People who study disease origins are familiar with how Old World people got such a huge microbiological edge over the earlier inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere: livestock. Virtually all of the terrible influenza and pox that decimated early Native American populations came from livestock of the hoofed and winged variety. The current threat of pandemic largely resides in China with their swine and poultry stock.
In his recent botch-job on the Native American genocide, Stefan Molyneux took Jared Diamond’s excellent work in Guns, Germs and Steel and distorted it to the point where he suggested that disease jumped on mouse and bat back and flew around the Americas wiping out natives.
First we had dense civilizations that were culled at 90% on first contact.
Second, we have the Eastern Woodland population which is largely ignored but did most of the resisting.
Third, we have the Plains Indians which went down hard and fast when they made direct contact with the U.S. Government, partially due to disease, which in the case of the Nez Perce, Crow and Blackfeet were catastrophic, marking a fall in a mere generation from first official contact with the European power.
Back to number two, how come the domain tribes of the Eastern Woodlands survived close contact with Europeans for exactly 200 years, giving ground at about 7 miles per year?
If disease were the culprit those trees to stalk white men from behind would not do any good. Yes, some coastal tribes died off early and quickly, between white disease and Indian enemies having no choice but to throw themselves at the mercy of the whites.
But most of the tribes wiped out were wiped out by Indians in white employ. They had disease-transfer contact [more so than enemy Indians, in fact] and were still operational.
Let me throw out a couple ideas on why the diseases that Europeans carried with them from living for thousands of years in close proximity to livestock did not wipe out the Eastern Woodland Indians right away.
One of the reasons Europeans did not name their children until age five and generally beat the shit out of them and used them as economic units—and even had Saint Nick as an evil elf coming to bring booze for the parents on Christmas Eve and coal for the kids to shovel into the furnace—was that this close living with animals bred such disease that most European kids died in childhood. Consequently they developed a high birthrate low-child empathy strategy.
The Indians had a land management economy that provided well for a fixed population, so had small numbers of children and treated them well. When hit with disease—which the Europeans clamed as the hand of their own murderous God—the Indians often kidnapped European children to replace losses. Since most of these children were brutalized indentured servants and abused children of said servants, they rarely wished to return to their white parents [who were not permitted to be armed]. Yes, Indians were always savage to enemies, but among their own were surprisingly gentle in most cases, with cases of brutality usually being ritualized by the, group, such as culling the elderly and sacrificing the young, among the Delaware and Pawnee respectively. But on a parent to child basis, Eastern Woodlands Indians outside of the Mississippian culture, who were the survivors of a fallen civilization [smashed and infected by the Soto Entrada], were like perfect postmodern parents.
In one case in 1790s Ohio, an adopted white who hated his Shawnee adoptees would drink, pretend to get drunk and then kill an Indian while drunk and would be forgiven for being under the influence of alcohol and retained in the tribe! Most white adoptees just liked being an Indian better, some deserting white society to seek that life out. Whatever the case, it is my contention that the following facts suggest that these Eastern Woodland Indians did suffer terribly from disease, and that when they adopted white captives to fill the gaps they began breeding immunity as well as gaining the individual help of those converts to their tribal cause.
In 1622 Virginia, 1676 New England, 1750s Pennsylvania, 1780s West Virginia and 1795 Ohio, we have records from white chroniclers that describe white Indians not only fighting on the side of the Indians but of holding leadership positions in the tribes.
We have extensive records of Indians from 1538 to 1812 travelling back and forth to Europe and returning, without dying and requiring resurrection, from the filthy European conditions Although Pocahontas did pay the ultimate influenza price for her marriage to an Englishman.
Period artwork from the 1670s through the 1820s depicts chiefs and warriors who appear ethnically closer to polish people then to Plains Indians.
I cannot prove—although perhaps there is evidence of extensive European-Eastern Woodland Indian interbreeding in the genome—that the Indians of the east were essentially half-breed cultural resistance tribes. But my research into the white servitude issue, the discovery that Indians served as plantation bounty hunters and the knowledge that they would need physical children as replacements for the many they lost to disease, have convinced me that there is a physical dimension to the traditional rural American connection to the Idea of the Indian.
America in Chains
Informative and well written.
Additional information on the relocation of the Greenland farmers to the eastern woodlands of North America in the 1300's and 1400's can be found in the book (Sagas of the Icelanders}. For several hundred years, until about 1300 AD, Greenland was warm enough that settlers from Iceland farmed all around the edge of Greenland. When the climate cycle swung back to cold, they were relocated by the fleets of Prince Henry Sinclair at the request of the King of Norway. Some were relocated in Norway, some in the Orkney Islands, but some 5,000 or 6,000 were dumped along the NE coast of what is now the US. I guess that the ones with money to pay for passage were taken to Norway, but the ones with no money were dumped at the nearest destination.
The Lumbee tribe of North Carolina and Virginia is also interesting. The Jamestown settlement, including Virginia Dare, disappeared and were assumed to have been absorbed into a native tribe. When European explorers later encountered the Lumbee, they were observed to be living in European style two story houses. Many had blue or green eyes, and brown hair.
I have also read several books about children captured in central Texas by the Comanche. When rescued, many tried to run away and rejoin the Comanche. Apparently, in their opinion, they had a better life with the Comanche.