Another smallpox epidemic sweeps the Missouri River…

Another smallpox epidemic sweeps the Missouri River region between 1837 and 1838 after an American Fur Company steamboat, the S.S. St. Peter, had traveled westward up the Missouri River from St. Louis.

Its passengers and traders aboard had infected the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes.

There had been approximately sixteen hundred Mandan living in the two villages at this time, and the disease effectively destroys the Mandan settlements.

Almost all the tribal members, including the chief, Four Bears, die by October.

Estimates of the number of survivors vary from only twenty-seven individuals to up to one hundred and fifty, though most sources usually give the number one hundred and twenty-five.

A native tribe that had migrated from the Ohio River valley, the Mandans lives along the banks of the Missouri River and two of its tributaries—the Heart and Knife Rivers—in present-day North and South Dakota, having.

Speakers of Mandan, a Siouan language, they stand in contrast with other tribes in the Great Plains region in the establishment of permanent villages instead of leading a nomadic existence, tracking herds of buffalo.

These permanent settlements feature round, earthen lodges surrounding a central plaza.

While the buffalo is key to the daily life of the Mandan, agriculture and trade supplement it.

First encountered by Europeans in 1738, the Mandan’s friendliness and willingness to trade has brought many traders and fur trappers to their villages over the past several decades.

Diseases are beginning to take their toll on the natives in the west, as they have already done in the east.

The Mandan had first been plagued by smallpox in the sixteenth century and had been hit by similar epidemics every few decades.

Attacks by neighboring tribes and epidemics of smallpox and whooping cough, had significantly diminished the Mandan's population by the turn of the nineteenth century.