All the traders, and every vessel that sails in Alaskan waters, have medicine-chests, and to their credit be it said that, as far as they can, they do everything in their power to aid the natives when sick; but the aborigines have not the right idea of taking physic, since they appreciate nothing but forcible treatment—large doses of something that acts immediately, or nothing at all. For instance, if the trader gives an Indian a dose of Epsom-salts, the amount given must be at least four or five times as much as would do for himself, or there will be no effect on the patient whatever. Consequently, the simplest remedies known are the only ones which the white man dare give to these people, and they have, as a matter of course, very little power to relieve them. During the last six or seven years a violent form of typhoid-pneumonia has been wasting whole settlements on the Kadiak and Aleutian coasts; the Creoles and the natives alike yield at once to the disease, making scarcely an effort to save themselves. The traders everywhere became seriously alarmed, as the force of sea-otter hunters was rapidly decreasing, and exerted themselves to their utmost in staying the epidemic, which seemed to be carried from one village to the other in vessels and by canoes. But the only medicines which can be used in the safe and successful treatment of this complaint were regarded as unworthy of notice by the suffering natives, who, not feeling immediately relieved after taking them, would then totally ignore their further use. Bad enough are the indigenous ills of the savages in Alaska. They were, however, nothing to the horrors which followed the importation of small-pox by the Russians in 1838-39. This terrible scourge swept like wildfire up from its initial point at Sitka, over the whole length of the Alaskan mainland and island coast, until it faded out in the far north where it had nothing to prey upon. It actually carried in its grim grasp one-half of the whole population then living in that large area to an abrupt and violent death—several districts were so afflicted that not a soul escaped—every human being was exterminated; it was exceedingly fatal and virulent in the Sitkan archipelago. We, knowing the filth and exposure of the lives of these people, can readily understand how they fell down and were crushed under the march of this disease.[55] As might be supposed the Russians lost no time in thoroughly vaccinating the survivors; and they have been faithfully followed, in this duty, by our own sailors and traders who now live in the country.