1830s brought disease, death to Plains Indians »
By Old Hoppy Sep 11, 2009 in Expansion, Indians-Native Americans | 0 Comments
During the 1830s, diseases brought to the Great Plains region, chiefly smallpox, devastated many Plains Indian groups. This was nothing new in the cultural mingling and cultural conflicts between Native Americans and European traders/settlers. But it was one of the earliest documented pandemics in what we now call the Old West.
According to historian Paul H. Carlson in his excellent book “The Plains Indians,” this smallpox outbreak was started when deckhands in an American Fur Company steamboat moving up the Missouri River came in contact with members of several tribal groups living along the Missouri. By 1837, Carlson says, thousands of Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa people had died. He suggests that probably half of the Arikara and Hidatsa population of 4,500 died in this 1837 outbreak. In addition, he estimates this smallpox outbreak killed “virtually all” of the 1,600 Mandans living in the Upper Missouri region.
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