"One hyas tyee ship—great chief ship—Moore, four masts, three cows on board."
"Which way did he go?"
The Indians pantomimed along the northwest coast.
"From which," says Lewis, "I infer there must be settlements in that direction."
The great desire, almost necessity, now, seemed to be to wait until some ship appeared upon the shore from which to replenish their almost exhausted stores.
Whenever the boats went in and out of Meriwether Bay they passed the Memeloose Illahee, the dead country of the Clatsops. Before 1800, as near as Lewis and Clark could ascertain, several hundred of the Clatsops died suddenly of a disease that appeared to be smallpox, the same undoubtedly that cut down Black Bird and his Omahas, rolling on west and north where the Hudson's Bay traders traced it to the borders of the Arctic.
In Haley's Bay one hundred canoes in one place bespoke the decimation of the Chinooks, all slumbering now in that almost priceless carved coffin, the Chinook canoe, with gifts around them and feet to the sunset, ready to drift on an unknown voyage.
There was a time when Indian campfires stretched from Walla Walla to the sea, when fortifications were erected, and when Indian flint factories supplied the weapons of countless warriors. But they are gone. The first settlers found sloughs and bayous lined with burial canoes, until the dead were more than the living. No Indians knew whose bones they were, "those old, old, old people." Red children and white tumbled them out of the cedar coffins and carried away the dead men's treasures.
"There was mourning along the rivers. A quietness came over the land." Stone hammers, flint chips, and arrows lie under the forests, and embers of fires two centuries old.
The native tribes were disappearing before the white man came, and the destruction of property with the dead kept the survivors always impoverished.