The Indians would look around and shrug their shoulders. They had no chiefs. Like many North American Indian tribes, they made communal decisions by consensus, with at most a special influence being exerted by one or two respected elder males.

But Stevens, hellbent on following the treaty-making protocol established among Western nations, plowed ahead, finding someone on each occasion to treat as the chief who would put his X on the treaty to make it official. To make matters worse, the negotiations took place via interpreters who employed the Chinook Jargon, a trade language used by the local Indians to communicate (roughly) with one another, a language with only a few hundred words, a language obviously incapable of facilitating Stevens’s rather delicate negotiations.