hands of one of the Canadians. A desperate struggle was just at the point of breaking out, which would inevitably have resulted in the death of all the white men, when a sudden intuition flashed through the quick mind of Ross, and rushing between the