216 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
as if turned ina lathe. Tons of these vessels have been carried away from this 
and other islands. I was told that in a secluded ravine, in the interior of the 
island, known to but few, a car-load of these stone vessels lie on the surface, most 
of them broken. 
There are no stone spears, arrows or axes found on the island, or very few, as 
there were no land animals except foxes, of a variety peculiar to these islands. 
The natives found bone to answer their purpose; rude knives of stone were com- 
mon; in fact, the natives could procure all the food they required by a curious 
provision of nature. The waters abounded with flying-fish: they rise out of the 
water when disturbed, and sail with the wind for 200 or 300 yards. Greatschools 
of tunas, white bass and yellowtails surround the bays, driving the smaller 
fish toward the shore. The flying-fish, in escaping, land far up the beach, 
where the natives could pick them up at their leisure. 
It is said that the natives worshiped the sun. I saw what was said to bea 
picture of the sun painted in a cave, with other designs. They were too ancient 
and indistinct for me to decipher. The early mission fathers sent an expedition 
to the island to destroy a so-called temple in which the natives worshiped. 
When or how these people disappeared or perished is not known to the people 
now living on the coast. There is a tradition that long ago the Russians, trading 
for furs along the Alaskan coast, furnished the natives of that country guns and 
taught their use, and employed them as hunters. In the course of time they 
worked down along the coast of California and discovered the Channel islands, 
which abounded with sea-otter, the most valuable of all furs. The natives of 
Catalina and the neighboring islands used these skins for clothing and bedding. 
This. excited the cupidity of the Russians, who the next year brought down 
several hundred of their hunters, armed with guns, and left them on the islands. 
Finding the natives rich in furs and powerless to defend themselves, they ex- 
terminated them. This is the story. On St. Nicholas island, eighty miles out 
in the ocean, a sailor of Avalon said to me he counted thirty skeletons in a row, 
which the violent sandstorm had uncovered, the left temple of each broken in. 
Out of the drifting sands of this island boat-loads of stone implements are 
taken. One hundred and fifty stone mortars were taken to the World’s Fair, at 
Chicago. 
Here we find once populous islands on our coast, of the origin of whose people 
or their fate we know nothing. Perhaps a pestilence destroyed them, as it did 
many thousands of natives on the upper Missouri river in 1837. 
The statement, so often seen emanating from semiofficial sources, that there 
are as many Indians now in the United States as when the continent was dis- 
covered, and that they are not decreasing in numbers, is utterly at variance with 
the facts. The remaining 250,000 Indiansare the remnant of three millions, who 
inhabited the territory of the United States in a. p. 1500. When first known, 
early in the century, the Kaw Indians numbered between 5000 and 10,000, and 
when I first knew them they numbered 1500; now there are but 250 left. 
