250 Haevby W. Scott
fruits of the country ; and, for such a life, Puget Sound was the Indian's true paradise. As a rule, too, they were less ferocious there, and less troublesome to the whites, than in other Pacific Coast regions. Yet there was "one fierce Indian outbreak at Puget Sound.^ Contact with the whites, in various parts of the Oregon country, which bad begun with the Lewis and Clark expedition, introduced omditions which, within a few years, b^^an the decimation of the Indian tribes. It is believed that two-thirds of the Indians had perished before 1852, and, soon after that, only a small moiety of the entire race remained. Intermixture of the whites with the Indians was not favorable to either race ; and, with few exceptions, the vitality of the mixed offspring was low. Yet there are per- sons among us in whose veins runs Indian blood who have sound physical constitutions and excellent moral fiber; and Indian blood exists in individuals in whom it would not be noticed at all.
The social customs of the pioneer of Or^jon were those mainly of the states from which they came, modified, how- ever, by conditions and peculiarities that spring up in every new country. Change of situation always has upon a people an effect of this kind. People who came to Oregon did not do things in just the same ways they had been accustomed to do them in their former seats; and the change often caused closest friends who had come to the country together to draw apart. It is one of the phenomena of the ascendancy of nature over man. Change of feeling and of disposition had been effected by so radical a change of situation.
In early Oregon there was no land speculation, as there had been in the states of the Mississippi Valley. Doubtless it was prevented by the donation land laws, which made ample provision for every settler, yet required him to live on the Ismd four years, by which time each one had become attached to the soil and did not wish to sell. Again, the future value of land was scarcely foreseai then; the value of timber, not at all.
4 This WM the Indian war of iSss-S^' In the Rogue River country Indians gaye trouble during aeveral jrears previbvily.
