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Smallpox beat Lewis and Clark to American West
October 31, 2002 -- By Evelyn Boswell, MSU Research Office
The American West had a tragic history before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ever loaded their canoes, a renowned historian of epidemics said recently at Montana State University-Bozeman.
Like tourists who visit Ground Zero in New York City, Lewis and Clark heard horrifying accounts of events that occurred before their arrival, Elizabeth Fenn said at the third annual conference on Medical History of the American West. Fenn is a history professor at Duke University and the author of "Pox Americana," a book on the smallpox epidemic in North America during the Revolutionary War.
Lewis and Clark learned, for example, that smallpox had almost wiped out the Arikara Indians. They heard from the Mandans that smallpox and Sioux attacks had left them with two villages. The Clatsop Indians told Clark that smallpox had destroyed their nation.
The smallpox epidemic of 1775 to 1782 was an "absolutely enormous episode of pestilence," Fenn commented.
"It was the first continent-wide epidemic that we can document in historical records," she continued. "By examining the 18th century West through the lens of this horrific episode, we can see how vastly things changed in the century before Lewis and Clark."
By the time Lewis and Clark showed up, the West was already transformed, she added. The explorers encountered the silence of abandoned villages and the stillness of forsaken encampments.
"The arrival of horses, the arrival of guns, the arrival of smallpox ... the crying and wailing of survivors was already past," Fenn said. "It was already yesterday's news by the time Lewis and Clark arrived."
Fenn was the keynote speaker during an all-day conference held Oct. 29 at the Museum of the Rockies. The conference was sponsored by the Volney Steele Endowment for Study of Medical History, the WWAMI Medical Education Program at MSU, and the Department of History and Philosophy at MSU. Focused on epidemic diseases in the Early American West, the conference looked primarily at smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis.
"These diseases hold relevance to the challenges of our time. Serious diseases still threaten us," said Herbert Swick, executive director of the Institute of Medicine and Humanities in Missoula.
Pierce Mullen, professor emeritus of history at MSU, said "Now that we have been faced with nascent bioterrorism threats, nationally and internationally, the best way to study them without endangering you and me is to study them historically."
Montana lost approximately 8,000 people in the influenza pandemic that struck in 1918-19 and flared up again in 1920, Mullen said. The first Montana victim was a 16-year-old girl in Scobey. Prime targets were males between 15 and 35.
"For Montana, influenza was the fourth horseman of the apocalypse," Mullen said.
Ellen Leahy, health officer for the Missoula City-County Health Department, said it took persistent smallpox epidemics and a lot of controversy before the Montana legislators agreed to create the State Board of Health in 1901. The now-defunct board made it easier to respond to epidemics on a state-wide basis, she said.
Connie Staudohar, adjunct professor in the Honors Program at MSU, said tuberculosis was originally seen as the counterpart to consumption. But after Montanans realized that TB was a communicable disease, they tried to control behaviors. They also developed a sanitarium near Deer Lodge.
Evelyn Boswell, (406) 994-5135 or evelynb@montana.edu
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