supported easily five times the number of native people that were on it. These Indians always claimed that they were once a populous and powerful people, but that in some way they had provoked the Divine anger and been destroyed, and this claim is undoubtedly based upon fact, and on this question, although there are uncertainties regarding the manner of the decimation of the Indians of the Willamette and Lower Columbia Rivers, we have something definite to go on. This decimation began before the first white settlers came, and was largely finished before 1830. None of the histories give any idea of the number of Indians who inhabited this region before historic times, and this can only be conjectured, but it is certain that once a commensurate Indian population filled Western Oregon from the Cascade Mountains to the
