The new territory was soon to be the scene of a terrible tragedy.  The white man had brought new diseases into it, measles, fevers, and even, smallpox; they spread rapidly among the Indians, aggravated by their imprudence and ignorance of proper treatment, and many died.  The Indians became convinced that the missionaries were to blame, and it is claimed, too, that the emissaries of the Hudson Bay Company urged them on.  However that may have been, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1847, the Indians fell upon the missionaries and killed fifteen, of them, among the dead being Marcus Whitman and his wife.  So ended the life of the man who saved Oregon, and of the woman who was the first of her sex to cross the continent.

Meanwhile, far to the south, a drama scarcely less thrilling was enacting, its chief personage being John Augustus Sutter.  Sutter was a Swiss and had received a military education and served in the Swiss Guard before coming to America in 1834.  He settled first at St. Louis and then at Santa Fe, where he gained considerable experience as a trader.  Finally, in 1838, he decided to cross the Rockies, and after trading for a time in a little schooner up and down the coast, was wrecked in San Francisco Bay.  He made his way inland, and founded the first white settlement in the country on the site of what is now Sacramento.  Here, in 1841, he built a fort, having secured a large grant of land from the Mexican Government, and set up what was really a little empire in the wilderness, over which he reigned supreme.  And here, three years later, down from the snow-filled and tempest-swept passes of the Rockies, came a party of starving and frost-bitten scarecrows, the exploring expedition headed by John Charles Fremont, of whom we shall speak presently.

The rest of Sutter’s history is soon told.  In 1848, when Mexico ceded California to the United States, he was the owner of a vast domain, over which thousands of head of cattle wandered.  A few years later, he was practically a ruined man—­ruined by gold.  On the eighteenth day of January, 1848, one of his men named Marshall, brought to Sutter a lump of yellow metal which he had uncovered while digging a mill-race.  There could be no doubt of it—­it was gold!  News of the great discovery soon got about; there was a great rush for this new Eldorado; Sutter’s land was overrun with gold-seekers, who cared nothing for his rights, and when he attempted to defend his titles in the courts, they were declared invalid, and his land was taken from him.  To crown his disasters, his homestead was destroyed by fire; finding himself ruined, without land and without money, he gave up the struggle in despair and returned east, passing his last years in poverty in a little town in Pennsylvania.