Illness that devastated families and even in some cases entire villages came to Alaska in waves that were nearly always as unexpected as they were unknowable. Survivors left to try to pick up the pieces of their lives and even their cultures often were faced with destruction on an unknown scale.

Although the causes of epidemics are generally impossible to pinpoint, they were usually introduced as a result of an influx of people into an area. For example, Russian ships brought disease to the Aleutian Islands as early as the late 1700s. Among other sources were whaling ships that plied the waters of the north and stopped in villages along the way, missionaries who moved into an area or the thousands of miners who took part in the gold rushes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In later years, mail carriers and even ships bringing medical supplies brought illness into a region or a village.

Robert Fortuine, writing in his 1989 book "Chills and Fever," notes that the first well-documented epidemic of respiratory disease in the Alaska region occurred in Kodiak in 1804. He said that a Boston ship returning from the California coast with a group of Koniag sea otter hunters apparently brought it.

Fortuine points out that the cultural devastation wrought by epidemics is hard to fathom. Traditional methods of fighting disease employed by shamans failed, causing confusion and doubt among many people. The indigenous populations also had no way of knowing why it was that non-Natives usually survived whatever illness swept through and they often were not even affected by it.

Fortuine discusses the toll taken on entire groups of Alaska Natives. He notes that the two worst events appear to be epidemics in 1835-1840 and 1900, with the 1900 epidemic being worse because of the speed with which people became infected.

"The smallpox epidemic of 1835-1840 and the influenza-measles epidemic of 1900 are both examples of historical events in Alaska that caused death, social disintegration, abandonment of traditional homes and despair on a scale unparalleled by anything but a major war," he writes. "Never would the survivors of such overwhelming personal and collective tragedy be quite the same again."

There were many waves of various illnesses from the 1790s up to the early 1900s and including the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Fortuine states, however, that the epidemic of 1900 "was probably the most calamitous event in the history of the Alaska Native people since the smallpox epidemic of 1835-1840." He stressed that what made the 1900 epidemic different was the fact that influenza and measles struck with "lightning force and within days whole villages were sick or dying."

"So great was the toll and the impact on the people in some areas that for many years later events were reckoned from that date," he states.

Robert J. Wolfe studied the epidemic that ravaged Alaska in 1900. His findings were published in a paper he wrote in 1982, named "Alaskašs Great Sickness, 1900" a name given to it by the Yupšik people of Western Alaska. Wolfe pointed out that the "Great Sickness" affected the Native population along the Aleutian Chain, the western seacoast south of the Bering Strait and three major rivers of the Interior, the Yukon, Kuskokwim and Nushagak.

"It was alleged that communities frequently lost 25 to 50 percent of their members and that a quarter of western Alaskašs Eskimo population perished," he said. And such tragedy led to widespread disorder and helplessness for several weeks.

Wolfe, however, noted that despite the widespread devastation, Native people displayed impressive resilience. "Although relatively ineffective in managing the acute onslaught of infectious diseases, the Eskimos and Indians displayed a remarkably rapid social and economic recovery following the epidemic," he said. "The widespread famine and starvation so many outsiders predicted apparently never occurred. After the epidemic, local populations in the Yukon and Kuskokwim region regrouped and began harvesting secondary food resources . . ."

By the time the flu epidemic of 1918-1919 hit, some village leaders had learned techniques that kept the illness at bay. Writing in "Epidemic and Peace," 1918, Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. noted that at Maryšs Igloo, a strict quarantine was imposed after flu arrived.

"Although the disease was so deadly that it killed 88 in the lower part of the village, it never reached the upper part only a thousand feet away," he said.

Still, the epidemic, which is estimated by some to have killed as many as 100 million people worldwide, hit Alaska particularly hard. Some villages, such as Susitna Station, never recovered from the epidemic and eventually disappeared from existence.

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