Hall Jackson Kbllby 281
I might pursue to much greater length my statements in regard to this interesting region ; so as to speak of its towns, villages, missions, population, and of all its natural features and productions, more fully and minutely. But while I felt boimd to allude, as I have, to the most remarkable facts which I observed during my travels in High California, I have avoided going into details, or making statements which my own inspection has not enabled me to verify. A few words more concerning the native tribes of California, and I will pass northward to the Or^;on.
Most of the native Indians have perished, or have gone into the missions about the bay of San Francisco. ^ Many tribes are utterly extinct ; in places where I was told that, in 1832, there was a population of a thousand or fifteen hundred souls, I found sometimes but one hundred, sometimes not more than fifty, and sometimes none ; and not a vestige of their habita- tions, save a pile of discolored stones, or a slight depression of the soil. Pestilence and the wrath of man have combined in the work of extermination, until, of the ancient owners of this most interesting territory, very few now occupy its fertile fields. I do not believe, and I speak after due investigaticm, that the whole Indian population between the Colorado and the Pacific, in 1834, exceeded three thousand souls. But along the Sacrament and elsewhere, there is abundant evidence that, in former times^ a teeming and crowded population was spread over that now desolate region.
When I remember the exuberant fertility, the exhaustless natural wealth, the abundant streams and admirable harbors, and the advantageous shape and position of High California, I cannot but believe that at no very distant day a swarming multitude of human beings will again people the solitude, and that the monuments of civilization will throng along those streams whose waters now murmur to the desert, and cover those fertile vales — whose tumuli now record the idolatrous worship and commemorate the former existence of innumerable savage generations.
