THE GREAT ISLAND OF KADIAK. 113 



au effort to save themselves. The traders everywhere became 

 seriously alarmed, as the force of sea-otter hunters was rapidly 

 decreasing, and exerted themselves to their utmost in staying- the 

 epidemic, which seemed to be carried from one village to the other 

 in vessels and by canoes. But the only medicines which can be 

 used in the safe and successful treatment of this complaint w^ere 

 regarded as unworthy of notice by the suffering natives, who, not 

 feeling immediatel}^ relieved after taking them, would then totally- 

 ignore their further use. 



Bad enough are the indigenous ills of the savages in Alaska, 

 They were, however, nothing to the horrors which followed the im- 

 portation of small-pox by the Kussians in 1838-39. This terrible 

 scourge swejDt like wildfire up from its initial point at Sitka, over 

 the whole length of the Alaskan mainland and island coast, until it 

 faded out in the far north where it had nothing to prey upon. It 

 actually carried in its grim grasp one-half of the whole population 

 then living in that large area to an abrupt and violent death — sev- 

 eral districts were so afflicted that not a soul escaped — every 

 human being was extei'minated ; it was exceedingly fatal and viru- 

 lent in the Sitkan archipelago. We, knowing the filth and exjDos- 

 ure of the lives of these people, can readily understand how they 

 fell down and were crushed under the march of this disease.* As 

 miglit be supposed the Kussians lost no time in thoroughly vacci- 

 nating the survivors ; and they have been faithfully followed, in 

 this duty, by our own sailors and traders who now live in the covm- 

 try. 



Another imported evil, the measles, is almost as deadly up here 

 among the natives as small-pox. "While it is a simple trouble arous- 

 ing no especial anxiety with us, yet in this climate, together with 

 the careless methods of life, it assumes a black form and becomes 

 malignant and fatal. The last extended attack took place princi- 

 pally in the villages of the Kadiak district in the winter of 1874- 

 75, where it so alarmed and impressed the sojourning members of 

 an Icelandic Commission as to shake their desire to emif^rate to 



* La Perouse, who touched on this coast in 1786 at Litooya Bay, under 

 the flanks of Mount Fairvveather, decLares that he saw marks of the small-pox 

 on the savages who were there then ; most likely what he saw was the scar of 

 scrofulous sores. In 1843-44 another small-pox outbreak on the Aleutian 

 Islands took place, but the people had been vaccinated in the meantime, and 

 nothing serious came of it. 

 8 



