In 1829, too, a Boston ship came into the Columbia for salmon. Was it "the Bostons," as the Indians said, or was it the first ploughing at Fort Vancouver, that uncorked the vials of pestilence? For miles the shores of the Columbia were dotted with villages so near that a rifle-ball would reach from one to another. The Willamette was filled with a numerous and powerful people, a people that had good houses, great fisheries, and manufactured thread and nets and cloth from the fibre of the milkweed. The deadly fever came among them. The simple Indian remedies failed. The jugglery of medicine men proved vain. In vain was the general sacrifice of eagle's feathers and wooden images. The fated Multnomahs went into their sweat-houses. Half-suffocated in the vapor-bath, reeking with perspiration, they jumped into the cold Columbia. Barely crept they back to the wigwam door. In three weeks Kesano's people perished, and he had been wont to summon five hundred warriors to the chase. At his village, Wakanasissi, six miles below Vancouver, the bones lay five feet high and ten rods long for years, where the dead were piled in a ghastly open tomb. With six solitary survivors Kesano moved his lodge to Fort Vancouver. Here ever after the old chief was honored above all other Indians with a plate at a side table in the great hall, with a feather in a silk hat and a scarlet coat. With his large flat head, bright clear eyes that could look one through, Roman nose, heavy jaws, set firm lips, and hair carefully dressed, old Chief Kesano stalked in and out, an honored pensioner at Fort Vancouver.
That fever time! From 1829 to 1832 thirty thousand Indians perished in the valley of the Columbia and Willamette. In 1831, on the Cowlitz, the living sufficed
