Scale and Treatment

Apropos of yesterday's post, The West Beyond the West: a History of British Columbia author and historian Jean Barman sent me a PDF of an issue of the Cowlitz Historical Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Summer, 2019) that provides what amounts to a source. But it's curiously put.

On Page 21 an "epidemic" is mentioned (a couple pages later the word "pandemic" is used), but the disease isn't mentioned, only inferred through mention of "quinine" (treatment for malaria, of course), which the Hudson's Bay Company had in its stores and "distributed." Also, a local-regional comparison based on a HBC employee's family(-ies) having a 90% survival rate, while those nearby (without HBC affiliation) had an extremely high death rate. 

One wonders why the scale of the illness (epidemic, pandemic) and its treatment (quinine) are mentioned, but not its name (malaria). For my part, I guess I am caught up on how the local Coast Salish indigenous population who built Fort Victoria (Songhees?) were paid in blankets; and if those blankets came from Fort Vancouver (which is likely), could they have carried that which killed the Fort Vancouver local indigenous population -- assuming that what these tradable blankets carried was not the unnamed disease (malaria is not transferrable by blanket) but another inferred illness (smallpox)?

Of course there is no evidence to suggest that the Vancouver Island Coast Salish population suffered from anything other than low wages in the building of Fort Victoria. It wasn't until the spring of 1862 that smallpox came to town -- a good thirty years after the epidemic that ravaged Fort Vancouver.

Image: Nuxalt Woman Discovers Smallpox Bodies -- July 1862, Shawn Swanky.