VACCINATION. 65 



speaking without facts in our assertion that savage tribes suffered equally with the 

 rich ami the civilised. Mr. Simon was indebted for the ensuing interesting 

 paragraph to Mr. Lloyd's translations of "Prince Maximilian's Travels in the Interior 

 of North America " : 



"The disease first broke out about the loth of June, 1837, in a village of 

 Mandans, a few miles below the American fort, Leavenworth, from which it spread 

 in all directions with unexampled fury. The character of the disease was as 

 appalling as the rapidity of the propagation. Among the remotest tribes of the 

 A.ssiiiiboins, from fifty to one hundred died daily. The patient, when first seized, 

 complains of dreadful pains in the head and back, and in a few hours he is dead ; the 

 body immediately turns black, and swells to thrice its size. In vain were hospitals 

 fitted up in Fort Union, and the whole stock of medicines exhausted. For many 

 weeks together our workmen did nothing but collect the dead bodies and bury them 

 in large pits ; but since the ground is frozen, we are obliged to throw them into the 

 river. The ravages of the disorder were the most frightful among the Mandans that 

 ever broke out. That once powerful tribe, which by accumulated disasters had 

 been reduced to 1,500 souls, was exterminated with the exception of thirty persons. 

 Their neighbours, the Big-bellied Indians and the Bicorees, were out on a hunting 

 excursion at the time of the breaking out of the disorder, so that it did not reach 

 them till a month later; yet half the tribe was already destroyed on the first of 

 October, and the disease continued to spread. Veiy few of those attacked recovered 

 their health ; but when they saw all their relations buried, and the pestilence still 

 raging with unabated fury among the remainder of their countrymen, life became a 

 burden to them, and they put an end to their wretched existence, either with their 

 knives and muskets, or by precipitating themselves from the summit of the rock near 

 their settlement. The prairie alt around is a vast field of death, covered with 

 imbtiried corpses, and spreading for miles pestilence and infection. The Big-bellied 

 Indians and the Ricorees, lately amounting to 4,000 souls, were reduced to less than 

 half. The Assiniboins, 9,000 in number, roaming over a hunting territory to the 

 north of the Missouri, and as far as the trading-posts of the Hudson's Bay Company, 

 are, in the literal sense of the expression, nearly exterminated. They, as well as the 

 Crows and the Blackfeet, endeavoured to fly in all directions, but the disease 

 everywhere pursued them. At last every feeling of mutual compassion and 

 tenderness seems to have disappeared ; every one avoided the others. Women and 

 children wandered about the prairie seeking for a scanty subsistence. The accounts 

 of the situation of the Blackfeet are awful. The inmates of above one thousand of 

 their tents are already swept away. They are the bravest and most crafty of all the 

 Indians, dangerous and implacable to their enemies, but faithful and kind to their 

 friends. But veiy lately we apprehended that a terrible war with them was at hand, 

 and that they would unite the whole of their remaining strength against the whites. 

 Every day brought accounts of new armaments, and of a loudly-expressed spirit of 

 vengeance towards the whites ; but the small pox cut them down, the brave as well 

 as the feeble, and those who were once seized with this infection never recovered. It 

 is affirmed that several bands of warriors who were on their march to attack the fort 

 all perished on their way, so that not one survived to convey the intelligence to their 

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