t Fort Vancouver, when
I was there. Their treatment of the Indians had brought out the better
qualities of the savages. Farming had been undertaken by the company to
supply the Indians with bread and vegetables; they raised some cattle
and horses; and they had now taught the Indians to do the labor of the
farm and herd. They always compensated them for their labor, and always
gave them goods of uniform quality and at uniform price.

Before the advent of the American, the medium of exchange between the
Indian and the white man was pelts. Afterward it was silver coin. If
an Indian received in the sale of a horse a fifty dollar gold piece, not
an infrequent occurrence, the first thing he did was to exchange it for
American half dollars. These he could count. He would then commence his
purchases, paying for each article separately, as he got it. He would
not trust any one to add up the bill and pay it all at once. At that
day fifty dollar gold pieces, not the issue of the government, were
common on the Pacific coast. They were called slugs.

The Indians, along the lower Columbia as far as the Cascades and on the
lower Willamette, died off very fast during the year I spent in that
section; for besides acquiring the vices of the white people they had
acquired also their diseases. The measles and the small-pox were both
amazingly fatal. In their wild state, before the appearance of the
white man among them, the principal complaints they were subject to were
those produced by long involuntary fasting, violent exercise in pursuit
of game, and over-eating. Instinct more than reason had taught them a
remedy for these ills. It was the steam bath. Something like a
bake-oven was built, large enough to admit a man lying down. Bushes were
stuck in the ground in two rows, about six feet long and some two or
three feet apart; other bushes connected the rows at one end. The tops
of the bushes were drawn together to interlace, and confined in that
position; the whole was then plastered over with wet clay until every
opening was filled. Just inside the open end of the oven the floor was
scooped out so as to make a hole that would hold a bucket or two of
water. These ovens were always built on the banks of a stream, a big
spring, or pool of water. When a patient required a bath, a fire was
built near the oven and a pile of stones put upon it. The cavity at the
front was then filled with water. When the stones were sufficientl