One of the earliest documented disease pandemics in the history of Anglo-European settlers moving westward during the 1830s and '40 srought diseases to the Native American ethnic groups (tribes) of the Great Plains.
From earliest contacts, cultural differences and battles overland use and European settlers and native Americans as explorers, pioneers, and settlers expanded westward across the continent. But the first documentary evidence of the destruction smallpox would have on tribal groups in this region dates back to the 1830s and & 40s.
Historian Paul H. Carlson in his excellent textbook, "The Plains Indians," said this smallpox outbreak was traced to contact between deckhands in an American Fur Company steamboat moving up the Missouri River and members of several tribal groups living along that river, a major early trade and migration route into the Plains and Upper Midwest. By 1837, Carlson said, thousands of Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa people had died. He suggested that as many as half of the Arikara and Hidatsa population of 4,500 died in this 1837 outbreak In addition, he estimated this smallpox outbreak killed "virtually all" of the 1,600 Mandans living in the Upper Missouri River region.
Some historians suspect, in fact, that some of the early Puritans & # 39; stories of mysterious, empty These historians theorize that the villages are probably empty because the native people have been exposed to various European diseases by fishermen and others (The Historians know from fragmentary accounts and sketchy maps that Portuguese explorers and fishermen were in in the Native American villagers saw the Europeans coming and were fleeing the risk of diseases. North American waters decades before Plymouth Colony.)
Perhaps the credit more pious Puritan writers them with food and shelter was due to far grimmer circumstances, ie, sickness and disease that killed or knocked away the Indians of New England.
"The Indian Wars," accounts reveal some of the more horrible, dark side of European contact with Native Americans - cases when white people intentionally infected Indian villages with smallpox and other diseases by means of abandoned blankets and clothing. Those were dark times filled with dark deeds by Europeans and Native Americans alike.
But one of the earliest traceable outbreaks of smallpox among the Plains Indians tribal groups came from the American Fur company boat venturing up the Missouri River in the mid - 1830s.
