The Epidemic of 1837
North Dakota
In the summer of eighteen thirty-seven, a steamboat traveling upriver from Saint Louis reached Fort Union carrying smallpox. The disease spread to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara villages along the Missouri with catastrophic speed. The Mandan, who had numbered roughly two thousand people at the beginning of that summer, were reduced to fewer than one hundred fifty by autumn.
Entire villages vanished. The Hidatsa lost perhaps half their population. The Assiniboine lost similar numbers.
Eyewitness accounts from Fort Union describe scenes that the traders themselves could not fully record. The epidemic of eighteen thirty-seven was one of the deadliest single-season disease events in North American history.
