ck-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 neighbo