Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/145



the Great Spirit is displeased with all nations who wantonly engage in war; they abstain from all aggressive hostilities. Wyeth gave the Flatheads equal, or even greater praise, saying he had never known an instance of theft among them ; and neither quarreling or lying ; and that they were brave when put to the test, and more than a mateh for the Blackfeet in battle. And the same praise is due e(|ually to the Nez Perces. The Cayuses made loud pretentions to religion for a while after the missionaries earae but fell from grace with the murder of Dr. Whitman by members of their tribe. With the exceptions of the Flatheads and Kez Perces it is quite reasonable that the Indian's native idea of religion, or a Great Spirit, arose from his inability to comprehend the forces of nature about him on all sides. But the example of the Flathead and the Nez Perce shows what might have been developed out of those tribes if they could have been handled and taught by uniformly honest and ,iust men. For these Indians had in them the germs of a vigorous civilization which could have been so trained and ex- panded as would have produced teachers and governors of all other tribes, and saved the nation millions of dollars and thousands of valuable lives in suppress- ing Indian wars.

So far as the British and their agent, the Hudson's Bay Company, was con- cerned, the morals and religious teaching of the Indians was a matter of no im- portance or concern of theirs unless it affected the fur trade. One religion was just as good as another to them, and no religion was better than either. An In- dian that would not go out and hunt for furs and come in and trade his pelts for trinkets was to the fur company a very poor Indian. When the British agents, Warre and Vavasour, visited Oregon in 1845, they reported the Indians as a very superstitious race, and declared "that neither the Roman Catholic nor the Methodist missions had done much toward reclaiming the Indian population, who are an idle, dissolute race."

The Indian population of the Oregon country, according to estimates made by the Hudson's Bay Company, was in the year 1842 as follows:

Port Vancouver locality 200

Umpqua Valley locality 800

Cape Disappointment locality 100

Chinook Point locality -. 100

Coweeman on Columbia locality 100

Champoeg on Willamette locality 150

Nisqually Puget Sound locality 500

Cowlitz County Valley locality 250

Port Colville, Upper Columbia locality 800

Pend d 'Oreille, Idaho, locality 400

Flatheads. Bitter Root Valley locality 500

Kootenais — Kootenai rivei', Idaho, locality 500

Okanogan, Upper Columbia locality 300

Walla Wallas, Walla Walla Valley locality 300

Port Hall — Eastern Idaho locality 200

Port Boise, Boise Valley locality 200

Port Victoria. Vancouver Island locality 5,000

Port Rupert. Vaucouvei' Island locality 4,000