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A Merged History
of Canada and The United States
by Bill Jones
The Plight of Native Americans
To the Introduction & IndexSins of Omission.. The author has committed the same unpardonable sins of most writers of history, that is, ignoring the millions of Native Americans who were the owners of the lands before Europeans arrived to displace them. Columbus did not discover any lands anywhere. He only arrived after a long voyage from Spain. Alaska was not discovered by Russia. People were already there. Hudson Bay was not discovered. The Inuit had lived along its shores for thousands of years. The time lines given above only represent when and how the lands were wrested away from the Native American inhabitants, and even that story is continually recounted with great bias toward the invaders. The system of colonization in lands already populated was the real culprit. One should wonder if we would repeat that history, given the chance.
Population Estimates.. Some current estimates are that there were as many as 60 million Native inhabitants of North America during the 16th Century. A census was never taken, nor was there much interest ever given to the subject, except to assess the force necessary to overcome them. Such population estimates may be either close or distorted. It is well known that Native population declined drastically and consistently over four centuries. Some factors that caused the precipitous decline of population were; Institutional Genocide, Diminishment of Habitat and Animal resources (The Buffalo), and Epidemics of Contagious Diseases. By far, the most significant cause seems to have been the latter. Few today can visualize how new diseases could have had such drastic effects over such a long time period. To do so we must travel back in time before modern medicine.Smallpox.. The following excerpts are quoted from the 1891 edition of Chambers Encyclopedia.
Smallpox: The cause of smallpox is universally allowed to be a specific contagion, of whose nature we are in profound ignorance. There is probably no disease so contagious as this. An American physician reported an instance in which the poisonous effluvium crossed a river 1500 feet wide and infected ten out of twelve carpenters who were working on the other side. The contagion acts through the air or by one being in the same vicinity with one who is sick. The disease may be caused by the dead body, even when it has not been touched. Clothing will retain it for months, and it is said for years when confined.Chambers also records that several other diseases prevalent from the 16th Century were also mass killers of American Indians; due to the fact that America was isolated from the rest of the World, the inhabitants had never experienced the diseases, and the people had no naturally inherited resistance to them (antibodies). These other diseases were; Red Measles, Scarlet Fever, Influenza, Diphtheria, and Infectious Tuberculoses. The latter caused an outbreak of sores all over the body and in the lungs, complete weakness, and usually resulted in death within a year. And, the Indians were always isolated away from whatever medical care that might have been available to the colonial settlers, limited as that was.
Race has much to do with the severity of the disease; the constitution of the Red Indian being singularly susceptible to the consequences of the contagion and exhibiting very little power of resisting the fatal tenancy of the disease.
In 1707 smallpox was introduced to Iceland when more than a fourth part of population died from it. Smallpox reached Greenland in 1733 when it spread so fatally as to almost depopulate the country.
Smallpox was introduced in the Western hemisphere by the Spaniards about 15 years after the discovery of America. In Mexico within a short period 3.5 million persons died. Epidemics of smallpox exterminated whole tribes of Indians, the effects being so universally fatal that it spared no one to tell the story of the annihilation.
The epidemiology of Smallpox alone was about 90 deaths of 100 cases, and it was so contagious that it swept rapidly from tribe to tribe, year after year, for over three Centuries. It would be almost impossible that any tribe would have avoided repeated epidemics. So we can assume that 90 percent of the original American Indian population of North America died of Smallpox alone.
It is ironic that the European settlers did not intentionally introduce these killing diseases to the Natives. It just happened as a consequence of people traveling from where the diseases existed. And it is more than likely that the diseases would have eventually reached the New World at some later time and would likely have had the same tragic results.
