Even with the increased trade in robes, and some increase in the number of Indians hunting on the plains, the accelerated rate of killing had little effect on the size of the herds. They were forced into a smaller range year by year, but the steep decline toward total destruction did not become very noticeable until after the Civil War.
14. The Great Killer
The sad experience of the Plains tribes with the white man's diseases proved again that primitive man has little resistance to the contagions of civilization. Measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases all took their toll of the red men, but the deadliest killer of all was smallpox. Much in the same manner as this dread plague wiped out the armies of Montezuma and paved the way for the Spanish conquest of Mexico City, it cut down the flower of the Plains warriors all along the Missouri, opening an easier path for the westward thrust of the American frontier.
Methods of smallpox vaccination developed in urban centers were not available to the Indian tribes of the upper Missouri in the 1830's, and it is doubtful that the Indians would have willingly submitted to such practices. When the Indians did come down with the disease, there was no way to give them adequate care in their tipis. Camps were normally kept clean by moving them to new locations every few days, but when smallpox struck, they had to remain in one place and soon became filthy pest holes. The white man's practice of placing the victim in isolation to live or die, and thus protect his fellows from the contagion if possible, was repugnant to the Indians.
In the summer of 1837 an especially virulent strain of smallpox came by the steamer St. Peter up the Missouri from St. Louis with the annual supply of trade goods for the upriver posts. It is possible that the disease was carried in some of the bales of clothing and blankets aboard; by the time Fort Pierre was reached, people on the boat were sick with the pox. The American Fur Company, instead of delaying the boat until the victims had recovered and the boat could be fumigated, sent it on upstream, hoping to keep the Indians away from the sick. The traders feared that any long delay in the arrival of the steamer would annoy the crowds of Indians waiting at each post for their annual trading spree, and would lead to a serious loss of trade and profits.
Although the Indians at each stop were warned of the danger, they refused to believe the traders, thinking it a trick of some kind. They resorted to all sorts of stratagems to break the quarantine, sneaking on board the boat or slipping into the forbidden sections of the post, determined that they would not be put off in their attempts to trade; nor would they stay away from places they had been accustomed to visit.
At the Mandan villages one chief managed to slip aboard and reach the sick bay, where he stole a blanket from a smallpox patient lying helpless on his cot. The chief then hurried ashore and hid his loot. He refused to surrender the blanket, even in exchange for a new one. Soon the germs from the stolen blanket spread throughout the Mandan villages, and proved to be exceptionally deadly, killing many of the victims within a few hours after the first symptoms were noticed.
Panic seized the villages. The people hastily threw their dead off the nearest bluff, and many committed suicide when they thought they might be getting the pox. By the end of the summer only a few old men and some young boys, thirty in all, were left alive in the whole Mandan tribe. Across the Missouri an Arikara village also suffered great losses, as did the Hidatsa camps to the northwest.
Up the river at Fort Union two of the company men broke out with the pox, then thirty of the Indian women at the post. Although the trader locked the gates and warned the Assiniboins to keep well away from the walls, he found them stubbornly determined to trade, hanging around as close to the walls as they could get, until they too caught the disease, with fatal results for about half the tribe.
At Fort Union the supplies for Fort McKenzie were loaded on a keelboat, which also carried a few passengers. Three of these, including one Blackfoot, broke out with the pox. In an effort to keep the pox from spreading to the large bands of Piegans and Bloods that had come in for the annual trade, the boat was tied up at the mouth of the Judith River, about forty miles downstream from Fort McKenzie, so that the invalids could recover before reaching the post. When the Indians heard that the boat was being held downriver, they threatened to go and capture it if it did not come up at once. Then when the boat did arrive, the Indian customers insisted on starting trade immediately.
They secured their new goods and started back toward the hunting grounds before the pox struck. Then the epidemic started in all the camps at once and the people died in large numbers. In some camps only two or three people were left alive, often the old ones who had survived the pox of 1781.
The Crows, more sensible than the other tribes, fled from the fur post and the Yellowstone Valley at the first news of the scourge. They retreated to the mountain fastnesses high on the Wind River until October. When they did come in to trade late in the fall some of them caught the pox, but it was less deadly to them. The strain might have lost some of its virulence, or the cold weather might have given the victims a better chance to fight off the sickness. Certainly in winter their camps would be more sanitary.
At the height of the plague the Assiniboins, instead of fleeing to distant hunting grounds, stayed near Fort Union and traded every robe they could lay hands on, even those they should have kept for their own use during the coming winter. They explained that so long as they were going to die soon, they would not need the robes and might as well have what fun they could.
While most of the river tribes blamed the traders for the plague, refusing any responsibility on themselves for breaking the quarantines, the Blackfeet concluded that the pox had been sent to them as a punishment for their warlike ways, their plan to attack Fort McKenzie the coming winter, and their many far-ranging war parties, which had kept the region in a state of war for twenty years. Partly as a result of this conviction of guilt, and partly because they had lost so many of their fighting men to the pox, they abruptly ceased their aggressive attempts to take hunting grounds from other tribes. They fought no more wars of conquest and were content to withdraw from some of the fringe territory they had occupied in recent years. They gave up all claim to the Missouri Valley above the Gates of the Mountains, and even Sun Valley became a place to visit in the summer instead of a winter camping ground. Their winter camps were never put south of the Marias again, but kept near the Canadian border, about where they had been in 1807.
The withdrawal might not have been entirely voluntary. The Flat-heads and Nez Percé and their allies from the Columbia Basin had escaped the plague and could now muster as many fighting men on the buffalo grounds of central Montana as could the Blackfeet. They were well armed too, buying guns from their trader friends. After 1837 the western tribes frequently came across to the Sun River to hunt, going on east another hundred miles into Judith Basin if the herds had moved away.
In Dakota the smallpox left a wide stretch of open land on both sides of the Missouri from Fort Pierre about 250 miles upstream, in country formerly claimed by the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa. At the same time the Sioux in Minnesota came under heavy pressure from the advancing settlers. Year by year the Sioux reluctantly gave up some of their forest land with its fishing lakes and wild rice, and moved farther west into the buffalo country. Thus the plague was an important factor in forcing the reluctant Sioux to change from their seminomadic state into true nomads as they were able to acquire large, new buffalo ranges in Dakota to compensate for their losses in Minnesota. By 1850 they had established some claim to the Black Hills and the Powder River country.