Smallpox Blankets during the French Indian War :: Smallpox Disease

A different perspective on a variola epidemic during the french and Indian War appears in Andrew J. Blackbirds History of the capital of Canada and Chippewa Indians of Michigan. Blackbird, Chief Mack-e-te-be-nessy, was a member of a distinguished Ottawa family from the northwesterly 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, desire many similar autoethnographic texts, is a combination of autobiography, history, ethnography, and polemic. He opens with a established 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, ab stunned 1757. Blackbirds story is unique because of the unusual disease vector. It was a notable fact that by this time 1763 the Ottawas were greatly reduced in numbers from what the y were in former times, on account of the small-pox which they brought from Montreal during the French state of war with Great Britain. This small pox was sold to them shut up in a tin cut, with the strict injunction not to open the blow on their focusing homeward, except only when they should reach their country and that this disaster contained something that would do them great good, and their people The foolish people believed really at that place was something in the box supernatural, that would do them great good. Accordingly, after they reached home they undecided the box but behold there was another tin box inside, smaller. They took it out and opened the second 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 frequentl y what it was, and a great many closely inspected to try to find out what it meant. But alas, alas pretty soon burst out a terrible sickness among them. The great Indian doctors themselves were taken sick and died. The customs duty says it was indeed awful and terrible. Every one taken with it was sure to die.