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    Tales of the Wild West: Indians
    Tales of the Wild West: Indians
    Tales of the Wild West: Indians
    Ebook62 pages47 minutes

    Tales of the Wild West: Indians

    By Rick Steber

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    "According to popular theory the first inhabitants of north America arrived during the last Ice Age. Between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago people are believed to have crossed from Asia to North America on a natural land bridge, where the Aleutian Island chain now exists.

    These people migrated south, hunting mastadons and mammoths, giant ground sloths, camels and long-horned bisons. They ate the meat and used the hide for clothing and shelter. Their weapons consisted of rocks and obsidian-tipped spears. In time the atlatl, a device used to throw spears or darts, was developed. It was not until about 3,000 years ago that the bow and arrow was introduced to North America.

    On the eve of the white man's arrival the population of North America, divided among 500 tribes, was estimated to exceed one million. But the Europeans brought with them diseases from which the native people had no natural immunity and plagues of smallpox, fever, tuberculosis, measles and venereal disease swept through the Indian nations with devastating results. Ninety percent of the people died: entire tribes were wiped off the face of the earth. Those who remained were rounded up and placed on reservations. The way of life they had known for countless centuries was doomed.
    "

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRick Steber
    Release dateDec 12, 2012
    ISBN9781301718764
    Tales of the Wild West: Indians
    Author

    Rick Steber

    RICK STEBER grew up in Alaska running sled dogs. He is the author of a number of nonfiction books set in the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Oregon.

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      Book preview

      Tales of the Wild West - Rick Steber

      Introduction

      Stone age people from Siberia are believed to have crossed an ice bridge to North America during the last great Ice Age, more than 13,000 years ago. These people were big game hunters who used spears, clubs and rocks to kill mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses and long-horned bison.

      When the white man arrived in North America there were more than 400 separate Indian tribes. The native population had no immunity to the white man’s diseases and fell victim to smallpox, fever and ague, tuberculosis, measles and venereal disease. The death rate among the Chinook tribe at the mouth of the Columbia River reached 95%. Entire villages were exterminated.

      Within a single generation the native population of the Northwest, which had numbered more than 100,000, had been reduced to fewer than 15,000 people. The survivors could offer little resistance to those who flooded into the country in search of fur, gold, farmland and timber.

      The Indians were herded onto reservations. When their reservation land was found to be rich in natural resources they were pushed onto the poorest land. Those who chose to fight were killed or exiled to the Oklahoma Indian Territory. The Indian way of life was doomed.

      Mountain Fever

      It was called mountain fever and it spelled suffering, agony and death for the native population of the Northwest. Between the years l829 to l832 an estimated 30,000 Indians died from mountain fever.

      At the village of Wakanassi, six miles from Fort Vancouver, the dead were heaped in a ghastly open tomb six feet deep and 160 feet long. Within three weeks of the first outbreak of sickness the tribe, which had once boasted 500 warriors, was reduced to seven survivors.

      David McLoughlin, son of Doctor John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, wrote of the horrible scene he witnessed: Once there were villages along the Columbia all the way from the sea to the Cascades. All these plains were covered with tepees and warriors came dashing down these hills. Where are they now? A typhoid malaria came shortly after the first plowing of fields at Fort Vancouver and the Indians died by the hundreds and by the thousands. Quietness came over the land. No more Indian shouts and halloos and games of ball. No more Indians came up to Fort Vancouver with furs. There was a stench from all the waters, and buzzards hovered in the sky. The bones were corded up like wood and burned in great funeral pyres. The streams were filled with corpses that floated out to sea, for always in the fever the natives leaped into the cold Columbia and never lived to reach shore. They died in the water. The Oregon Country was depopulated.

      Whitman Massacre

      When Mrs. James Cason was a small girl she lived with her father in one of the six adobe huts on the Whitman Mission. On the afternoon of November 29, 1847 the Cayuse Indians went on the warpath and the young girl was left a homeless orphan.

      She recalled, I was washing dishes when I heard the report of a gun. That was the shot that killed Gilliam, the tailor. The Indians stood in the doorway and shot him.And as the horrible work was going on outside I and some others went upstairs where we could look from a window and see part of the conflict.

      The children watched as Doctor Whitman was called to the door and tomahawked. Fourteen people, including Doctor Whitman, his wife Narcissa and Mrs. Cason’s father were killed. The Indians rounded up the others, 53 women and children, and held them as hostages.

      As soon as Peter Skene Ogden, Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Fort Vancouver, learned of the massacre he immediately led a company of men to Fort Walla Walla. On December 29, 1847 he was able to win the release of the captives by paying a

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