to the north.
“And they are rich, and live in houses, with piles of robes to creep into and hide?”
“That’s the Pawnees,” Saynday said jauntily. He began to feel better. The deathly smell was not so strong now. “I think I’ll go and visit the Pawnees first,” Smallpox remarked. “Later on, perhaps, I can get back to the Kiowas.”
“You do that,” directed Saynday. “Go and visit the Pawnees, and when you grow tired there from all the work you have to do, come back and visit my poor people. They’ll do all they can for you.”
“Good,” said Smallpox. He picked up his reins and jerked his weary horse awake. “Tell your people when I come to be ready for me. Tell them to put out all their fires. Fire is the only thing in the whole world that I’m afraid of. It’s the only thing in God’s world that can destroy me.”
Saynday watched Smallpox and his death horse traveling north, away from the Kiowas. Then he took out his flint and steel, and set fire to the spindly prairie grass at his feet. The winds came and picked up the fire, and carried it to make a ring of safety around the Kiowas’ camps.
“Perhaps I can still be some good to my people after all,” Saynday said to himself, feeling better.
And that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is, to this good day.
Told to Alice Marriott by Frank Givens (Eagle Plume).
Rethinking Virgin Soil Epidemics: COVID-19 Death Rates by Age and Race
It may seem strange to include a document from recent US experience in a chapter where so much of the material comes from centuries past. But the emergence in 2019 of a new virgin soil pandemic, COVID-19, raises important questions about how epidemics unfold in history. COVID-19, like many other pathogens, originated in an animal, probably a bat, and passed into an intermediate host, perhaps a pangolin, or scaly anteater. From there, it seems, it leapt into human beings, possibly through the sale and consumption of the animal in urban meat markets. The virus entered a human population with no experience of it, and therefore no antibodies to it. Exactly how deadly the virus is also remains a subject of some debate, in part because different peoples in different places seem to experience it in different ways. The racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates are depicted as ratios in Figure 2.1, which make it clear that white Americans have been far less likely to die of the disease than Hispanic/Latino or Black Americans. (Native Americans, too, have suffered higher death rates than white patients, although their experience is not recorded on this chart.)
Figure 2.1 COVID-19 death rates by age and race.
(Source: CDC data from 2/1/20–6/6/20 and 2018. Census population estimates for USA. Brookings.)
Note that it is impossible to explain these differences as the result of missing antibodies in one population or another. In modern America, white, Black, Latino, and Native Americans have about the same level of exposure to known disease pathogens, including COVID-19. What, then, makes Latino and Black people more likely to die from COVID? Medical specialists cite pre-existing health problems – diabetes, pulmonary ailments, and obesity among them – that stem from higher rates of poverty in minority communities. If higher poverty rates among minority peoples are a product of America’s racist past, then COVID-19 death rates are also, in part, artifacts of historic inequalities. Knowing this, how might we think about other virgin soil epidemics in the past? In recent years, historians and other scholars have begun to question the role of virgin soil epidemics in America’s colonial-era depopulation. Closer research (see Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (2015) edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Allen C. Swedlund. Tucson: University of Arizona Press) indicates that death rates from disease alone were not as high as once thought. Alfred Crosby himself has sought to modify some of his claims, and now says that death rates even from smallpox probably did not exceed 30 percent, and that deaths from virgin soil epidemics were increased by war, enslavement, and dispossession. How do such findings change our larger narrative of American history? If violence made virgin soil epidemics deadlier, what mix of biology and cultural choices – war, slavery, and so forth – created the world of colonial America?
Thomas James, “Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans”
While smallpox and other imported diseases were a pathogenic firestorm that often made the conquest of the Americas easier for grasping colonists, not all invaders were so uniformly horrific for all Indians. In this regard, the horse was to some degree the counterpart of smallpox and other Eurasian diseases. The horse was a European import that revolutionized life for many Indians. There were few if any horses in Indian hands prior to the seventeenth century, when Indians took horses from the Spanish and converted them to their own use. In many places, the horse made Indians much more difficult to conquer. It allowed many Indians to move out on the Great Plains to hunt buffalo as a primary means of subsistence, a way of life that was much less alluring before horses converted sunlight and grass to speed and mobility. The ways that horses conveyed power and strength to Indians are suggested in the following account. Thomas James spent three years in the far Southwest in the early nineteenth century, at a time when Spain’s empire included a vast part of what would one day become most of the American Southwest. (In 1821, Spain had actually ceded this region to the newly independent republic of Mexico.) James’s encounter with Ute Indians, who had adapted the horse for their own hunting, raiding, and trading economy, suggests how tenuous Spanish control over this region actually was, and how Ute success with horse breeding and horse rearing contributed to a powerful sense of autonomy from the Spanish empire.
After reading this account, it becomes clear that invading biota do not always displace indigenous peoples, but rather become key to indigenous economy, politics, and identity.
* * *
(Excerpt from Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, 1846 edn. Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1962.)
… In the latter part of February [1822] I received a deputation of 50 Indians from the Utah tribe on the west side of the mountains. They came riding into the city, and paraded on the public square, all well mounted on the most elegant horses I had ever seen. The animals were of a very superior breed, with their slender tapering legs and short, fine hair, like our best blooded racers. They were of almost every color, some spotted and striped as if painted for ornament. The Indians alighted at the Council House and sent a request for me to visit them. On arriving I found them all awaiting me in the Council House, with a company of Spanish officers and gentlemen led hither by curiosity. On entering I was greeted by the Chief and his companions, who shook hands with me. The Chief, whose name was Lechat, was a young man of about 30 and of a right Princely port and bearing. He told me in the Spanish language, which he spoke fluently, that he had come expressly to see me and have a talk with me. “You are Americans, we are told, and you have come from your country afar off to trade with the Spaniards.
