Beatrice: That we had Wetxuuwiis, that saved Lewis and Clark.

Josiah: What’s the story behind that? How did that come about?

Beatrice: Well, Wetxuuwiis was taken captive as a little girl, from tribe to tribe. And finally, they sold her and she got to New York, into the Great Lakes area. They kept her there and she learned to speak English and she learned to do a lot of things that the Indian woman did, that the White ladies did, showed her how to cook, make things. And she was finally married to a Frenchman and she had a little boy. And one of her friends told her, “you know he is going to take you over on the big waters and it is a great big water and you go over with him.” He was a Frenchman. “You might never return and you might never come back to this country.” And so she escaped. She made a raft and went over one of the lakes and then hitchhiked.

She knew the wolf. The wolf pack went before her and guided her out west, until she got to, before she got to the Flathead country her little son died; he must have been a little boy, maybe 2 or 3 years old. And so she buried him and then went to the Flathead nation. They were kind of close to us. In fact some of our people were part Flathead. But they practiced that, they used to flatten their head. But the Nez Perces never.

And so she finally come home and they were digging, there used to camp where they dug camas and camp around there. When Lewis and Clark came by there were several little boys playing and they saw them coming and they ran back to camp. And Lewis and Clark followed them. And they got to the camp. By that time Wetxuuwiis was pretty old, and she was laying in her bed in a teepee. And then she heard the commotion and she asked what’s happening? They said, “Oh, there are some people here. We’ve never seen people like that before. They have white faces, but there is one black man, maybe he painted his face black.” He was a colored guy, with Lewis and Clark. (York.) She lifted up her teepee and she looked out and said, “soyaapo.” And we figured that word,“soyaapo,” she got back east because we didn’t have it. So she must have been that she learned that back east from some other tribe. Then she heard them say, “What shall we do with them, should we kill them?” After she looked outside and saw them she said, “No don’t kill them. They’re good people. Saved their lives and they’ll give you gifts,” she told them. “They’re good people.” And they put down their guns or whatever they had. They didn’t kill Lewis and Clark because of her. She came back from the Great Lakes and she lived among them. So they spared their lives because of her telling them, “Don’t kill them.” And so Lewis and Clark lived. But several of tribes back along the way said, “They should have killed them.” Even some of the Nez Perce said, “they should have killed them.” But she saved their lives.