Smallpox Blankets during the French Indian War :: Smallpox Disease

A different perspective on a weepox epidemic during the cut and Indian War appears in Andrew J. Blackbirds History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of mile. Blackbird, Chief Mack-e-te-be-nessy, was a member of a dis fannyguished Ottawa family from the northwest shore of the Michigan lower peninsula. He wrote his History late in life, after a long career in education, politics, and public service. Blackbirds book, like many homogeneous autoethnographic texts, is a combination of autobiography, history, ethnography, and polemic. He opens with a conventional reference to inaccuracy in current histories. In the course of correcting the record he relates the story, preserved by elders of his nation, of a smallpox epidemic during the height of the French and Indian War, nigh 1757. Blackbirds story is unique because of the unusual disease vector. It was a notable position that by this time 1763 the Ottawas were corkingly reduced in numbers from what they were in for mer times, on account of the small-pox which they brought from Montreal during the French war with Great Britain. This small pox was sold to them shut up in a tin blow, with the strict injunction not to open the box on their representation homeward, merely only when they should reach their country and that this box contained something that would do them large good, and their people The foolish people believed really there was something in the box supernatural, that would do them great good. Accordingly, after they reached home they clear the box but behold there was another tin box inside, smaller. They took it out and open(a) the bet on box, and behold, still there was another box inside of the second box, smaller yet. So they kept on this way till they came to a very small box, which was not more than an inch long and when they opened the last one they found nothing but mouldy particles in this last little box They wondered very much what it was, and a great many closely in spected to try to find out what it meant. But unluckily, alas pretty soon burst out a terrible unhealthiness among them. The great Indian doctors themselves were taken sick and died. The tradition says it was indeed fearful and terrible. Every one taken with it was sure to die.