One suggests that fever and ague came with the settlers, but the Valley of the Columbia was never a fever and ague country and the pioneers, however malaria stricken at the beginning, must have been thoroughly disinfected by their long trip across the plains. Others say that the turning up of the soil by the Hudson's Bay people at the farms at Fort Vancouver released malaria from the soil and this caused the epidemic, but the disease was here before the farms, and it was impossible that a disease which raged over hundreds of square miles could have come from so trivial a cause. It may have been the modern la grippe striking an unprotected people. Whatever it was no more potent angel of death ever visited an afflicted people.
The white man had no need of war or violence in his dealings with these Indians, nor did
