1775-1782 — Smallpox Outbreaks, Natives and Colonists, North America — ~84,000

lornajarrettblanchard January 1, 1775

–Hundreds of thousands. US National Library…Medicine. Native Voices. “Timeline. 1775…”[1]

— ~84,000 Colonies, Native America. Fenn. Pox Americana…1775-82. 2001, 274

— ~32,000 Great Plains Natives 1780-82. Fenn. Pox Americana…1775-82. 2001.

— 13,000 Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa tribes. Lehmer in Hodge 2009, 79-80.[2]

Philadelphia (1776-1777) ( 2,500)

–2,500 Simonds. The American Date Book. 1902, p. 82.

–2,500 Willsey and Lewis. “Philadelphia,” Harper’s Book of Facts. 1895, p. 626.

Great Plains Native Americans (1780-82) (~32,000)

— ~32,000. Great Plains Natives, 1780-82. Fenn. Pox Americana…1775-82. 2001.

— Tens of thousands. Hodge, Adam. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, p. 188.

— Tens of thousands. Rich, E.E. (ed.). Cumberland House Journals; in Hodge 2009, 87.[3]

— 13,000. Arikara, Mandan, Hidatsa tribes. Lehmer in Hodge 2009, 79-80.

— Terrible losses. Assiniboine. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox….” 2009, 81.

— Considerable. Blackfoot. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 76.

— Several thousand. Cree. Hodge, Adam. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 81

–Diminished very much. Gros Ventres. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 81.

— 2,000. Ojibway. Calloway, One Vast…, 421, 423; in Hodge 2009, 83.

— Heavy. Piegans. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 76.

— 1/3-1/2. Shoshones. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 76-77

— Considerable. Sioux. Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism…Smallpox…” 2009, 83.

— Suffered much. Snakes. Lewis and Clark, Original Journals, V2, 373, in Hodge, 177.

Southwestern Alaska Natives. Especially Sitka vicinity (1775-77) ( ? )

— Great numbers. Portlock, Nathaniel. 1789, pp. 271-72; in Boyd 1999, 23-24.[4]

Western Washington Native Americans (1776-78) ( 11,000)

— 11,000 Boyd, Robert Thomas. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence. 1999.[5]

Canadian Plains First Peoples (~30,000)

— ~30,000. “Canadian plains alone.” Hodge. Vectors of Colonialism.” 2009, 87.[6]

Narrative Information Overview:

U.S. National Library of Medicine: “As the American Revolution begins, epidemic smallpox spreads across North America, killing hundreds of thousands of whites and Native peoples, from the Eastern Seaboard to the Mississippi River and from the Gulf Coast into Canada. In Mexico City, smallpox erupts and moves north to the Niuam (Comanche), who carry it north to the Shoshone. The epidemic devastates Native populations from the Pacific Northwest to Alaska.”

(United States National Library of Medicine. Native Voices. Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness. “Timeline. 1775: Smallpox strikes again in North America.” Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services.)

Alaska

Portlock: “12 August 1787, Portlock’s Harbor…

“I expected to have seen a numerous tribe, and was quite surprised when I found that it consisted only of three men, three women, the same number of girls, two boys about twelve years old, and two infants….I observed the oldest of the men to be very much marked with the small-pox, as was a girl who appeared to be about fourteen years old. The old man endeavored to describe the excessive torments he endured whilst he was afflicted with the disorder that had marked his face, and gave me to understand that it happened some years ago. This convinced me that they had had the small-pox among them at some distant period. He told me that the distemper carried off great numbers of the inhabitants, and that he himself had lost ten children by it; he had ten strokes tattooed on one of his arms, which I understood were marks for the number of children he had lost. I did not observe any of the children under ten or twelve years of age that were marked; therefore I have treat reason to suppose that the disorder raged little more than that number of years ago {1775-1777}; and as the Spaniards were on this part of the coast in 1775, it is very probable that from them these poor wretches caught this fatal affliction….A number of the Indians who visited us from the Eastward were marked with the small-pox, and one man who had lost an eye gave me to understand that he had lost it by that disorder; but none of the natives from the Westward had the least traces of it….” (Portlock, Nathaniel. A Voyage Round The World But More Particularly To The North-West Coast Of America. 1789, pp. 271-72. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2005; in Boyd, Robert Thomas. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, pp. 23-24.)

East Coast

From November 5, 2001 CNN interview with Dr. Elizabeth Fenn, assistant professor of history at George Washington University, and author of Pox Americana:

CNN: Can you tell us how this epidemic affected the course of the Revolutionary War?

FENN: It had a dramatic effect on the early episodes. There’s some evidence that indicates that it helped to keep George Washington and the Continental Army from pursuing the British into Washington in 1775 and 1776, and also wreaked havoc on the American soldiers when they invaded Canada and tried to make Canada the 14th colony involved in the rebellion.

CNN: Does anyone know the source of this historic outbreak — where it originated?

FENN: It appears that smallpox was present in Canada when the American troops got there, but once it took hold in this crowded camp, the effects were devastating….

CHAT PARTICIPANT: How is smallpox transmitted?

FENN: Smallpox is almost exclusively transmitted from one human being directly to another….you can track connections between people, by watching epidemic smallpox move….

CNN: How long did it take to finally eradicate smallpox?

FENN: The eradication campaign in a way can be traced back to Edward Jenner’s development of vaccination in 1796…. It’s really vaccination that enabled the eradication of smallpox to even be possible. The World Health Organization’s eradication campaign really lasted for about 20 years. It culminated in the final certification of eradication in 1979.

CHAT PARTICIPANT: Are those of us who have been vaccinated for small pox in the forties still protected?

FENN: …The vaccination for smallpox confers immunity only temporarily. While smallpox was still around, people were expected to be re-vaccinated periodically, every three to five years…

CNN: How great a threat is a bioterrorism attack with smallpox today?

FENN: There are really two things to remember about smallpox. First, it depends on having a population of susceptible individuals. Second, it depends upon connections between those individuals. This is because it’s a disease contagious from one person to another. In both of those regards, we are more vulnerable today, odd though it seems, than in the 1700s. So, if an incident were to occur, the consequences certainly could be disastrous.

Lamb: “In the fall and winter of 1776-1777 the country was ravaged by the smallpox, the curse of the last century. The army in Canada had been decimated by it, and it had made appearance in all the larger cities, where inoculation was as yet powerless to check its spread, owing in part doubtless to the general dread of even the milder form of the disease. In January, 1777, the epidemic reached Fishkill, and great alarm was felt that it would be communicated to the barracks.” (Lamb. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries. 1879, p. 6.)

Philadelphia

“Small-pox and camp-fever cause 2500 deaths…1776-77.” (Willsey. “Philadelphia,” Harper’s Book of Facts. 1895, p. 626.)

Great Plains Native Americans

Hodge: “…the arrival of smallpox on the northern plains in 1780 constituted a demographic catastrophe for the region’s Indian inhabitants….it took thousands of lives….[and] constitutes a thus far overlooked turning point in northern Great Plains history.” (Hodge 2009, 65-66)

“The epidemic that eventually reached the Saskatchewan River originated in Mexico in 1779. After killing tens of thousands south of the Rio Grande, smallpox reached into New Mexico and Texas, where it likely met another strand of the disease moving westward from Louisiana. In 1780, the Comanches contracted the disease while raiding the Spanish settlements of the Southwest, thus taking the malady, along with their stolen horses, to the southern Great Plains. From there, it appears that Shoshones contracted the disease from their Comanche neighbors via the horse trade, facilitating its movement northward.[7]….” (Hodge 2009, 73)

“On the northwestern reaches of the Great Plains, the Blackfeet contracted smallpox while warring on the Shoshone….” (Hodge 2009, 75)

“Both the Shoshones and Piegans suffered heavy losses to smallpox…. Later explorers noted that the Blackfoot confederacy as a whole sustained considerable losses during the epidemic of 1780-82….” (Hodge 2009, 76)

“Although precise figures are difficult to obtain in regard to the Shoshone, it appears that they lost more people during the epidemic, probably somewhere between one-third and one-half of their population….As the historian George E. Hyde writes, smallpox ‘badly shattered’ the Shoshone.[8]

“It appears that Shoshones transmitted smallpox to their Crow neighbors, most likely through the horse trade. When Francois Antoine Larocque visited the Crows in 1805, he learned that just before the disease struck, they occupied some two thousand lodges. As a result of the 1780-82 epidemic, as well as some later outbreaks, according to his hosts, they now counted but three hundred lodges. Hyde estimates that their losses were about fifty percent during the first major outbreak.”[9] (Hodge 2009, 77)

“The Crow likely transmitted Variola to the semi-sedentary Missouri River tribes….Since these tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, lived in static, highly populated villages, the disease ran rampant among them. As a result, their casualties far surpassed those of other northern plains tribes, for they suffered from what Trimble refers to as ‘acute crowd infections’.”[10] (Hodge 2009, 78)

“…smallpox simply ravaged the Missouri villagers [such as the Mandan, Arikara and Hidatsa].” (Hodge 2009, 79)

“Formerly able to send four thousand men on the warpath, the Arikara could muster but five hundred warriors after smallpox ravaged them.”[11]

“Scholars place overall losses for the three Missouri River tribes at nearly seventy percent. Donald J. Lehmer conservatively estimates that the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa lost a total of some 13,000 individuals, a mortality rate of sixty-eight percent. Lehmer, however, concedes that losses probably reached closer to seventy-five or eighty percent….”[12] (Hodge 2009, 80)

Hodge speaking of the Cree: “Those who tried to flee from the disease only spread it further and before long, several thousand Indians died.” (Hodge 2009, 81-82)

“David Thompson and Edwin Thompson Denig, who lived on the plains during the mid-nineteenth century, recorded that the Nahathaway, or Cree, lost half of their people in 1782 and that entire villages simply ceased to exist.[13]….Some two thousand Ojibway perished.[14] (Hodge 2009, 82)

“Although little information is available regarding the precise casualties sustained by the Gros Ventres of the Plains, a neighbor of the Cree and Assiniboine, evidence suggests that smallpox left their population “diminished very much.”[15] (Hodge 2009, 82-83)

Hodge on Sioux: “Seven separate winter counts produced by Sioux bands record that smallpox killed many people during the years 1779, 1780, 1781, and 1782. Of those counts, six of them reported consecutive years of smallpox.[16] The number of losses that the Lakota and Yankton Sioux sustained, however, is difficult to gauge because the winter counts do not provide any numerical estimation of the destruction. Linea Sundstrom suggests that Sioux losses were considerable, as ‘[a] high mortality rate can be inferred from the use of the phrase ‘[smallpox] used them up’.’”[17] (Hodge 2009, 83)

“Scholars’ best estimates place overall Indian losses between one-third and one-half.[18] The Canadian plains alone, which were not even home to the groups which bore the brunt of the outbreak, lost some thirty thousand natives. As if such heavy casualties were not devastating enough, the epidemic swept the entirety of the northern plains in less than a year and a half. During the course of approximately fifteen months, tens of thousands of Indians sickened and died.[19] According to Donald J. Lehmer, these tremendous population losses simply “threatened the very existence of the individual tribes” of the region.[20] Smallpox nearly annihilated some groups, leaving their few survivors broken and struggling to survive….” (Hodge 2009, 87)

(Hodge, Adam R. Vectors of Colonialism: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1780-82 and Northern Great Plains Indian Life (A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts). May 2009.)

Pacific Northwest Natives

Crosby: “The disease [smallpox] often spread far beyond the European frontier, often to people who had barely heard of the white invaders. Smallpox probably reached the Puget Sound area on the northwest Pacific coast in 1782 or 1783, a part of the world then as distant from the main centers of human population as any place on earth. When the explorer George Vancouver sailed into the Sound in 1793, he found Amerindians with pockmarked faces, and human bones scattered along the beach at Port Discovery, skulls, limbs, ribs, backbones – so many as to produce the impression that this was ‘a general cemetery for the whole of the surrounding country.’ He judged that ‘at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present.’ It was an assessment that he could accurately have extended to the entire continent.[21]” (Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin-Soil Epidemics,” in Warren. American Environmental History, 2003, 54-55.)

Fenn, 2003: “Cruising the northwest coastline of America in 1792, Captain George Vancouver was troubled. Where, he wondered, were all the natives? The land was abundant, with a seemingly unlimited supply of salmon and fresh water, but there were strikingly few people. Instead, the British navigator found deserted villages. The first, encountered south of Vancouver Island on the shores of Discovery Bay, was ‘over-run with weeds; amongst which were found several human skulls, and other bones, promiscuously scattered about’.

“As Vancouver charted the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the scene repeated itself regularly. ‘During this Expedition’, crew member Thomas Manby noted, ‘we saw a great many deserted Villages some of them … capable of holding many hundred Inhabitants’. For Manby, the conclusion was inescapable: ‘By some event, this country has been considerably depopulated, but from what cause is hard to determine.’ Vancouver agreed. All the evidence, he believed, indicated ‘that at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present’.

“There had indeed been a disaster, one so vast, in fact, that even its witnesses and victims could not appreciate its extent. In the years from 1775 to 1782, as the Revolutionary War reshaped society and politics along the eastern seaboard, a very different cataclysm shook the entire North American continent. The cataclysm, huge and hideous, was smallpox….

“Recorded eyewitness accounts of the pandemic of 1775–82 end at Hudson Bay and the northern plains. The epidemic, however, did not. It struck the northwest coast, where George Vancouver and others observed its depopulating effects….

“References to abandoned villages and to smallpox-scarred Indians can be found in at least a dozen journals kept on seven different voyages to the Pacific north-west from 1787 to 1795. Even Lewis and Clark, returning through the Cascades in 1806, stopped at a nearly deserted Chinook village where they met an old woman ‘badly marked with the Small Pox’, who remained there still. The woman indicated that the disease had struck ‘about twenty-eight or thirty years past’.

“If it is clear that the epidemic did indeed strike the north-west coast, it is not clear exactly how or when it did so. It is most likely that the pox proceeded westward from the Shoshones, following native trade networks down the Columbia River to the sea. Yet no evidence proving this has been found.

“It is also possible that the pox arrived by sea. From 1775 to 1779, four Spanish voyages cruised north from San Blas, Mexico, in an effort to stake out and protect territorial claims. Could one of these have carried the infection? Perhaps. But if so, it has not yet turned up in the historical record. Nor, for that matter, does mention of smallpox or depopulation appear in the journals of Captain James Cook’s 1778 voyage, perhaps indicating that the epidemic arrived after that date.

“Russians also frequented the north-western coastline, and they had already established trading posts in southern Alaska. Smallpox had ravaged Asia’s Kamchatka peninsula in 1768, and there is some evidence that it was present in 1774. But there is no clear indication that Russians carried the contagion eastwards in these years.

“We are left, then, with George Vancouver’s mystery. From 1775 to 1782, as conflict and political upheaval rocked the east coast, smallpox had wreaked its own havoc wherever it found access to susceptible populations. From Quebec to Mexico to Hudson Bay, the continent was alive with human activity. Variola found not just susceptible populations, but connections between them. Transported by human carriers between ports and along rivers, roads, lakes, and trails, the virus showed how closely linked seemingly disparate regions already were. In so doing, it forged a horrific common experience that spanned the continent and reshaped life for years to come.” (Fenn, Elizabeth A. “The Great Smallpox Epidemic.” History Today, Vol. 53, Issue 8, 2003.)

Ruby and Brown: “As effective as these tools were [iron], they could not match another Russian import in their swiftness to kill. Some time around 1750 disease spread from ‘far to the north,’ where it had been borne by a wrecked ship reported to have previously acquired the contagion in a Chinese port. The plague moved rapidly to the south, trapping susceptible natives in its death swath and wiping out nearly three-quarters of a village at the mouth of the Columbia River near present-day Ilwaco. To prevent its further ravages Chinook survivors put their lodges, clothing, and other effects to the torch, a practice which some of them would continue until the late nineteenth century. The once proud and powerful villagers, the scourge of natives in all quarters, now stood scourged themselves and in fear that the Great Spirit would return to vent the rest of his wrath on them.

“This would not be the last Lower Chinook exposure to imported disease. Striking them as it had natives as far east as the Missouri River, where it had been introduced by white traders, the smallpox moved up that river to reach the Columbia sometime about 1782-83, or nearly a quarter of a century before white men would follow its lethal path to the Pacific. As natives succumbed to its ravages, the British blamed it on American traders, the Americans blamed it on the French, and the French in turn, on the Spanish.” (Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown. The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia River. 1976, p. 34.)

Sources

Boyd, Robert Thomas. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, 403 pages. Partially digitized by Google. Accessed 8-28-2017 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=jnWMCaFcuM4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

CNN. “Elizabeth Fenn: The History of the Smallpox Virus.” November 5, 2001. Accessed at: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/COMMUNITY/11/05/fenn/index.html

Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin-Soil Epidemics.” Pp. 50-62 in Warren. American Environmental History, 2003.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana – The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Hodge, Adam R. Vectors of Colonialism: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1780-82 and Northern Great Plains Indian Life (A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts). May 2009. Accessed 9-18-2012 at: http://etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/Hodge%20Adam%20R.pdf?kent1239393701

Lamb, Martha Joanna. The Magazine of American History with Notes and Queries (Vol. III). New York and Chicago: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1879. Digitized by Google. Accessed at: http://books.google.com/books?id=iCIDAAAAMAAJ

Portlock, Nathaniel. A Voyage Round The World But More Particularly To The North-West Coast Of America. 1789, pp. 271-72. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2005; in Boyd, Robert Thomas. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999, pp. 23-24.

Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown. A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest (revised edition). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=-7zBc-pqnGsC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown. The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia River. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Google preview accessed 6-7-2019 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=HuCjdhf_hMIC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Simonds, W. E. (Editor). The American Date Book. Kama Publishing Co., 1902, 211 pages. Google digital preview accessed 9-8-2017 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=JuiSjvd5owAC

United States National Library of Medicine. Native Voices. Native Peoples’ Concepts of Health and Illness. “Timeline.” Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services. Accessed 9-17-2012 at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/index.html

White, Richard. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County, Washington. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1980, 1992, and 1999. Google preview accessed 6-7-2019 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=KtMhCwAAQBAJ&dq=richard+white+land+use,+environment&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Willsey, Joseph H. (Compiler), Charlton T. Lewis (Editor). Harper’s Book of Facts: A Classified History of the World. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1895. Accessed 9-4-2017 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=UcwGAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Additional Reading

Robertson, R. G. Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press, 2002. Google preview accessed 6-7-2019 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=-EoEm_OO8RgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

[1] This probably includes Mexico and the Canadian provinces.

[2] Lehmer, Donald J. “Epidemics among the Indians of the Upper Missouri,” Selected Writings of Donald J. Lehmer. Reprints in Anthropology, vol. 8. Edited by W. Raymond Wood. Lincoln: J&L Reprint Co., 1977, p. 107. In: Hodge, Adam R. Vectors of Colonialism: The Smallpox Epidemic of 1780-82 and Northern Great Plains Indian Life (A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts). May 2009, pp. 79-80.

[3] Rich, E. E., (ed.). Cumberland House Journals and Inland Journals, 1775-82 (2 vols.) London: The Hudson’s Bay Record Society, 1952.

[4] Portlock, Nathaniel. A Voyage Round The World But More Particularly To The North-West Coast Of America. 1789. Reprinted by Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2005.

[5] Boyd, Robert Thomas. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. University of Washington Press, 1999,

[6] Hodge notes the Canadian provinces “were not even home to the groups which bore the brunt of the outbreak…”

[7] Hodge footnote 24: George E. Hyde, Indians of the High Plains: From the Prehistoric Period to the Coming of Europeans (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 164; Fenn, Pox Americana, 213-4; Ann F. Ramenofsky, Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 130; Donald J. Lehmer, “Epidemics Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri,” in The Selected Writings of Donald J. Lehmer, ed. W. Raymond Wood (Lincoln: J&L Reprint Co., 1977), 106.

[8] Hodge footnote 37: Hyde, Indians of the High Plains. 1959, 165.

[9] Hodge footnote 38: Francois-Antoine Larocque, “Yellowstone Journal,” in Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818, ed. W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1985), 206; Fenn, Pox Americana, 220; Hyde, Indians of the High Plains, 165.

[10] Hodge footnote 40: Trimble, “Epidemiology on the Northern Plains.” 108.

[11] Hodge footnote 45: Pierre Antoine Tabeau, Tabeau’s Narrative of Loisel’s Expedition to the Upper Missouri, ed. Annie Heloise Abel, trans. Rose Abel Wright (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1939, 1968), 123-4; Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 419; Fowler, “The Great Plains,” 16; Hyde, Indians of the High Plains, 17. Jean-Baptiste Truteau mentions that the Arikaras suffered from three different smallpox outbreaks during the late eighteenth century. Truteau, “Journal of Truteau,” 299. According to Hyde, all three outbreaks occurred between 1772 and 1780. George E. Hyde, Red Cloud’s Folk: A History of the Oglala Sioux Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937, 1957), 17.

[12] Hodge footnote 46: Lehmer, “Epidemics,” 107; Fenn, Pox Americana, 274; W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen, eds., Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 (Norman: Oklahoma Univ. Press, 1985), 6; Donald J. Lehmer, “The Other Side of the Fur Trade,” in The Selected Writings of Donald J. Lehmer, ed. W. Raymond Wood (Lincoln: J&L Reprint Co., 1977), 100.

[13] Hodge footnote 52: Thompson, David Thompson’s Narrative, 92; Edwin Thompson Denig, Five Indian Tribes of

the Upper Missouri, ed. John C. Ewers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 109, 114.

[14] Hodge footnote 53: Calloway. One Vast Winter Count. 421, 423.

[15] Hodge footnote 54: Henry and Thompson. New Light, vol. 2, p. 531.

[16] Hodge footnote 56: Mallery, Picture-Writing, vol. 1, 308, vol. 2, 589; Ronald T. McCoy, “Winter Count: The Teton Chronicles to 1799,” Ph.D. diss., Northern Arizona University, 1983, 217-224. One of these counts refers to consecutive years of measles ravaging the Sioux. McCoy points out that this could have very well also been smallpox, for smallpox was often mistaken for measles at the time. This study counts it as an instance of smallpox, for it is likely that it was part of the larger epidemic.

[17] Hodge footnote 57: Linea Sundstrom, “Smallpox Used Them up: References to Epidemic Disease in Northern Plains Winter Counts, 1714-1920,” Ethnohistory, 44, 2 (1997): 314.

[18] Hodge footnote 70: Fowler. “The Great Plains,” p. 20-21; Stearn, Effect of Smallpox, p. 47; Calloway, Our Hearts Fell to the Ground, p. 40.

[19] Hodge footnote 71: Rich. Cumberland House Journals, lx.

[20] Hodge footnote 72: Lehmer, “Epidemics,” p. 109.

[21] Cites: Richard White. Land Use, Environment, and Social Change. The Shaping of Island County, Washington. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980, pp. 26-27, and Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown. The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia River. 1976, p. 80.