The smallpox epidemic that ravaged the people of the Great Plains in 1837 and 1838 was believed to have begun in spring of 1837 when a deckhand became ill aboard an American Fur Company steamboat named S.S. St. Peter[1]. The steamboat traveling up the Missouri River to Fort Union from St. Louis, docked at Fort Clark near the two earth-lodge villages of the Mandan people on June 18 1837. The disease spread to the Mandan people [2]. In July 1837, the Mandan numbered no more than 2,000, by October that number had dwindled to 138. On August 11, Francis Chadron, a trader at Fort Clark, wrote,“I Keep no a/c of the dead, as they die so fast it is impossible”[3].
By the time the S.S. St. Peter made it to Fort Union several deck hands had died, but only Jacob Halsey, an American Fur Company clerk, showed visible signs of the disease. In an attempt to stop the spread of the disease fort personnel performed primitive inoculations. Pus from Halsey's skin eruptions were used to inoculate approximately thirty Native American women and several white men living in or around the fort. Within two weeks, the women who received the inoculations began dying from the disease[2].
As the disease reached a peak at Fort Union bands of Native Americans continued to arrive at the fort for trade.
Halsey wrote:
Later, a longboat was sent to Fort McKenzie via the Marias River. At Fort McKenzie the disease spread among the Blackfoot people housed there[1]. The epidemic continued to spread into the Great Plains killing thousands during the fall of 1837, but by and large died out that winter. In the end, it is estimated that two-thirds of the Blackfoot population died along with half of the Assiniboines and Arikaras, a third of the Crows, and a quarter of the Pawnees[3].
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The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder reviewed a claim by Ward Churchill, comparing to the cited source his claim that in 1837 the United States Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians by distributing blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, and reported "Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says." Most other historians who have looked at the same event disagree with Churchill's interpretation of the historical evidence, and believe no deliberate introduction of smallpox occurred at the time and place Churchill claimed it had.[4][5]
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