THE GEORGE CATLIN INDIAN GALLERY. 461 



The accounts given by two or three white men, who were amongst the Maud an s 

 during the ravages of this frightful disease, are most appalling and actually too heart- 

 rending and disgusting to he recorded. The disease was introduced into the country 

 by the Fur Company's steamer from Saint Louis, which had two of their crew sick 

 with the disease when it approached the Upper Missouri, and imprudently stopped to 

 trade at the Mandan village, which was on the bank of the river, where the chiefs 

 and others were allowed to come on board, by which means the disease got ashore. 



I am constrained to believe, that the gentlemen in charge of the steamer did not 

 believe it to be the small-pox; for if they had known it to be such, I cannot conceive 

 of such imprudence, as regarded their own interests in the country, as well as the fate 

 of these poor people, by allowing their boat to advance into the country under such 

 circumstances. 



It seems that the Mandans were surrounded by several war-parties of their more 

 powerful enemies the Sioux, at that unlucky time, and they could not therefore dis- 

 perse upon the plains, by which many of them could have been saved; and they were 

 necessarily inclosed within the piquets of their village, where the disease in a few 

 days became so very malignant that death ensued in a few hours after, its attacks; 

 and so slight were their hopes when they were attacked that nearly half of them 

 destroyed themselves with their knives, with their guns, and by dashing their brains 

 out by leaping headforemost from a thirty-foot ledge of rocks in front of their vil- 

 lage. The first symptom of the disease was a rapid swelling of the body, and so very 

 virulent had it become that very many died in two or three hours after their attack, 

 and that in many cases without the appearance of the disease upon the skin. Utter 

 dismay seemed to possess all classes and all ages, and they gave themselves up in 

 despair, as entirely lost. There was but one continual crying and howling and pray- 

 ing to the Great Spirit for his protection during the nights and days; and there be- 

 ing but few living, and those in too appalling despair, nobody thought of burying the 

 dead, whose bodies, whole families together, were left in horrid and loathsome piles 

 in their own wigwams, with a few buffalo robes, &c, thrown over them, there to 

 decay and be devoured by their own dogs. That such a proportion of their com- 

 munity as that above mentioned should have perished in so short a time seems yet, 

 to the reader, an unaccountable thing ; but in addition to the causes just mentioned 

 it must be borne in mind that this frightful disease is everywhere far more fatal 

 amongst the native than in civilized population, which may be owing to some ex- 

 traordinary constitutional susceptibility ; or, I think, more probably to the exposed 

 lives they live, leading more directly to fatal consequences. In this, as in most of 

 their diseases, they ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water whilst 

 in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out. 



Some have attributed the unexampled fatality of this disease amongst the Indians to 

 the fact of their living entirely on animal food ; but so important a subject for inves- 

 tigation I must leave for sounder judgments than mine to decide. They are a people 

 whoso constitutions aud habits of life enable them most certainly to meet most of its 

 ills with less dread, and with decidedly greater success, than they are met in civilized 

 communities; and I would not dare to decide that their simple meat diet was the 

 cause of their fatal exposure to one frightful disease, when I am decidedly of opinion 

 that it has been the cause of their exemption and protection from another, almost 

 equally destructive, and, like the former, of civilized introduction. 



During the season of the ravages of the Asiatic cholera, which swept over the greater 

 part of the western country aud the Indian frontier, I was a traveler through those 

 regions and was able to witness its effects ; and I learned from what I saw, as well 

 as from what I have heard in other parts since that time, that it traveled to and over 

 the frontiers, carrying dismay and death amongst the tribes on the borders in many 

 cases, so far as they had adopted the civilized modes of life, with its dissipations, 

 using vegetable food and salt ; but wherever it came to the tribes living exclusively 



