Diseases Devastate Tribes - Oregon Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Historians estimate that over 250,000 emigrants used the Oregon Trail, its various cutoffs and alternatives to move from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean between 1830 and 1870. Along with wagons, and livestock, the overland migration also brought contagious diseases. A series of epidemics swept through the Willamette Valley and Columbia estuary in the years 1830-32 and destroyed an estimated 75% of the native population. These fevers and accompanying dysentery, referred to be emigrants as "intermittent fever" or the bloody flux" continued well into the 1840s. When emigrants began arriving in greater numbers during the 1850s, the native population of the prime settlement areas was so reduced that survivors offered little opposition to the appropriation of their lands.

. . .we passed a pile of human bones that had been thrown out of a shanty that, I suppose, had been built for a vault. Perhaps they were the remains of indians who had died of the contagious fever of 1839. The bones were scattered all arount,__skulls, backbones, thigh-bones and pelvis in high profusion. Alas, the poor Indian! Not even his bones are allowed the rest of the grave, but are knocked about with the utmost contempt, and of the once powerful tribe of the Cascades but few now remain, the remnant of a mighty race. . . .

Origen Thomson
September 11-27, 1852

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