Life in the Old West

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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Blizzards in Old West days were catastrophic throughout most of the West, particularly throughout the Great Plains. For obvious reasons, severe snow, strong winds, and poor visibility combined with near-zero or sub-zero temperatures were dangerous for anyone living in isolated and rural areas. Combine that with the openness of the terrain and dependence upon cattle and stored crops for food, and streams, creeks, or poorly dug wells for water, and blizzards were a far greater disaster then than they are now.

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