they broke out into cries of joy, and honored our arrival by several volleys of musketry. Their women had prepared a great quantity of dry wood; we accepted it thankfully, and they received in return a present of tobacco, lead, flour, coffee and sugar - the articles they prize most.
The Indians gave us the sad tidings of the ravages which the smallpox was then causing at Post Bouis and its neighborhood, near Little Medicine river, which empties into the Missouri at the upper bay of the Great Bend. This bend is thirty-six miles in circumference, while it is only four miles
across by land. At my request the captain put me ashore, and two hours after I was among the sick. I baptized all the little children who had not yet been fortunate enough to receive that sacrament. I spent the night with them, giving them all the consolation in my power. Some believed that the disease resembled the great plague in Lon
don. The survivors long retained black spots. Even during this contagious disease, the Indians retained their old custom of giving a last abode to the dead by placing the body, wrapped in a blanket or buffalo-robe, on scaffolds raised eight or ten feet above the plain. They left them thus exposed to the burning heat of a July sun, the most intense of the year. The pestilential exhalations of these corpses infected the air for miles around.
They showed me in their camp a little orphan boy who had been attacked, and who, given up, had been turned out of the lodge in the midst of the night, during a fearful rain, by his adoptive father, a cruel and unfeeling man. He was still alive in the morning, when a Canadian perceived him, and, like the good Samaritan, carried him to his but and
lavished the.*most constant care on him. I had the pleasure to see him recovering, and to baptize him.
Some days after I was at Fort Pierre, situated on the shore, south of the Missouri, about 1,500 miles above St. Louis, and near the mouth of the Shicka, or Bad river. The influenza had existed for some time in the fort, and a panic had seized many at the news that the smallpox was