, namely, the comparative carelessness
and indifference with which they are regarded and treated. But some
rather striking developments of recent years have raised grave doubts in
our minds as to whether they were always the mild and inoffensive "house
cats" that they pass for at present. These are the astonishing and
almost incredible developments that occur when for the first time these
mild and harmless "diseaselets" are introduced to a savage or
half-civilized tribe. Like an Arabian Nights' transformation, our
sleepy, purring, but still able to scratch, "pussy cat" flashes out as a
ravenous man-eating tiger, killing and maiming right and left.
Measles--harmless, tickly, snuffly, "measly" little measles--kills from
thirty to sixty per cent of whole villages and tribes of Indians and
cripples half the remainder!

My first direct experience with this feature of our "household pets" was
on the Pacific Coast. All the old settlers told me of a dread pestilence
which had preceded the coming of the main wave of invading civilization,
sweeping down the Columbia River. Not merely were whole clans and
villages swept out of existence, but the valley was practically
depopulated; so that, as one of the old patriarchs grimly remarked, "It
made it a heap easier to settle it up quietly." So swift and so fatal
had been its onslaught that villages would be found deserted. The canoes
were rotting on the river bank above high-water mark. The curtains of
the lodges were flapped and blown into shreds. The weapons and garments
of the dead lay about them, rusting and rotting. The salmon-nets were
still standing in the river, worn to tatters and fringes by the
current. Yet, from the best light that I was able to secure upon it, it
appeared to have been nothing more than an epidemic of the measles,
caught from the child of some pioneer or trapper and spreading like
wildfire in the prairie grass. A little later I had an opportunity to
see personally an epidemic of mumps in a group of Indians, and I have
seldom seen fever patients, ill of any disease, who were more violently
attacked and apparently more desperately ill than were sturdy young
Indian boys attacked by this trifling malady. Their temperatures rose to
one hundred and five or one hundred and six degrees, they became
delirious, their faces were red and swollen, they ached in every limb,
and the complications that occasionally follow mumps even in civilized
patients were frequent and e