The tall master followed them with his eye.

In the departing forms he saw a picture of the disappearing race.

He knew history well, and how it would repeat itself on the great plateau and amid the giant forests of the Oregon.

He felt that the old man was probably one of the last great chiefs of the Umatillas.
On one of the peninsulas of the Oregon, the so-called Islands of the Dead, the old warriors of the tribes were being gathered by the plagues that had come to the territories and tribal regions ever since the Hudson Bay Company established its posts on the west of the mountains, and Astoria had been planted on the great river, and settlers had gathered in the mountain-domed valley of the Willamette.

Wherever the white sail went in the glorious rivers, pestilence came to the native tribes.