of the great Pawnees.  Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred villages, thousands and thousands of horses.  They numbered more than six thousand warriors.  Their name had become a by-word of terror on the northern continent, from shore to shore, and little children in the eastern states, who knew not the name of the tribes two miles from their dwellings, had learned to dread even the name of a Black-foot.  Now the tribe has been reduced to comparative insignificancy by this dreadful scourge.  They died by thousands; whole towns and villages were destroyed; and even now, the trapper, coming from the mountains, will often come across numberless lodges in ruins, and the blanched skeletons of uncounted and unburied Indians.  They lost ten thousand individuals in less than three weeks.

Many tribes but little known suffered pretty much in the same ratio.  The Club Indians I have mentioned, numbering four thousand before the pestilence, are now reduced to thirty or forty Individuals; and some Apaches related to me that happening at that time to along the shores of the Colorado, they met the poor fellows dying by hundreds on the very edge of the water, where they had dragged themselves to quench their burning thirst, there not being among them one healthy or strong enough to help and succour the others.  The Navahoes, living in the neighbourhood of the Club Indians, have entirely disappeared; and, though late travellers have mentioned them in their works, there is not one of them living now.

Mr. Farnham mentions them In his “Tour on the Mountains”; but he must have been mistaken, confounding one tribe with another, or perhaps deceived by the ignorance of the trappers; for that tribe occupied a range of country entirely out of his track, and never travelled by American traders or trappers.  Mr. Farnham could not have been in their neighbourhood by at least six hundred miles.

The villages formerly occupied by the Navahoes are deserted, though many of their lodges still stand; but they serve only to shelter numerous tribes of dogs, which, having increased wonderfully since there has been no one to kill and eat them, have become the lords of vast districts, where they hunt in packs.  So numerous and so fierce have they grown, that the neighbouring tribes feel great unwillingness to extend their range to where they may fall in with these canine hunters.

This disease, which has spread north as far as the Ohakallagans, on the borders of the Pacific Ocean, north of Fort Vancouver, has also extended its ravages to the western declivity of the Arrahuac, down to 30 deg. north lat., where fifty nations that had a name are now forgotten, the traveller, perchance, only reminded that they existed when he falls in with heaps of unburied bones.

How the Black-feet caught the infection it is difficult to say, as their immediate neighbours in the east escaped; but the sites of their villages were well calculated to render the disease more general and terrible; their settlements being generally built in some recess, deep in the heart of the mountains, or in valleys surrounded by lofty hills, which prevent all circulation of the air; and it is easy to understand that the atmosphere, once becoming impregnated with the effluvia, and having no issue, must have been deadly.