I examined
several of the individuals afflicted with it and endeavoured to obtain
every information on the subject from the most authentic sources. The
following facts may be depended upon. The disorder attacks those only who
drink the water of the river. It is indeed in its worst state confined
almost entirely to the half-breed women and children who reside
constantly at the fort and make use of river water drawn in the winter
through a hole cut in the ice. The men, being often from home on journeys
through the plain, when their drink is melted snow, are less affected;
and if any of them exhibit during the winter some incipient symptoms of
the complaint the annual summer voyage to the sea-coast generally effects
a cure. The natives who confine themselves to snow-water in the winter
and drink of the small rivulets which flow through the plains in the
summer are exempt from the attacks of this disease.
These facts are curious inasmuch as they militate against the generally
received opinion that the disease is caused by drinking snow-water; an
opinion which seems to have originated from bronchocele being endemial to
subalpine districts.
The Saskatchewan at Edmonton is clear in the winter and also in the
summer except during the May and July floods. This distance from the
Rocky Mountains (which I suppose to be of primitive formation) is upwards
of one hundred and thirty miles. The neighbouring plains are alluvial,
the soil is calcareous and contains numerous travelled fragments of
limestone. At a considerable distance below Edmonton the river,
continuing its course through the plains, becomes turbid and acquires a
white colour. In this state it is drunk by the inmates of Carlton House
where the disease is known only by name. It is said that the inhabitants
of Rocky Mountain House, sixty miles nearer the source of the river are
more severely affected than those at Edmonton. The same disease occurs
near the sources of the Elk and Peace Rivers; but in those parts of the
country which are distant from the Rocky Mountain Chain it is unknown
although melted snow forms the only drink of the natives for nine months
of the year.
A residence of a single year at Edmonton is sufficient to render a family
bronchocelous. Many of the goitres acquire great size. Burnt sponge has
been tried and found to remove the disease but an exposure to the same
cause immediately reproduces it.
A great proportion of the children of women who have goitres are born
idiots with large heads and the other distinguishing marks of cretins. I
could not learn whether it was necessary that both parents should have
goitres to produce cretin children: indeed the want of chastity in the
half-breed women would be a bar to the deduction of any inference on this
head.
