Page:Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America.djvu/48

 the eastern tribes, but dwell together in villages. They are endowed with a greater capacity and quickness of apprehension; are more pliant and tractable in temper; are fond of imitating the customs of white men; and now receive, with eagerness, the truths of Christianity, from those upon whom but a few years ago they perpetrated the most barbarous murders: but the fever and ague, to which the country is very subject, has of late thinned their numbers. The Company's principal chaplain resides at their depot of Fort Vancouver, on the north side of the Columbia river, where agriculture, rearing of stock, and other commercial operations are prosecuted on a great scale. The same enlightened body has, of late years, liberally assisted American missionaries employed in instructing the dissolute maritime tribes, and in founding an American colony on the Willamette, a southern tributary of the Columbia; and has since conveyed across the mountains several Canadian priests, who, under the authority of the bishop at Red River, are gone to form another British settlement on the shores of Puget's Sound,—the nucleus of a future empire in the far west. The case is widely different in the frozen regions of the north; there the Indian hunters are scattered through interminable forests, into