208 



plants or wood. They have no styptics. Swellings produced by injuries 

 they sometimes scarify. Sores that are slow in healing are cauterized, and 

 they employ moxa by the application of coals of fire, and the powder left by 

 Avorms under the bark of trees is also strewn over to dry them np. This, and 

 also potter's clay dried and powdered, is used for chancres. Suction by the 

 mouth is employed as a topical remedy to alleviate ^^ain, and this too is 

 part of the practice of the tamahno-us doctors. Their sweat-houses are par- 

 tially excavated in the ground, just large enough to contain the body of one 

 person', and covered with boards and earth, the heat being produced by hot 

 stones ; after the operation they plunge into cold water. Fractured limbs 

 are bandaged and splinted with strips of wood. 



Of diseases to which they are subject, venei'eal in its different forms 

 and the small-pox are assumed to have been introduced by the whites ; the 

 latter, it is true, indirectly, it having reached here through other and more 

 distant tribes. According to Mr. Dunn,* "it commenced amonfj the tribes 

 residing between the sources of the Missouri and the Mississippi. Thence it 

 spread its devastations northward as far as Athabasca and the three horns 

 of the Grreat Slave Lake, and westw'ard across the Rocky Mountains, through 

 the whole region of the Oregon Territory, spreading to a vast distance along 

 the shores of the North Pacific." The date of this visitation he does not 

 mention. Lewis and Clarke supposed that it had swept the Columbia some 

 thirty years before their arrival, or about the year 1780. There have been 

 several retiirns of it since, the last in 1852-53, when the coast tribes par- 

 ticularly were ravaged. To these imported diseases, the measles are probably 

 to be added, which are scarcely less fatal than the others. The great mor- 

 tality produced by congestive fever between 1820 and 1830 upon the 

 Columbia has been mentioned by various writers. This the Lidians, though 

 doubtless erroneously, supposed to have originated from an American ves- 

 sel. Among indigenous diseases, consumption is one of the most de- 

 structive : their carelessness in regard to dress, the slight shelter from 

 rain and exposure permitted by their wandering habits, and the dampness 

 of the climate for a large part of the year, rendering it exceedingly common. 

 And it seems to have become more so, since the partial change in'their habits 



* The Oregon Territory, &c., by John Dunn, late of Hudaon's Bay Company. 



