Tribal fever: twenty-five years ago this month, smallpox was officially eradicated. For the Indians of the high plains, it came a century and a half too late.

Publication: Smithsonian

Publication Date: 01-MAY-05

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On may 4, 1837, Francis A. Chardon, the churlish head trader at Fort Clark, a fur-company outpost on the Upper Missouri River, reported in his journal, "Last night the Cock crowed five times." The superstitious Chardon then added: "Bad News from some quarter is expected."

But with the severe winter over, and the ice-clogged river finally thawed, Chardon's mood inched toward optimism. The nearby Mandan and Hidatsa tribes had gathered hundreds of packs of bison robes. Traders and Indians alike were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the steamboat St. Peters, churning upriver from St. Louis to pick up the furs and drop off its annual load of supplies from Pratte, Chouteau & Company, the western branch of John Jacob Astor's former American Fur Company.

The St. Peters, a 119-ton side-wheeler, docked at Fort Clark on June 19 and unloaded trade goods and Indian provisions. Also aboard was Chardon's 2-year-old son, Andrew Jackson Chardon, whom he had fathered with a handsome Lakota Sioux woman, Tchon-su-mons-ka. That night the crew members of the St. Peters joined in a boisterous "frolick," singing and dancing with the men and women at the Mandan's bustling village of Mit-tutta-hang-kush.

The next day the St. Peters headed upstream toward Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone. But in its wake it left a ticking time bomb. In addition to its cargo of supplies, the steamboat had been carrying several passengers and crewmen infected with variola major, the lethal virus feared for thousands of years by its better-known name: smallpox.

Smallpox had previously swept across the high plains from Mexico in the late 18th century, ravaging the Mandan and other tribes such as the Ojibwa, Pawnee and Arikara, whose population fell by as much as two-thirds. But by the 1830s the Mandan and the other tribes of the Upper Missouri had largely outlived their acquired immunity to the disease, and none had been inoculated or vaccinated. As a result, the voyage of the St. Peters triggered one of the most catastrophic epidemics recorded on the North American continent. "There is nothing in our experience we can compare it to," says W. Raymond Wood, an anthropologist who has studied Plains Indian cultures. "It was completely devastating."

The disease had announced itself when a St. Peters crew member had showed symptoms on May 2, two weeks after the boat left St. Louis. Ignoring suggestions that the man be put ashore,...

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