Smallpox and the Turning (1835–1838)

The smallpox epidemic that swept Russian America and the Northwest Coast in 1835–1838 — a demographic catastrophe handled here soberly, with named scholarly mortality ranges rather than a single invented figure. The chapter sets out the toll among the Tlingit, the Sugpiaq, and the Aleuts; the Russian vaccination effort and Veniaminov’s encouragement of it; and the contested interpretation, going back to Veniaminov’s own account, that the epidemic — which the shamans could not halt but vaccination could — shook Tlingit confidence in their traditional religion and opened a slow path toward Orthodoxy.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / American (canonized 1977)

A Demographic Catastrophe

In the mid-1830s a wave of smallpox moved up the Northwest Coast of North America and into Russian America, reaching Sitka late in November 1835 and persisting along the coast and among the Tlingit into 1838. It struck the Sitka Tlingit in mid-January 1836 and “raged for two months,” then spread south to the Tsimshian and Haida (Gibson, “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast,” 1982–83, drawing on Veniaminov’s own Zapiski and on Tikhmenev’s history of the Russian-American Company). The epidemic fell across the years of Veniaminov’s Sitka ministry and confronted him directly with the deadliest force in the colonial encounter — not the soldier or the trader, but the imported disease against which native peoples had no immunity.

Smallpox (Variola) was the great killer of the contact era across the Americas. Spread by respiratory droplets and by contact with the rash, scabs, and contaminated objects, it incubates for about twelve days and then produces high fever followed by the characteristic eruption of pustules over the whole body; in “virgin-soil” populations with no prior exposure and no acquired immunity, case-fatality could be staggering, and the disabling effect of so many adults falling sick at once — with no one left well enough to fetch water, tend fires, or nurse the dying — multiplied the mortality beyond what the virus alone would have caused. Northwest Coast peoples had met smallpox before: a great epidemic in the 1770s–1780s, well before the Russians settled Sitka, had already torn through the coast. But a generation or more had passed, the children and young adults of the 1830s had no immunity, and the disease found them defenseless. This long, recurring pattern of imported epidemic disease among Alaska Natives is the subject of Robert Fortuine’s Chills and Fever (1989), within which the 1835–38 smallpox is one episode in a centuries-long demographic disaster.

The mortality must be given as the scholarship gives it: as a set of named, attributed figures, not a single number. The principal modern demographic study, James Gibson’s “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast,” supplies the ranges, itself drawing on Veniaminov, Tikhmenev, the company surgeon Blashke, and Bancroft:

The Tlingit overall. Gibson estimates the Tlingit population fell “from 10,000 in 1835 to 6,000 in 1840 — a mortality of 40 percent,” and notes they “never fully recovered” (Gibson 1982–83, citing his own demographic reconstruction).
Local Tlingit losses. In particular villages the toll was far higher: Gibson reports that “up to 400 Tlingits died in one village near Sitka,” and that “almost half” of the Tlingit at Sitka itself perished, with 161 deaths recorded there; he gives a fatality rate of about 25 percent among the Stikine and Sitka Tlingit, while noting some “straits” villages were devastated and others scarcely touched (Gibson 1982–83).
The Sugpiaq (Kodiak). Of about 2,200 native people on Kodiak Island, Gibson reports 736 died — roughly one-third — because, like the Tlingit, they largely refused vaccination (Gibson 1982–83).
The Aleuts. By contrast the Unangan (Aleut), who accepted vaccination and even helped administer it, suffered far less — a fatality rate Gibson places at roughly 6 to 13 percent, with the Atka district “negligibly affected.” (Gibson rejects a competing claim that the Aleut population fell by nearly half, arguing it wrongly folds the Kodiak Sugpiaq into the Aleut count.) (Gibson 1982–83.)

[Disputed: estimates of the total native dead in Russian America from the 1835–1838 epidemic vary widely. Gibson treats the Tlingit loss as about 40 percent (10,000 to 6,000) and the Kodiak loss as about one-third; he explicitly rejects Bancroft’s higher figure of “50 to 60 percent” as too high. Region-wide aggregate figures for Alaska on the order of thirteen thousand deaths circulate in popular compilations but are not pinned to Gibson or to the medical-historical literature; the safest course is to give the named ranges above and attribute them.] The wider medical history of disease in early Alaska is treated by Robert Fortuine, Chills and Fever (1989), which sets the 1835–38 smallpox within the long, grim record of epidemic mortality among Alaska Natives.

Vaccination

What made the difference between the peoples who were spared and the peoples who were devastated was vaccination. By the 1830s the practice introduced by Edward Jenner at the close of the eighteenth century was well established: inoculation not with smallpox itself (the older, dangerous practice of variolation) but with cowpox (vaccinia), a mild related virus that conferred cross-immunity to smallpox at little risk. The technique was simple in principle — lymph or matter taken from a vaccinated person’s pustule was introduced into a scratch on the arm of the next — but on the Northwest Coast it ran into a brutal logistical problem: there was no refrigeration and no reliable way to keep the live vaccine viable across the months-long sea voyage from European Russia. Vaccine was kept “alive” by passing it arm-to-arm from one freshly vaccinated person to another, a chain that broke whenever a link failed, and the dried lymph sent from Russia frequently spoiled in transit and arrived inert (Gibson 1982–83; Fortuine, Chills and Fever, on the mechanics and limits of early vaccination in Alaska).

The Russian-American Company nonetheless ran a vaccine program — fragile, undersupplied, but real. The company surgeon at Sitka, Dr. Eduard Blashke (Blaschke), vaccinated Russians, creoles, and resident Aleuts; feldshers (surgeon’s assistants) vaccinated on Kodiak; an earlier round had immunized about 298 people at Sitka and Kodiak in 1828–29 (Gibson 1982–83). The Aleuts, already disposed to trust the Russians, took the vaccine and survived; the Tlingit and the Kodiak Sugpiaq, suspicious of a procedure pressed on them by the colonial power and of a thin scratch said to ward off a disease they could see killing the unmarked, largely refused, and died in far greater numbers. Their refusal was not irrational superstition but the predictable response of independent peoples to an unfamiliar intervention urged by outsiders they had reason to distrust — and it had lethal consequences.

Veniaminov actively encouraged vaccination, and the sources credit him with instructing the Tlingit in how to be vaccinated against the disease (The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity, OrthoChristian.com [orthochristian.com]; Gibson 1982–83). Here the priest and the man of science were one: the same Veniaminov who kept barometric records and built instruments grasped what the vaccine could do, and he lent the Church’s moral weight to a public-health measure the Tlingit were inclined to reject. By the end of 1837 more than 250 Tlingit had been immunized — too late for the many the epidemic had already killed, but a real change in the relationship between the Tlingit and the colony, and a vivid demonstration, to the survivors, that the Russians possessed knowledge that worked where their own remedies had not.

The Contested Turning

Here the history must be careful, because the standard narrative of the mission draws a direct line from the epidemic to a softening of Tlingit attitudes and the first real openness to Orthodoxy — and that interpretation, while it goes back to Veniaminov himself, deserves to be stated as interpretation, not as a mechanical law of cause and effect.

Veniaminov set down his own reading of the epidemic’s effect on the Tlingit in his Zapiski, and Gibson summarizes it as a threefold shift (Gibson 1982–83, paraphrasing Veniaminov): first, the disease fell most heavily on the older, most traditional, most anti-Russian generation, the carriers of the old order; second, it broke confidence in the shamans, who “in spite of their guardian spirits, perished together with those who sought their help,” their remedies powerless against the contagion; and third, it convinced many Tlingit of the benefit of vaccination and the superior knowledge of the Russians, as they watched the vaccinated live and the unvaccinated die. Veniaminov drew from this the conclusion — in language Gibson rightly flags as “ethnocentric and sanctimonious” — that the epidemic marked a dawn of “enlightenment” among the Tlingit.

The modern historian must hold two things together here. On one hand, the demographic and attitudinal shift is real and is reflected in the conversion record: Gibson notes about twenty Tlingit baptized in 1839 alone (as many as in the entire period before 1830), some hundred more (including two former shamans) by Easter 1843, and a couple of hundred further by the mid-1840s, with a dedicated Tlingit church begun at Sitka in 1846 (Gibson 1982–83, citing Veniaminov and Tikhmenev). On the other hand, to narrate this simply as a providential “turning” is to risk baptizing a catastrophe: the opening came because a foreign disease had killed a large fraction of a people and discredited their religious leaders in their grief. The sober account, which Veniaminov’s own honesty partly supports, is that the epidemic created the conditions in which his patient, respectful, non-coercive method (see The Principles of Mission) could at last find a hearing among the survivors — not that the deaths were a divine instrument of conversion.

That distinction — between reporting what the sources attest and certifying a providential reading of mass death — is exactly the discipline this collection owes its subject and the Tlingit alike.

What the Sources Will and Will Not Bear

It is worth being precise about the mechanism the sources actually describe, because it is easy to slide from it into something the sources do not support. The epidemic did not convert anyone. What it did, on Veniaminov’s own telling, was remove obstacles: it thinned the ranks of the generation most committed to the old order and to resistance; and it discredited the shamans, whose authority rested precisely on their claimed power over sickness and death and who were seen to die alongside, and as helplessly as, those who came to them for healing. In a society where the shaman was the visible guarantor of the traditional religious world (see Novo-Arkhangelsk), his public failure against a disease the Russians could demonstrably prevent shook the whole edifice of confidence that had kept the Church out. Into that shaken world Veniaminov’s long-prepared, non-coercive approach could finally speak, and some among the survivors — including, strikingly, two former shamans by 1843 — chose baptism.

To read this as God sending plague to bring a people to faith is to make of the catastrophe a divine instrument, and the sober historian, no less than the honest theologian, must decline. Orthodox tradition does indeed confess a providence that brings good out of evil it does not author — the dogmatic logic of the Cross itself, where the worst of acts is turned to salvation without ever ceasing to be the worst of acts. But that confession cuts against, not for, the providential melodrama: it insists that the evil remain named as evil, the catastrophe as catastrophe, and that no human narrator presume to read off the divine purposes from a death toll. Veniaminov, to his credit, did not coerce, did not exploit the epidemic to extract baptisms under duress, and ministered to the dying of all peoples; but his retrospective reading of the disaster as a dawning “enlightenment” earns Gibson’s reproach of an “ethnocentric and sanctimonious” tone, and the modern account should not repeat it. What can be said is narrower and truer: that a foreign disease killed a large fraction of the Tlingit, broke the standing of their religious leaders, and so created — at a price no one would ever choose — the conditions in which a respectful mission found, at last, a hearing among the survivors.

This is also where the honest history of the mission must keep the colonial frame in view. The smallpox was not a natural disaster visited on an isolated people; it traveled the trade routes that the Russian-American Company and its competitors had opened, and reached the Tlingit because the colonial encounter had brought the wider world to their shores. The same encounter supplied both the disease and the vaccine, both the catastrophe and the partial remedy. To set this down plainly is not to diminish Veniaminov, whose conduct within that frame was humane and whose method was the opposite of coercion; it is to refuse the comfortable story in which suffering is tidily redeemed, and to honor the Tlingit dead by counting them as a loss rather than a providential turning.

References

Gibson, James R. “Smallpox on the Northwest Coast, 1835–1838.” BC Studies 56 (Winter 1982–83): 61–81. (The principal demographic study: timing and spread; the named mortality ranges — Tlingit c. 40%, Kodiak c. one-third, Aleut c. 6–13%; the vaccination effort and Dr. Blashke; Veniaminov’s threefold interpretation, with Gibson’s caution about its tone; the post-epidemic conversion figures.)
Veniaminov, Ivan (St. Innocent). Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago otdela [Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District]. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1840. (The saint’s own contemporary account of the epidemic’s effect on the Tlingit, the source Gibson paraphrases.)
Fortuine, Robert. Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1989. (The medical-historical context of epidemic disease among Alaska Natives.)
Black, Lydia T. Russians in Alaska, 1732–1867. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004. (The Russian-American Company, the Tlingit, and the colonial setting of the epidemic.)
The Grandeur of Holy Simplicity (Life of St. Innocent). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com). (Veniaminov’s encouragement of vaccination and instruction of the Tlingit.)
Garrett, Paul D. St. Innocent: Apostle to America. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979. (The Sitka years and the aftermath of the epidemic.)