smallpox

Perhaps the disease outbreak in North Dakota’s history was the smallpox epidemic that all but destroyed the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara peoples. In June of 1837, infected passengers aboard a steamboat spread the deadly virus up and down the Missouri River.

To stop an epidemic of smallpox in 1899, the Grand Forks Board of Health ordered all schoolchildren to be vaccinated at the city’s expense and ordered all…

What began as a case of smallpox in a family near Olga, North Dakota, became an “alarming” epidemic that spread to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation…

The history of smallpox in North Dakota spans centuries. The terrible disease devastated the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people in 1781. Years later, in…

Wahpeton and Breckenridge had their hands full in 1906 with a typhoid fever epidemic, a rabies scare, and smallpox. Dozens of people fell ill with typhoid…

James Robinson was eccentric North Dakota Supreme Court justice who opposed vaccinations. He also peddled booze as a cure during the 1918 flu pandemic.…

Statewide mandates to curb disease outbreaks are not new in North Dakota. In the summer of 1892, Governor Andrew Burke declared a quarantine against…

Smallpox ravaged the world for centuries before it was eradicated by vaccination in 1980. In what is now North Dakota, smallpox devastated Native tribes…

The Grand Forks area saw a smallpox epidemic in the fall of 1878 that killed the city’s first physician. Few newspaper accounts exist about the outbreak,…

Epidemics of diphtheria, smallpox, scarlet fever and other diseases struck schools, churches and families throughout North Dakota more than a century ago.…