Recording a Pandemic
A Pictorial History of Smallpox
It has been two years since the Becoming Texas gallery opened at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. With the exhibition starting the story of Texas 16,000 years ago and ending with Mexican independence in 1821, there is no shortage of stories to tell about the many diverse peoples who made these lands home.
An ever-changing display of artifacts tells these stories, reinforces the idea that a better understanding of our history is always developing, and ensures there is always something new to experience in the gallery. Safely kept in archives, libraries, museums, and in private and family collections around the world, artifacts and primary source documents are the keys to our past that help us understand who we are today. These stories from our past also help us see that struggles people faced in the past are not dissimilar to ones we face today.
Thanks to the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Matthew Davila, a member of the Standing Rock Lakota Sioux Tribe, we had the tremendous honor of being able to display over the past two years a Lakota “winter count,” a pictorial calendar used to record a tribe’s most important events from year to year. For the Lakota, a year was marked from the first snowfall to the following year’s first snowfall. Upon the first snowfall, elders in each community would decide on one particular event that would serve as a historical reminder to be painted on the winter count hide to commemorate the year. The pictographs on the hide allowed history keepers to recall the event as it was shared from generation to generation. When a winter count had filled a hide, copies were often made to distribute the stories in order to guarantee the history of the tribe was well preserved.
This particular winter count is an original copy of Lone Dog’s 1800s Winter Count given to Gordon William Smith, a young man from Fort Worth, who collected American Indian artifacts as a boy. In 1934 he was inducted into the Lakota tribe and given the name “High Bear.” Although the Lakota were not living on the lands we now call Texas, Lone Dog’s Winter Count tells of an important and difficult story that greatly affected tribes throughout the Americas, and sadly resonates with events we face today.
Starting at the center and spiraling outwards, Lone Dog’s Winter Count covers 70 years of history. The first image, in the center (representing the winter of 1800–1801), is a block of 30 parallel black lines in three columns. This commemorates 30 members of the tribe that were killed in a war with enemies. Going to the next year (1801–1802), the image is of a figure covered in red dots. That year many members of the tribe died of smallpox, a highly infectious disease. From the 1500s to well into the 1800s, it is estimated that smallpox and other European diseases killed as many as 90% of American Indians.
European accounts of smallpox and its effect on native populations began early after the Spanish sacked the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlan and made it Mexico City in 1521. In the Florentine Codex, a large manuscript compiled by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún between 1545 and 1590, an illustrated entry about smallpox vividly describes the impact on the Nahua people. In the account the friar says the disease, “brought great desolation: a great many died of it.”
By the 1700s, governments knew how easily smallpox spread, and communities enacted quarantines for people infected with the disease. In a 1786 letter, the Governor Cabello of the Province of Texas received orders from Mexico City that any Spanish subject infected should be placed in a quarantine far away from the settlements, “located in such a way that the prevailing winds running through the area shall not carry the sickness to the nearby towns and ranches.”
Other documents written during multiple smallpox epidemics recount the devastation caused to the Lipan Apache. The Lipan could only leave their dead where they died as missions and presidios denied them any assistance with the infected. In 1786, the Spanish distributed a vaccine for smallpox to some of its colonists. In another letter Governor Cabello acknowledges receipt of instructions on how to administer the vaccine, but he states, “I seriously doubt if (that purpose) can really be accomplished in the terms which are prescribed, given the wretchedness, poverty, and deplorable circumstances (currently being experienced).”
The last outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949. Over 400 years after it was first documented, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. Behind the successful eradication of smallpox were the doctors and scientists who relied in part on the historic accounts of the disease to study its spread. By looking at the past, they could assess how to stop its deadly infection.
Prior to the current pandemic we are facing, the sad story of smallpox we present in Becoming Texas, was to tell the story of its devastation on American Indians and how it greatly shifted the balance of power to European colonists. Hopefully, the recounting of this difficult story now offers a perspective about how our ancestors struggled with deadly diseases, and an examination of their methodology will influence best choices and practice in our own time.
This post is contributed by Franck Cordes, Curator, at the Bullock Texas State History Museum.
Support for the Bullock Museum’s exhibitions and education programs is provided by the Texas State History Museum Foundation.
Major support for Becoming Texas provided by Bobbie Nau, John L. Nau III, the Joan and Herb Kelleher Charitable Foundation, the Mays Family Foundation, the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation, Joan and Bruce Blakemore, H-E-B, the Dan L Duncan Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ed Rachal Foundation, the Stedman West Foundation, the West Endowment, and the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation.
