9 The Smallpox Epidemic

Harris also cited a story recounted by Vancouver anthropologist Charles Hill-Tout, who interviewed a Squamish elder named Mulks in 1896 who told of:

"A dreadful skin disease loathsome to look upon" which afflicted people who had been forced by hunger to eat salmon covered with sores.

"Men, women and children sickened, took the disease and died in agony by hundreds, so that when spring arrived and fresh food was procurable there was scarcely a person left of all their numbers to get it," Mulks told Hill-Tout.

"Camp after camp, village after village was left desolate."

Another account Harris mentioned, from Saltspring Island, said the pestilence was thought to have come on a contaminated wind from the south and that the clean north wind wasn't strong enough to block it away. The wind blew all winter "until most of the tribe were dead and there were too few left to bury their bodies."

In 1792, Captain George Vancouver, charting the coastline from Cape Flattery along the Strait of Juan de Fuca, around Puget Sound and up the coast to English Bay and beyond, reported the physical evidence of Mulks' account.

He observed a whole series of villages in which the buildings were in decay, weeds overgrew  the footpaths and everywhere there was evidence of a sudden death that had overwhelmed the inhabitants' ability to cope.

Some of them, like the "extensive" deserted village he found at the north end of the Strait of Georgia, had buildings and defensive fortifications "so skillfully contrived, and so firmly and well executed" that the naval commander found it difficult to attribute their construction to "untutored tribes" until the abandoned weapons, implements and clothing of the vanished inhabitants convinced him otherwise.

I turned to Edmond S. Meany's entertainingly annotated 1907 excerpt from the original journals, Vancouver's Discovery of Puget Sound, for the explorer's observations regarding the apparent depopulation of the Georgia Basin.

"In our different excursions," Vancouver wrote, "particularly those in the neighborhood of port Discovery, the scull, limbs, ribs, and backbones or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers.

"Similar relics were also frequently met with during our survey in the boats; and I was informed by the officers, that in their several perambulations, the like appearances had presented themselves so repeatedly, and in such abundance, as to produce an idea that the environs of port Discovery were a general cemetery for the whole of the surrounding country."

Vancouver found evidence of traditional ceremonial burials - some in canoes, some in baskets - and was at pains to prevent any "indignities" by his crew toward the human remains. But he also noted the signs of mass cremations, one in which the skulls and bones of 20 individuals were counted, and of hasty burials in which bodies had been tumbled into holes and only lightly covered with earth and, most distressing, many bodies obviously left to decay where they fell.

Whether these mortalities were the result of an epidemic or by recent warfare, Vancouver said he couldn't venture, but he was a shrewd observer and took note that whatever had happened, it hadn't been in the ancient past because although the deserted villages were rank with weeds, shrubs hadn't yet grown to any size, indicating that the events occurred "not many years since."

He clearly suspected smallpox was more likely than war.

"This deplorable disease is not only common, but it is greatly to be apprehended and is very fatal amongst them, as its indelible marks were seen on many; and several had lost the sight of one eye, which was remarked generally to be the left, owing most likely to the virulent effects of this baneful disorder."

Although ethnologists, anthropologists and the native Indians themselves have long been aware of that a smallpox epidemic either preceded or occurred at about the same time as first contact with European explorers and traders, scholarship has only recently begun to confirm the catastrophic magnitude of the event recorded in oral traditions.

The Chinook, the Snohomish, the Clallam, the Nitinat and the Dididaht, the Straits Salish in the Gulf Islands, the Cowichans, the Lummi, the Tsawwassens, the Semiahoo and all the Sto:lo tribes of the lower Fraser rapidly fell victim to the smallpox catastrophe of 1782.

So when Simon Fraser passed through the canyon into Sto:lo territory wearing the reputation of a returning supernatural transformer, the awe and dread with which he was greeted by local peoples is understandable.

If Boyd's analysis is right, Fraser may have arrived in the immediate aftermath of a second wave of smallpox which had pulsed through the region from 1800 to 1805 (he'd noted that smallpox was present in a camp he visited in the Interior).

The arrival of the fur trade from New Caledonia represented change, but Fraser was entering a landscape that had already been transformed and thrown into utter disarray by what can only be described as a demographic collapse which, in a telling quote by Karl W. Butzer that appears in the Harris paper, led to widespread settlement discontinuity.

"To grasp the implications of such discontinuity, one must imagine what almost total depopulation would mean in Italy or Spain.  .  ." Butzer wrote in 1992.

Power balances that had endured for centuries must have been overturned, some once-great nations had been obliterated, others had expanded into power vacuums left by the departed, the social order had been altered, great gaps had been rent in the traditions, histories and genealogies of an oral culture, survivors jockeyed for access to resources.

And behind all this, of course, people must have shared the same feelings that modern psychology now describes as "survivor's guilt," the feelings of despair, despondency, numbed emotions - "my senses have been charred" wrote soldier poet Wilfrid Owen in the carnage of the First World War - and personal guilt for not having died with the rest.

And so when Fraser entered Sto:lo territory in 1808, his canoes sweeping past the ruins of Sxwóxwiymelh without even noticing, he wasn't just passing into exotic new terrain, he was also encountering a grieving survivor culture and everything that entailed.

British Columbia, it turns out, was not just built upon the enterprise and ingenuity of the newcomers like Fraser who came to develop an empty, unused wilderness and wound up dominating the cultural landscape we share today. It was built on the bones of its previous inhabitants, their wealth and resources annexed by the ignorant and the uncaring, wrested from the massively diminished, despondent and psychologically traumatized survivors of a shattered world.

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