Page:Cathlamet On the Columbia.djvu/97

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS
77

fully visit together with ten or twenty yards of pure air between them.

Ordinarily, when white persons were about, when death came, the dead were decently buried, but occasionally the interment was as fearful as the sickness, and this was true of the victims of any disease that the Indian feared was infectious.

One Winter evening a good old missionary, telling in reflective mood his experiences on the Northern Coasts in a smallpox epidemic, told of sending Kathla, a young Indian girl who had contracted the disease, to a hut far outside the Indian village on a point in the bay where her old grandmother went with her as nurse, and how every morning he went in his canoe to a point of tide -washed rocks near their hut, and not daring on account of his people to go near-