sores and blotches, which rendered them unfit for food. But as the people depended very largely upon these salmon for their winter’s food supply, they were obliged to catch and cure them as best they could, and store them away for food. They put off eating them till no other food was available, and then began a terrible time of sickness and distress. A dreadful skin disease, loathsome to look upon, broke out upon all alike. None were spared. Men, women, and children sickened, took the disease and died in agony by hundreds, so that when the spring arrived and fresh food was procurable, there was scarcely a person left of all their numbers to get it. Camp after camp, village after village, was left desolate. The remains of which, said the old man, in answer by my queries on this, are found today in the old camp sites or midden-heaps over which the forest has been growing for so many generations. Little by little the remnant left by the disease grew into a nation once more, and when the first white men sailed up the Squamish in their big boats, the tribe was strong and numerous again" The epidemic of the 1770s was the first and the most devastating more to follow. During the next few decades other damaging outbreaks would attack this area. A smallpox epidemic in 1800–1801, influenza in 1836–1837, measles in 1847–1848, smallpox again in 1862. First contact with Europeans: 1791-1820 The Sḵwx̱wú7mesh were the first indigenous people on the mainland in British Columbia known to have met Europeans, who first came to the head of Howe Sound in 1792 near Stá7mes, a village near the town of Squamish. Along the Burrard Inlet, where numerous villages existed, Spanish Captain Jose Maria Narvaez was the first European to explore this area in 1791. In the following year, 1792, the British naval Captain George Vancouver (1757–1798) met the Spanish expedition in Burrard Inlet. In oral history passed down through Sḵwx̱wú7mesh families, first contact between the natives and the explorers resulted in Captain Vancouver's shoulder being dislocated. A common game, where two players would try to play a sort of tug-o-war with their arms, a warrior ripped George Vancouver's arm out of its socket, with George thinking of shaking hands. It was said that some prophets among the nation foreseen the coming of something in the future. Andy Paull