| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian. By R. G. Robertson. (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 2001. xviii, 329 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-87004-419-2.)

This book may appeal to general readers who do not know that uncounted multitudes of Indians died of various diseases introduced from Europe. "The natives were conquered by a far more efficient killer than the white man's guns," R. G. Robertson writes. "The Indians of the western hemisphere were vanquished by smallpox—a disease many of them called the rotting face" (p. 311). Robertson is a retired stock options marketer.

The fur trade of North America carried smallpox to Indians of the continental interior. At least sixteen epidemics—smallpox, bubonic plague, and measles—swept away native populations in the eighteenth century, and by the time of Robertson's account smallpox had killed more than half of the native inhabitants. To demonstrate the role of the fur traders, Robertson traces the spread of pox among village tribes of the upper Missouri River region—Mandan, Arikara, and Hidatsa—by employees of the St. Louis fur trader Francis A. Chardon in 1837 and 1838. His timeline follows Chardon's Journal at Fort Clark 1834–1839, edited by Annie Heloise Abel (1997).

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