1869 — Smallpox Epidemic, Gros Ventre Natives, Montana Territory –700-~800
— ~800 Kohn. Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence… 2001, p. 131.
— ~800 Selcer, Richard F. Civil War America, 1850 to 1875.[1]
— 700 Hoxie. Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation… p. 100.
Narrative Information
Fowler: “The Crows’ hostility to the Assiniboines, coupled with their desire to avoid smallpox with the Gros Ventres contracted it in the winter of 1869, led most of Crows at the agency [River Crow Agency] to move south to rejoin the remainder of their people.” (p. 50)
Hoxie: “Invisible to the government on whom they increasingly relied, River Crow bands began to move to a place where they could be seen. Smallpox pushed them first. In the summer of 1869 the disease ripped through th Gros Ventres camps which had begun to cluster in the vicinity of Fort Belknap on the Milk River. In a matter of weeks, the tribe’s population dropped from 2,000 to 1,300. More disastrous, according to the Gros Ventre agent, ‘the younger portions of th nation were the persons principally attacked….Thus the best hunters of the nation have died, leaving a large number of old people and children to the charity of the government.’ Long familiar with the disease, the River Crows moved south of the Missouri as soon as they learned of their ally’s plight.” (p. 100)
Koch: “The writer spent the greater part of the year 1869-70 at and about the mouth of Muscleshell on the Upper Missouri.[2]…The center of…life on the upper part of the river was the trading post at Muscleshell….in the heart of the Indian county….” (pp. 292-293)
“The trade at Muscleshell was principally with the River Crows and upper Gros Ventres….While I was on the Missouri, an epidemic of smallpox came among the Gros Ventres, and probably two-thirds of them perished. They were camped on Milk River at the time and nearly all who were attacked died, as they treated it with their usual cure-all, the sweat-bath, followed by a plunge into ice-cold water. Quite a number committed suicide from fear of the disease. Finally the camp became panic stricken, and the Indians scattered to the mountains, each lodge by itself. At last the epidemic wore itself out, but I was told that it was no uncommon thing to find lodges standing in the mountains, all their former inhabitants lying dead around them. Many of the whites along the river took the disease, but all in a mild form. Infected robes which found their way east are said to have caused the outbreak of smallpox which occurred the following year at Philadelphia and other points.” (pp. 296-297)
Kohn: “Gros Ventre Indian Smallpox Epidemic of 1869 — Outbreak of smallpox that killed about 800 Gros Ventre Indians living in northern Montana territory…in 1869….
“In 1869 several crew members aboard the U.S. river steamer Utah, traveling on the Milk River in northern Montana, became infected with smallpox. One of them died and was buried along the banks of the river, and subsequently a group of Gros Ventres uncovered the dead body, taking the man’s contaminated clothing and thus becoming infected with smallpox….The infected Gros Ventres carried the variola virus upriver to their camps in the Fort Belknap region;[3] soon most of the tribe there became infected and spread the disease to others.
“Placing their dead in trees, as was the custom of the Gros Ventres, helped spread the smallpox infection to white traders, who stole the corpses’ contaminated robes and skins and sold them to others. In this way, the disease spread farther into the territory where more than half of the Gros Ventre tribe (totaling about 1,500 members) succumbed to the disease; many of the survivors were blinded or disfigured (notably with pockmarked faces).”[4] (pp. 131-132)
Sources
Fowler, Loretta. Shared Symbols, Contested Meanings: Gros Ventre Culture and History, 1778-1984. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Google digital preview accessed 9-12-2016 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=FdgXDUXxNsYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hoxie, Frederick E. Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America 1805-1935. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Google digital preview accessed 9-12-2016 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=_YnfAh3RngcC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=true
Koch, Peter. “Life at Musselshell in 1869 and 1870.” Pp. 292-303 in Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, Vol. II. Helena, MT: State Publishing Co., 1896. Google digital preview accessed 9-12-2016 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=wrluAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=true
Kohn, George Childs (Ed.). Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence From Ancient Times to the Present (Revised Edition). NY: Checkmark Books, 2001.
Selcer, Richard F. Civil War America, 1850 to 1875 (Almanacs of American Life series). Facts On File, an imprint of Infobase Publishing, 2014. Google digital preview accessed 9-12-2016 at: https://books.google.com/books?id=dqIBqiNoB9wC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
[1] From table listing disease types, dates, locations and death toll. Notes concerning the Gros Ventre of Northern Montana, “About 800 deaths out of tribal population of 1,500.”
[2] Spelled Musselshell today and is a census-designated place, a County and a river in Montana.
[3] Today the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation is located in north central Montana.
[4] Notes as further reading: Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History; Studt et al., Medicine in the Intermountain West.