Frobisher's success in intercepting the Company's Indians induced others to attempt a similar course. The idea was, of course, to give goods of a better character, and to travel so far into the savage country as to relieve the Indian, who always contemplated the annual journey to the Company's post with repugnance of such necessity. In 1779 Peter Pond, an able, but desperate character, was the first to attempt storing such goods as he could not bring back immediately, in one of the wintering huts at Elk River, against his return the following season. This imitation of a Company's post proved successful, and led to its being repeated on a larger scale. But matters were not equally propitious with the vast bulk of the peddlers, bushrangers, swashbucklers, and drunken half-breeds who were comprised in the Canadian trading fraternity. A numerous crew of them got from their winter quarters at Saskatchewan to the Eagle Hills in the spring of 1780. Here they held high carouse amidst a body of Indians as drunken, and much more noisy and abandoned, as themselves. One of the traders becoming tired of the continued application of an Indian for more grog, gave him a dose of laudanum. The savage thereupon staggered a few steps away, lay down and died. A cry went up from the man's wives, a skirmish ensued, and the sun went down on seven corpses. One of the traders, two of his men, and four half-breed voyageurs lost their lives, and the rest were forced to abandon their all and take to flight. [Illustration: INDIAN TRAPPERS. (_From "Picturesque Canada," by permission._)] The same spring, two of the Canadian posts on the Assiniboine River were assailed during a quarrel. Several white men and a large number of Indians were killed. [Sidenote: Terrible smallpox epidemic.] The fearful act of vengeance which might now have been meditated at this juncture was never carried out, for in 1781 an epidemic of smallpox broke out, wreaking a memorable destruction upon all the Indians of Rupert's Land. It is worthy of remark, the extraordinary and fatal facility with which this disease had always made headway among the aborigines of the North American continent. There must have been some predisposition in their constitutions which rendered them an easy prey to this scourge of Europe. Later, when the boon, brought into Europe by Lady Mary Montague arrested and partially disarmed the monster, smallpox had wrought unmitigated havoc amongst whole tribes and circles of the Red men, more than decimating the entire population and occasionally destroying whole camps, while leaving scarcely more than one shrivelled hag to relate to the Company's factors the fell tale of destruction.