The Mandan Smallpox Epidemic of 1837

In June of eighteen thirty-seven, the American Fur Company steamboat St. Peter arrived at Fort Clark on the Upper Missouri River. Passengers aboard were infected with smallpox. The Mandan people had no immunity.

Five years earlier, the artist George Catlin had spent weeks in the Mandan villages, documenting their culture, their ceremonies, and their earthlodge architecture in hundreds of paintings and field notes. He recorded a people of approximately sixteen hundred people at Fort Clark alone, a nation with a continuous cultural tradition stretching back centuries on the Missouri River bluffs.

By the end of eighteen thirty-seven, fewer than one hundred fifty Mandan survived.

Francis Chardon, the Fort Clark factor for the American Fur Company, kept a journal through the epidemic. His entries record the progression of deaths in the villages across the river, sometimes dismissively, sometimes with horror. The Hidatsa and Arikara, neighboring nations, also suffered severe losses, though they survived in larger numbers than the Mandan.

What the epidemic could not destroy, though it came close, was Mandan culture itself. The language, the ceremonial practices, the material traditions, the oral histories survived through the survivors and through the generations that followed. The MHA Nation, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation at Fort Berthold, describes its history as persistence, not disappearance. They are still there.

The catastrophe of eighteen thirty-seven is not a monument. It is a context for everything that came after: the Missouri River, the earthlodge sites, the Garrison Dam, the reservation. The same people.