WINTER 1839—40
Tä´dalkop Sai, "Smallpox winter." The Kiowa were ravaged by the smallpox, the second visitation of that disease within their memory, the first having been in 1818. The disease is indicated in the conventional Indian manner by means of the figure of a man covered with red spots (compare figures from Mallery's Dakota calendar; see also [1861—62] and [1892]). It was brought by some visiting Osage, and spread at once through the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche, killing a great number in each tribe. The Kiowa and Apache fled to the Staked plain to escape it, and the Comanche in some other direction.
Fig. 80—Winter 1839—40—Smallpox.
This was the great smallpox epidemic which began on the upper Missouri in the summer of 1837 and swept the whole plains north and south, destroying probably a third, if not more, of the native inhabitants, some whole tribes being nearly exterminated. The terribly fatal result of smallpox among Indians is due largely to the fact that their only treatment for this disease and for measles, both of which came to them from the whites, is the sweat bath followed by the cold plunge. In this instance the disease first broke out among the passengers of a steamer in the Missouri river above Fort Leavenworth, and although every effort was made to warn the Indians by sending runners in advance, the sickness was communicated to them. It appeared first among the Mandan about the middle of July, 1837, and practically destroyed that tribe, reducing them in a few weeks from about sixteen hundred to thirty-one souls. Their neighboring and allied tribes, the Arikara and Minitarí, were reduced immediately after from about four thousand to about half that number. The artist Catlin gives a melancholy account of the despair and destruction of the Mandan.
Fig. 81—Smallpox (from the Dakota calendars).
From the Mandan it spread to the north and west among the Crows, Asiniboin, and Blackfeet. Among the last named it is estimated to have destroyed from six to eight thousand (Clark, 13). As the plains tribes were then almost unknown to the general government, we find little of all this in the official reports beyond the mention that over sixty lodges of Yanktonais Dakota—perhaps four hundred persons—died by this disease about the same time (Report, 75). In 1838 it reached the Pawnee, being communicated by some Dakota prisoners captured by them, in the spring of that year. From the best information it seems probable that at least two thousand Pawnee perished (Clark, 14), about double the whole population of the tribe today. It probably continued southward through the Osage until it reached the Kiowa and Comanche the next year, although it is possible that it may have come more directly from the east through the emigrating Chickasaw, who brought it with them to Indian Territory in the spring of 1838 (Report, 76). We learn (Gregg, 6) that the disease ravaged New Mexico in the spring of 1840 and was again carried east to the frontiers of the United States by the Santa Fé traders.