"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[Henry Kammler]

> >
> >How many of realize that smallpox was as bad or far worse for American
> >natives than the black plague ever was for Europeans?
>
> Well, that's a fairly subjective statement.  In some parts of Europe, the
> mortality WAS over 90%, sometimes over 95%, and the plague hit in
> successive waves, with complete social chaos and cultural breakdown in its
> wake.  50% is usually cited by demographers about the Black Death, but no
> one really knows, there being no accurate record-keeping in those days.

Do you have sources for that? "Our" collective hitorical consciousness in ye
goode olde Germany always has pestilence as the most horrible plague in the
first place, mortality rates would reach 50% or more in the crowded cities, not
so in the rural areas, though, where the majority of the people lived. Smallpox
also demanded a high toll but was not too rare and thus left its survivors
immunized. The deadliest mixture was civil war coupled with pestilence, pox and
influenza like in 1618-1648.

> The deadliest of the plagues to hit the Northwest wasn't smallpox.  It was
> "the mortality", the unknown disease that was introduced by an irate Boston
> trader against the peoples of the Lower Columbia and the Lower Fraser in
> the early 1820s.  The fatality rate there is also unknown, but appears to
> have been over 95%.  Apparently it was a hemorrhagic fever of some kind
> (like Ebola or the deadliest super-influenzas), and was somehow brought in
> from the tropics.......

Evidence points towards measles as being the disease called "mortality"
(1824/25), mortality was probably 10-20%. Boyd gives a good overview in the
Handbook of NAI, vol.7, Northwest. Smallpox came in waves of one generation
apart (1770, 1801, 1836/38) with an initial mortality of over 30%, and less
than 20% in the subsequent waves (due to immunity). Smallpox was probably the
biggest contributor to population loss over most of the time because of its
frequent reocurrence. The hot river valleys of Oregon and Washington may be an
exception:

> Has me wondering what the infection rate among natives in the frontier era
> for malaria was; or whether that mostly afflicted the colonists?

Malaria ("fever and ague") was the deadliest of all infections, it raged in the
1830s and killed three-forths of the native population around Ft.Vancouver in
one year (1830). Mortality between 1830 and 1841 in the Willamette and Columbia
Valleys was an average 92% (from an estimated 13,940 to 1,175), unequally
distributed. Only 2 per cent of the Kiksht speaking peoples in the Portland
Basin survived the mentioned period (Boyd 1990: 137ff.).

So much about that.
Henry