Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/308



The first estimates we have of the number of the native race in the valley of the Columbia were by Lewis and Clark, who gained their information while exploring the river from its sources in the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Based upon information derived from the natives, their estimate was forty thousand. This was in 1805-6.

Forty years later, Rev. C. G. Nicolay, of King's College, Oxford, and member of the Royal Geographical Society of London, writing in support of England's right to the country created by the assumed moral benefits to the natives effected by the trade influences of the Hudson's Bay Company and, doubtless, with all the information that company could furnish estimated the number at thirty thousand, including all the country from the Caliifornia line north to 54 40'. Noting that the second estimate is for the wider bounds, and yet twenty-five per cent, less, the numbers seem strongly to indicate that the native race was rapidly decreasing between the dates mentioned.

In looking for the causes of this decrease of population of the native race, we find at the outset diseases common to, but not very destructive to civilized life, are, nevertheless, terrible in their effects on people living so near the plane of mere animal life as were the natives of Oregon especially those of them in the largest valleys, and near the sea, when first seen by white men. The first American explorers received information from the