Dr. Large, our energetic and successful medical missionary at Bella Bella, was then at the Fraser River for the summer season, and visited and gave the chief medical attention. He appeared to improve under treatment and bade fair speedily to recover, but in an unexplainable manner to the medical man the recovery was delayed. He found, on inquiry, that the chief was not taking the medicine prescribed, and had said that he did not think he would ever get well. When pressed for his reasons, he confessed the belief that he was the third victim of the witch-doctors’ rage, and that he could not live. The missionary reasoned with him, pleaded with him, prayed with him, but without avail, and finally the poor fellow died, the victim of his own superstitious fears, upon which the conjurers had worked all too successfully. We were grieved beyond measure that such a noble life had been thus cut short, and that the power of superstition and ignorance was still so manifest. This power of the medicine-man is coupled with the Indian’s belief in witchcraft. No heathen Indian ever dies a natural death, for every sickness or accident is due, according to their superstitious view, to the evil eye or malign spell of someone who is evilly disposed towards them. When calamity or sickness comes they immediately apply to the witch-doctor to perform his incantations and discover the witch. Sometimes it is an old woman of the tribe, whose term of life is now necessarily short; sometimes it is a slave or a bright girl or boy, and sometimes a whole family are pointed out as the “guilty ones” and doomed to death. The atrocities committed by the natives, moved by this dreadful superstition, are numberless and in many cases too dreadful to relate. How fervently we pray that the enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit may penetrate the gloom of heathen darkness and forever drive out all the nameless horrors which belong to paganism. CHAPTER XIII. _STRUGGLES WITH WHISKEY, AND THE RAVAGES OF FIRE-WATER._ “Mourn for the lost,--but pray, Pray to our God above, To break the fell destroyer’s sway, And show His saving love.” For hundreds of years the natives of the Pacific Coast of British Columbia have been exposed to the temptations of the white man’s whiskey. The traders on ships in those early years thought it to their advantage to take a good supply of rum with them in the traffic for furs, and the poor people became so infatuated with it that while it lasted they would not even go out after the pelts. Whether it was the awful effects of the whiskey traffic upon the natives, or the risk that the Company’s servants ran in dealing with drunken Indians, or the loss to the Company’s business due to the condition of the natives, we cannot say--perhaps it was all of these--but finally Sir George Simpson, the Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, forbade the sale of liquor at any of the trading posts.