Distinctly Montana Magazine

70 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 5 - 2 0 2 6 Once they contract- ed the disease, the Shoshones played a disproportionate role in its dissemi- nation to the Upper Missouri tribes. The Shoshones' wealth in horses positioned them as prominent brokers in inter- tribal trade, but it also made them frequent targets for enemy raiding par- ties. Young Man, a Piikáni (Piegan Blackfeet) warrior, recounted the ghastly consequences of one of these chance encounters to David Thomp- son, a fur trader. In a dawn attack, Young Man and his comrades slashed open the Shoshones' tipis and were immediately "appalled with terror, [for] there was no one to fight with but the dead and dying, each a mass of curruption [sic]." As members of afflicted tribes wit- nessed and personally experienced the symptomatic progression of smallpox, especially the horrifying disfigurement that it caused, they became distraught. The latter phe- nomenon is most clearly illustrated by the graphic descriptions of sui- cide chronicled by fur traders during the epidemic of 1837–1838. The na- ture of the disease's origin was also disturbing to Plains Indians, who then had no comprehension of inter- personal disease transmission. As Young Man informed David Thompson, "We had no belief that one Man could give [the ill- ness] to another, any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another." According to eighteenth-century fur traders in Canada, the Northern Plains tribes suffered catastrophic losses during this pestilence. In a summary of their findings, Fenn states that "estimates of overall mortality among the Atsinas, Crees, As- siniboines, Chippewyans, and Blackfeet ranged from 50 to 98 percent." Without reliable, quantitative data to corroborate those assertions, Fenn calculated baseline (minimum) mor- tality estimates. Utilizing the best demographic data available for that period, Fenn assumed a mortality rate of 43 percent, a statistic based on analysis of 7,000 "un- vaccinated smallpox cases in Madras, India, during the 1960s." Acknowledging the limitations of her method- ology and source materials, Fenn concludes that this epidemic killed at least 13,000 Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras, as well as 3,440 Crows, 3,583 Sioux, and 10,406 "Northern Plains Indians," i.e., tribes that occupied ter- ritories located primarily or exclusively in Canada. Sadly, the writings of Alexander Culbertson, Edwin Denig, Charles Larpenteur and Francis Chardon clearly indicate that several Upper Missouri tribes suffered mor- tality rates from the epidemic of 1837–1838 that corre- spond closely to figures cited by their Canadian p r e d e c e s s o r s . Indeed, fatali- ties would have been significantly higher if vacci- nation programs had not been se- lectively conduct- ed. Denig, for example, states that the latter ep- idemic reduced the Assiniboines' population from a pre-plague lev- el of 1,000 lodg- es to 400, while emphasizing that "200 [of these] were saved by having been vac- cinated in former years by the Hudson's Bay Company." After Congress passed the Indian Vaccination Act of 1832, the U.S. government implemented a short-lived, limited-scale pro- gram to vaccinate indigenous peoples against smallpox. Howev- er, in a communiqué dated May 9, 1832, Secretary of War Lewis Cass informed Indian Agent John Dougherty that "no effort will be made to send a surgeon higher up the Missouri than the Man- dans, and I think not higher than the Arikaras." Consequently, Michael Trimble, an archaeologist and historical epidemiologist, concludes that the "Yankton, Yanktonai, and Teton [Sioux],"

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