Page:History of Oregon volume 1.djvu/704

Rh great number of deaths among the Cayuses, amounting to nearly one half the population.

That the natives murmured Whitman was aware; but he hoped that two deaths which had occurred in his house, of one of his adopted children and one of Osborne's, would have shown them that the disease carried off white people as well as Indians. Spalding asserts in the Oregon American, a small semi-monthly paper published in 1848, that not only Joe Lewis, but the Catholic priests who had arrived at Fort Walla Walla from Canada on the 5th of September, with the design of establishing missions among the