Voices of Disaster: Smallpox around the Strait of Georgia in 1782

Abstract

This essay considers native and non-native evidence for smallpox around the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound in the late eighteenth century. It concludes that smallpox devastated the Salish peoples of these regions, probably in the winter of 178I-82, reaching them via the lower Columbia from the plains where, in I780-8I, the disease was rampant. The implications of this conclusion and the reluctance of scholars to identify smallpox on the early Northwest Coast are also investigated. Well, its a good thing to study these things back, you know. Like the way the people died off. -Jimmy Peters, i9861 The old Indians grow quite pathetic sometimes when they touch upon this subject. They believe their race is doomed to die out and disappear. They point to the sites of their once populous villages, and then to the handful of people that constitute the tribe of today, and shake their heads and sigh. -Charles Hill-Tout, 1904 2 Demographic collapse, in short, led to widespread settlement discontinuity. To grasp the implications of such discontinuity, one must imagine what almost total depopulation would mean in Italy or Spain ca. ISoo-silent villages, decaying cities, fields lying waste, orchards overgrown with brush. -Karl W. Butzer, I99z3 It is now clear that Europeans carried diseases wherever they went in the Western Hemisphere and that among genetically similar peoples with Ethnohistory 41:4 (fall 1994). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 0014-1801/94/$ 1.50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 05:33:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms