Distinctly Montana Magazine

69 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m by DOUGLAS A. SCHMITTOU T HE ONSET OF EPIDEMIC DISEASE HAS LONG EVOKED A PRIMORDIAL FEAR IN THE HEARTS OF PEOPLE, particular- ly when a novel pathogen, one for which nobody possesses im- munity, is introduced to "virgin-soil" populations. Fortunately, Montana has never been subjected to a pandemic as devastat- ing as the Black Death, a virgin-soil manifestation of bubonic plague, which ravaged Europe from 1346 to 1353. Most historians and epidemiologists estimate that the Black Death killed approximately 30–50% of Europe's pre-plague population. However, Ole Benedictow, the author of The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever, presents a painstakingly crafted argument that fatalities were much higher, some 60% of the population. See https://www.historytoday.com/archive/ black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever. Disease outbreaks in Montana are dwarfed by this 14th-century pestilence, primarily because of enormous differences in pop- ulation. Nevertheless, tribes indigenous to Montana and the northern plains were afflicted by two virgin-soil epidemics that resulted in mortality rates equal to, if not greater than, those caused by the Black Death. Consequently, the smallpox epi- demics of 1781–1782 and 1837–1838 remain unsurpassed for their lethality in Montana epidemiological history. In Pox Americana, Elizabeth Fenn traces the emergence of a hy- per-virulent and deadly strain of the virus, variola, during the three centuries that preceded the pan-Plains outbreak of small- pox in 1781. Florence, Italy, which had been utterly decimated by the Black Death, recorded a total of only 84 deaths from three smallpox epidemics that transpired between 1424 and 1458. A mid-17th-century outbreak in London resulted similarly in a mortality rate of seven percent. Subsequent outbreaks in Boston and Scotland, which occurred, respectively, in 1792 and 1787, claimed the lives of approximately 30% of their victims. A vir- gin-soil epidemic that struck an isolated village on the Japanese island of Hachijo-Jima a few years later provides important con- text for hypothesizing minimal mortality rates among the Upper Missouri tribes in 1781. "Of the 86 percent of villagers infected," Fenn states that "some 38 percent died." This invisible assassin crossed the Rio Grande by late 1780 or early 1781, when it infected the Comanches, most probably through contact with Spanish traders in Texas and New Mex- ico. Far to the north, traders reported its presence among the Assiniboines and Crees in October 1781. As historian Theodore Binnema observed, "Never before had so large a portion of the population of the plains faced such a calamity."

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