Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian (review)

Abstract

In late spring 1837, the crew of a Missouri River steamboat carried smallpox to the Indian trading posts of the upper Missouri, and spread contagion to the Mandans, Arikaras, Hidatsas, Assiniboin, Blackfeet, and other Plains tribes. It was one of the worst Native American smallpox epidemics in history. It is also the most notorious, because of graphic descriptions from traders, because of popular attention given those tribes by early writers and artists such as George Catlin, and because of the work of latter-day historians like Bernard DeVoto. The epidemic took the lives of perhaps 23,000 Indians on the northern Plains, including a quarter or more of the Blackfeet, half the Arikaras, half the Assiniboin, and more than nine-tenths of the Mandans.