the Great Spirit is displeased with all nations who wantonly engage in war; they
abstain from all aggressive hostilities. Wyeth gave the Flatheads equal, or even
greater praise, saying he had never known an instance of theft among them ; and
neither quarreling or lying ; and that they were brave when put to the test, and
more than a mateh for the Blackfeet in battle. And the same praise is due
e(|ually to the Nez Perces. The Cayuses made loud pretentions to religion for
a while after the missionaries earae but fell from grace with the murder of Dr.
Whitman by members of their tribe. With the exceptions of the Flatheads and
Kez Perces it is quite reasonable that the Indian's native idea of religion, or a
Great Spirit, arose from his inability to comprehend the forces of nature about
him on all sides. But the example of the Flathead and the Nez Perce shows what
might have been developed out of those tribes if they could have been handled
and taught by uniformly honest and ,iust men. For these Indians had in them
the germs of a vigorous civilization which could have been so trained and ex-
panded as would have produced teachers and governors of all other tribes, and
saved the nation millions of dollars and thousands of valuable lives in suppress-
ing Indian wars.
So far as the British and their agent, the Hudson's Bay Company, was con- cerned, the morals and religious teaching of the Indians was a matter of no im- portance or concern of theirs unless it affected the fur trade. One religion was just as good as another to them, and no religion was better than either. An In- dian that would not go out and hunt for furs and come in and trade his pelts for trinkets was to the fur company a very poor Indian. When the British agents, Warre and Vavasour, visited Oregon in 1845, they reported the Indians as a very superstitious race, and declared "that neither the Roman Catholic nor the Methodist missions had done much toward reclaiming the Indian population, who are an idle, dissolute race."
The Indian population of the Oregon country, according to estimates made by the Hudson's Bay Company, was in the year 1842 as follows:
Port Vancouver locality 200
Umpqua Valley locality 800
Cape Disappointment locality 100
Chinook Point locality -. 100
Coweeman on Columbia locality 100
Champoeg on Willamette locality 150
Nisqually Puget Sound locality 500
Cowlitz County Valley locality 250
Port Colville, Upper Columbia locality 800
Pend d 'Oreille, Idaho, locality 400
Flatheads. Bitter Root Valley locality 500
Kootenais — Kootenai rivei', Idaho, locality 500
Okanogan, Upper Columbia locality 300
Walla Wallas, Walla Walla Valley locality 300
Port Hall — Eastern Idaho locality 200
Port Boise, Boise Valley locality 200
Port Victoria. Vancouver Island locality 5,000
Port Rupert. Vaucouvei' Island locality 4,000
