Píhó K`ádó, "Peninsula sun dance." The peninsula or bend is indicated by a line bending around the medicine lodge. The dance is thus designated because held in the píhó, or peninsula, on the south side of the Washita, a short distance below Walnut creek, within the present limits of the reservation. This dance simply serves as a tally date, as nothing of more special interest is recorded for the summer. It would seem that the incursions of the Cheyenne and Arapaho had prevented the usual holding of the k`ádó for the two preceding years.
Fig. 79—Summer 1839—Peninsula sun dance.
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).