| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly, 32.1

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| Book Review | Western Historical Quarterly, 32.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874. By Robert Boyd. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press/Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. xv + 403 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, bibliography, index. $50.00.)

Discussion of pandemics and their ravages of the aboriginal population of the Northwest Coast of America was for decades cursory. Writers who approached the subject found a frustratingly incomplete record. Early explorers and travelers referred to abandoned villages or evidence of the ravages of diseases--most vividly of smallpox, but did little to enlighten subsequent generations on the identity and extent of the spread of infectious diseases, their demographic consequences, or the widespread changes that these events inflicted on the helpless victims who succumbed to the ailments. 1

Robert Boyd has crafted a masterful study of the pestilences that were a pivotal part of the experience of initial and ensuing contact between Euro-Americans and Indians. This book, which was begun more than two decades ago as a dissertation, has grown through years of research and collaboration with ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and folklorists. Boyd has tapped ship logs, travel narratives, Native autobiographies, reports of physical anthropologists and archaeologists encountering and examining human remains, and threads of tales of epidemics in Native oral literary texts. The evidence he assembles is compelling and chilling. . . .

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