Archeological evidence and examination of Amerindian place names also indicate that there were no buffalo along the De Soto route, nor between it and salt water. A century and a half later, when the French and English arrived, they found the shaggy animals present in at least scattered herds from the mountains almost to the Gulf and even to the Atlantic. What had happened in the interim is easy to explain in the abstract: An econiche opened up, and the buffalo moved into it. Something had kept these animals out of the expanses of parklike clearings in the forest that periodic Amerindian use of fire and hoe had created. That something declined or disappeared after 1540. That something was, in all likelihood, the Amerindians themselves, who naturally would have killed the buffalo for food and to protect their crops.
The cause of that decline and disappearance was probably epidemic disease. No other factor seems capable of having exterminated so many people over such a large part of North America. The dismal genocidal process had already begun before De Soto arrived in Cofachiqui. A year or two before, a pestilence had threshed through that province, killing many. Talomeco, where the Spanish raided the burial temple mentioned earlier, was one of several towns without inhabitants because an epidemic had killed and driven off so many. The intruders found four large houses there filled with the bodies of people who had perished of the pestilence. The Spanish judged Cofachiqui heavily populated, but its citizens said their number had been much greater before the epidemic. De Soto entered Cofachiqui on the heels of a medical disaster, just as he had with Pizarro in Peru….
The epidemics continued to arrive and to do their work of extermination, as they did in every part of the Americas we know anything about in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To cite but one, in 1585–6, Sir Francis Drake led a large fleet to the Cape Verdes, where his men picked up a dangerous communicable disease, and then sailed off to raid the Spanish Main, but so many of the English were sick and dying that the venture failed miserably. Seeking redress, he attacked the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida, infecting the local people with the Cape Verde epidemic. The Amerindians, “at first coming of our men died very fast, and said amongst themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.” Presumably the disease proceeded on into the interior.11
When the French penetrated into the hinterlands behind the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where De Soto had fought so many battles with so many peoples, they found few to oppose their intrusion. And the decline in Amerindian numbers continued; indeed, it probably accelerated. In six years, the last of the Mound Builders, the Natchez, with their pyramid-top temples and their supreme leader, the Great Sun, diminished by a third. One of the Frenchmen wrote, unintentionally echoing the Protestant, John Winthrop, “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you, it is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.”12
The exchange of infectious diseases – that is, of germs, of living things having geographical points of origin just like visible creatures – between the Old World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously one-sided, as one-sided and one-way as the exchanges of people, weeds, and animals. Australasia, as far as science can tell us, has exported not one of its human diseases to the outside world, presuming that it has any uniquely its own. The Americas do have their own distinctive pathogens, those of at least Carrion’s disease and Chagas’ disease. Oddly, these very unpleasant and sometimes fatal diseases do not travel well and have never established themselves in the Old World… Niguas, as Fernándo de Oviedo called the tropical American chigger causing barefoot Spaniards so much trouble in the sixteenth century, reached Africa in 1872 and spread across the continent as an epidemic of lost toes and fatal secondary infections of tetanus, but it has since retreated to the nuisance category and has never changed the Old World’s demographic history. Europe was magnanimous in the quantity and quality of the torments it sent across the seams of Pangaea. In contrast, its colonies, epidemiologically impecunious to begin with, were hesitant to export even the pathogens they did have. The unevenness of the exchange … operated to the overwhelming advantage of the European invaders, and to the crushing disadvantage of the peoples whose ancestral homes were on the losing side of the seams of Pangaea.
Notes
1 1 Andrés Bernáldez, Historia de los Reyes Católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel, in Crónicas de los Reyes de Castilla desde Don Alfonso el Sabio, Hasta los Católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1878), III, 668; Journals and Other Documents of Columbus, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Heritage Press, 1963), 226–7.
2 2 Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery, Admiral Philip (London: Fisher & Unwin, 1909), 74–5.
3 3 I shall always be referring to the often fatal variola major smallpox. The mild variola minor did not appear until late in the nineteenth century. Donald R. Hopkins, Princes and Peasants, Smallpox in History (University of Chicago Press, 1983), 5–6.
4 4 John Duffy, “Smallpox and the Indians in the American Colonies,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 25 (July–August 1951): 327.
5 5 William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), 271.
6 6 Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 33 (April 1976): 290–1.
7 7 Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change. The Shaping of Island County, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 26–7; Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, The Chinook Indians, Traders of the Lower Columbia River (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 80.
8 8 Juan López de Velasco, Geografía y Descripción Universal de las Indias desde el Año de 1571 al de 1574 (Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Fortanet, 1894), 552.
9 9 Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia (Chicago: Armann & Armann, 1935), 98, 102–3, 117; Handbook of South American Indians, ed. Julian H. Steward (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946–59), VI, 309–10; see also Guillermo Fúrlong, Entre las Pampas de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos “San Pablo,” 1938), 59.
10 10 Narratives of the Career of Hernando de Soto, trans. Buckingham Smith (New York: Allerton Book Co., 1922), I, 65, 70–1.
11 11 Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1891), I, 585–9; Julian S. Corbett, ed., Papers Relating to the Navy During the Spanish War, 1585–1587 (Navy Records Society, 1898), XI, 26.
12 12 John R. Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin no. 43, 1911), 39. See also Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned, Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 247–90; George R. Milner, “Epidemic Disease in the Postcontact Southeast: A Reappraisal,” Mid-Continent Journal of Archeology 5 (no. 1, 1980): 39–56. The archeologists are beginning to produce physical evidence that supports the hypothesis of fierce epidemics, swift population decline, and radical cultural change in the Gulf region in the sixteenth century. See Caleb Curren, The Protohistoric Period in Central Alabama (Camden, Ala.: Alabama Tombigbee Regional Commission, 1984), 54, 240, 242.
Documents
Frank Givens, “Saynday and Smallpox: The White Man’s Gift”
Where the reading above conveys a sense of universal and near-total vulnerability of Native Americans to Eurasian pathogens, in fact, different peoples had different degrees of vulnerability depending on a range of factors, from proximity to an outbreak to whether they lived in semi-sedentary homes or more nomadic encampments. Generally speaking, sedentary peoples, who lived with more exposure to larger
