Smallpox and the Kwakwaka’wakw

Published in the North Island Gazette January 31, 2013

The arrival of European traders brought many new diseases to the North Island, including measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases.

 

The most ravaging of these was smallpox, spread through droplet infection, usually through personal contact but also through contact with items like blankets.  Taking a month to run its course, symptoms included the presence of small sores all over the body and a high fever.

 

Smallpox may have first reached the Pacific Northwest in either the 1520s as a part of the Northern Hemisphere smallpox pandemic, or during the first recorded coastal pandemic of the 1770s.  There was some oral history reported to anthropologists that blamed the disappearance of the Hoyalas peoples of Quatsino on an epidemic illness around this time.

 

Indigenous peoples in North America were very susceptible to smallpox, as it had never been endemic to the area, and people had no natural immunity. 

Ethnographer Franz Boaz noted that there is a Kwakwaka’wakw word which means a man whose body “was covered all over with mouths which laughed and shouted all the time.”  This is believed to refer to the presence of smallpox sores.

 

In 1847 Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, George Simpson, reported after a trip to Northern Vancouver Island that “curiously enough, they (Kwakiutl) have been exempted from the small-pox.”  

 

Simpson noted that the HBC was in possession of a vaccine, which they offered, but local Chiefs refused.  Simpson noted that they did not push the issue, feeling “that our medicine would get the credit of any epidemic that might follow, or perhaps the failure of the hunt or the fishery.” First Nations did not possess quinine, which Europeans successfully used to treat the active disease.

Drawing of a person with smallpox by an unidentified aboriginal artist.

 

In March 12, 1862, the Brother Jonathan arrived in Victoria en route to the Columbia River. After the ship left on March 13 it was discovered that with the ship smallpox had arrived in Victoria. Shortly after, another steamer, the Oregon, also arrived in Victoria with smallpox on board.

 

At the time there was debate in the local Victoria papers about whether a quarantine should be enacted, but only a voluntary hospital was set up for those suffering from the virus. Legislators were concerned that a quarantine would unnecessarily restrict the liberty of individuals.

 

After it was clear that there was a full blown outbreak in Fort Victoria,  HBC officials banished the large population of Indigenous who had come to trade from the Fort, and told them to go home.  Some scholars estimate this population numbered between 2500 and 5000 Indigenous peoples. 

 

Although a vaccination was available at the time, and many missions along the coast had inoculated Indigenous communities successfully, many Indigenous people in the early stages of active infection were physically removed from the area of Fort Victoria and told to return to the North Coast, Haida Gwaii, and the North Island. They spread smallpox along their travel routes. 

Fort Victoria around the period of the outbreak of the coastal smallpox epidemic.

 

Unfortunately the official journal from Fort Rupert for the year 1862 has been lost, but the reports of many ships’ captains in the area at the time report the ravages of the disease.  They note that “hundreds were swept away within a few days” and “the tribe native to that section was nearly exterminated.” 

 

There were some reports that unscrupulous traders would unwrap dead bodies and re-sell blankets to other Indigenous communities, thus further transferring the disease. There is not a lot of evidence to indicate that this was a widespread practice, and the number of non-Indigenous people in many communities along the coast at this time would have been quite low, so it is not clear what, if any, measurable impact this practice would have had.

 

Young and healthy people were largely effected, which had an impact on reproduction rates for communities.  Survivors were identifiable because of their extensive scarring. The first case was reported in March and by December the epidemic of 1862 was over.

 

An 1850 census of First Nations in the area placed the Kwakwaka’wakw population at about 8 850, and in 1866 the estimate was 3 750, which would be an overall loss of 53%. Some reports put the impact as high as 90% of Indigenous populations. The impact was so great that some settlers at the time said that for many years afterward human bones littered the coast.

 

Some anthropologists have commented that it is remarkable that First Nations cultures were able to retain so much of their knowledge and cultural traditions with the loss of so many community members.  The Kwakwaka’wakw are truly a resilient people.