How Old World Diseases Destroyed Indian America Essay

The Invisible Enemy – How Old World diseases destroyed Indian America and created Colonial America. In the years prior to the Pilgrims establishing Plymouth colony in 1620, the area had been ravaged by an epidemic of disease which had wiped out the original Indian inhabitants. The Pilgrims believed that God had sent the disease among the Indians to clear the site for his ‘chosen people’. This is but one example of how the introduction of disease would forever change the existing Indian America into a ‘new’ America the Natives would barely recognize and would face an everlasting struggle to be part of. The impact of Old World diseases is one of the most critical aspects to understanding the history of Native American Indians. Old World pathogens were carried by the Europeans into the ‘virgin soil’ of Indian America would forever change the very existence of the Native Americans. Epidemics of killer disease were to rampage through Indian society and the Indians being immunologically defenseless succumbed in their thousands. Smallpox was the most devastating of the early killer diseases, followed by deadly strains of typhus and measles (Thornton 1987:44-45). These were followed by bubonic plague, diphtheria, cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, mumps, pertussis, colds, pleurisy, and, virulent forms of pneumonia and influenza along with respiratory infections, poliomyelitis, venereal syphilis, malaria, yellow fever and dysentery. The mortality rates from smallpox were appallingly high and the periodic outbreaks compounded the losses. Thornton, Miller and Warren (1991:41) conclude that â€Å"American Indian populations were exposed to cycles of population reduction caused by both recurrent epidemics of the same disease and by epidemics of newly encountered diseases experiencing ‘virgin veil’ conditions†. In 1779, smallpox broke out in Mexico City, and over the next four years the disease reached pandemic proportions, spreading in all directions; through the Southwest, the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains and by 1783 into Canada. Thousands of Indians died. Mortality rates of 90 per cent were commonplace; tribes were decimated, in some instances wholly obliterated. Indian populations fell into a precipitous decline; one estimate speculates that the population of Native Indians in North America fell by 74 percent between 1492 and 1800. In some regions populations recovered and in some areas increased, as refugees from other areas coalesced with existing groups, but all told, disease, in conjunction with war, slavery and other cultural disruptions determined there was scant opportunity for population recovery to occur. Treatment of epidemic related illnesses by traditional methods were often lethally counterproductive. Sweat lodge ceremonies to purify the body required convening people in a confined space and therefore making the airborne transmission of viruses easier. The profuse sweating brought about dangerous dehydration as did the use of customary herbal medicines, many of which contained cathartic and emetic properties. With the Indians resorting in anguish to curing societies and community rituals to combat new diseases; shamans explored new and more effective rituals through fasting and dreaming. The Mandan Indians, a farming tribe, living along the Missouri River at the edges of the Great Plains, were virtually wiped out by disease. When first encountered by the French in 1738 the Mandans population was approximately 15,000 but over the next hundred years, numbers declined dramatically. The Mandans location at the hub of the trade network on the Missouri River guaranteed exposure to the epidemic diseases sweeping through trade routes. Nucleated, sedentary tribes were hardest hit by disease; for the Mandans and â€Å"river peoples† like them, this caused further shifting of the power balance in the region to the Plains groups. After experiencing devastating losses in the smallpox pandemic of 1779-81, by June 1837 the Mandan population was at best 2,000; by October 1837, after another smallpox epidemic, 138 Mandan Indians remained. Like the Mandans, the Huron interactions with European traders inevitably brought disease to their villages. Prior to the summer of 1634, a Huron population of 30,000 persons and 20 villages was estimated by the French Jesuits who had lived among them. Influenza struck in 1636. Smallpox hit hard in the mid-1630s, returning in 1639 and by 1640 half the Huron people had been killed by the disease. A house to house census conducted by the Jesuits in the spring of 1639 and over the winter of 1639-40, documents the impact of the 1639-40 smallpox epidemic; the last in a series of catastrophic diseases between 1634 and 1640. A total of 12,000 Huron and their neighbors the Tionantate remained. As disease took its appalling toll, the Huron looked increasingly to the Jesuits for spiritual help. The missionaries who had been barely tolerated before, were largely unaffected by disease and therefore in the eyes of the Huron, men of power. Reinforcing this belief was the failure of the Huron shamans to forewarn or safeguard their people from the devastation. Over the course of the six years between 1634 and 1640, the Huron experienced a depopulation rate of 60 per cent. The Kiowa were a nomadic, buffalo-hunting tribe. They ranged from the head of the Missouri River to the Black Hills until driven southward by the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux to the region near the Arkansas River in the early nineteenth century. At this time the Kiowa numbered around 2,000. Plains Indians being more dispersed, had a lesser chance of infection and greater chance of survival, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, epidemics of smallpox struck the Indians of the West hard. Up to half of the Plains Indians may have died in the smallpox pandemic of 1779-81, which had advanced along trade routes that the Indians followed to trade horses. The Dohasan calendar (1832-92) was begun by the Kiowa chief named Dohasan and continued until 1892 by his nephew when Dohasan died in 1866, chronicles sixty years of devastating change for the Kiowa. Using a copy of the calendar drawn by Dohasan himself, anthropologist James Mooney compiled an account of the events depicted by the calendar, from information supplied by Dohasan and supplemented with information from other Kiowa chronicles. The calendar accounts epidemics among the Kiowas in the winter of 1839-40 and 1861-62, and in the summer of 1849, cholera. By the summer of 1879, buffalo were so scarce that to keep from starving the Kiowas had to kill and eat their horses. The calendar ends in 1892 with a measles epidemic, which broke out at the reservation school, and once the school superintendent sent the sick children home, spread quickly. In 1848 gold was discovered in California, this inevitably brought more immigrants across the Plains, who in turn brought cholera, measles and scarlet fever to the Indians. The eventual conquest of the West by the American military came about in the in the aftermath of biological catastrophes which had left the Indians practically powerless and unable to resist. Conclude about how these experiences/events were critical in native American history Conclude by explaining why (or why not studying native American history is important today Native American history is important and it is imperative that it still be studied today. As part of the fundamental roots of this country; and the brutal behaviors It is impossible not to be apathetic to the Native Indians immense suffering at the hands of the formation of Colonial America. The gains achieved by the new America’ were at the detriment of the Indian people.