Disease & Death Came to Plains Indians From Europeans in the 1830s-'40s

1 of the earliest documented illness pandemics in the history of the American West took location when Anglo-European settlers moving westward throughout the 1830s and '40s brought illnesses to the Native American ethnic groups (tribes) of the Fantastic Plains.

From earliest contacts, cultural variations and battles more than land use and ownership took location in between European settlers and Native Americans as explorers, pioneers, and settlers expanded westward across the continent. But the initial documented proof of the devastation smallpox would have on tribal groups in this area dates back to the 1830s and '40s.

Historian Paul H. Carlson in his Great textbook, "The Plains Indians," stated this smallpox outbreak was traced to contact in between deckhands in an American Fur Business steamboat moving up the Missouri River and members of numerous tribal groups living along that river, a main early trade and emigration route into the Plains and Upper Midwest. By 1837, Carlson mentioned, thousands of Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa folks had died. He recommended that as a number of as half of the Arikara and Hidatsa population of 4,500 died in this 1837 outbreak. In addition, he estimated this smallpox outbreak killed "practically all" of the A single,600 Mandans living in the Upper Missouri River area.

Illnesses that came from Europeans and wiped out villages and huge numbers of Native Americans had been absolutely nothing new elsewhere in America, even as early as the 1830s. Some historians suspect, in reality, that some of the early Puritans' stories of mysterious, empty villages with complete meals shops which they encountered upon landing in New England had been indicators of smallpox and other illness epidemics that preceded the Puritans. Those historians theorize that the villages have been almost certainly empty since the native folks were exposed to a number of European ailments by fishermen and other individuals who had come just before the recorded visits of English settlers. The villages may possibly had been empty mainly because the Native American villagers saw the Europeans coming and have been fleeing the danger of illnesses. (Historians know from fragmentary accounts and sketchy maps that Portuguese explorers and fishermen had been in North American waters decades prior to Plymouth Colony.)

Possibly the credit extra pious Puritan writers gave to God for miraculously delivering them with meals and shelter was due to far grimmer situations, i.e., sickness and illness that killed or drove away the Indians of New England.

Later on in the history of the settlement of the Old West, in the course of the years identified to numerous historians as "the Indian Wars," accounts reveal some of the a lot more horrible, dark side of European contact with Native Americans -- circumstances when white men and women intentionally infected Indian villages with smallpox and other illnesses by signifies of abandoned blankets and clothes. These have been dark instances filled with dark deeds by Europeans and Native Americans alike.

But A single of the earliest traceable outbreaks of smallpox between the Plains Indians tribal groups came from the American Fur Corporation boat venturing up the Missouri River in the mid-1830s.

You can come across out a lot more about illness Fantastic Plains Indian groups' battles with deadly ailments at my web page, "Life in the Old West," positioned at http://www.lifeintheoldwest.com.