Page:The Columbia river , or, Scenes and adventures during a residence of six years on the western side of the Rocky Mountains among various tribes of Indians hitherto unknown (Volume 1).djvu/309

 caused instant death; and thousands of the miserable wretches by suicide anticipated its fatal termination. Whole villages were depopulated, and an old man well known in the Indian country, named Louis La Liberté, told me that one morning during its height he saw between two and three hundred bodies of men, women, and children, suspended from trees, close to an adjoining village of the Cree nation, the surviving inhabitants of which did not exceed forty persons. They believed that the "Great Master of Life had delivered them over to the Evil Spirit for their wicked courses;" and for many years afterwards those who escaped, or survived the deadly contagion, strictly conformed themselves to their own code of moral laws. The recollection of it, however, is now fast wearing away from their memory. Those who bore any traces of it are nearly extinct; and on the eastern side of the mountains, intoxication, and its attendant vices are becoming too prevalent. The western tribes still remember it with a superstitious dread, of which Mr. M'Dougall took advantage, when he learned that the Tonquin had been cut off. He assembled several of the chieftains, and showing them a small bottle, declared that it contained the small-pox; that