Cox re voyageurs and Native people around Astoria

[Mike Cleven]

At 10:52 AM 1/25/99 -0800, David Robertson wrote:
>Cox, Ross.  "Adventures on the Columbia".  Portland:  Binfords & Mort,
>s.d.  ['Binfords & Mort's hundred page, illustrated, large type FAR
>WESTERN CLASSICS edited by Alfred Powers ... No. 2']
>
>This edition contains much more Metis French than anything else of
>linguistic interest to our list.  In fact, it looks like a good source for
>the former.  The one other item I find is on
>
>* page 56:  '[Duncan M'Dougall] assembled several of the chieftains and,
>showing them a small bottle, declared that it contained the smallpox...if
>the white people were not attacked or robbed for the future, the fatal
>bottle should not be uncorked.  He was greatly dreaded by the Indians, who
>... called him by way of preeminence "the great smallpox chief".
>
>This I cite because it looks like another possible example of a direct
>translation from the Chinook Jargon.  But it brings up today's quiz
>question:  Qhata mayka wawa "smallpox" khapa uk ChInUk Wawa?

It's funny (not "funny ha-ha") that this tale comes from someone named Cox.
 Because there's a story of an HBC (NWC?) expedition led by a Mr. Cox, who
met a large army of Nicola warriors (presumably in the Merritt-Spences
Bridge area; I can't remember) and won their friendship by "inoculating
them against the pox" with a festering cowpox pustule he kept in a
handkerchief.  I've never been able to figure out if the historian (I think
it's in Akrigg) is telling this story disingenuously, in that he could have
been _infecting_ them rather than _inoculating_ them.  Does anyone know
about vaccination techniques on the frontier, if any, or does this sound as
suspiciously like deliberate infection as it does to me?  I can't remember
the year, although something tells me it was the 1830s, and I don't know
about the schedule of smallpox epidemics in the Nicola territory......