253 
Smallpox was the deadliest, but by no means the only, plague 
that afflicted the aborigines. Typhus carried off one-third of the 
Micmac in Acadia in 1740, and in the winter of l!)02-.3 destroyed 
the entire Eskimo population of Southampton island in Hudson bay. 
About 1830 the British Columbia Indians suffered heavy losses from 
influenza, a malady that spared none of the tribes during the great 
ej^idemic of 1918.^ I^ulmonary afflictions, especially tuberculosis, 
attacked the natives at an early date and ever since have caused a 
high mortality. Between 1891 and 1901, a malady that ofiicial records 
designated as “ consumption ’’ carried off 65 Indians of the Sarcee 
tribe alone, reducing its already diminished population from 240 to 
203. These diseases, if known at all in America before its discovery 
l)y Euro])eans, were certaiidy very rare, and they exacted a heavier 
toll because the natives had never develoj^ted the slightest immunity. 
Of shorter duration than diseases, because Europeans finally 
awoke to its menace, but, while it lasted, almost equally destructive 
of aboriginal society, was alcohol. The Indians, unlike many other 
)n-imitive peoples, had no alcoholic beverage in prehistoric times, and 
from the earliest days of settlement they abandoned every restraint 
in theii’ frenzy for the white man’s firewater. ‘‘ They do not call it 
drinking unless they become drunk, and do not think they have been 
drinking unless they fight and are hurt. However, when they set 
about drinking, their wives remove from their wigwams the guns, 
axes, the mounted swords (spears), the bows, the arrows, and (every 
weapon) even their knives, which the Indians carry hung from the 
neck. . . . Immediately after taking everything with which they 
can injure themselves, the women carry it into the woods, afar off, 
where they go to hide with all their children. After that they have 
a fine time, beating, injuring, and killing one another. Their wives 
do not return until the next day, when they are sober. At that time 
the fighting can be done only with the poles of their wigwams, which 
they pull to pieces to allow this use.”- 
These excesses that Denys witnessed in the Maritime Provinces 
during the seventeenth century, every trader and explorer observed 
throughout the length and breadth of Canada down to the middle 
of the nineteenth. Whisky and brandy destroyed the self-respect of 
1 About tlirpr Inindred Iiubaiis in llio Mackenzie valley, almost 10 per cent of the population, died 
of inlliienza in 192S, 
-Den>'s: Op. cit., p. 444. 
