Press and Propaganda

Changing Attitudes

After August, there were only several articles on smallpox each month. In December, the Colonist even had an article that considered the disease from a Native point of view.

9 December 1862, p. 3.

From Cowichan.--...A few deaths from small pox were still occurring among the Indians--the victims, rather singularly, being chiefly old women. The old people of the tribe relate that some thirty or forty years ago there was a similar state of affairs to the present--that the weather was very foggy--hiyou smoke --and that there was an unusually plentiful catch of salmon, but that the Indians did not live to benefit by the abundance, the small-pox having cut them off in great numbers; they are consequently in great fear that a like calamity may now befall them.