rdoned for alluding to them.

The natives of the Sandwich islands, who were in a state of paganism at
that time, have since adopted a form of Christianity, have made
considerable progress in imitating the civilization of Europe, and even,
at this moment, begin to entertain the idea of annexation to the United
States. It appears, however, that the real natives are rapidly dwindling
away by the effects of their vices, which an exotic and ill-assimilated
civilization has rather increased than diminished, and to which religion
has not succeeded in applying a remedy.

At the mouth of the Columbia, whole tribes, and among them, the
_Clatsops_, have been swept away by disease. Here again, licentious
habits universally diffused, spread a fatal disorder through the whole
nation, and undermining the constitutions of all, left them an easy prey
to the first contagion or epidemic sickness. But missionaries of various
Christian sects have labored among the Indians of the Columbia also; not
to speak of the missions of the Catholic Church, so well known by the
narrative of Father De Smet and others; and numbers have been taught to
cultivate the soil, and thus to provide against the famines to which
they were formerly exposed from their dependence on the precarious
resources of the chase; while others have received, in the faith of
Christ, the true principle of national permanence, and a living germ of
civilization, which may afterward be developed.

Emigration has also carried to the Oregon the axe of the settler, as
well as the canoe and pack of the fur-trader. The fertile valleys and
prairies of the Willamet--once the resort of the deer, the elk, and the
antelope, are now tilled by the industrious husbandman. Oregon City, so
near old "Astoria," whose first log fort I saw and described, is now an
Archiepiscopal see, and the capital of a territory, which must soon be a
state of the Union.

Of the regions east of the mountains described in my itinerary, little
can be said in respect to improvement: they remain in the same wild
state. The interest of the Hudson's Bay Company, as an association of
fur-traders, is opposed to agricultural improvements, whose operation
would be to drive off and extinguish the wild animals that furnish their
commerce with its object. But on Lake Superior steamboats have
supplanted the birch-bark canoe of the Indian and the fur-trader, and at
Saut Ste. Marie, especially on the American side, there is now e