Deadly Emigres: Contagious Disease in Early America
Not all invaders have legs...
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Note: This essay uses the term “Indians” instead of the more fashionable alternatives.
The progression of air- and vector-borne disease in early modern industrial society has few parallels to the ghastly story of the pandemics that decimated Native New World/Indian populations in the 16th to 19th Centuries. The courses and origins of the various pathogens, and how they arrived in our hemisphere with such devastating effect, have given over to myth and fantasy in contemporary thought. Why the Indians were hit so much harder than their non-Indian brethren are just now coming to light.
There were three apparent reasons European-origin diseases were so much more devastating to the Indians:
Immunological isolation from other world populations;
Changes in diet and living patterns brought on by accommodation to non-Indian migration to the New World;
Very narrow genetic makeup of Indian populations.
A fourth reason, widespread, willful, intentional infection by Euro-Americans, borders on grand conspiracy theory, so I won’t talk about it here.
How did the Indians get here?
Current scholarship holds that the earliest Indian ancestors probably arrived in the Western Hemisphere by migration, after the glaciers of the last Ice Age faded, either across a land bridge from what is now the Russian Far East or by boat. Parasites found in mummified remains of pre-Archaic Indians and DNA analyses link these populations biologically to the rest of mankind via the inhabitants of the Russian Pacific coast. The migration isolated Indian immune systems. In addition, often-fatal weaning diarrhea was apparently common in Indian populations, resulting in a very high infant-mortality rate which kept their populations small.
A dangerous combination.
Living in isolation from other populations for at least 15,000 years, the New World Indians became immunologically distinct from the rest of humankind. Separated from the dynamics of Euro-Asian migrations, conquests, trading and plagues, the Indians had dietary (anemia, rickets and beriberi) and enviro-genetic (arthritis, tuberculosis, syphilis and dental caries) mechanisms to cope with, but lacked exposure to the viruses and bacteria such as smallpox, measles, bubonic and pneumonic plague, influenza, and cholera that swept the Eastern Hemisphere for most of recorded history.
The arrival of the Europeans and their African slaves to the Americas introduced diseases against which the Indians had no immunity.
With an already chronically low birth rate, low Indian male motility, and infant mortality rates ten times those of the Europeans and Africans, the Indians could not offset the oncoming devastation to their populations. As European explorers, traders, and colonists closed off more land, the Indian way of life and methods of subsistence changed from hunting and gathering to ever-expanding farming. This aggravated the anemia already plagued their populations, while limiting their growth through increasingly confined areas.
This change of diet and closer exposure to non-family members increased the potency of the contagions when they reached the Indian populations.
As those populations shrank, the tribes’ traditional raid/kidnap style of warfare to increase their numbers became more frequent and aggressive, increasing their exposure to contagions even further. As the influx of European and African immigrants increased, so too did the number of Indians who refused to accommodate to new ways of life. Some moved west, encroaching on Indian populations that had not yet been exposed to the newcomers, and who also had not had a great deal of contact with tribes from the east. When they started making up new family ties and increased the size of the gene pool, their immunological problem worsened. Newer research shows that diseases such as measles and chickenpox can be more deadly when contracted from a family member than from a stranger. This increase in population and food supply reliability may have been beneficial, but it also increased the number of opportunities for pathogenic attacks by disease that the Indians had not seen.
And the result was catastrophic.
Smallpox was by far the most potent destroyer of native American populations. By 1619, only five generations after Columbus, the Indian population was but 5 to 10 percent of what it had been in 1519. During this period, smallpox reduced the Massachusett population from 10,000 to just over a thousand. When smallpox hit the Mohawk in 1633 and the Huron the next year, only two thousand survived of a pre-pandemic population of 8,100. By 1667, increasing casualties from the newer style of gunpowder warfare and disease made it difficult to maintain even those numbers.
In the south and the west, the Spaniards spread disease with their explorations.
Measles spread from Sonora in 1531-33, reaching as far north as the Columbia River. In 1539-43, de Soto marauded north from Florida into modern Arkansas and east Texas. From 1545 to 1548, a combination of pneumonic/bubonic plague and typhus had decimated the populations. When other Spanish expeditions sought food from the powerful combinations that De Soto had found, they encountered devastation. An influenza epidemic struck the Americas in 1559, two years after it had struck Europe, likely brought by the Spaniards.
Over the years, disease showed no signs of abatement.
From 1837 to 1870, at least four pandemics swept through the Plains Indian populations. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 along the Missouri reduced the Mandan from 1,600 villages to 31. Measles ravaged the Columbia River valley in the 1840s. Even as treatments and inoculations were introduced and became widely available, the number of doctors available (and willing) to offer them to the Indians was small, and the Indians themselves were often deeply suspicious of them.
The diseases that Europeans had suffered for millennia hit the Indians like prairie fires.
Between their very high infant mortality, low birth rate, poor and changeable diet, and the social upheaval caused by the coming of the Europeans and the Africans (and later the Asians) to American shores, the Indians were in the middle of a very large bio-diversity vise that no culture had much chance of surviving intact. The sociological and physical devastation wrought by their higher casualty count—from what Europeans shrugged off—diminished their chances for survival even further.
This Redhead: The Dialogues
No, it’s not intended as a play on anything, nor does my experimental, all-dialogue novel have anything to do with disease or with Native Americans. No, it’s about two people who, well, see, Red tries unsuccessfully to pick Blondie up one night, and, well…
This Redhead: The Dialogues is just that—dialogues between two people with nothing in between. They meet, have fun; don’t; get serious; try not to get serious, but…well, ya know… Available from your favorite booksellers or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Britain's Darkest Hour Reconsidered
The Turning Point
And Finally...
On 29 June:
1900: China declares war on all foreigners. Discontent had been growing in China over the extraterritorial foreign missions that had been exploiting Chinese resources for decades. This had given rise to a secret society called the Righteous Harmonious Fists, known as the Boxers. This Boxer Rebellion would kill untold thousands of missionaries, merchants and Christian converts in a year.
2023: Alan Arkin dies in San Marcos, California. Best known as a “serio-comic” actor with an irrepressible sense of both humor and gravitas, Hollywood first noticed Arkin in 1967’s Cold War farce The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! for which he won a Golden Globe. Decades of steady stage, screen and TV work and awards followed before 2007’s Little Miss Sunshine won him Oscar gold.
And today is NATIONAL WAFFLE IRON DAY for unclear reasons. Not to be confused with NATIONAL WAFFLE DAY, which is 24 August, though no one knows why for that one, either. But hey, you want to have a waffle today, knock yourself out.