These articles had found their way up the river from white traders on the seashore.
On the twenty-first of October the explorers discovered a considerable stream which appeared to rise in the southeast and empty into the Columbia on the left.

To this stream they gave the name of Lepage for Bastien Lepage, one of the voyageurs accompanying the party.

The watercourse, however, is now known as John Day's River.

John Day was a mighty hunter and backwoodsman from Kentucky who went across the continent, six years later, with a party bound for Astoria, on the Columbia.

From the rapids below the John Day River the Lewis and Clark party caught their first sight of Mount Hood, a famous peak of the Cascade range of mountains, looming up in the southwest, eleven thousand two hundred and twenty-five feet high.