"No good--no good!" insisted Sacajawea. "That way no good. My brother say go that way."
She pointed to the north, and insisted that the party should go in that direction.
For a hundred miles Clark scouted down the headwaters of the Salmon River, and at last turned back, to report that neither horse nor boat ever could get through. At the Shoshone village, uneasy, the men were waiting for him.
"That way!" said Sacajawea, still pointing north.
The Indian guide, who had served Clark unwillingly, at length admitted that there was a trail leading across the mountains far up to the northward.
"We will go north," said Lewis.
They cached under the ashes of their camp fire such remaining articles as they could leave behind them. They had now a band of fifty horses. Partly mounted, mostly on foot, their half wild horses burdened, they set out once more under the guidance of an old Shoshone, who said he knew the way.
Charbonneau wanted to remain with the Shoshones, and to keep with him Sacajawea, his wife, so recently reunited to her people.
"No!" said Sacajawea. "I no go back--I go with the white chief to the water that tastes salt!" And it was so ordered.
Their course lay along the eastern side of the lofty Bitter Root Mountains. The going was rude enough, since no trail had ever been here; but mile after mile, day after day, they stumbled through to some point on ahead which none knew except the guide. They came on a new tribe of Indians--Flatheads, who were as amazed and curious as the Shoshones had been at the coming of these white men. They received the explorers as friends--asked them to tarry, told them how dangerous it was to go into the mountains.
But haste was the order of the day, and they left the Flatheads, rejoicing that these also told of streams to the westward up which the salmon came. They had heard of white men, too, to the west, many years before.
Down the beautiful valley of the Bitter Root River, with splendid mountains on either side, they pressed on, and on the ninth of September, 1805, they stopped at the mouth of a stream coming down from the heights to the west. Their old guide pointed up this valley.
"There is a trail," said he, "which comes across here. The Indians come to reach the buffalo. On the farther side the water runs toward the sunset."
They were at the eastern extremity of that ancient trail, later called the Lolo Trail, known immemorially to the tribes on both sides of the mountains. Laboriously, always pressing forward, they ascended the eastern slopes of the great range, crossed the summit, found the clear waters on the west side, and so came to the Kooskooskie or Clearwater River, leading to the Snake. And always the natives marveled at these white men, the first they ever had seen.