Dr. T. M. Bridges
“Old Ocean” (at right), one of the Lewis and Clark Shoshone guides. This picture was taken about 1885, when the noted Indian guide was more than one hundred years old.
“We did not know,” said the old arrow maker, “what whooping cough, measles, and smallpox were until the whites brought these diseases among us. A train of emigrants once camped near us; some of their white papooses had the whooping cough; our papooses caught it from them. Our medicine man tried to cure it as he would a bad cold, and more than half of our papooses died from the disease and the treatment. Hundreds of our people have been killed with the smallpox brought to us by the white man.
“The white men keep crowding the Indians that are east of here out west, and they keep crowding us farther west. Very soon they will have us away out in Nevada where there is nothing but lizards and snakes and horned toads to live on. If they crowd us farther than that, we shall have to jump off into the Great Water.”
Bur. Am. Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution
Family of Bannock Indians of Pocatello’s tribe, about 1860.
When Old Morogonai was telling me these and other tales about the cruel wrongs the Indians have suffered from the whites, I was not prepared to sympathize with him as I can now. But I have seen so much since on both sides that I am sure he told me the truth. Most of the trouble between the whites and the Indians has been caused by the white men, who had not white hearts; they did not treat the Indian fairly.
Shoshone and Bannock Indian relics collected by Dr. T. M. Bridges.