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 of 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