Deserted Salish village
THEY HAD BEEN CHILDREN THEN, they said, sixty or seventy years past. Many of their people, whom the white people later called Nez Perce, had gone east to hunt buffalo with their neighbors the Flatheads during the winter. In spring the families who had stayed behind crossed the mountains to join the hunters. They came to the hunting camp and found the lodges standing as usual, but their relatives whom they were expecting to greet were dead, almost all of them. Only here and there did they find anyone still alive. They took the survivors and returned home, but the disease followed them and killed them all, except some who ran away and a very few of those who stayed. In the beautiful Kamiah Valley beside the Clearwater River, their aged faces still bearing the marks of that long-ago spring, the missionary Asa Smith recorded their story in 1840. The scourge swept through the whole country, they told him, so that hardly anyone survived.
Though one was blind and the other two were very, very old, the three Coeur d’Alenes remembered what their fathers had told them about the terrible plague. They told the young Jesuit how their parents had carried the victims far away from their village on the St. Joe River and buried them on a rocky point, body after body, deep beneath the stones.
It had been about seventy years ago, they calculated, back when they were young. A few of their men had gone buffalo hunting when everyone left in camp fell ill. Large red pustules appeared on their bodies, especially their chests, and a few days later they died. On some people the pustules were black instead of red, and those died almost instantly. Within a few days, only fifteen children were left alive in the entire village. One of them was the Flathead elder called Old Simon, who was said to be the oldest man in his tribe when he died in 1841. A few of the survivors were still living in the Bitterroot Valley in 1847 and passed their story to the pen of Father Mengarini. The same epidemic that visited their tribe, they said, had also appeared among another nation about five days’ journey north, but there not a single person survived. “Of them remained not even the name,” they told the priest.
When fur trader John Work asked Colville elders in 1829 if their people were increasing or decreasing in population, they told him that immense numbers of their people had been swept off by a dreadful visitation fifty or sixty years before, and he noted as evidence the scars that marked their faces.
Like the Nez Perce and the Flatheads, Kootenai bands living just west of the Divide often shuttled to the buffalo grounds on the northern Plains, and it was on such a spring expedition, the people said, that Charcoal Bull decided to raid a Shoshone camp. Several warriors entered a lodge and found a dead man inside. Although Charcoal Bull had strictly warned his men to leave everything alone, two young raiders secretly removed the dead man’s moccasins. Some time later, as they returned home over a mountain pass just north of modern Glacier Park, one of the youths tried on the stolen moccasins. Both boys became sick, and their illness passed to the others. One of those afflicted was Bad Trail, whose sister dreamed that by roasting the fat of a buffalo’s stomach and rubbing the grease on her brother’s sores, the disease could be cured. She tried it, and her treatment was credited with saving eight of her brothers, the only survivors of their entire band. They were the ones who passed the story of the stolen moccasins to their children and their children’s children.
The two French Canadians journeyed west from the Saskatchewan River trade house with the Kootenais in the fall of 1800. For seventeen nights they traveled through the mountains, the twenty-six men and seven women, until they reached the Kootenai lodges. Later they moved south, to fine open plains. The Kootenais had but few horses, the Canadians said when they returned, but many were running wild as deer in the woods. “They have been in this state ever since the Time of the Small Pox in the Summer 1781,” the travelers told Peter Fidler, “which swept away whole Nations.”
From a vantage point on a high knoll near the foothills of the Rockies, Piegan Blackfeet scouts looked down upon silent lodges in a camp of Snake Indians and decided to attack:
With our sharp flat daggers and knives, [we] cut through the tents and entered for the fight; but our war whoop instantly stopt, our eyes were appalled with terror; there was no one to fight with but the dead and the dying, each a mass of corruption. We did not touch them, but left the tents, and held a council on what was to be done. We all thought the Bad Spirit had made himself the master of the camp and destroyed them. It was agreed to take some of the best of the tents, and any other plunder that was clean and good, which we did.
Soon the dreadful disease was spreading through the Piegan tents. An elderly Cree named Saukamappee who lived among the Blackfeet explained that “we had no belief that one Man could give it to another, any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Saukamappee, narrating this story in 1787 to the Hudson’s Bay Company apprentice David Thompson, recalled the people who rushed into the river for relief and drowned, and the shrieks and howlings of despair of those who survived.
Hudson House was an early fur trading post situated just at the edge of the Prairies near present-day Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. In 1781 it represented the Hudson’s Bay Company’s westernmost outpost on the North Fork of the Saskatchewan River, their farthest push toward the Rocky Mountains and the unknown Columbia country. When clerk William Walker arrived in mid-October of that year to open the trade house for its winter business, he worried that nearby grass fires would make game scarce for the winter, and soon dispatched five men on a hunting expedition to the buffalo grounds. The group included a hunter named Mitchell Omen, who later told David Thompson that after the party had proceeded west for about 150 miles, they came to an Indian camp and saw people sitting on the beach beside the river as if to cool themselves. When they approached they saw that the natives were very weak and were marked with smallpox, from which they were just recovering. The furmen climbed the bank to the tribal camp and looked inside the tents. They were filled with victims of the disease. The survivors had moved their own tents a short distance away, too weak to go far, but a few of them had regained enough strength to hunt and keep the others alive. “They were in such a state of despair and despondence that they could hardly converse with us,” Omen recalled. “From what we could learn, three-fifths had died under this disease.”
While Omen’s party was making this grim discovery, an Indian man had arrived at Hudson House who was taken with smallpox and said he had left seven of his companions dead in their tent on the plains. “This plaguey disorder,” Walker wrote, “by what I can hear was brought from the Snake Indians last summer, by the Different Tribes that trades about this River.” Walker lay some of the blame for the pox’s aggressive spread on the abundance of traded firearms and the subsequent increase of tribal raiding parties, which in his opinion brought about far more contact among disparate bands than in the past.
The next day three more infected natives arrived, and for the rest of the month workers were kept busy digging graves. Walker’s journal described a pox that raged with such intensity “that in a short time I do not suppose there will hardly be a staid Indian living.” The people apparently had begun to grasp the contagious nature of the disease, he noted, for many would not go near anyone who was stricken. This caused some who might otherwise have recovered to die of starvation—once afflicted, Walker said, they tended to give up any hope of recovery.
None of the company’s European-born employees showed any symptoms of the pox, and although one of the mixed-blood workmen fell sick in early November, after fifteen bad days he was pronounced fit to return to work. But sick and dying Indians continued to struggle in, bearing reports of much worse devastation that they had left behind. Walker expressed shock and helplessness at their plight, and was concerned about how the tribes would be able to hunt and trap during the coming season—the disease was disrupting the established routines of the company. “It will be very detrimental to Our Affairs,” he predicted.
On Sunday, December 2, after Walker read the Divine Service and his men buried one Indian woman, Mitchell Omen and his hunting party returned without any meat at all. Instead of buffalo, they had seen only more silent tents filled with dead bodies. The next day a man and two young boys came in, members of a group that had camped near the fur post in October. The smallpox had struck them on the day of their departure, and the three were all that remained out of five tents. Their band had taken a great number of skins and stored plenty of provisions the past summer, he told Walker, but now “the Wolves had destroyed it all, also pulled down the Tents and devoured the Bodies, shocking news indeed and so well we shall know it this Winter.”
This was the situation that Walker tried to convey in a letter he sent on the fourth of December to William Tomison, his superior headquartered east beyond the Forks of the Saskatchewan River at Cumberland House: “I am sorry I should have such Disagreeable News to send You, but the smallpox is rageing all round Us with great Violence, sparing very few that take it.” The few Indians in his neighborhood who had survived were frightened to go out “for fear of falling in with Others that is Bad.” Hudson House depended heavily on traded provisions, and with little more than a month’s worth of food left in the larder, Walker decided to ship half his men the 350 miles downstream to Cumberland House, with the confidence that Tomison could supply their needs.
William Tomison, however, was embroiled in a situation of his own. On December 11 a party had arrived at Cumberland House that included a woman “troubled with a Violent pain in her back & much inclined to Vomitting.” Equally disturbing was news of more smallpox to the south. Tomison, the sort of man who counted hours and noted symptoms as they progressed, seemed more willing than Walker to stare the disease in the face. He checked regularly on the female victim, but his care did her no good, and she “expired between two & three in the afternoon being only the fourth Day of her ailment.” At her subsequent burial, Tomison noted that her relatives would not touch the body.
A few days later more visitors arrived with reports of “that Devouring Disorder the small pox rageing amongst the Natives … & God knowes what will be the End thereof.” Tomison had the new arrivals, including Walker’s men, assemble all their belongings and smoke them with “the Flour of Sulpher” as a disinfectant. Tomison wrote that he traded with a group of Indians and “made them Presents as Usual but never expect to see them again.”
When a boy was brought into the post with a violent pain in his breast and stomach, Tomison tended to him with fatherly attention. The second day his patient was still very ill, and on the third morning blisters erupted on his head and thighs. By the sixth day the lad could hardly swallow, but Tomison could think of nothing to help; “when Medicines come to be wanted, I am certain that there is nothing here to do us any Good.” He assigned a man to watch over the boy and on the eighth night reported that the patient was now blind. Still he did not give up hope for the lad’s recovery, worrying whether he would regain his sight after the disease passed. When a group of Indians arrived the next day who had not heard of the disorder, Tomison had a tent pitched for them some distance away and would not let them enter the post in hopes of preventing their infection. On January 4, 1782, the eleventh day of the Indian boy’s affliction, one man tended the patient while the rest cut firewood and wove fishing nets. The next morning Tomison recorded “one man making a Coffin & one man digging a grave for the Indian lad he died last night between 9 & 10 OClock & was for 24 hours delirious.”
As the winter wore on, more diseased and starving people staggered into the post. “Indeed their Condition is too shocking to be described by pen,” Tomison wrote, as he dipped into his own scanty food supplies to feed a starving family. “I do assure your Honors, it cuts me to the Heart to see the Miserable condition they are in & not being able to Help.” On the seventh of February, Tomison buried a close acquaintance named Wee’shen’now and learned that another had perished while trying to make his way to the post. These men were two of his key business associates, and he determined to try to salvage some furs to offset the value of the goods he had advanced them. He visited their tents, stripped the valuable beaver coats from a few of the bodies, and brought back seventy-eight beaver pelts. He buried four of the victims and pondered what to do about the thirteen starving people at the camp who were still alive. One had brought down a moose a day’s journey away but was too weak to haul it in; Tomison sent some of his men to fetch the meat for the survivors.
Upon his return to Cumberland House, Tomison decided that he could not provide for all the men sent down by William Walker, and he ordered them back to Hudson House. It must have been a hard decision, and in a letter Tomison expressed sympathy with Walker’s struggles. He also bemoaned their business losses, reckoning they had advanced supplies worth more than a thousand beaver pelts to the natives, which he now saw no way to recover. He was at a loss as to what to do about securing new transport canoes, “for all that Used to build are all Dead.” Tomison could see that important knowledge and experience were being lost, and he fretted over the unknown fate of two dependable trappers named Sandfly and Pusas’quet’tumen. The next day, in what became a grisly ritual, he sent off men with duffle to use as burial shrouds, instructing them to bring in the furs of any deceased Indians they might find. The first crew returned with coats made from beaver and lynx, and reported that they had buried five Indians. Another pair of men discovered that wild animals had disfigured both bodies and furs.
Meanwhile, two weeks’ journey upstream at Hudson House, William Walker indicated that the people around his post had apparently weathered the worst of the outbreak. After writing his December 4 letter to Tomison, he did not see one new case of smallpox until the first of February, and then no more again until the middle of March. But the post was still far from healthy; both whites and Indians battled hunger for the entire winter, and Walker’s journal entries read as if the men had all lost their skill to hunt. He made some references to the scarcity of game, and others to women and children who had recovered from the smallpox but were starving to death. In a land traditionally rich in moose and close to the edge of buffalo range, the brigade stooped to snaring rabbits as their main source of food. The way the epidemic seriously disrupted the subtle rounds of winter hunting only underscored the company’s dependence on tribal skills.
In the course of a normal year, the majority of men from outlying posts canoed downstream in May to Cumberland House, where they gathered the winter fur packs and ferried their take on to Hudson Bay for shipment to England. This year, however, William Walker decided to hold his own crew around Hudson House in order to comb the countryside for undelivered furs. In his last letter of the season to Tomison, Walker sounded almost optimistic that they could make something from the horrid winter after all. “There is a good few Indians alive up here yet, Some not over the Pox, and a great many young fellows gone to bring their own and the furrs of their deceased relations,” he wrote.
As the winter tailed away, William Tomison kept his Cumberland House men at the nets, capturing sturgeon and pike in lieu of their preferred red meat. He ministered to the sick around him and ventured out in the field to learn the fate of Sandfly and his family. When the weather turned warmer, he fell with great relief into the more pleasant routines of spring, sending Indian women out for canoe gum and tracking the waves of migrant swans and ducks that would rejuvenate the house diet. Finally, in the middle of May, Tomison was forced by the shortage of hands to join the canoe brigade downriver to York Factory: “This great Misfortune Obliges me to go on the Head of the Journey Myself.” But even then Tomison was not clear of the great misfortune; he soon found that the pox had preceded him to Hudson Bay.
I BELONG TO THE GENERATIONS of humans who received vaccinations against the Variola virus. I can remember watching the steady prick, prick, pricking of the needle on my upper right arm, chosen because I already knew I was left-handed. I recall the small pustules that arose like dewdrops from the test circle, and how they itched like crazy. Just as my older brother had before me, I defied the admonitions of doctor and mother not to touch those pustules, picking at them until the clear liquid ran down, then scraping away the crusty shell that formed around the bull’s-eye. Those fascinating pinpricks soon receded into little more than a curious shared birthmark, one that could be found on every other body splashing in the water at the beach. Sun and skin color and shape conspired to make each mark unique, and although my brother and I might stare at a particularly striking vaccination, we never connected them to the ancient dread they symbolized. Photos we saw in Life magazine of the last horrifying Asian cases of smallpox did not make the scabs on our upper arms tingle with empathy or fear. We had no idea that when we came down with the chicken pox, one after another, and got to lay out of school for a week, we were getting a very small glimpse of the Grim Reaper in full swing.
Before smallpox was eradicated, a case of the disease began much like chicken pox, with flu-like symptoms of muscle aches and fever that came on twelve to fourteen days after exposure. The pain could increase beyond imagination, often concentrating in one area, and sometimes led to severe anxiety or vomiting. After a couple of days, the fever backed off, only to return accompanied by the first characteristic red spots. These grew into blisters that were usually concentrated in the mouth and nasal passages. Within another day, a fast-moving rash began to run from back, neck, and forearms toward the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. The denser the pustules, the poorer the prognosis. Mouth and throat irritation could lead to severe dehydration; cracked and runny sores invited secondary bacterial infection; swollen mucous membranes could cause blindness and sterility. Gradually a crust formed on top of each pustule, then hardened into a scab. Most deaths from smallpox occurred during the second week of the disease, but survivors had to endure the sores for twice that long, and they carried the visible scars for the rest of their lives.
The appearance of the first symptoms signaled that the patient was contagious. The disease was at its most communicable during the first week of the rash, but could still be transmitted as long as the scabs hung on—usually about a month after exposure. Infection occurred either directly, by breathing the airborne virus, or indirectly, by touching the oozing lymph or contaminated material and then inhaling viral particles hidden within them. Corpses remained contagious for up to three weeks after death; articles that the sick person had come into contact with, such as bedding or clothing, could remain infectious for more than a year.
Smallpox is an Old World disease, and through long association the peoples of Europe built up a strong resistance to its devastation. Outbreaks of the pox would roll through the crowded towns and villages every few years, hitting the very young and very old the hardest. Those who made it through had received a vaccination mark of lifelong immunity. Because smallpox was so embedded in European culture, it came to the New World as soon as the Spanish conquistadors began their rampage through the Caribbean and Mexico. From 1519 to 1521, the soldiers of Hernando Cortés kicked off an epidemic, which was described by their Franciscan missionaries. The scattered settlements of colonial America recorded outbreaks of greater and lesser impact over the next two and a half centuries. All observers noted the disproportionate effect the disease had on native populations, but few actually saw the first wave of infection. As horses and guns radiated ahead of Spanish, English, and French traders moving from the periphery of the continent into its interior, the frequency and speed of communications between the tribes increased dramatically. So did the prospects of a large-scale eruption of disease.
Initial reports of the Western Hemisphere’s first clearly documented smallpox pandemic emerged from the Mexican plateau in the late 1770s. The disease swept south across the Guatemalan highlands and radiated north with equal vehemence; by 1780 it had appeared in New Mexican pueblos and across the southern Plains, homeland of the Comanche Indians. Since their acquisition of horses only a few decades earlier, Comanches often rode hundreds of miles north to trade with Shoshones on the eastern front of the Rockies and Crows on the northern Plains. In 1780 and 1781, smallpox could have passed from the Comanches to the Shoshones and then spread through the complex social web that crisscrossed the Columbia Plateau and the prairies. Both the Kootenais and the Piegan Blackfeet, occupying territory on either side of the Continental Divide, specifically pointed to the Shoshones (or Snakes, as they were often called) as the source of the outbreaks that afflicted their tribes. One tendril of the disease would naturally have flowed east from the Blackfeet along the Saskatchewan River to Hudson House and beyond.
JUST HOW FAR THE WESTERN arm of the outbreak reached from its nodes on the Columbia Plateau remains uncertain—the trade house journals of William Walker and William Tomison, literally hundreds of miles removed from the scene, represent the contemporary writing nearest to the Northwest. But beginning in 1787, sailors along the north Pacific coast reported the pockmarked faces of smallpox victims among tribes from the Queen Charlotte Islands south through Puget Sound to central Oregon. George Vancouver’s expedition of the 1790s noted large empty villages, not all of which could be explained by seasonal movements. Lewis and Clark saw evidence of an epidemic among the Clatsops at the mouth of the Columbia, and on their return upriver in 1806 Clark noticed the ruins of a large village near the Willamette River. When he inquired as to the cause, an old man brought a woman forward to show her face, making signs to explain how she almost died when just a girl and how his people all had died. Clark put the old man’s signs into words: “From the age of this woman this Distructive disorder I judge must have been about 28 or 30 years past, and about the time the Clatsops inform us that this disorder raged in their towns and distroyed their nation.”
These sightings might have been part of the great 1780s pandemic, with the virus moving from the Plateau down the Columbia and then up and down the Pacific Coast. It is also possible that Vancouver, Lewis and Clark, and others saw the results of limited regional outbreaks that had moved south from Russian settlements on the Kamchatka Peninsula or arrived via a Spanish ship that traded in the Northwest in 1775. But wherever the smallpox came from, it was in the Northwest to stay.
Variola is a recurring virus; once established, it sweeps through succeeding generations. Thus smallpox reappeared in the Northwest in the early 1800s, just as the immune survivors of its previous visitation were raising a new population of susceptible targets. Again the disease came from the Great Plains, some said from the Crows, and again it swept across the Plateau, through the Flatheads and Nez Perce, to the Pend Oreilles and Kalispels, on to the Spokanes and the Colvilles. Some of the Plateau tribes remembered the second visitation as being less virulent than the first, but Clatsop people told Lewis and Clark that it had wiped out several hundred inhabitants and four chiefs only four years earlier. The captains described a number of deserted villages along the river and the coast as corroboration.
Memories of the scourge were still strong in 1811, when a Kootenai woman known as Qanqon dressed herself as a man and traveled down the Columbia prophesying disease and claiming to possess the “power to introduce the Small Pox.” These prophesies so inflamed the Clatsops and Chinooks near the mouth of the river that the newly arrived Astorians took the supposed man inside their fort for protection. A few weeks later David Thompson also arrived at Astoria, where he recognized the Kootenai as the former wife of one of his voyageurs. Returning upriver with a group of Astorians and Qanqon, Thompson was approached by four fishermen at the Cascade rapids who inquired about “the Small Pox, of which a report had been raised, that it was coming with the white Men and that also 2 Men of enormous Size [were coming] to overturn the Ground.” Noting that the men would gladly have plunged a dagger into Qanqon had he not stood in the way, Thompson assured them that there was no truth to this apocalyptic prophesy.
Duncan McDougall, chief factor at Astoria, might have taken a cue from the local people’s strong reaction to Qanqon’s boasts. When tension with the tribes reached a dangerous level a few weeks later, McDougall, according to his clerk Ross Cox,
assembled several of the chieftains, and showing them a small bottle, declared that it contained the small-pox; that although his force was weak in number, he was strong in medicine; and that … he would open the bottle and send the small-pox among them. The chiefs strongly remonstrated against his doing so … that if the small-pox was once let out, it would run like fire among the good people as well as among the bad.… He was greatly dreaded by the Indians, who were fully impressed with the idea that he held their fate in his hands.”
It soon became clear that the recurrent horror of smallpox was only one of many diseases that native people would endure—from influenza and malaria to measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, and diphtheria. Tribes that had numbered in the thousands became extinct, others mere remnants of their former strength. From the source lakes of the Columbia to its mouth, early anthropologists heard stories that involved single or paired survivors who wandered far, consumed with shock and grief, until they chanced upon one another. Together they provided the seed of a new village, and new life.
As decades passed, the fury of the sicknesses slowly abated. After more than two centuries, many of those diseases have become subjects of epidemiological history instead of dire prophecies. Smallpox, the precursor of them all, is now confined to isolated vials, tucked away in guarded vaults, awaiting either its own ordered extinction or a sudden call to protect unexposed humanity from another dreadful visitation.
Before the white men ever appeared in the Kootenai country, the story goes, when the people still cut their firewood with bone axes, Never Sits Down was camping beside a lake with his father and another man. The man became ill with the smallpox, and then Never Sits Down fell sick, too. Sores started breaking out on his body. When he saw what was happening to him, Never Sits Down walked out to the lake. The people in the camp had a belief that sore-ridden people should not touch water. To their amazement, Never Sits Down entered the lake and swam clear across it. He swam back, only to turn around and swim across to the far side again. Finally he disappeared from sight. Never Sits Down was gone for several days, and when he returned he was cured.
A Kootenai elder called Eustace told this story in 1930, surrounded by younger members of his St. Mary’s band, near the same lake where Never Sits Down swam away his sores. Eustace said he had more stories about the exploits of the strong and resilient Never Sits Down, but before he would continue he wanted to make sure his listeners thought about what he had said. “This was a long time ago,” Eustace explained, “but the blood of Never Sits Down is still around.” He pointed to the man sitting beside him, then to others in the group; to many people. The “devouring disorder” has faded to a distant memory today, but the blood of Never Sits Down lives on.