Cholera is caused by a bacteria that lives in water, but many early Americans thought it was transmitted by miasma. This mistake was a problem as many cities in Europe and early America drank water from wells and rivers into which people emptied their waste water. The first cholera was in 1817 in Indian, but the disease quickly spread throughout the world. By the 1831 the epidemic hit England, and by 1832 it decimated America. People died not only in the United States, but also in Canada and the Caribbean.
When John Montefiore died in the Barbados Cholera Epidemic, his family set up a memorial water fountain in his honor to protect the city in the future. A quarter of the people living on the island died in the 1854 epidemic
You can learn more about how people figured out how cholera worked in the video below.