and still are doing so. Cabeza de Vaca, staggering lost and desperate across Texas circa 1530, unintentionally presented his Amerindian masters with some sort of dysenteric disease that killed half of them and elevated him and his comrades to the status of priestly physicians, ironically saving their lives. We have said nothing of the insect-borne diseases, though in the nineteenth century, malaria was the most important sickness in the entire Mississippi Valley. We have said nothing of the venereal infections, which depressed the indigenes’ birth rates as they raised death rates from Labrador to Perth in western Australia. Old World pathogens in their dismal variety spread widely beyond the seams of Pangaea and weakened, crippled, or killed millions of the geographical vanguard of the human race. The world’s greatest demographic disaster was initiated by Columbus and Cook and the other marinheiros, and Europe’s overseas colonies were, in the first stage of their modern development, charnel houses. Afterward, mixed European, African, and indigene societies quite unlike any that had ever existed before grew up in the colonies in the torrid zone, with the single major exception of northern Australia. The temperate-zone colonies developed less distinctively; they became Neo-European, with only minorities of non-whites.
We accept that Mexico and Peru were full of indigenous peoples prior to European arrival, because their ancient monuments of stone are too huge to ignore and because their descendants still live in these lands in large numbers. But to imagine the Neo-Europes, now chock-full of Neo-Europeans and other Old World peoples, as once having had large native populations that were wiped out by imported diseases calls for a long leap of historical imagination. Let us examine one specific case of depopulation of a Neo-Europe.
Let us select a Neo-European region where indigenous agriculturalists of an advanced culture lived: the portion of the eastern United States between the Atlantic and the Great Plains, the Ohio Valley and the Gulf of Mexico. By the time Europeans had quartered that region, had traversed it up and down, back and forth, often enough in search of new Aztec Empires, routes to Cathay, and gold and furs to have acquainted themselves with its major features – by 1700 or so – the native inhabitants were the familiar Amerindians of the United States history textbooks: Cherokee, Creek, Shawnee, Choctaw, and so forth. These and all the others, with only one or two exceptions, were peoples without pronounced social stratification, without the advanced arts and crafts that aristocracies and priesthoods elicit, and without great public works comparable to the temples and pyramids of Meso-America. Their populations were no greater than one would expect of part-time farmers and hunters and gatherers, and in many areas less. Very few tribes numbered in the tens of thousands, and most were much smaller.
The scene in this part of North America had been very different in 1492. The Mound Builders (a general title for a hundred different peoples of a dozen different cultures spread over thousands of square kilometers and most of a millennium) had raised and were raising up multitudes of burial and temple mounds, many no more than knee or hip high, but some among the largest earthen structures ever created by humans anywhere. The largest, Monks Mound, one of 120 at Cahokia, Illinois, is 623,000 cubic meters in volume and covers six and a half hectares. Every particle of this enormous mass was carried and put into place by human beings without the help of any domesticated animals. The only pre-Columbian structures in the Americas that are larger are the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán and the great pyramid at Cholula. Cahokia, in its heyday, about 1200 A.D., was one of the great ceremonial centers of the world, served by a village with a population estimated by some archeologists as upward of 40,000. (The largest city in the United States in 1790 was Philadelphia, with a population of 42,000.) Graves at Cahokia and other such sites contain copper from Lake Superior, chert from Arkansas and Oklahoma, sheets of mica probably from North Carolina, and many art objects of superb quality. They also contain, in addition to the skeletons of the honored dead, those of men and women apparently sacrificed at the time of burial. One burial pit at Cahokia contains the remains of four men, all with heads and hands missing, and about 50 women, all between 18 and 23 years of age. Surely this assemblage is evidence for a grim religion and a severely hierarchical class structure – this last a key factor in the origins of civilization everywhere.
When whites and blacks settled near the site of Cahokia and similar centers (Moundsville, Alabama; Etowah, Georgia) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the local Amerindian societies were relatively egalitarian, their population sparse, their arts and crafts admirable but no longer superb, their trade networks regional; these people knew nothing of the mounds and ceremonial centers, abandoned generations before. The whites credited them to Vikings, or to the lost tribes of Israel, or to prehistoric races now gone from the earth.
The builders of the mounds had been Amerindians, of course, in some cases, no doubt, the ancestors of the people who were living near the sites when the Old World settlers arrived. These ancestors had been alive in large numbers when the Europeans first approached the coasts of the Americas. They were the people through whose lands and bodies Hernando de Soto hacked a path from 1539 to 1542 in his search for wealth equal to what he had seen in Peru. His chroniclers give us a clear impression of regions of dense population and many villages in the midst of vast cultivated fields, of stratified societies ruled with an iron hand from the top, and of scores of temples resting on truncated pyramids, which, though often stubby and made of earth rather than masonry, remind one of similar structures in Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.
Where in the images of North American native societies that we share today is there a place for De Soto’s wily opponent, the “Señora of Cofachiqui,” a province that probably contained the present site of Augusta, Georgia. She traveled by sedan chair borne by noblemen and was accompanied by a retinue of slaves. For a distance of a hundred leagues “she was greatly obeyed, whatsoever she ordered being performed with diligence and efficacy.”10 Seeking to deflect the greed of the Spaniards away from her living subjects, she sent the former off to sack a burial house or temple that was 30 m long and 12 or so wide, with a roof decorated with marine shells and fresh-water pearls, which “made a splendid sight in the brilliance of the sun.” Inside were chests containing the dead, and for each chest a statue carved in the likeness of the deceased. The walls and ceiling were hung with art work, and the rooms filled with finely carved maces, battle-axes, pikes, bows, and arrows inlaid with fresh-water pearls. The building and its contents were, in the opinion of one of the grave robbers, Alonso de Carmona, who had lived in both Mexico and Peru, among the finest things he had ever seen in the New World.
The Amerindians of Cofachiqui and of much of what is now the southeastern United States were impressive country cousins of the civilized Mexicans, perhaps comparable to the immediate predecessors of the Sumerians in general culture, and there were a lot of them. The latest scholarly work estimates that the population of one marginal area, Florida, may have been as high as 900,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Even if we skeptically subtract half from that figure, the remainder is impressively large. The southeastern United States, relative to what it had been, was vacant circa 1700 when the French came to stay.
Something eliminated or drove off most of the population of Cofachiqui by the eighteenth century, as well as a number of other areas where heavy populations of people of similar cultural achievements had lived two centuries before: along the Gulf Coast between Mobile Bay and Tampa Bay, along the Georgia coast, and on the banks of the Mississippi above the mouth of the Red River. In eastern and southern Arkansas and northeastern Louisiana, where De Soto had found 30 towns and provinces, the French found only a handful of villages. Where De Soto had been able to stand on one temple mound and see several villages with their mounds and little else but fields of maize between, there was now wilderness. Whatever had afflicted the country through which he had passed may have reached far to the north as well. The region of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, among the richest in natural food resources on the continent, was nearly deserted when whites first penetrated from New France and Virginia.
There had even been a major ecological change in the regions adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico and for tens of kilometers back from the coast, a change paralleling and probably associated with the decline in Amerindian numbers. In the sixteenth century, De Soto’s chroniclers saw no buffalo along their route from Florida to Tennessee and back to the coast,
