This bulb, the root of the arrowhead lily (_sagittaria variabilis_) is described by Lewis and Clark as “never out of season,” and as being “gathered chiefly by the women, who employ for the purpose canoes from ten to fifteen feet long, about two feet wide, nine inches deep, and tapering from the middle. They are sufficient to contain a single person and several bushels of roots, yet so very light that a woman can carry them with ease. She takes it into a pond where the water is sometimes as high as the breast, and by means of her toes separates this bulb from the root, which, on being freed from the mud, immediately rises to the surface of the water and is thrown into the canoe. In this manner these patient females will remain in the water for several hours, even in the dead of winter.”[7] This first party of the white race, thirty-six in number, were thus detained eight days gathering a sufficiency of food to make it prudent to risk a journey of ten days through the heart of the great and fertile Columbia Valley, then so devoid of large game as to make it reasonable to assume that at some period not very remote from the time of their visit the population had slaughtered the elk, deer, and antelope, and driven the buffalo to the east side of the Rockies. The practice of large parties of the strongest tribes passing that backbone of the continent every summer to hunt this noblest of North American game is good presumptive evidence that it had at no remote period ranged in the valley of the Columbia. In 1806, then, we have the fact of a population, roughly estimated at forty thousand, ekeing out a hand-to-mouth living, from salmon chiefly, with the additions of wokas kouse (wapato and camas),—the latter much the more generally distributed from the Pacific Ocean to the summit flats of the Rocky Mountains—by going across those mountains annually for game. They had, of course, to go in parties sufficiently strong for defense against the hated, dreaded and destructive Blackfeet. The taking of such journeys proves their necessity. The tribes unable through weakness or situation to make such expeditions, as were all those of Western and Southwestern Oregon, had to gather their precarious living from the plants mentioned, grass seeds, the small native fruits, of crab apple, haw, huckleberries, cranberries, etc. Looking over a recent report of the Division of Botany, United States Department of Agriculture—a contribution from the United States Herbarium, Vol. V, No. 2, by Frederick V. Coville—I find one hundred plants described as used by the Klamath Indians, forty-six of which—as seeds, fruits or roots—were used as food by that tribe. No effort has yet been made to enumerate all the kinds of flesh, fish, and insect life used by the native race for sustenance. Lewis and Clark found evidence that the coast native sometimes resorted to searching the beach for fish cast up by the tide. The tribes on the south bank of the