American Indians and the smallpox question?

Question

I am doing research for a paper on American Ethics. I can't seem to find any correct documentation about this. I found a few back in the 18th century. However I thought there was another outbreak in the 19th century after American forced the Indians onto Reservations. Can anyone please help with correct and documented information? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I wish I could be more helpful, but in my reading and research I had learned that the Indian agents in the 1800s, as corrupt and evil as some were, had passed contaminated blankets with small pox to their charges, decimating hundreds.

I simply, at this point, cannot back it up with hard facts.

p.s. Try to find the "Reader's Digest America's Fascinating Indian Heritage." It is a storehouse of information about the tribes of North America and what brought them to their knees.

Answer 2

I don't see an instance like you mention, but there was a breakout of smallpox in 1837. The breakout was started when the steamer St. Peter arived at Fort Clark in present day North Dakota. The steamer was carrying trade goods for the American Fur Company. Because they knew that some men on the boat had smallpox F.A. Chardon and others of the company tried to keep the Mandans away. This attempt was not successful, and they came to trade anyway. It is reported that they suffered about a 98% death rate. 31 out of 1600 tribe members survived! The outbreaks were confined to the tribes that came up to the upper Missouri trading posts and those tribes near by. The Mandan, Blackfeet, and the Assiniboine suffered the worst. The traders tried to warn the other tribes to stay away so that they wouldn't get sick but they didn't listen and came anyway. Tribes like the Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota raided the empty Mandan villages and carried the disease back to their respectful tribes. They tried to vaccinate the indian women at Fort Union but this didn't seem to work out to well. The Blackfeet suffered the same fate as the Mandan. The Assiniboine who came to Fort Union soon became infected and they carried the disease all the way back to Canada with them. The men of the AFC (American Fur Company) have long been blamed for infecting the indian people with the smallpox virus. Look at the historical record, and please see that these men did the best they could at the time to keep the indians away. They warned them several times to stay away and not come in and trade, but they came and traded anyway. All I am asking is that everyone realize that trading with the indians was their business and they didn't want to kill the business by killing the indians. The smallpox outbreak of 1837 was not intentional but a terrible accident.

Answer 3

Here is a link to an article on the Blackfoot referring to smallpox and measles decimating the population in the nineteenth century, but doesn't provide dates for the movement onto reservations or the outbreaks. The Bibliography may be useful for more information, the annotations are promising.

The Bureau of American Ethnography is also a good source for material. There are collections of accounts written about various groups from the viewpoint of missionaries who lived among them.

Also, I would look for statistics from the Interior Department, for part of the time, and the War Department for a lot of the time. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was transferred between the Interior and War Departments several times. Try your library's Government publications site for this material. Thomas (from the Library of Congress) is good, but the data may be more easily tracked through other sources. I'd "cultivate" your reference librarian for this kind of help, they'll know their library better than I.

Answer 4

There was a massive small pox outbreak in the early 1800's in the Rock Mountain area that wiped out up to 95 percent of some tribes like the Mandan and most Blackfeet. That was around 1830- to 1840.
Over all, about 85 percent of the American Indians died off because of diseases brought by white contact.