McDougal, smallpox, and the Natives around Astoria

[Leifer]

"...It was on this occasion that McDougal is said to have practiced a piece of sharp strategy on the Indians. The smallpox had ravaged the coast a few years before, and the Indians remembered it with the utmost terror. McDougal assembled the chiefs who he believed to be in conspiracy against the Astorians, drew forth a bottle, told them that it contained the smallpox, which he could spread among them by simply uncorking the bottle, and threatened to smite them on the first evidence of hostility. The terrified Indians promised peace and kept their word..."

--Chittenden, "The American Fur Trade of the Far West" Vol. 1, Chapter 11

So it's 1811 and this is taking place after the folks at Astoria (by the Columbia river) find out about the "terrible disaster to the Tonquin -- nothing less than her capture and destruction by the Indians, and the massacre of her crew." So McDougal, one of the partners who was in charge at the outpost comes up with the above idea. Without getting into modern ethics and all of that, and based solely on safety and survival, I think this was a pretty ingenious idea that at least worked for the time being. I'm sure this type of a ruse had been used before, but, I find it fascinating that McDougal would use a bluff that 170 some odd years later would be a viable reality: unleash a virus from a bottle.

Thoughts on McDougal's bluff? Other such similar ruses from the Fur Trade?

[Rod]

Well, there was J.A. Hamilton & Larpenteur's bluff to overawe the Assiniboinne at Ft. Union as detailed in Forty Years a Fur Trader. There's also been a paper written on the fear of pillaging the fur trade forts.....not sure, but it might be in one of the volumes of Papers of the North American Fur Trade Conference...I'll have to look. A common thread in those stories usually involves a keg of gunpowder and a candle or torch, and the threat to blow everyone in the fort up. Of course, in the case of the Tonquin that actually happened.

Rod

[Rod]

Found the article I was thinking of----'A Fear of Pillaging: Economic Folktales of the Great Lakes Fur Trade' by Bruce White, as printed in "The Fur Trade Revisited; Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference". Great book, by the way, if you can find a copy it's well worth reading.

Rod