The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (review)

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874. By Robert Boyd. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. xv + 403 pp., preface, introduction, maps, illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth.)

To my knowledge, Robert Boyd’s The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence is the most comprehensive, detailed monography on the impact of imported diseases within a single region of North America. His exhaustive documentation of the mortality and devastation wrought by disease is so overwhelming that the survival of Northwest Coast native peoples into the present appears miraculous. Boyd himself offers the best explanation for why focusing on this region is instructive. As he states in his introduction, his research is merely a case study of processes that occurred generally throughout the Americas. He makes no claim for the Northwest Coast experience being unique or in any way distinctive. But because depopulation occurred later there compared to elsewhere in North America, there are more records describing what happened and how, who was affected and why, and what the consequences were.

Boyd’s approach focuses on three kinds of evidence, each of which adds a different dimension to understanding the demographic collapse that followed European contact. He uses the reports of European and American traders, missionaries, and government officials to trace the geographic and chronological spread of the most serious epidemics and chronic afflictions: smallpox, venereal diseases, and tuberculosis (the latter Boyd argues were indigenous to the Americas but were introduced as new variants to the Northwest Coast with the arrival of Europeans), malaria, smallpox again along with dysentery and influenza, measles, smallpox, and again smallpox. While the first of the smallpox epidemics to hit the region probably was the deadliest, the 1862 epidemic, nearly one hundred years later, is the most well-documented and therefore appears as the most awful, even more horrific, as Boyd points out, because so few local governments thought to take advantage of the existence and ready availability of the smallpox vaccine. By tracking where each epidemic hit and the extent of its resulting mortality, Boyd is able also to demonstrate the disappearance and migration that occurred and the consolidation of communities that took place in the wake of each epidemic.

Native memories, most of which were collected by anthropologists engaged in ethnographic research at the turn of the twentieth century, are another important source of information in Boyd’s study. By far the most interesting material in the book, these stories of disease, both personal accounts of particular individuals and communities and mythologized narratives, powerfully convey native explanations for the epidemics and their efforts to combat them. Afflicted communities sometimes blamed themselves but just as often, if not more often, saw Europeans as the source of these new maladies. The widely held suspicion that Europeans carried diseases in a bottle and could choose when and how to inflict them on native peoples apparently originated with European traders who threatened and coerced Indians by boasting of such power. Native testimony also recounts how traditional remedies failed to defeat these new diseases. Especially dangerous was the customary healing practice of taking a sweat followed by a cold bath, a basic cure for so many other ailments but a fatal response to smallpox.

A third aspect to the spread of disease was the actual depopulation. Toward the end of the book, after organizing earlier chapters chronologically by each epidemic occurrence, Boyd assesses the demographic costs by reconstructing population histories for the northern coast and the Lower Columbia. Boyd concludes that the first one hundred years of European contact resulted in a population decline of at least 80 percent.

I highly recommend this book. Although much has already been written about the Native American population decline, Boyd makes an important contribution in having so meticulously documented the...