Six people at this place, six at Talida, sixteen at Minchúmina, make up all the population of a region perhaps a hundred and fifty miles square. Yet it is a noble Indian country, one of the most favourable in all the interior, capable of supporting hundreds of people. Signs, indeed, of a much larger occupation of it were not wanting, and all accounts speak of the wholesale destruction of the natives by disease. We were told of a village a little farther up this stream where every living being, save one old man, died of diphtheria five years previously, while those who have heard the stories of the horrors of the epidemic of measles in 1900, usually connected in some way with the stampede to Nome of that year when the disease seems to have entered the country, will understand how a region once thickly peopled, for Alaska, has become the most thinly peopled in all the territory.
A half-breed trader, long resident at a point perhaps two hundred miles lower down the Kuskokwim, told me of coming back to a populous village after an absence of a few weeks, to find every person dead and the starving dogs tearing at the rotting corpses. It is terrible to think what the irruption of a new disease may mean to these primitive natives. Even a disease like measles, rarely fatal and not commonly regarded as serious amongst whites, takes to itself a strange and awful virulence when it invades this virgin blood. The people know no proper treatment; maddened by the itching rash that covers the body, they fling off all cover, rush outdoors naked, whatever the weather, and either roll in the snow or plunge into the stream; with the result that the disease "strikes in" and kills them. Such is the description that is given of its course along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim. At many a Yukon village half the people died, despite the aid the few missionaries then on the river could afford; upon the Kuskokwim the havoc seems to have been still greater. Six years later, death again stalked through this region after having visited the Yukon, and this time seized his victims by the throat. In another chapter has been given some account of an outbreak of diphtheria on the Chandalar, following a more serious epidemic at Circle City and Fort Yukon. It was during that same winter the disease raged in this region, remote from any sort of medical or even intelligent lay aid, and swept off all the children that had been spared by the measles or had been born since that time. At our next stopping-place we saw the graves of nineteen children who died in one day!