Report of a Journey of Survey from Victoria to Fort Alexander via North Bentinck Arm

… Smallpox has this year contributed a sad quota of death. During my stay there this disease, which had only just broken out when I arrived, spread so rapidly that, in a week, nearly all the healthy had scattered from the lodges and gone to encamp by families in the woods, only, it is to be feared, to carry away the seeds of infection and death in the blankets and other articles they took with them. Numbers were dying each day; sick men and women were taken out into the woods and left with a blanket and two or three salmon to die by themselves and rot unburied; sick children were tied to trees, and naked, gray-haired medicine-men, hideously painted, howled and gesticulated night and day in front of the lodges in mad efforts to stay the progress of the disease….