with them.  About the same time some of the Crees also reached the settlement, and the infection thus communicated from both quarters spread with amazing rapidity.  Out of a total population numbering about 900 souls, 600 caught the disease, and up to the date of my departure from Edmonton (22nd December) 311 deaths had occurred.  Nor is this enormous percentage of deaths very much to be wondered at when we consider the circumstances attending this epidemic.  The people, huddled together in small hordes, were destitute of medical assistance or of even the most ordinary requirements of the hospital.  During the period of delirium incidental to small-pox, they frequently wandered forth at night into the open air, and remained exposed for hours to dew or rain; in the latter stages of the disease they took no precautions against cold, and frequently died from relapse produced by exposure; on the other hand, they appear to have suffered but little pain after the primary fever passed away.  “I have frequently,” says Pere Andre, “asked a man in the last stages of small pox,-whose end was close at hand, if he was suffering much pain; and the almost invariable reply was, None whatever.”  They seem also to have died without suffering, although the fearfully swollen appearance of the face, upon which scarcely a feature was visible, would lead to the supposition that such a condition must of necessity be accompanied by great pain.

The circumstances attending the progress of the epidemic at Carlton House are worthy of notice, both on account of the extreme virulence which characterized the disease at that post, and also as no official record of this visitation of small-pox would be complete which failed to bring to the notice of your Excellency the undaunted:  heroism displayed by a young officer of the Hudson Bay Company who was in temporary charge of the station.  At the breaking out of the disease, early in the month of August, the population of Carlton:  numbered about seventy souls.  Of these thirty-two persons caught the infection, and twenty-eight persons died.  Throughout the entire period of the epidemic the officer already alluded to, Mr. Wm. Traill, laboured with untiring perseverance in ministering to the necessities of the sick, at whose bedsides he was to be found both day and night, undeterred by the fear of infection, and undismayed by the unusually loathsome nature of the disease.  To estimate with any thing like accuracy the losses caused among the Indian tribes is a matter of considerable difficulty.  Some tribes and portions of tribes suffered much more severely than others.  That most competent authority, Pere Lacombe, is of opinion that neither the Blood nor Blackfeet Indians had, in proportion to their numbers, as many casualties as the Crees, whose losses may be safely stated at from 600 to 800 persons.  The Lurcees, a small tribe in close alliance with the Blackfeet, suffered very severely, the number of their tents being reduced from fifty to twelve.  On the.’