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

Robert Boyd. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. xv + 403 pp. Ill. $50.00.

Demographic studies of the Native American population decline from epidemic diseases have been going on for more than thirty years, primarily as anthropological contributions to medical and Indian history. Boyd's book is a regional contribution, deeply researched, original, and valuable. The author is an ethnohistorian and contributor to the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians. The focus of this study is on introduced diseases--primarily smallpox, measles, and malaria--on the Northwest Coast from Sitka to Oregon during the century after their first known appearance in l775.

Malaria became endemic in Oregon and the lower Columbia basin; smallpox and measles epidemics occurred repeatedly throughout the region, with mortality rates of about 10 percent for measles and more than 30 percent for smallpox. By meticulous calculation, tribe by tribe and village by village, Boyd concludes that the total native population decline on the Northwest Coast over the century was from about 184,000 to 37,153, or 80 percent. The percentage is actually modest compared with disease-induced declines in Mexico, California, New Mexico, and elsewhere in North America.

Smallpox, the most devastating of all the diseases, came to the Northwest Coast on exploring or trading vessels from Mexico, Kamchatka, and California, brought by Spaniards, Russians, and Americans. The disease spread from port to port by ship, and further as natives fled from their infected villages. Measles in one instance came with Walla Walla Indians returning home from Sutter's Fort, California--an exception to the general rule that whites from outside the region introduced the contagions.

Smallpox vaccination efforts were pitifully inadequate. Half a century after Thomas Jefferson first gave vaccines to Indians, there was no federal vaccination program in the Pacific Northwest. A small handful of Army physicians, Catholic and Anglican priests, and Hudson's Bay Company officials saved a few thousand lives. The cultural gulf between Indians and whites made vaccinating difficult. Native Americans had no germ theory, and vaccination contradicted their ideas about diseases, which they attributed to witchcraft. Many believed that whites deliberately gave them smallpox; the Makahs of the Olympic peninsula said that the whites wanted to kill them to get their land. Natives could be persuaded of the value of vaccination if they witnessed vaccinated tribesmen escaping the disease, but that required some of them to be vaccinated. Between white indifference and Indian suspicion, little was done to prevent smallpox epidemics.

As for smallpox treatment, quarantines were few, panic-driven, and ineffectual. Boyd found that there was only a single smallpox hospital, one at Victoria in l862, with no physicians and a single untrained nurse assisting a missionary. One would think that by the mid-nineteenth century the natives might have learned a few basic principles of smallpox nursing, but they remained terrorized and overwhelmed. The closeness of their family and community life made them all the more vulnerable, all the more despairing; they abandoned one another in sickness to virtually certain death. The desertions must have caused families pitiful anguish, though it is nowhere recorded.

The traditional Indian therapies were of course futile--indeed, counterproductive, as sweat baths and cold-water plunges weakened individual resistance. Natives attributed healing to the powers of medicine men, who were not only helpless, but also accountable with their lives for their failures against smallpox. One Bella Bella medicine man committed suicide to atone for his shame.

Boyd briefly discusses some of the consequences of the Northwest Indian population collapse: villages were abandoned or consolidated; intertribal marriages compensated for the lack of tribal partners; survivors abandoned resistance to white acculturation; and Christian missionaries...