This was during the great cholera epidemic that swept the country in the spring and summer of 1849, which was carried to the plains by the California and Oregon emigrants and by some of the tribes then in process of removal from the east. The Kiowa remember this as the most terrible experience within their history, far exceeding in fatality the smallpox of nine years before. It was a disease before entirely unknown to them, and was particularly dreaded on account of its dreadful suddenness, men who had been in perfect health in the morning being dead a few hours later. The disease appeared immediately after the sun dance, which was held on Mule creek (_Ädóä P'a_, "Tipi wind-break river"), between Medicine-lodge creek and the Salt fork of the Arkansas, and, like the previous smallpox, it was brought by visiting Osage who attended the dance. During the performance a man became inspired or "crazy," as in the ghost dance, and prophesied that something terrible was about to happen after the _taíme_ had been returned to its box. Hardly was the dance over and the _taíme_ put away when a man was attacked by this strange disease and died in a few hours; then another became sick and died as suddenly, and another, until in a few days the epidemic spread through the tribe, killing great numbers, including an unusual proportion of medicine-men. The Kiowa say that half their number perished during its prevalence; this is probably an exaggeration, but whole families and camps were exterminated and their tipis were left standing empty and deserted. Many in their despair committed suicide, but the survivors saved themselves by scattering in different directions until the disease had spent its fury. The tribes of the lake region and those which had been recently removed to Indian Territory generally escaped the disease, but among the wild tribes of the plains, from the Dakota to the Comanche, the ravages of the cholera during this season were as awful as among the white population of the eastern states. The western Dakota, who suffered severely, believed that the disease had been deliberately introduced by the whites for their more speedy extermination (_Report, 78_). The agent for the Pawnee states that up to June of 1849 twelve hundred and thirty-four persons, or nearly one-fourth of the tribe, had already died, and the disease was still making fearful ravages among them, while the survivors were in such dread of the terrible scourge that no persuasion could induce them to bury the dead, and within a short distance of the agency it was not unusual to find the unburied corpses partially devoured by wolves (_Report, 79_). [Illustration: FIG. 104--Cholera (from the Dakota calendars).]