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
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, are now reduced to thirty or forty Individuals; and some
Apaches related to me that happening at that time to along the shores of
the Colorado, they met the poor fellows dying by hundreds on the very
edge of the water, where they had dragged themselves to quench their
burning thirst, there not being among them one healthy or strong enough
to help and succour the others.
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