98 ANTIQUITIES IN TENNESSEE. 



coast to where tliey are now found. And no one but God knows where the 

 voracity of the one is to stop, short of the acquisition of everything that is desirable 

 to money-making man in the Indians' country ; or when the mortal destruction of 

 the other is to be arrested, whilst there is untried flesh for it to act upon, either 

 within or beyond the Rocky Mountains. 



" I would venture the assertion, from books that I have searched, and from 

 other evidences, that, of numerous tribes which have already disappeared, and of 

 those that have been treated with, quite to the Rocky Mountains, each one has 

 had this exotic disease in its turn, and in a few months has lost one-half or more 

 of its numbers ; and, from living witnesses and distinct traditions, this appalling 

 disease has several times, before our day, run like a wave through the Western 

 tribes, over the Rocky Mountains, and to the Pacific Ocean, thinning the ranks of 

 the poor Indians to an extent which no knowledge, save that of the ever-looking 

 eye of the Almighty, can justly comprehend.'" 



Mr. Catlin- thus describes the sufl'erings of the Mandans by this disease, at the 

 time of their extinction, in the summer of 1838. 



" It seems that the Mandans were surrounded by several war parties of their 

 more powerful enemies, the Sioux, at that unlucky time, and they could not, there- 

 fore, disperse upon the plains, by which many of them could have been saved; and 

 they were necessarily inclosed within the piquets of their village, where the disease 

 in a few days became so very malignant, that death ensued in a few hours after its 

 attacks. So slight were their hopes, when they were attacked, that nearly half of 

 them destroyed themselves with their knives, with their guns, and by dashing their 

 brains out by leaping, head foremost, from a thirty-foot ledge of rocks in front of 

 their village. 



" The first symptom of the disease was a rapid swelling of the body, and so very 

 virulent had it become, that very many died in two or three hours after their 

 attack, and that in many cases without the appearance of the disease upon the 

 skin. Utter dismay seemed to possess all classes and all ages, and they gave them- 

 selves up in dismay, as entirely lost. There was but one continual crying and 

 howling, and praying to the Great Spirit for his protection, during the nights and 

 days; and there being but few living, and those in too appalling despair, nobody 

 thought of burying the dead, whose bodies, whole families together, were left in 

 horrid and loathsome piles in their own wigwams, with a few bufi"alo robes, etc. 

 thrown over them, there to decay and to be devoured by their own dogs. . . It 

 spread to other contiguous tribes, to the Minnetarees, the Knisteneaux, the 

 Blackfeet, the Cheyennes, and Crows, among whom twenty-five thousand perished 

 in the course of four or five months." 



The Reverend Mr. Parker, in describing his tour across the Rocky Mountains, 

 says that amongst the Indians below the falls of the Columbia, at least seven- 

 eighths, if not nine-tenths, as Dr. McLaughlin believes, have been swept away by 

 disease between the years 1829 and the time that he visited the place in 1836. 

 " So many and so sudden were the deaths which occurred, that the sliores were 



' North American Indians, vol. ii, p. 714. » Vol. ii, p. lid. 



