not
seem to hurt each other much; but one or two of them, smarting under the
lash, returned the blows in good earnest, and then they all got angry
and beat each other so unmercifully that, in a few minutes, they were
scarcely able to move. Nothing could exceed the ludicrous picture which
Gabriel would draw out of this little event.

There is one circumstance which will form a particular datum in the
history of the western wild tribes: I mean the terrible visitation of
the small-pox. The Apaches, Comanches, the Shoshones, and Arrapahoes
are so clean and so very nice in the arrangement of their domestic
comforts, that they suffered very little, or not at all; at least, I do
not remember a single case which brought death in these tribes; indeed,
as I have before mentioned, the Shoshones vaccinate.

But such was not the case with the Club Indians of the Colorado of the
West, with the Crows, the Flat-heads, the Umbiquas, and the Black-feet.
These last suffered a great deal more than any people in the world ever
suffered from any plague or pestilence. To be sure, the Mandans had
been entirely swept from the surface of the earth; but they were few,
while the Black-feet were undoubtedly the most numerous and powerful
tribe in the neighbourhood of the mountains. Their war-parties ranged
the country from the northern English posts on the Slave Lake down south
to the very borders of the Shoshones, and many among them had taken
scalps of the Osages, near the Mississippi, and even of the great
Pawnees. Between the Red River and the Platte they had once one hundred
villages, thousands and thousands of horses. They numbered more than
six thousand warriors. Their name had become a by-word of terror on the
northern continent, from shore to shore, and little children in the
eastern states, who knew not the name of the tribes two miles from their
dwellings, had learned to dread even the name a Black-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