Note 46 — LETTER—No. 58. (continued 2)

The Reverend Mr. Parker in his Tour across the Rocky Mountains says, that amongst the Indians below the Falls of the Columbia at least seven-eighths, if not nine-tenths, as Dr. M‘Laughlin believes, have been swept away by disease between the years 1829, and the time that he visited that place in 1836. “So many and so sudden were the deaths which occurred, that the shores were strewed with the unburied dead, whole and large villages were depopulated, and some entire tribes have disappeared.” This mortality he says “extended not only from the Cascades to the Pacific, but from very far North to the coast of California.” These facts, with hundreds of others, shew how rapidly the Indian population is destroyed, long before we become acquainted with them.