$24.95
Rotting Face – Smallpox and the American Indian
R. G. Robertson details the history of smallpox and the profound impact the disease had in Europe, Asia and the Americas, where it killed or maimed rich and poor, royalty and peasant.
Robertson’s gripping and graphic account dispels some popular myths about the role of whites in the spread of this devastating disease.
Description
Rotting Face – Smallpox and the American Indian
An event that forever changed the face of the west.
On April 17, 1837, the steamboat St. Peter’s pulled away from a St. Louis and began it annual journey up the Missouri River. Its mission was to deliver supplies to fur trading posts on the upper Missouri.
On that spring day, no one aboard the St. Peter’s could have imagined the effect the voyage would have on Western history and the American Indian culture. The steamboat carried a shipment not listed on its manifest — a disease so horrible Indian parents sometimes killed their children to save them from terrible agony. Its scientific name was Variola major. Its common name was smallpox. Many natives knew it as “Rotting Face.”
R. G. Robertson details how the smallpox epidemic of 1837-1838 altered the political and social structure of Native American tribes. In less than a year the disease virtually destroyed the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arickara cultures. It claimed entire villages of Blackfeet, stripping that proud nation of its power and wealth, leaving it too weak to stop invasions by other tribes and white settlers.
Before it ran out of human fuel, Rotting Face claimed an estimated 20,000 natives, doing more damage to the Northern Plains tribes in one year than all the military expeditions ever sent against American Indians.
ISBN – 0-87004-419-2
329 Pages
Hardback
6.25″ x 9.25″
Caxton Press, 2001