NOTE: This version is updated since the August 16th broadcast.
During a cholera epidemic in the Dakota region in 1851, rumors among the indigenous population blamed the epidemic on drawings by Swiss artist Rudolph Kurz.
Hidatsa leader Great Hair came to Fort Clark to inspect Kurz’s drawings. Kurz described Great Hair as “distinguished for his intelligence as well as his gift of eloquence. ... a middle-aged man of dignified and imposing presence … As president of the council he is regarded as the most notable personage in the village ... he is most influential.”
According to Rudolph Kurz's journal entry for August 14th, Great Hair “paid me a visit today, bringing one of his friends with him. With signs, he entreated me to open my sketchbook for them, that they might see with their own eyes and decide whether my sketches were really the cause of the sickness so prevalent among them.” He later wrote, “[Great Hair] finds in my drawings nothing in the least to warrant suspicion. He will talk with his people.”
But two days later, on this date, Great Hair’s wife died. This development had Indians fleeing into the hills, and by August 18th, Rudolph Kurz was confined to his room at Fort Clark. Kurz said James Kipp, the chief fur trader at Fort Clark, “came and begged me to put my drawings away, to allow no Indian to see them ever again.” Kurz bemoaned: “They talked in the village of nothing but my sketches. …The entire blame for the cholera epidemic was cast upon me.”
There was concern for the artist's life. The Mandans and Arikaras were said to be even angrier with him than the Hidatsas were. He needed to get out. Sometime between August 30th and September 5th, Kurz fled upstream to the relative safety of Fort Union.
In the mid 1800s, it was not unusual for the native peoples of the northern plains to attributing disease to visiting artists. It was a time when modern germ theory was just beginning to emerge.
Dakota Datebook by Andrew Alexis Varvel
Reference:
- Rudolph Friederich Kurz (author) and Carla Kelly (editor), “ON THE UPPER MISSOURI: The Journal of Rudolph Friederich Kurz, 1851-1852” (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), pages 32-36, 45, 149.
