Tlingit, which were intensified by the first fur traders and the steady influx of arms, may have done considerable damage to the trade in some years. What economic changes the looted people led to among the northern tribes seems to have been little explored. Europeans and Americans First contacts and mass deaths The first contacts with Europeans occurred among the southernmost Salish tribes. Here, two Spanish ships appeared in 1775, at least one of which, the Santiago led by Bruno de Hezeta, probably introduced smallpox to the Quinault. This catastrophic smallpox epidemic is estimated to have cost the lives of at least one-third of the Pacific Coast Indians; among the Salish in what is now the United States, the losses were probably much higher, so high that they could hardly defend themselves against raids by the initially less affected peoples from the north. Again and again the disease flared up, as in 1790, when the visit of a ship led by the Spaniard Manuel Quimper to the Beecher Bay First Nation transmitted the disease; among the Lower Elwha Klallam alone, at least 335 skeletons were found at Tse-whit-zen in 2005. Overland trade soon played as large a role in the spread as it did in transmission by the crews of fur trader ships. Thus, among the inland Salish of the Flathead, Spokane, and Coeur d'Alene living in the backcountry, a "great disease" occurred in 1807 to 1808, but it is not until the epidemic of 1853 that it can be said with certainty that it was smallpox. Mass immigration But still the number of settlers in the region was extremely small, even if California was flooded with gold seekers. This was joined by early settlers in Washington and Oregon. In 1850, a census recorded 1,049 white residents in what is now Washington; by 1860, there were 11,594. With the Gold Rush on the Fraser of 1858, the population further north also skyrocketed. Thousands of mostly armed gold prospectors - mostly from California - combed the region, displacing or killing an unknown number of Indians. In the process, the "old settlers" quickly became a minority. This in turn forced the British colonial government to provide a counterbalance. Thus, it urgently encouraged immigration from Great Britain, pushing the Stó:lō or Tait in particular even closer together, and deporting others to tiny, out-of-the-way reservations. Douglas had already swung toward reservation policy some time