LIKE OTHER TRIBAL NATIONS ON THE Plains, the Kiowa Tribe, my tribe, created pictorial records of important events, stories, and people. The accounts, known as sai-guat, can be translated as “calendars.” In many calendars, disease and epidemics are graphically illustrated. The winter of 1839, as recorded by Set’tan, for example, is known as Tä’dalkop Sai, or smallpox winter, represented by the image of a person covered with spots. This is the first mention of the disease in this sai-guat and was rerecorded by Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney in his Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, produced for the Bureau of American Ethnology.
“The epidemic broke out early in spring and continued through the summer,” writes Mooney. “It began in the Kiowa school, and its terribly fatal consequences were due largely…