the Indian tribes of Saskatchewan.  Small-pox, in its most aggravated type, had passed from tribe to tribe, leaving in its track depopulated wigwams and vacant council-lodges; thousands (and there are not many thousands, all told) had perished on the great sandy plains that lie between the Saskatchewan and the Missouri.  Why this most terrible of diseases should prey with especial fury upon the poor red man of America has never been accounted for by, medical authority; but that it does prey upon him with a violence nowhere else to be found is an undoubted fact.  Of all the fatal methods of destroying the Indians which his white brother has introduced into the West, 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.