st, this plague of small-pox is the
most deadly. The history of its annihilating progress is written in too
legible characters on the desolate expanses of untenanted wilds, where
the Indian graves are the sole traces of the red man's former domination.
Beneath this awful scourge whole tribes have disappeared the bravest and
the best have vanished, because their bravery forbade that they should
flee from the terrible infection, and, like soldiers in some square
plunged through and rent with shot, the survivors only closed more
despairingly together when the death-stroke fell heaviest among them.
They knew nothing of this terrible disease; it had come from the white
man and the trader; but its speed had distanced even the race for gold,
and the Missouri Valley had been swept by the epidemic before the men
who carried the firewater had crossed the Mississippi. For eighty years
these vast regions had known at intervals the deadly presence of this
disease, and through that lapse of time its history had been ever the
same. It had commenced in the trading camp; but the white man had
remained comparatively secure, while his red brothers were swept away by
hundreds. Then it had travelled on, and every thing had gone down before
it-the chief and the brave, the medicine-man, the squaw, the papoose. The
camp moved away; but the dread disease clung to it--dogged it--with a
perseverance more deadly than hostile tribe or prowling war-party; and
far over the plains the track was marked with the unburied bodies and
bleaching bones of the wild warriors of the West.

The summer which had just passed had witnessed one of the deadliest
attacks of this disease. It had swept from the Missouri through the
Blackfeet tribes, and had run the whole length of the North Saskatchewan,
attacking indiscriminately Crees, half-breeds, and Hudson Bay employees.
The latest news received from the Saskatchewan was one long record of
death. Carlton House, a fort of the Hudson Bay Company, 600 miles
north-west from Red River, had been attacked in August. Late in September
the disease still raged among its few inhabitants. From farther west
tidings had also come bearing the same message of disaster. Crees,
half-breeds, and even the few Europeans had been attacked; all medicines
had been expended, and the officer in charge at Carlton had perished of
the disease.

"You are to ascertain as far as you can in what places and among what
tribes of Indians, and what s