Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/321

Rh Doctor McLoughlin instituted the first hospital in Oregon for white people here prior to the overland immigration of family life from the Missouri border in 1843. The native race then were' being removed rapidly by a disease they themselves called the "cold sick,' which had raged among them from 1832 . Some of the symptoms indicated a malarial cause, but quinine and other ague remedies had no effect upon the Indian sick. Like the plague now raging in India, it was confined, seemingly, entirely to the natives; also, almost entirely to the fishing villages on the large rivers. I have long had a theory which I confess being unable to give an intelligent reason for; that that plague had its origin in eating filth. The natives themselves found that to thrust their arrow points through the putrid liver of a deer or elk would enable them to kill their enemies by a slight wound by blood poison. Is it not, then, possible that eating putrid flesh, or fish the garbage cast up by the tide, the spent salmon from the river shore, or those wallowing in death throes on its surface, could not be done with impunity?

In times of famine the natives, on the sea coast and on the rivers, did eat such food; as the inland tribes, like the Klamaths, sometimes sustained life by eating black moss, and the bark of certain trees. These latter foods, however, were not putrid.

To support the theory that this cold sick plague, which began on the Lower Columbia in 1832, and which kept the wail for the dead sounding along its banks till 1844, may have originated in poisoned food, we have the statement of Lewis and Clark's journal that salmon pemmican which they purchased in quantity at The Dalles moulded, and made the men sick, in the damp and warm winter camp, near the sea. But, whatever the cause, the effect was to depopulate, or cause the abandonment of once populous villages.