the people of Oregon. By 1861, the ship had fallen into disrepair and was sold again to the California Steam Navigation Company, who retrofitted it, restored the original name of Brother Jonathan, and kept it on the northward route from San Francisco to Vancouver via Portland, allowing prospectors to work the Salmon River Gold Rush. Over the next several years, the vessel gained a reputation as being one of the finest steamers on the Pacific Coast, being the fastest ship to make the run, sixty-nine hours each way. However, in the summer of 1865 the ship suffered a collision with a barkentine on the Columbia River, damaging the hull. Captain Samuel DeWolf, who had just assumed command of the vessel in June, recommended that the ship be repaired in dry dock, but the company performed the repairs while still in the water, as there was so much business that a backlog of cargo began to form. 1862 smallpox epidemic When Brother Jonathan traveled north from San Francisco and arriving in Victoria, British Columbia, on 12 March 1862, it brought along a miner infected with smallpox. When the disease began to infect indigenous people camped around Victoria, colonial authorities forced them to leave but as they made their return trip home, they spread the disease throughout the Salish Sea area and Pacific Northwest, from Puget Sound to southern Alaska. According to historian John Lutz, "The citizens of Victoria, one could say, panicked. Or, one could say, with a less charitable view, that they deliberately drove the Indigenous people out of town, and that spread the disease back to their home communities up and down the coast." Estimates of the death toll vary. Portland State University anthropologist Robert T. Boyd suggests that, by the end of 1862, 14,000 indigenous people along the coast had died from the outbreak. Other estimates suggest that, over the next year, at least 30,000 indigenous people in the region died. At least half of the population of indigenous peoples along the coast died, leaving behind "mass graves, deserted villages, traumatized survivors and societal collapse" that facilitated the colonization of the area. Shipwreck On its last voyage, the ship had been heavily loaded and according to DeWolf's widow, he felt that the ship sat too low in the water, even without the passengers, but he was told that if he did not set sail, he would be fired