SOURCE: “‘A Terrible Sickness Among Them’: Smallpox and Stories of the Frontier,” in Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 136-57.

[In the following essay, Jaskoski compares Native American accounts of the smallpox epidemic in the Great Lakes region to Francis Parkman's version of events.]

I

Histories of North America have largely ignored, marginalized, or discounted the contributions of Native North American historians. As a result, the official story has been, as Annette Kolodny says, “univocal and monolingual, defining origins by what later became the tropes of the dominant or conquering language” (12). Kolodny calls for a reopening of the frontier, a reassessment “thematizing frontier as a multiplicity of ongoing first encounters over time and land, rather than as a linear chronology of successive discoveries and discrete settlements. … There can be no paradigmatic first contact because there are so many first encounters. And there can be no single overarching story” (13). Richard White's detailed exploration of the history of the Great Lakes area from 1650 to 1815 is a step in the direction Kolodny proposes, but even this impressive revisionist account of the pays d'en haut, as he calls it, omits the work of Native historians. However, White's paradigm of the eighteenth-century northwest frontier as a space defined by multi-interest negotiation, compromise, and improvisation provides a useful framework for examining the ways in which nineteenth-century historians, writing in the context of literary romanticism, conceptualized the frontier of the previous century.

Colonial history of the Western Hemisphere fascinated American historians a hundred years later. Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Willard Motley perceived conflicts like the conquest of Mexico or Peru as the working out in the hemisphere of the destinies of the European world powers. Parkman, in his multivolume series on the French and British in North America, returned again and again to the area around the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Ohio valley.

During the time Parkman's works were being published, between 1840 and 1900, a number of American Indian authors also wrote histories of the Great Lakes area. LaVonne Ruoff mentions some half dozen of these histories, devoted to accounts of the Tuscaroras, Ojibwas,¹ Wyandots, Iroquois, and Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the Native historians gave little attention to the European balance of power as acted out on the North American continent. Their agenda was different and more complex. They addressed a dual audience of Indians and non-Indians, and their texts reflect that mixed reception. Their aims were several: to preserve and explain their nations' pasts; to correct erroneous or biased ideas about Indians; to argue for compliance with treaty obligations; to present themselves as models contradicting stereotypes of savagism; and to promote better treatment, especially better education, for Indians.²

These works belong to a genre that Mary Louise Pratt, borrowing a term from Françoise Lionnet, calls “autoethnographic texts.” Applying the term to works by indigenous Latin American authors, Pratt says that an autoethnography is

a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them. … [These texts] involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of understanding. Autoethnographic works are often addressed to both metropolitan audiences and the speaker's own community. Their reception is thus highly indeterminate.

(35)

Such texts offer the possibility of recovering a less one-sided story of the frontier experience. The focus of this essay is a specific set of such contact stories: accounts of the coming of smallpox among the eighteenth-century Great Lakes Native peoples.

Contagious disease decimated the Western Hemisphere's indigenous populations on a scale that far outweighed military conquest. Of all the plagues carried with the conquest, smallpox was the most devastating; “war, famine and all other causes of death combined could not be compared to smallpox” (Sheehan 229). Comparison of Native American and colonizers' accounts of smallpox permits a unique insight into that liminal, chaotic geographical and psychological space known as the “frontier.”

Three nineteenth-century historians who wrote about the colonial Great Lakes area recorded accounts of smallpox epidemics and their origins. The most widely known smallpox story comes from Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1870). Ottawa political leader Andrew J. Blackbird relates a similar story from the same period of the French and Indian War in his History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (1887). William Whipple Warren, a Minnesota Ojibwa historian and legislator, offers two very different accounts of an epidemic that took place in Minnesota in the 1780s in his History of the Ojibway People (1885). Comparison of these historians' smallpox stories enlarges our understanding of the history and epidemiology of the disease in the particular period. The smallpox stories also offer insight into alternative conceptualizations of the experience that historians a century later envisioned as the “frontier.” One other Ojibwa historian, George Copway, who does not tell a smallpox story, offers in his Indian Life and Indian History (1860) such a paradigm for understanding events of the time—including smallpox epidemics—as they were experienced by the native communities.

II

The first of these smallpox stories to be published, and the most well known, is in the sixth edition of The Conspiracy of Pontiac by Francis Parkman. Parkman excerpts the correspondence of July 1763 between General Jeffery Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces, and Colonel Henry Bouquet, who was on his way from Philadelphia to relieve the besieged garrison at Fort Pitt. Parkman's treatment of the episode offers insight into his method and his self-perception as a historian. He says that Amherst, writing to Bouquet,

finds fault with Captain Ecuyer at Fort Pitt for condescending to fire cannon at [the Indians]. … This despicable enemy had, however, pushed him to such straits that he made, in a postscript to Bouquet, the following detestable suggestion:—

“Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.”

(Signed) J. A.

Bouquet replied, also in postscript:—

“I will try to inoculate the lllll with some blankets that may fall in their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself. As it is a pity to expose good men against them, I wish we could make use of the Spanish method, to hunt them with English dogs, supported by rangers and some light horse, who would, I think, effectually extirpate or remove that vermin.”

Amherst rejoined: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race. I should be very glad your scheme for hunting them down by dogs could take effect, but England is at too great a distance to think of that at present.”

(Signed) J. A.

There is no direct evidence that Bouquet carried into effect the shameful plan of infecting the Indians, though, a few months after, the small-pox was known to have made havoc among the tribes of the Ohio. Certain it is, that he was perfectly capable of dealing with them by other means, worthy of a man and a soldier; and it is equally certain that in relations with civilized men he was in a high degree honorable, humane, and kind.

(2:43-7)

Parkman footnotes Amherst's last “J. A.” signature with a discussion of the state of the manuscripts. He then adds that the reports of the subsequent smallpox outbreak came from a Gershom Hicks (2:45).³

The passage offers a specimen of Parkman's self-presentation as historian and a window into his strategy as author. Elsewhere in The Conspiracy of Pontiac his method is to present his story as a polyvocal text in which he weaves together the voices of eyewitnesses, participants, and contemporary commentators to produce a highly dramatic rendering of the events described. However, in this instance Parkman does not trust his texts to speak for themselves, and his handling of them suggests ambivalence and distress at the news his research has uncovered.

His narrator is caught throughout the passage between conflicting loyalties and judgments. The proposal to infect the Indians with smallpox is “detestable,” but Amherst has been “pushed” to make it; the plan is “shameful,” but Bouquet is honorable when dealing with “civilized men”; there is no evidence that Bouquet actually distributed infected blankets, but a smallpox epidemic did break out. Amherst's and Bouquet's words are inserted into both the text proper and the footnotes, and the narrator's comments appear in both places as well. Up to this point in his history, Parkman has been framing his story as part of a master narrative recounting a civilizing project (British colonization) that has been momentarily interrupted by a doomed uprising (Pontiac's war). Now that narrative falters as evidence of the colonizers' corrupt intentions and despicable means comes to light. The historian's language conveys his attempt to distance himself from means that he finds repugnant, even while he approves the end—the colonizing project.

Parkman's smallpox story illustrates a concept of frontier ideology outlined in Miller and Savage's discussion of Roman stereotypes of Germanic peoples. Characterizing an indigenous population as subhuman or animallike is necessary, they say, in order to define the region as “uninhabited” and thereby to justify settlement by the occupying power. In a footnote, Parkman offers just such reasoning, expressed in another of Amherst's letters: “I wish there was not an Indian Settlement within a thousand miles of our Country, for they are only fit to live with the Inhabitants of the woods: (i.e., wild beasts), being more allied to the Brute than the human Creation” (2:44). The emphases are Amherst's; his language, together with Bouquet's reference to the Indians as “vermin,” serves the function assigned to stereotyping: “Frontier stereotypes justify behavior that would normally be defined as illegal or immoral but which, on the frontier, directed toward the aboriginal people, becomes a predictable norm. Such behavior assumes that the aboriginal people are something less than human and reflects a radical human-versus-subhuman dichotomy” (Miller and Savage 131).

Francis Parkman was not critiquing frontier ideology, however, but (as Levin shows) offering it as a grand romantic drama. The smallpox episode compelled his imagination: He cites this “sufficiently startling … proposal of the Commander-in-Chief to infect the hostile tribes with the small-pox” (1:viii) as information important enough to justify issuing an extensively revised text in the sixth edition of The Conspiracy of Pontiac. The presentation of the smallpox episode is a melodramatic minidrama: Amherst and Bouquet take the main stage to carry on their blustering dialogue, and Parkman as narrator retreats to pedantic editorializing and footnotes.

This dramatic conceptualization emphasizes the psychology of individuals, which was Parkman's abiding interest as a historian. He outlines his view in the introduction to the second volume of The Conspiracy of Pontiac, where he confidently addresses a homogenous audience sharing his own values:

We have followed the war to its farthest confines, and watched it in its remotest operations; not because there is anything especially worthy to be chronicled in the capture of a backwoods fort, and the slaughter of a few soldiers, but because these acts exhibit some of the characteristic traits of the actors.

(2:3)

Notwithstanding his long stays among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, Parkman looks exclusively through the lens of his elite New England upbringing. The designation of the “farthest,” “remotest,” “backwoods fort” reiterates the notion of the frontier as a wild and uninhabited space, a void or chaos awaiting an act of creation—that is, settlement—and locates it at the margins of the civilized, creating center. The emphasis on the “characteristic traits” of important men (as opposed to “a few soldiers”) corresponds with those nineteenth-century historical theories that held “great men” to be the most important makers of history. To understand the character and psychology of the man behind the event would be to understand the event itself.

This theory can explain why Parkman not only includes but dwells on the blanket episode. As history, the Amherst-Bouquet conspiracy is inconclusive: Whether the British were actually responsible for the epidemic is never established. Seen as literary narrative, it lacks action and closure; the tale remains truncated and incomplete, dwelling on motivation and never establishing execution or consequences. However, although inconclusive as event or incomplete as narrative, the story is fascinating as psychology and character study, a revealing interlude in colonial history conceived as romantic drama.

III

A different perspective on a smallpox epidemic during the French and Indian War appears in Andrew J. Blackbird's History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan. Blackbird, Chief Mack-e-te-be-nessy, was a member of a distinguished 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.

Blackbird's book, like many similar 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, about 1757. Blackbird's 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 they were in former 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 box, with the strict injunction not to open the box on their way homeward, but only when they should reach their country; and that this box contained something that would do them great 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 opened 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 much 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 tradition says it was indeed awful and terrible. Every one taken with it was sure to die. Lodge after lodge was totally vacated—nothing but the dead bodies lying here and there in their lodges—entire families being swept off with the ravages of this terrible disease. The whole coast of Arbor Croche … was entirely depopulated. … It is generally believed among the Indians of Arbor Croche that this wholesale murder of the Ottawas by this terrible disease sent by the British people, was actuated through hatred, and expressly to kill off the Ottawas and Chippewas because they were friends of the French Government or French King.

(9-10)

The story's function within Blackbird's history and its relationship to other sources of information about contemporary smallpox epidemics show Blackbird to have been a careful historian, as well as a subtle shaper of narrative and a dedicated polemicist.

Before relating the smallpox story, Blackbird alludes to the relationship the British sought to establish with the Ottawas after the British victory over the French:

The British Government made such extraordinary promises to the Ottawa tribe of Indians. … They should receive gifts from her sovereign in shape of goods, provisions, firearms, ammunition, and intoxicating liquors! Her sovereign's beneficent arm should be even extended unto the dogs belonging to the Ottawa tribe of Indians. And what place soever she should meet them, she would freely unfasten the faucet which contains her living water—whiskey, which she will also cause to run perpetually and freely unto the Ottawas as the fountain of perpetual spring!

(8)

The account parallels the smallpox story that is narrated next. In both instances, delegations of Ottawas visit Montreal; the Ottawas hear extravagant promises; and a commodity that is proffered as having almost magically beneficent properties turns out to be an agent of horrible destruction. Trade becomes treachery. The secret of both flowing fountain and magic box is invisible death and long-lasting deterioration.

The striking image in each vignette is the gift: bountiful fountain, nested boxes. However, the rhetoric in the two passages contrasts in tone and technique. Sarcasm pervades the catalog of British-provided “goods, provisions, firearms, ammunition, and intoxicating liquors” and continues in the hyperbolic metonymy of the “sovereign's beneficent arm … extended unto the dogs” of the Indians and the metaphorical “faucet which contains her living water.” Figurative language is enriched with biblical echoes in fountain and spring.⁴ The box of smallpox described in the subsequent paragraphs might be another powerful figure of speech, recalling legends of hidden evil in caskets and Pandora's box. The description of the box, however, proceeds in a tone of factual understatement and journalistic reporting: The passage lacks rhetorical ornamentation of any kind, and events are reported as fact, not allegory.

The distinction between fact and trope, history and legend, is consistent with Blackbird's treatment of legend, myth, and history throughout his book. In describing a massacre on Mackinac Island, he distinguishes the massacre story, which he considers to be historical, from a romantic legend about the two survivors. The romance “may be considered, at this age, as a fictitious story; but every Ottawa and Chippewa to this day believes it to be positively so” (21). The chapter in which this episode is related begins with a headnote that reinforces the distinction by contrasting the “Earliest Possible Known History of Mackinac Island” and “Its Historical Definition” with “The Legends of the Two Who Escaped.”

Other passages in Blackbird's History appeal to conservative Christian readers and support his careful distinction between belief and evidentiary proof. Chapter 9 retells two of the great myths of “Nenaw-bo-zhoo,” the stories of the flood and the earth diver and of the hero swallowed by the water monster; in doing so, Blackbird points out parallels between these traditions and the biblical stories of Noah and Jonah. Blackbird's claims are positive, unapologetic, and undefensive: “These are some of the legends told among the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, as related in their own language, which are in some things quite similar to the records of the Bible” (78). Later, he comments on popular theories that Indians were descended from the “lost tribes” of Israel: “From evidence of working in metals and from the many other relics of former occupants, it is evident that this country has been inhabited for many ages, but whether by descendants of the Jews or of other Eastern races there is no way for us to determine” (96). In his skepticism Andrew Blackbird was ahead of many respected scientists of his day. In general, the narration of the smallpox story corresponds with his depiction of historical events as distinguished from legend, myth, or speculation.⁵

External evidence also supports the hypothesis that the box of smallpox was probably real. In the period Andrew Blackbird was writing about, the last fifty years of the eighteenth century, smallpox inoculation had gained widespread acceptance in England and was also practiced in France. Edward Jenner first derived smallpox vaccine from cowpox, which is harmless to humans and produces immunity to smallpox. However, until Jenner's vaccine was adopted in the latter part of the eighteenth century, immunization against smallpox was accomplished through inoculation, a very different procedure. Inoculation involved deliberate infection of a subject with live smallpox virus taken from an infected individual. The method produced immunity, but it was risky. The rates of death from inoculation were estimated at one in fifty, compared to one in six when the disease was contracted fortuitously (Miller 117-23, 125); however, among Indian populations the success rate for inoculation tended to be lower (Duffy).

The practice of smallpox inoculation is dated to the eleventh century in China and was known in Africa and the Middle East. Translations of Chinese medical treatises were a major means of promoting smallpox inoculation in eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas.⁶ The “mouldy particles” that Andrew Blackbird says caused an infection among the Ottawa Indians sound remarkably like the infectious matter introduced in the process of inoculation. Chinese medical textbooks offer descriptions of classic inoculation procedures. The Golden Mirror of Medicine, for instance, describes four methods of smallpox inoculation; two of them are as follows:

(1) The nose is plugged with powdered smallpox scabs laid on cotton wool … (2) … The powdered scabs are put into the end of a silver tube which is about six or seven inches long and curved at the end. The scabs are blown into the nose.

(Hume 140)

Is it possible that a container of smallpox matter collected for purposes of inoculation was available in Montreal, and that it came into the hands of a group of Indians from Michigan, who carried the infection home? Is it possible that whoever gave the box to the Ottawas had benign motives, hoping to enable them to become immunized against this terrible plague?

Jesuit missionaries in China were much involved in studying and translating classical Chinese treatises of all kinds, and were important agents in introducing Chinese knowledge and culture into Europe. Jesuits had been active in carrying out inoculation campaigns among indigenous peoples in Latin America. There was a Jesuit mission at L'Arbre Croche (Henry 47). Individual links for such a connection exist, but it is precisely the nature of the pays d'en haut as an “abyss” between cultures undergoing “contact” that precludes certainty on these questions. White refers to the history of this time and place as “a fractured society … preserved in fractured memory. … The fragments are the history” (2). Blackbird's box of smallpox is one such fragment: Its matching or contiguous pieces are missing in the interstices of those fractures.

The dating of this epidemic is also both problematic and revealing. Other records indicate that Blackbird's smallpox story actually conflates two different events. The opening sentences, dating the epidemic to the last years of the French and Indian War, allude to the great epidemic that passed throughout New France from 1755 to 1757. This plague was so devastating that military campaigns were aborted and trade had to be abandoned (Duffy 336; Stearn and Stearn 43-4); it decimated the populations around Fort Mackinac and on the islands of the straits connecting lakes Michigan and Huron. However, the destruction of L'Arbre Croche, a fifteen-mile-long town on the northwestern shore of the lower Michigan peninsula, which Blackbird mentions at the end of his story, took place some fifty years later, around 1799, in a different pandemic that swept through the former French territories from upper Canada as far south as Louisiana (Stearn and Stearn 51-2).⁷ It appears that Blackbird has synthesized the two episodes into a single narrative.

This collapsing of temporal distinctions between events that are related thematically but separate in time is characteristic of oral traditions. In the Preface to his history of the western Ojibwa, William Warren notes it as a difficult issue for the historian: “Through the somewhat uncertain manner in which the Indians count time, the dates of events … may differ slightly from those … endorsed by present standard historians as authentic” (26). Blackbird's rhetorical strategy serves an autoethnographic design. If his agenda is to “intervene” in the official story, then documenting chronology takes second place to the more pressing need to convey the instability, disruption, and devastation that characterized the frontier.

The story of the introduction of smallpox into the Ottawa population is an origin story, an account of a paradigmatic event that was reenacted many times. Its character as paradigm, however, does not conflict with the possible existence of the objects described in it. Furthermore, Blackbird's smallpox story displays a literarily satisfying wholeness lacking in Parkman's: There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, plausible (although speculative) motivation, and tragic consequences out of proportion to the actions that precipitate them.

IV

Two more smallpox stories, from William Warren's History of the Ojibway People, extend our understanding of historians' construction of the events of the period. During the 1840s William Whipple Warren, a young Ojibwa educated in New York and at mission schools, began collecting oral histories from Indians, traders, and settlers in Minnesota. After his election in 1850 to the Minnesota legislature, Warren reworked his stories with more material into a history of the western Ojibwa, which remained in manuscript at the time of his death in 1853. Warren's book, History of the Ojibway People, was eventually published by the Minnesota State Historical society in 1885. The History offers two different stories to explain a smallpox epidemic in the 1780s that decimated the Pillager band of Ojibwas of Leech Lake, Minnesota.

The first story opens in the summer of 1781, when the Leech Lake Ojibwas were camped on the Red River. A trader came upriver from the Mississippi; he was ill and could not leave his boat, but his assistants put out a lot of rain-soaked cloth to dry in the sun. The temptation was finally too much for the Ojibwas, Warren says; preparing for “their grand medawe rite … when they are accustomed to display all the finery of which they are possessed, caused them doubly to covet the merchandise of the sick trader” (257-8). Eventually all of the trader's stock, including a substantial amount of liquor, was appropriated. In the ensuing chaos “the rifled trader was obliged quickly to embark in his empty canoe, and leave the inhospitable camp of the Ojibways to save his life. It is said that he died of the sickness from which he was suffering, at Sauk Rapids, on his way down the Mississippi” (259). This event, Warren says, gained the Pillager band their name. It also precipitated the censure of other Ojibwas who predicted that traders would stay away.

Accordingly, the following spring (1782), a group of Pillagers took a supply of beaver skins to Fort Mackinac. There the British commandant gave

their leader a medal, flag, coat, and bale of goods, at the same time requesting that he would not unfurl his flag, nor distribute his goods, until he arrived into his own country.

With this injunction, the Pillager chief complied, till he landed at Fond du Lac, where, anxious to display the great consequence to which the medal and presents of the British had raised him in his own estimation, he formally called his followers to a council, and putting on his chief's coat, and unfurling his flag, he untied his bale of goods, and freely distributed to his fellows. Shortly after, he was taken suddenly sick, and retiring to the woods, he expired by himself as the discovery of his remains afterwards indicated.

(260)

His companions also died, and the sickness—smallpox—spread to many villages. Warren concludes that “it is a common saying to this day [the 1840s], that the white men purposely inflicted it on them by secreting bad medicine in the bale of goods, in punishment for the pillage which the Leech Lake band had committed on one of their traders” (257-60).

This is a tale of theft and retaliation, greed and revenge, and it makes sense of the epidemic in terms of retributive justice and punishment for transgression. It offers literary symmetry and moral paradigms: The invisible trader sick in his boat parallels the invisible infection later distributed in the bundles of trade goods; the cloths stolen for ceremonial finery are followed by infected textile goods; the trader's death alone on a remote river has its counterpart in the Pillager chief's death alone in the woods. Like Andrew Blackbird's story, it has a satisfying completeness as to motives, actions, and consequences.

However, William Warren was as uncomfortable as Francis Parkman when it came to believing the worst of British officers, and he searched out a different explanation of the same epidemic. This second smallpox story begins on Dead River, to the west of Leech Lake, among a war party of Kenistenoe, Assiniboine, and Ojibwa warriors. The men traveled west to the banks of the Missouri, where they attacked a Gros Ventre village. There was little resistance, and the raiders took a number of scalps, one of them “a giant in size … as large as a beaver skin” (261). The oversized scalp was believed to have special powers, and when on the fourth day of the party's homeward journey a man died, the victors threw away “the fearful scalp … every day, however, their numbers decreased, as they fell sick and died” (261). Only four Ojibwas survived to reach their village at Dead River, where the disease then killed almost the entire population. Refugees fleeing this plague

spread the contagion to Rainy Lake … from thence by the route of Pigeon River it reached Lake Superior at Grand Portage, and proceeded up the lake to Fond du Lac, where its ravages were also severely felt, and where the Pillager party on their return from Mackinaw caught the infection, and taking it to Sandy Lake, but a few of their number lived to reach their homes at Leech Lake, where it is said to have stopped.

(261-2)

This story satisfies a modern understanding of the etiology of smallpox; in contrast to Warren's first story, it emphasizes empirical theories of epidemiology, with themes of contamination and contagion plotted through a causal chain realized in the series of villages falling, one by one, to the fearsome disease. The two stories meet in a particular place and moment: at the village of Fond du Lac⁸ in 1882, when the presence of the Ojibwas fleeing the scourge at Dead River coincides with the Pillager chief's precipitate distribution of his bounty.

However, although it is scientifically plausible, this revisionist story offers neither the narrative completeness nor the well-wrought fit of motive, action, and result that characterize both Blackbird's story and the first (and more popular) story that Warren relates. Tracing the course of the disease back through the villages it destroyed offers no closure, but only open-ended potential for infinite regress back through ever more remote sources. Indeed, the story never does reach the original European vector. This is a story of motiveless malignity, of a terrible chain of effects without cause.

Warren's inclusion of both stories enables him to present his methodology as a historian. In a transition paragraph between the two smallpox stories, Warren explains—in language reminiscent of Parkman's—that the belief that the British commandant had purposely given the Pillagers infected goods

was a serious charge, and in order to ascertain if it was really entertained by the more enlightened and thinking portions of the tribe, I have made particular inquiries, and flatter myself that I have obtained from the intelligent old chief of the Pillagers, a truthful account of the manner in which the smallpox was, on this occasion, actually introduced among the Ojibways.

(260)

Here Warren uses the smallpox stories—much as Blackbird discriminates between history, legend, and allegory—to portray himself as a skeptical, judicious historian. Unwilling to credit sensational tales, he delves deeper, makes “particular inquiries,” and finally accepts an explanation on the authority of an “intelligent old chief” who represents the “enlightened and thinking portions of the tribe.” The result is a “truthful account” of how things “actually” happened, and the writer can even indulge in a little self-congratulation: “I … flatter myself.”

The presentation of competing stories is not characteristic of Warren's History as a whole. Apparently, the smallpox stories fascinated and disturbed him, just as similar information had troubled Parkman, and both authors reveal a personal engagement with their materials more transparently in these episodes than elsewhere in their respective works. Where Parkman dwells on psychology, Warren effaces individual identities and thereby emphasizes the archetypal shape of his first story and the relation of both stories to the locations where they take place. While Warren's second story purports to be the credible, the truly historical account, inclusion of the first, discredited, smallpox story fulfills several functions: It accounts for the Pillager name, it permits the author to display and validate his method, and it offers an almost mythlike paradigm of culture contact.

V

These three books have a curious intertextual relation—or lack of relation—to each other. William Warren's History of the Ojibway People was written in the 1850s but was not published until 1885, more than thirty years after the author's death at the age of twenty-eight. In collecting Ojibwa traditions during the 1840s, Warren could well have received eyewitness accounts of the 1780 epidemic. In any case, he was the first English-speaking historian to record for publication the supposition that smallpox was deliberately introduced by colonizers as a weapon of war or revenge. It is tempting to speculate whether, if Warren had written thirty years later, or if he had seen Parkman's documentary sources, he might have been less eager to defend the commander of Fort Michilimackinac.

The 1870 edition of Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac is the first of these three books to make public the evidence of a deliberate intention to spread smallpox among the Indians. If Parkman had been able to see Warren's earlier notes, would he have considered the Amherst-Bouquet plan such an anomaly? Andrew Blackbird singles out “the history of the life of Pontiac … written by a noted historian” from “a number of writings by different men who attempted to give an account of the Indians” (7) as a work to which he responds; however, he makes no mention of Parkman's infected-blanket story, even though it offers striking parallels to his own remarkable account of the infectious box. Did Blackbird see an earlier edition of Parkman's history or was he alluding to a book by another author? Besides being the subject of popular memoirs and histories, Pontiac's war was—as Flynn notes—a major motif in the Indian dramas of the nineteenth century; Blackbird could well have encountered any of these popular representations of colonial history. With the discovery of archival sources, other possibilities give rise to tantalizing speculations. What confirmation might Blackbird have found for his theory of motive if he had seen the British generals' correspondence?

Francis Parkman's smallpox record and William Warren's second smallpox story are incomplete but complementary; Parkman's is all intention, Warren's all results. As narration, each supplies the other's lack: Parkman offers confirmation for the deliberate introduction of contagion that is missing in Warren, and Warren details the conclusion of such an action. There is no middle—or rather, the middle is indefinite, an abyss—between the two different epidemics separated by seventeen years in time and hundreds of miles in distance. Beginning and ending, motive and result, remain unconnected. There is no turning point, no critical moment of opening and discovery. The fragmentariness itself expresses the disruption and conflict of the frontier. Neither the individual stories nor any attempt to collate them provides a congruent reconstruction of the period. Only tantalizing parallels remain, suggesting possible, unprovable, connections. The fragmentation that White says characterized the era persists a hundred years after the events as individual historians attempt, from the isolated fragments available to them, to construct a coherent story of the past.

VI

The Ojibwa historian/autoethnographers do not invoke the romantic mythos that governs Parkman's story of creation out of chaos, civilization displacing wilderness. Warren's first story and Blackbird's narrative embody a Native American paradigm, a different kind of origin story and one that centers on expiation as a response to violence and on healing instead of conquest as a resolution of disorder. A third Ojibwa historian of the period, George Copway, presents the archetypal myth.

Born in Canada in 1818, George Copway had a varied career. Missionary, newspaper editor, and friend of James Fenimore Cooper, he lived at different times in the United States and in Canada. In 1850 Copway published a history of the Ojibwa Indians, The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation (Littlefield and Parins 35). In 1858 the book was reissued under the title Indian Life and Indian History, by an Indian Author …, and subsequent reprintings carried this title. In the course of outlining Ojibwa religious traditions, always an important task for Indian historians, Copway relates the origin myth of “Me-day Worship” (160), the central healing ritual of the Ojibwa people. (This is the same ceremony that Warren calls “medawa”; conventional spelling today is usually Midewiwin.)

The myth begins by describing an edenic existence at the beginning of time: “When Keshamonedoo made the red men, he made them happy. The men were larger, were fleeter of foot, were more dexterous in games, and lived to an older age than now. The forest abounded with game, the trees were loaded with fruit” (163-4). God watched over the people, and powerful otherworldly beings, called Manitou, traveled between heaven and earth on a vine that humans were forbidden to climb. However, one young man, singled out by these beings for favors, determined to escape the envy of his fellows by moving to the heavens. His deserted grandmother climbed to the sky to bring him back, and the village was punished for her transgression. People complained of pain; “some were unable to walk, and others equally unable to speak. They thought some of these fell asleep, for they knew not what death was. They had never seen its presence. … There was no more hunting, no more games, and no song was sung to soothe the sun to its evening rest. Ah, it was then a penalty followed transgression. Disease was the consequence of the breaking of the vine. Death followed” (167). The people punished the old woman by burning her cabin and appealed to the Manitou, who told the Ojibwas that death was to be a part of their world, but that they would be initiated into the medicinal uses of plants. This wisdom would be transmitted thereafter through the “Medwiwin” medicine ceremony (163-7).

Like many other Native American tales, this is an origin myth for a ceremony, framed as a story of transgression, quest, insight, and reintegration. In such stories, orderly intercourse exists between the human world and the world of the powerful Other in a homogeneous, harmonious universe. Transgression of a boundary or violation of a prohibition produces chaos, violence, death, and disruption—that is, a liminal, borderland condition where laws no longer operate. Finally, after expiatory negotiations, the original ideal state can be recovered temporarily by being re-created in ceremony.

Aware of his non-Indian audience's Christian frame of reference, Copway refers to the beings from the world of the other as “spirits”; this was a common shorthand that many Indians used to explain such concepts to Europeans. The designation suggesting angels, however, misses the sense of participatory exchange present in Native American peoples' cosmogonies. What the Native person could have seen as a process involving risk, education, discipline, and enlightenment in an encounter with a terribly powerful master could be misread by Europeans as propitiation and appeasement of a divine being. Put another way, for the Ojibwa the Other was more relatedly natural than alien divine, and to be reckoned with in terms of power that could be appropriated or acquired as well as appeased. Seeing that they themselves were encountered in terms the Indians used to designate a powerful Other, Europeans sometimes made the mistake of assuming that the Indians thought they were gods. This was not true; as is clear from the smallpox stories just considered, Europeans were recognized as human. Yet they were Other, and in making sense of their contact with these Others, the Native Americans had available paradigms from tradition.⁹

There are striking parallels between George Copway's version of the Midewiwin origin myth and William Warren's and Andrew Blackbird's smallpox stories. All the stories involve a world of the Other, and all show protagonists who travel into this liminal, borderland world: The Ottawas travel to Montreal, and the Pillagers visit Fort Mackinac. There is a prohibition in each, and Warren's story involves transgression of the prohibition (echoing the earlier transgression of stealing the goods). Disorder and disruption ensue, followed by chaos and death, in each case interpreted as retaliation by the Other. In Warren's story, the Midewiwin ceremony itself is what the Pillager band was preparing for when the original trader visited them. Blackbird's story emphasizes the theme of the dubious value of getting too close to the Other and the ambiguous relationship of death and medicine, both issuing from the same source. Indeed, if Blackbird's polluted box really existed as a container for smallpox inoculation, the event would emulate the myth in a remarkable way. Each story explains how death and possible annihilation came to the people.

If the myth is a paradigm for stories of the introduction of smallpox among Indians, then it shows that discovery is a two-way enterprise, not the sole prerogative of the invader or colonizer. The central figures of Blackbird's and Warren's stories are not passive victims waiting to receive an inexorable plague. They are discoverers: They go out to the dangerous, borderland region of the Other and they return with power. The power is destructive, but the myth explains that such power can eventually be appropriated and reconstituted with expiation and the proper ritual.

Blackbird, Warren, and Copway were themselves like the protagonists they wrote about. Each of these men wrote explicitly with the intention of dis-covering to a non-Indian audience the hidden, unnamed, silenced side of the frontier story. Their books may be seen as having a function similar to that of the Manitou of the myth: Like the tutelary beings who guide and teach humans (and unlike Parkman's narrative, which is addressed exclusively to the colonizers), the autoethnographies offer the prospect for a reweaving of communication and relationship across an abyss of misunderstanding and violence. Their project of intervening in the master narrative is profoundly optimistic, resting on assumptions that a receptive audience can be found and that a ceremony of education and healing can occur.

This essay began with the hypothesis that the story of the American frontier is incomplete if it considers only the perspective of the colonizer. Examination of these smallpox stories and the histories from which they come suggests that there is no single story. The frontier, by definition, belongs to the colonizer. So Parkman's dismissal of events in “backwoods forts” will always be a different story from Warren's and Blackbird's careful delineation of places that are named, known, and meaningful. Both Blackbird's and Warren's texts portray a society that resembles the pays d'en haut White describes: a conflicted—but not a chaotic—place that is defined by negotiation, compromise, and attempts to work out differences through solutions that approximate desiderata for either side. To the colonizer the frontier may be a “liberated zone” where, far from central authorities, no laws can be made to apply. To the colonialist historian it may be a wilderness waiting to be tamed. To the Native peoples, by contrast, frontier lawlessness originates in the disruption of an ordered existence by a catastrophe of virtually demonic appearance and dimension. Frederick Jackson Turner's definition of the frontier as “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (quoted in Hudson 13) may be true from either side, but the application of the terms will be reversed depending on whose point of view governs the story.

Francis Parkman's and William Warren's smallpox stories of infected blankets and infected scalps, no matter how complementary they are in their narrative structures, cannot be synthesized to make a coherent history. There is no “master narrative”; there is no omniscient viewpoint; there are only multiple stories of the frontier. This is the point at which frontier stories acquire contemporary relevance, for this condition of mutually exclusive stories of the American space still prevails. Smallpox is gone,¹⁰ the frontier is not: The frontier condition of multiple visions of the North American space persists. To understand that condition requires attention to the multiple constructions of it.¹¹

Notes

1. The current spelling is Ojibwa. Variant spellings in the titles and texts of individual works are retained in title citations and quotations (e.g., Chippewa, Ojebway, Ojibway).

2. See Clements' essay in this volume for an overview of the aims of early autobiographers and historians.

3. Knollenberg, working with archival sources unavailable to Parkman, offers further evidence that the plan was indeed carried out.

4. Blackbird, a devout Protestant convert from Catholicism when he wrote his History, would have found several allusions in the Revised Standard version of the New Testament, among them the Gospel of John 4.4 (“But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”) and Revelation 7.17 (“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes”). Blackbird's implicit contrast of the ideals of Christianity with the actions of Christians belongs to a tradition that includes much abolitionist literature, as well as writings by other nineteenth-century Native North American authors (see the essays by Murray, Dannenberg, and Peterson in this volume).

5. For contrasting analyses of the relationship of myth and history in two other smallpox stories, see Feer, and Marriott and Rachlin.

6. Several accounts point out that African slaves taught European colonizers in the Western Hemisphere how to inoculate for smallpox. Catholic missionaries carried out inoculation campaigns among Indians in Latin America, which were moderately successful when they were accepted, although not as effective as among Europeans. British colonists evidently did not attempt to inoculate Indians to prevent smallpox. Later, with the introduction of Jenner's vaccination method, Jefferson promoted the first of a number of U.S. government campaigns to immunize Indian populations against smallpox (Duffy; Sheehan; Stearn and Stearn).

7. Tanner's map of smallpox and other epidemics shows a major smallpox epidemic in the islands of the straits in 1757-8 (as well as in 1670-1 and 1681-2) and another in the Little Traverse region, where L'Arbre Croche was located, in 1800-1 (170).

8. This Fond du Lac is at the western tip of Lake Superior; present-day atlases show a Fond du Lac reservation at the site of the old village.

9. White points out that the Europeans, originally regarded as manitou, or grandfathers, suffered a demotion in rank when the French governor of Canada accepted the designation “father” (36). White also uses “manitou” as both the singular and the plural form, perhaps to avoid distracting English connotations of the Ojibwa plural “manidog.”

10. Smallpox is almost gone. In probably the most impressive project of mutual cooperation ever undertaken, eradication of smallpox throughout the world was completed in 1979. There is presently a plan to destroy all remaining laboratory stocks of variola, the smallpox virus. This deliberate annihilation of a species has, paradoxically, raised questions in the scientific community as to the wisdom of doing away with any life form, no matter how invidious (Caldwell).

11. I am grateful to the American Philosophical Society for a grant that supported the initial research for this essay. A California State University Foundation grant also assisted production of the final essay.

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