232 NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY 



parents lounging on their mats, is now only indicated by a heap 

 of undistinguishable ruins. The depopulation here has been truly 

 fearful. A gentleman told me, that only four years ago, as he 

 wandered near what had formerly been a thickly peopled 

 village, he counted no less than sixteen dead, men and woitien, 

 lying unburied and festering in the sun in front of their 

 habitations. Within the houses all were sick ; not ^one had 

 escaped the contagion ; upwards of a hundred individuals, men, 

 women, and children, were writhing in agony on the floors of 

 the houses, with no one to render them any assistance. Some 

 were in the dying struggle, and clenching with the convul- 

 sive grasp of death their disease-worn companions, shrieked and 

 howled in the last sharp agony. 



Probably there does not now exist one, where, five years ago, 

 there were a hundred Indians; and in sailing up the river, from 

 the cape to the cascades, the only evidence of the existence of 

 the Indian, is an occasional miserable wigwam, with a few 

 wretched, half-starved occupants. In some other places they 

 are rather more numerous; but the thoughtful observer cannot 

 avoid perceiving that in a very few years the race must, in the 

 nature of things become extinct; and the time is probably not 

 far distant, when the little trinkets and toys of this people will 

 be picked up by the curious, and valued as mementoes of a nation 

 passed away for ever from the face of the earth. The aspect of 

 things is very melancholy. It seems as if the fiat of the Creator 

 had gone forth, that these poor denizens of the forest and the 

 stream should go hence, and be seen of men no more. 



In former years, when the Indians were numerous, long after 

 the establishment of this fort, it was not safe for the white men 

 attached to it to venture beyond the protection of its guns with- 

 out being fully armed. Such was the jealousy of the natives 

 towards them, that various deep laid schemes were practised to 

 obtain possession of the post, and massacre all whom it had har- 



