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LEGENDS
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Grizzly Bear
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Understanding the Truth of Lewis and Clark While Twisted Hair was an older Chief who first visited with Lewis and Clark, among the tribal notables who later canoed down the Clearwater to meet the Corps near the present-day Lewiston was Hohots Llppip (Red Grizzly Bear) a Chief famous among all Northwest. This was at the time canoes made from five yellow pine were presented by Chief Walanmmottinin to the explorers to be used to descend the Snake and Columbia Rivers. |
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From the time Red Grizzly Bear was ten years old, he swam the Tamonmo (Salmon) River across and back everyday for five consecutive winters. As a young man, a recurring dream of a great, blood stained grizzly bear told him he was not to be afraid, that he would go to war and receive many wounds (eighty in all) over his body. But he would not die. Because of this he would be called Red Grizzly Bear.
Red Bear made presents of dressed buckskins for the white men for his visit. It was this “Bloody Chief”, at the age of ninety years, who greeted the first US Indian Agent to visit the Northwest, telling him, “…I am the oldest Chief, the chief chief when your brothers Lewis and Clark visited this country. They honored my friendship and told me it was better to be at peace.”
Red Grizzly Bear, whose name appears twelfth in the list of the signers of the treaty of Walla Walla in 1855, there spelled “Ha-Ha Still-pilp, was the son of this great “Bloody Chief” or “Many Wounds” as he came also to be known.
