Being checked in this sly business, they became ill-humored and returned, angry, down the river.
The explorers noticed here that the Indians flattened the heads of males as well as females.

Higher up the river, only the women and female children had flat heads.

The custom of artificially flattening the heads of both men and women, in infancy, was formerly practised by nearly all the tribes of the Chinook family along the Columbia River.

Various means are used to accomplish this purpose, the most common and most cruel being to bind a flat board on the forehead of an infant in such a way that it presses on the skull and forces the forehead up on to the top of the head.

As a man whose head has been flattened in infancy grows older, the deformity partly disappears; but the flatness of the head is always regarded as a tribal badge of great merit.
"On the morning of the twenty-eighth," says the journal, having dried our goods, we were about setting out, when three canoes came from above to visit us, and at the same time two others from below arrived for the same purpose.