Pox Americana
 Elizabeth A. Fenn
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Hill & Wang/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  ISBN: 0809078201

If we think that America has never known an infectious epidemic other than the Great Influenza after World War I, we'd be wise to consider the smallpox pandemic that swept the length & breadth of the North American continent just two hundred years ago.

Two hundred years can be measured in grandfathers & grandmothers. Your grandfather could have been born before the Civil War & might well have been given the name Abraham Lincoln before your family's name. Your grandmother's grandmother could have been a child during the 1812 War & her grandmother could have arrived just after the Great Smallpox epidemic of 1775-82 had swept across the land, wiping off the face of the earth tribe after tribe, settlement after homestead.

Pox Americana is a fascinating way to learn about the early years of this nation when cultures collided across the continent. Sometimes, as Elizabeth Fenn discovered during her research, the dread virus was an invisible passenger upon an unsuspecting carrier that would arrive in a tribe of otherwise healthy people & within weeks, the entire community would be dead. Sometimes it was intentionally sent forth by our wily forefathers to do their deadly work.

It is hard, probably impossible, for us today to grasp just how precarious life was back in those “good old days” -- how the implacable changes of the seasons affected our food supplies & our health; how supply & demand of anything impacted our abilities to strive & thrive. Being poor had nothing to do with it -- knowing how to survive did! No one, however, knew how to survive contagions -- we simply lived through them, never to get the disease again or we died.

And die we did, native & nonnative, by the thousands. Elizabeth Fenn, who teaches history at George Washington University & is the coauthor of Natives and Newcomers, has chronicled the destructive, desolating power of the smallpox that haunted our ancestors from coast to coast; from Russian promyshlenniki (hunters & traders) who first explored Alaska & then enslaved its residents to America's vast breadbasket, where entire native communities of farmers & hunter-gatherers were wiped out in months.

Back in 1721 Bostonians were in an uproar, declaring the new concept of inoculation that Dr. Boylston had begun experimenting with, as “a distrust of God's overruling care.” Meanwhile in England & Europe other delving minds were also experimenting. I remember a cartoon reprinted in one of my history books that showed people with miniature cows crouched on their arms -- certainly enough to terrify the non-initiated!

Let's start with George Washington who, in 1751, survived a bout of smallpox during the hurricane season in the Caribbean where he & his brother had sailed in hopes that the climate would alleviate Lawrence's persistent symptoms of the tuberculosis. By 1775 Variola major, which had successfully depleted Europe's population some 300 years before, was on the rampage “from Mexico to Massachusetts, from Pensacola to Puget Sound. For the virus, the great pestilence it multiplied rapidly, and it traveled vast distances. But in its wake it left death and despair, killing more than a hundred thousand people and maiming many more.”

Forty years later, when George Vancouver sailed along the coastline of the Strait of Juan de Fuca he was perplexed by the deserted villages. Then he discovered the bones “...promiscuously scattered about.” Why had these people died all at once? Everywhere he explored he found the same conditions & when he set up camp at Discovery Bay he observed a large village “capable of containing an hundred inhabitants.” Except the place was littered with bones. What had happened?

Further on as they charted the shoreline of the Puget Sound this intrepid crew did come across three “stout fellows” who bore the “much pitted mien & blindness” that howled smallpox. How did it get there?

In the chapter Vigilance we follow the footsteps of one John Patten, a rural New Englander who got caught up in the rage militaire of the Revolutionary War of 1775 & volunteered as a Continental soldier. John Patten had never had smallpox. “It is no coincidence that smallpox and independence fever erupted together or that contemporaries wrote of republicanism itself spreading “l[i]ke a Contagion...” For a virus that needs a constant supply of new, unexposed human beings...conditions were perfect.” In the summer of that year Boston was under siege from not only the King's men. “According to a civilian who escaped on July 10, the population was “very sickly: from ten to thirty funerals a day, but no bells allowed to toll.” George Washington's solution was to quarantine anyone with symptoms in the town of Brookline while any military cases were sent to a hospital set up at Fresh Pond near Cambridge.

General Howe & the British army were not immune either, they were, however, much more familiar with the concept of inoculation & they set about a mandatory inoculation of their rank & file. It is known that during the winter, when smallpox was raging through besieged Boston, this general permitted its citizens to leave. The author comments that no one knows if the timing of this release was intentional -- what it did for sure was spread infected people far & wide as they fled to safety behind the Continental Army Lines.

Meanwhile, clear across the continent, a sickly Franciscan missionary astride a mule, came upon a Hopi pueblo in New Mexico. No one wanted him there & so dejected & rejected he left, leaving behind a deadly calling card. He was not alone in bringing smallpox to the far west for eruptions began in Mexico City & all up the California coastline, faithfully following other missionaries' footsteps.

I cannot do justice to the scope & breadth of this author's research. Because of space & time, I must leave out what happened in New Orleans & the South as well as around the Hudson Bay & across Canada. The Pox Americana dealt more death than any army ever heretofore amassed for whatever reason.

In the Epilogue Elizabeth Fenn summarizes the sweep of the disease & offers statistics, she also comments: “The pestilence can teach us the ways in which other upheavels -- native warfare, missionization, the fur trade, and the acquisition of horses and guns...reshaped human life on the North American continent. The movement of the virus from one human being to another shows us how people actually lived in the late eighteenth century. For despite the political, social, and racial boundaries of the day, people rubbed elbows.” This is the way I love to learn about history.

Pox Americana is a compelling read, a dread-filled chronicle of another aspect of our story & Professor Elizabeth Fenn has written a rich & interesting story with a huge Notes Section, as befits a teacher of history!

An update on our own times: appearing in The New York Times: “The health secretary and President Bush have been discussing bioterrorism preparedness since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,” said Kevin Keane, a spokesman for Mr. Thompson, “the White House gave Mr. Thompson the go-ahead to ask Congress to pay for the 300 million doses, so the country could be prepared for 'the worst-case scenario.'”

“Federal health officials are negotiating with four drug companies to buy 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine — enough for every American — and are gingerly discussing the possibility that ordinary Americans might someday once again be vaccinated against the disease.”
(12/16/01)

Rebecca