Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/309

Rh Clatsop tribe of Indians during their stay near them in the winter of 1805-6, that some time previous to that a malady had been brought to them from the sea, which caused the death of many of their people. As they reached the Lower Willamette Valley, on their return eastward, they found living evidence that the malady had been smallpox, and the remains of capacious houses within the district now covered, or being rapidly covered, by the white race, which indicated that the disease had swept out of existence, or caused to flee the locality, large numbers of the natives. A woman was seen by Captain Clark in the company of an old man, presumably her father, sole occupants of a building two hundred and twenty-five feet long and thirty feet wide, under one roof, and divid'ed by narrow alleys or partitions into rooms thirty feet square. Other buildings, empty or in ruins, were found near this. This woman was badly marked with smallpox; and from her apparent age, and information the old man endeavored to convey, this disease had killed many people and frightened others away about thirty years previously.

Information received from natives by signs cannot be deemed reliable; but no writing qan be plainer than the human face marked by smallpox. We have, then, from the journal of Lewis and Clark, traditional information from the Clatsop natives, and in the appearance of this woman—presumably of the Multnomah tribe—evidence of the presence of smallpox one hundred miles in the interior; and fifty years later we have from the Yakima chieftain, Kamiakin, at the Walla Walla council held by Gov. I. I. Stevens, intimations that the suffering of his people from smallpox in former times was one reason for his objection to whites' settling in his country.

Whatever truth there may be in these earlier traditions of the natives, the rapid decrease of the tribes on the