Fever & Ague

A drawing of the Willamette Valley by Henry Eld of the Wilkes expedition, 1841.
Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

. . . one of my Indians began to show symptoms of the prevailing fever. . . . The heat was intense and the poor sick native was oblidged to lie down in the bottom of the canoe in great distress. When we reached our evening encampment he was burning with a high fever. . . . The darkness and damp, chill masma of the Willamette soon closed over us, and under their cover the poor fellow, being unable to endure the pains of fever longer crawled to the river's brink and tried to allay the burning inward heat by draughts from the running stream.
--Henry Perkins describing a trip from the mission at The Dalles to the Willamette Mission, 1843. The Indians he describes here died during the journey.

Fever and ague, or malaria, swept through the Pacific Northwest after being introduced by European and American traders and settlers in the 1800s, killing up to ninety percent of the region's native people. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Kalapuyan Indians numbered three thousand people. By 1841, only six hundred survived.

The marshes of the Willamette Valley provided breeding grounds for malaria-infected mosquitoes. Kalapuyans traveled from bog to bog to gather food, increasing the risk they would contract the disease. Once sick, valley Indians relied on sweat lodges and then immersed themselves into the chilly waters of the Willamette River. These pratices sometimes brought on pneumonia.

As they did elsewhere, epidemics ripped at the very fabric of Kalapuyan society and culture. They also made it possible for Euro-American settlers to populate the valley with little resistance from its original inhabitants who soon found themselves outnumbered. Finally, the epidemics mark the onset of a long and difficult tale of Native survival in their Willamette homeland.