In Chapter XI, "The Conqueror (1837)" of Across the Wide Missouri, Bernard DeVoto wrote of the American Fur Company's earnest but ineffectual response to the 1837 smallpox epidemic that devastated the tribes along the upper Missouri River:
Suppose however that [the company] had the knowledge of every American today--except the million or so who belong to anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, anti-research organizations and sometimes produce smallpox epidemics which differ from that which destroyed the Mandans only in that the rest of have been vaccinated...
A page or so later DeVoto suggested the rural south as at least a recent area of resistance to vaccines. Such resistance had not become popular among the prosperous and expensively schooled.
Across the Wide Missouri appeared in 1947, and won a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize.
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