Disease And Death In The New World

Disease and Death in the New World

By the time Native Americans suffered their bloody encounters with the Spanish conquistadors and, later, European settlers and the U.S. Army, their ranks may already have been decimated, not by the white man's weapons but by his diseases.

In the past 25 years, researchers have realized that Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World unleashed a wave of pestilence and death on the indigenous population. With the early explorers came the highly contagious diseases of European cities--smallpox, measles, typhus, scarlet fever, influenza, and others --to which Native Americans had never been exposed. As these crowd diseases swept through, they wiped out large amounts of the population.

This was not the first time that a new disease had been introduced into a human population. In the 1300s, Mongol armies and traders from Central Asia brought the bubonic plague to Europe, and the resulting epidemic — the “Black Death” — killed one-third of the population of Western Europe.

But even the Black Death can’t compare to the devastation of the indigenous peoples of North and South America. Hit by wave after wave of multiple diseases to which they had utterly no resistance, they died by the millions. Disease spread from the paths of explorers and the sites of colonization like a stain from a drop of ink on a paper towel.

In many Caribbean islands, native populations simply vanished, says Alfred Crosby, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin. Although scholars are still arguing over how many people lived on the islands before Columbus, says Crosby, "there is no argument that they are gone."

But there the agreement ends. While few now dispute that Old World diseases caused a horrendous population crash, debate is still raging on the magnitude, rate, and timing of this hemispheric depopulation. Estimating the number of deaths due to imported diseases is difficult because we have only rough population estimates of the Americas, even after Europeans arrived and started counting people. How many Native Americans were there?

One camp, led by ethno-historian and author Henry F. Dobyns, asserts that the Americas had a huge native population--112 million in all--that was virtually wiped out by disease after the Spanish landed in 1492. Dobyns envisions wave after wave of pandemics, starting at the initial point of contact and then sweeping up and down both continents, killing Native Americans before Europeans ever counted them.

For the North American population, over which the debate is most intense, Dobyns puts the estimate at 18 million in 1492. By 1900, that number had dropped to 500,000 maybe less.

Others, like George Milner, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, say that yes, epidemics did occur, but not quite so regularly or with such catastrophic effects. And that means Dobyns's numbers are "enormously high," says Milner. Douglas Ubelaker of the Smithsonian Institution, another member of the "small number" camp, calculates the pre-Columbus North American total at just 2 million, versus Dobyns's 18 million.

Resolving these differences won't be easy, because the evidence, as Milner describes it, is often "incomplete, spotty, and frequently biased." Crosby likens the data to a Rorschach test: "You interpret it according to your preconceptions."

In some places, documents from the 1500s are abundant and reliable. In others, they are scanty or simply nonexistent. And in the absence of written records, archeologists, ethno-historians, and anthropologists must use a variety of techniques--and often a host of perilous assumptions--to try to reconstruct what happened when the Old and New Worlds collided in 1492.

Part of the problem in deciphering just what happened is that, in some places at least, Old World diseases preceded actual contact with explorers by decades or even tens of decades as pathogens were carried inland along trade routes. The question, then, is whether the population had already been decimated by the time the Europeans made their first estimates.

Smallpox and the Inca

That is clearly what happened to the Inca, asserts Noble David Cook, a historian at the University of Bridgeport and Yale. When Pizarro's party arrived in Peru in 1532, the Incas told them of a disease that ravaged the population a few years earlier, killing thousands, including the ruler, Huayna Capac, and his principal wife.

By 1532, 30 to 50% of the population had died and the nation was in the throes of civil war. No wonder, says Cook, that the Spanish conquered with relative ease. He estimates the Inca population just prior to contact at 14 million. By 1600 the number had dropped to 1.5 million to 2 million.

The disease that caused the initial damage to the Inca was smallpox. The epidemic probably began in the Caribbean in 1519, with the arrival of Spanish conquistadors. In fact, it may have been the same epidemic that hit the Aztec in 1521, changing the course of Hernán Cortés’s invasion. "Cortes would have been thrown out of Mexico if it hadn't been for smallpox," says Crosby. The epidemic raged for 75 days in Tenochtitlan, or Mexico City, then the Spanish invaded.

Although it is hard to pin down the origin of the epidemic and its overland route, there is no question that it hit--and hit hard--in 1526, says Cook. The tale is recounted over and over again in records of Spanish soldiers who arrived in Peru just 6 years later and described the conquest.

Evidence also comes from the Inca "keepers of the record," who recorded history on quipos, or knotted strings. In 1543, one of the Spanish governors, Vaca de Castro, called them together to tell him about the past. The quipos are gone, but the written accounts of what the Incas said remain, says Cook. They, too, described the death of Capac and ensuing chaos.

From 1532 on, says Cook, "we are on more solid documentary ground." First- hand reports, both abundant and corroboratory, describe epidemics coming fast on the heels of each other: measles in 1531, and what looks like plague or typhus in 1546-48. Then another round of what seemed to be measles in 1556- 58. Then relative calm until 1585-91, when several epidemics hit simultaneously: smallpox, measles, and probably typhus again, with catastrophic consequences. Near Quito, 30,000 out of 80,000 died.

Disease spread faster than colonization

Estimates for South America seem rock solid when compared with many of those for North America. The problem is simply that Europeans landed on the perimeter of the continent in the 1500s but did not reach much of the interior until the 1700s. What happened in this fuzzy period before written records, known as proto-history, is anyone's guess.

In fact, in North America, disease spread faster than European colonization. Whole cultures may have been wiped out long before extensive contact occurred. For example, in 1539 the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto described a complex Native American society in the southeastern part of North America. He found large, thriving cities connected by networks of trade. But when the European settlers arrived in the 1700s, the sophisticated group de Soto saw--now known to be part of the Mississippian culture--was gone. The English colonists in North America found a wilderness ready for the taking, and the Indians who remained were not numerous enough to stop them.

The figure most often cited is that 90 to 95 percent of the native population of the Americas died between the time Columbus landed in the Caribbean and the end of the eighteenth century. That percentage is based largely on epidemiology — the study of how diseases spread in populations. Researchers use data on present-day epidemics to estimate what a likely death rate would have been for a population with no immunity to any of the diseases Europeans brought. But no one knows exactly how many people died, because no one knows exactly how many people were here in 1491, before Columbus arrived.

Historians also debate whether Europeans were guilty of genocide — the deliberate killing of an entire ethnic group. That question has many layers, and it’s difficult to answer — or even to ask — without succumbing to emotion or ideology. When millions of people die, we naturally look for someone to blame, but the desire to assign blame can prevent us from fully understanding the past.

Europeans certainly understood the impact of disease on American Indians. The Spanish learned quickly that the native populations of the Caribbean and Central America were highly susceptible to diseases. When John Lawson traveled through North Carolina in 1701, he noted repeatedly in his journals that the populations of the Indians he met were greatly reduced from only a short time earlier. Europeans also had a rough idea of how some diseases, such as smallpox, were transmitted, and they understood the importance of quarantine.

Lawson had great respect for the traditional medicine of the Indians, which was based on herbal cures and rituals and was often quite effective against illnesses and maladies present before Europeans arrived. Although Indians tried to adapt their system of medicine to new diseases, viruses such as smallpox simply overwhelmed them.

Smallpox symptoms, transmission, and mortality rates

People infected with smallpox experience influenza-like symptoms, including fever, back pain, and vomiting. Approximately three days later, the fever subsides and the individual develops a rash and fluid-filled blisters on the face, forearms and body. The smallpox lesions ulcerate in the nose and mouth, releasing more virus down the throat and often suffocating the individual. The virus is spread through respiratory contact, usually as a result of close contact with an infected person, or their soiled linens. Infectious dried crusts of the virus have been isolated from house dust a year after the infection.

In Europe and Asia, mortality rates from smallpox were approximately 30%. In the Americas, mortality rates were higher due to the virgin soil phenomenon, in which indigenous populations were at a higher risk of being affected by epidemics because there had been no previous contact with the disease, preventing them from gaining some form of immunity. Estimates of mortality rates resulting from smallpox epidemics range between 38.5% for the Aztecs, 50% for the Piegan, Huron, Catawba, Cherokee, and Iroquois, 66% for the Omaha and Blackfeet, 90% for the Mandan, and almost 100% for the Taino. Smallpox epidemics affected the demography of the stricken populations for 100 to 150 years after the initial first infection.

Indigenous and European reactions to disease

During the early contact period (keep in mind “early contact period” represented different years throughout the many different regions of the United States), many Native Americans did not believe that disease was transmitted between individuals. Instead, they blamed disease on supernatural forces. For example, during the early 1700s, Northern Plains groups considered smallpox to be a personification of the Bad Spirit. Disease was often thought of as punishment by the “Master of Life” for mistreatment of animals or other people.

Animal spirits were also blamed. According to traditional Cherokee knowledge, animals created diseases to protect themselves against humans. The Kwanthum of Vancouver described a dragon that lived in a swamp and breathed upon children. Its breath caused sores to break out “…and they burned with the heat, and they died to feed this monster. And so the village was deserted, and never again would the Indians live on that spot”. The Salish blamed a salmon season in which the fish were covered in sores and blotches. They reacted by killing as many of the fish as possible. These types of explanations were common before Europeans were connected with smallpox incidence.

Witchcraft was also a popular explanation throughout the contact period, often resulting in the torture or killing of accused individuals. Indigenous groups, including the New Mexico Pueblo and the Hurons, blamed members of their own communities as well as white missionaries for witchcraft. The Jesuits were often blamed when an infected person died after having holy water sprinkled on them. The Hurons were terrified of the Jesuits and prohibited them from entering their villages.

Substantial social interactions with the Jesuits and French traders often helped to spread the infection further. Native participation in the Canadian fur trade often brought infection to the main centers and carried the disease to all affiliated trading posts. The Oregon Trail also acted as an avenue for the spread of epidemics.

Some Europeans, from the Spanish in the 1500s to English colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw the spread of smallpox as amongst the natives as divine intervention. They believed that by wiping out the native population and clearing the continent for European settlement, God was declaring himself on their side.

Although there are rumors and stories of attempts to spread smallpox among native populations — by the Spanish in Central America and by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century — no documentary evidence survives to prove them. Although plenty of Europeans wanted the Indians out of their way, few seem to have engaged in deliberate biological warfare.

It’s worth remembering that germs weren’t discovered until the nineteenth century, and that although inoculation had been proven to work, most Europeans still feared it. People’s understanding of disease was still poor. European physicians believed, for example, that some diseases were caused by an excess of blood in the body, and “cured” them by attaching leeches to patients’ skin to “bleed” them.

Effects of smallpox and other diseases

The effects of the smallpox epidemics are preserved in historical and archaeological records. Hernando de Soto, Lewis and Clark, and many others described seeing overgrown, abandoned villages. Archaeological evidence of village abandonment exists for the Southeastern United States. A mass burial at the 16th century King site in Tennessee probably indicates a post-epidemic burial since mass burials are not common for ritual purposes in the Southeast. There are also increases in “multiple burials” (two bodies together) in this area. The Iroquois, stricken by grief, participated in Mourning Wars, in which individuals from other groups were taken to replace lost family members.

The greatest impact of the smallpox epidemics was sociocultural change. The loss of so many individuals within a population hindered subsistence, defense, and cultural roles. Families, clans, and villages were consolidated, further fragmenting the previous societal norms. The population loss also forced the fusion of different residential groups. The loss of many individuals within a population also reduced the collective knowledge of history and ceremony.

It is also important to note that these epidemics were just some of the causes of Native population decline during European contact. Intermarriage, slavery, wars, massacres, political disruption, economic changes, malnutrition, destruction of traditional subsistence patterns, and alcoholism also caused substantial depopulation and cultural change.