The Diseases: The Epidemic Waves

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = contemporaneous record, census or register material, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = Indigenous record or oral history, including the winter counts in §9. Debated / Claim = a disputed identification, figure, or interpretation, with the disagreement printed. This entry stands beside ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md (intent, at its fixed evidence levels) and ../genocide/demographic-collapse.md (hemispheric figures); it re-argues neither and re-derives no totals.

1. The Disease Suite — What Arrived

• Documented fact — the exchange. Crosby named the biological transfer that followed 1492 the Columbian exchange (Crosby, 1972; 1986). Its disease traffic was radically one-sided: a suite of Afro-Eurasian infections reached peoples who had never met them, while no American infection is documented to have killed on a comparable scale in the Old World (Crosby, 1976; Nunn & Qian, 2010).
• Documented fact — the list as the literature gives it. Introduced from the Old World, principally: smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, mumps, whooping cough, chickenpox, bubonic plague, diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever and, in the nineteenth century, cholera; the literature's deadliest ranking names smallpox, measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, bubonic plague, typhus and malaria (Crosby, 1976; Cook, 1998, Born to Die; Nunn & Qian, 2010, summarising Cook).
• Documented fact — not one arrival. Smallpox is documented in the Caribbean by 1518–19 and in Mexico in 1520 (Cook, 1998). Yellow fever is understood to have arrived from Africa, probably via the slave trade; cholera belongs to the nineteenth-century pandemics (Nunn & Qian, 2010; Crosby, 1986).
• Documented fact — how they travelled. Epidemics repeatedly outran face-to-face European contact, moving along Indigenous trade, travel, kinship and warfare routes ahead of Europeans (Thornton, 1987; Fenn, 2001; ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md §3). Ships, missions, slave-raiding, armies and, later, steamboats kept reseeding them.

2. "Virgin Soil" — the Concept and Its Debate

• Documented fact — the term. Crosby coined "virgin soil epidemics" in 1976: epidemics "in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless" (Crosby, 1976; ../genocide/demographic-collapse.md §4).
• Documented fact — the high-count use of it. Henry F. Dobyns (1966; 1983) argued epidemics had destroyed most people before Europeans counted them, proposed a depopulation ratio of about 20 to 1 (95 per cent), and built very high pre-contact totals from it. Debated / Claim: Henige's Numbers from Nowhere (1998) attacked that ratio as methodologically unsound. This entry takes no side: its hemispheric figures are only the ranges in ../genocide/demographic-collapse.md (Denevan, 1992, c. 53.9 million; Koch et al., 2019, 60.5 million, IQR 44.8–78.2 million, c. 90 per cent removed within a century).
• Debated / Claim — Jones, "Virgin Soils Revisited" (2003). David S. Jones argued that lack of prior immunity alone does not explain the varying severity, and that these epidemics, "despite their unusual severity, were caused by the same forces of poverty, social stress, and environmental vulnerability that cause epidemics in all other times and places" (Jones, 2003, William and Mary Quarterly 60(4); 2004). As a purely genetic explanation, "virgin soil" obscures those conditions.
• Debated / Claim — Kelton and the social-conditions school. Kelton showed for the Southeast that catastrophic smallpox came late, not first: no region-wide epidemic is evidenced there before 1696–1700, whose spread he ties to the English trade in enslaved Indigenous people — raiding, forced movement, malnourished refugees crowded into compact settlements (Kelton, 2007). His position, shared by Beyond Germs (2015): epidemics "followed rather than preceded" the colonial systems that made them catastrophic.
• Documented fact — where the debate leaves the record. Both schools agree the pathogens were new, and that mortality multiplied when whole communities fell ill at once — no one well enough to fetch water, cook, nurse or hunt — under colonial conditions of concentration, enslavement, malnutrition, displacement and destroyed food systems (../genocide/demographic-collapse.md §4). Debated is the relative weight of immunity versus conditions — not whether the waves happened.

3. First Waves in the South, 1518–1576: Mexico and the Andes

• Documented fact — Mexico, 1520. Smallpox reached Mexico in 1520 with the Narváez expedition from Cuba, during Cortés's assault on the Mexica empire; it struck Tenochtitlan during the fighting, killed the emperor Cuitláhuac, and is treated in the conquest literature as decisively weakening the city's defence (Cook, 1998).
• Documented fact — the Andes, before Pizarro. An epidemic, likely smallpox, ran ahead of the Spanish into the Inca empire in the 1520s, killing Huayna Capac and his heir and precipitating the Atahualpa–Huáscar civil war Pizarro exploited after 1532 (Cook, 1998). "Likely," not proven (Flagged points). Regional figures: ../genocide/demographic-collapse.md §3.
• Debated / Claim — cocoliztli, 1545 and 1576. Mexico's two greatest later sixteenth-century epidemics were called cocoliztli (Nahuatl, "pestilence"). Their pathogen is not settled. Acuña-Soto et al. (2004) argued from the symptoms — high fever, bleeding from nose, eyes and mouth, death in three to four days, outbreaks following megadrought — for an indigenous viral haemorrhagic fever. Ancient DNA from a 1545 cemetery at Teposcolula-Yucundaa, Oaxaca, instead recovered Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C in several individuals — presented by its authors as at least one agent present, not the sole cause everywhere (Vågene et al., 2018, Nature Ecology & Evolution). Neither identification is asserted here.

4. The New England Coast, 1616–1619

• Documented fact — the event. Between about 1616 and 1619 an epidemic devastated the southern New England coast, including the Patuxet, whose emptied village site Plymouth colonists occupied in 1620, and their Wampanoag and Massachusetts neighbours; nearby English and French fishermen and traders were largely spared (Marr & Cathey, 2010; Cook, 1973).
• Debated / Claim — the pathogen is unidentified. This entry does not call it smallpox. Candidates include smallpox, plague, yellow fever, influenza, chickenpox, typhus, typhoid fever, trichinosis, meningitis and hepatitis syndromes; Marr & Cathey (2010) added leptospirosis with Weil syndrome, arguing the recorded signs — fever, headache, nosebleeds, jaundice, skin lesions — fit it, with ship-borne rodent reservoirs explaining exposure. Retrospective diagnosis is, as that literature stresses, speculative.
• Debated / Claim — the death rate. Marr & Cathey (2010): published estimates "lack reliable numerator and denominator data" and range from one-third to as high as 90 per cent. That whole range, with its warning, is what the record carries.

5. The St. Lawrence and Huronia, 1634–1640 — Before the Dispersal

• Documented fact — a sequence, not a single plague. The Jesuit Relations document successive epidemics among the Wendat (Huron) from 1634: an epidemic of 1634 (measles in some scholarship, smallpox in others — printed as differing), influenza in 1636–37, possible scarlet fever in 1637, and devastating smallpox from 1639 (Trigger, 1976, The Children of Aataentsic; Warrick, 2007). St. Lawrence peoples — Innu, Algonquin and Wendat trading partners — were struck in the same years (Trigger, 1976).
• Documented fact — the Wendat count, as a range. Trigger's synthesis, from the Jesuit figures, puts the Wendat falling from about 25,000–30,000 before 1634 to about 10,000–12,000 by 1640 — roughly half to two-thirds dead in six years, villages abandoned and amalgamated (Trigger, 1976; Warrick, 2007). Pre-epidemic totals are estimates.
• Documented fact — the political consequence. The epidemics killed elders, leaders and children, split villages between those who blamed the Jesuits and those who sought baptism, and left the confederacy weakened on the eve of the Haudenosaunee offensives of 1648–49 — grouped with the Beaver Wars — which dispersed the Wendat homeland in 1649 (Trigger, 1976). They are documented as the condition preceding those wars, not their sole cause.

6. The Great Plains Epidemic, 1780–1782

• Documented fact — traced from Mexico City. Fenn reconstructed this as the northern arm of the continental smallpox epidemic of 1775–82. Smallpox struck Mexico City in August 1779; by 27 December it had afflicted 44,286 people there, and an estimated 18,000 died by early 1780 (Fenn, 2001, Pox Americana). Northward, it reached Texas and New Mexico in fall–winter 1780–81; Bancroft calculated 5,025 mission Indians dead in New Mexico alone, excluding non-mission Indians — his calculation, reported as such (Fenn, 2001).
• Documented fact — onto the Plains. Fenn traces the virus through Comanche trade and raiding networks to their Shoshone kin, thence to the Piegan Blackfeet, Western Cree (Nêhiyawak) and Assiniboine (Nakoda), reaching Hudson's Bay Company posts by autumn 1781 (Fenn, 2001; 2014).
• Tradition — the people's own account, recorded contemporaneously. Piegan elder Saukamappee, recorded by David Thompson, described Piegan raiders in summer 1781 entering a Shoshone camp to find "no one to fight with but the dead and the dying, each a mass of corruption," plundering it, and falling sick two days later (Thompson, in Fenn, 2001). HBC trader William Tomison reported of Cree and Assiniboine near Cumberland House that "not one in fifty have survived" — a trader's report, not a counted rate (HBC journals, in Fenn, 2001).
• Documented fact — corroboration. Lakota winter counts independently mark this epidemic for 1779–80 and 1780–81 (Battiste Good; §9). That convergence is why this route is stated as documented.

7. The Upper Missouri, 1837 — Fort Clark and the Mandan

• Documented fact — the steamboat. In June 1837 the American Fur Company steamboat St. Peter's ascended the Missouri with smallpox aboard; its captain knew of the sickness and continued for commercial reasons, reaching Fort Clark, beside the Mandan villages, on 19 June 1837 (Trimble, 1985; Chardon journal; Fulkerson report, 1837 [primary]; ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md §2).
• Documented fact — transmission, as reconstructed. Chardon and Fulkerson proposed a blanket stolen from the boat; sub-agent Joshua Pilcher's contemporary account instead supports person-to-person spread, including via three infected Arikara women who left the boat at Fort Clark — the route modern researchers following Trimble judge more likely (Trimble, 1985; Brown, 2006).
• Documented fact — the Mandan catastrophe, counts as ranges. The Mandan, about 1,600–2,000 people before the epidemic, were reduced to a few dozen to about 125 survivors — Chardon's figures lowest, later counts higher; no single number is asserted (Trimble, 1985; range fixed in ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md §2). The Hidatsa lost about half; the Arikara, Assiniboine and other Missouri peoples suffered heavily (Trimble, 1985). The Mandan–Hidatsa–Arikara community descends from the survivors (Fenn, 2014).
• Debated / Claim — intent, held at the strand's fixed level. The claim that in 1837 the U.S. Army deliberately distributed infected blankets to the Mandan is CLAIMED, NOT EVIDENCED — see ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md §2 (Brown, 2006; University of Colorado inquiry, 2006), and for Fort Pitt, 1763, the one documented deliberate-infection case, whose effect Fenn (2000) concludes cannot be proved. Not re-argued here. The documented culpability of 1837, as that file states it, is a known-infected commercial steamboat kept moving, and vaccination that had protected some peoples and not others.

8. Measles and Influenza Waves, 1840s–1919

• Documented fact — measles as a recurrent killer. Measles, often with dysentery, influenza or whooping cough, kept striking peoples whose previous exposure was a generation earlier, each wave again meeting a largely non-immune younger population (Boyd, 1999; Thornton, 1987). The Lakota counts register the rhythm: whooping cough "very prevalent and fatal" in 1813–14, measles in 1818–19 — "measles broke out and many died" (Lone Dog count, §9).
• Documented fact — the Pacific Northwest, 1847–48. A measles epidemic, tracked by Boyd north from California and along the emigrant routes, struck the Columbia Plateau in 1847–48. Among the Cayuse, whom Boyd numbers at no more than about 500 in 1847, measles and dysentery killed a large share — estimates reach about 40 per cent, on records Boyd calls sparse (Boyd, 1994; 1999). Cayuse deaths at the Whitman mission formed the background to the Whitmans' killing in November 1847.
• Documented fact — Okak and Hebron, Labrador, 1918. The 1918–19 influenza pandemic reached the North by ship: the Moravian vessel Harmony carried it from St. John's to northern Labrador in October 1918 (Nunatsiavut Government, 2018). At Okak the Moravian superintendent reported in March 1919 that 207 had died in a population of 263; the Nunatsiavut Government's figure is 204 of 263 — both printed, unreconciled (Budgell, 2018, citing the Moravian report; Nunatsiavut Government, 2018). At Hebron, 140 died in a population of 222 (Budgell, 2018). Combined Okak–Hebron mortality, about 71 per cent, is among the highest recorded anywhere in the pandemic; Okak was abandoned afterwards. Sandwich Bay lost 69 of 320 (Budgell, 2018).
• Documented fact — Alaska, 1918. The comparative literature Budgell cites gives up to about 60 per cent mortality in some Alaska Native villages (Budgell, 2018).

9. The Peoples' Own Records — the Winter Counts

• Tradition — the people's own account, as primary documents. Lakota and Dakota keepers recorded each year by one pictograph — the event by which it would be remembered — in the winter counts (waníyetu wówaepi), on hide and later cloth and paper, from first snowfall to first snowfall (Greene & Thornton, 2007; Mallery, 1886; 1893; Calloway, 2006). They name epidemic years as other archives name battles and treaties.
• Tradition — the people's own account — Battiste Good. His count names 1779–80 "smallpox used them up winter" — in the Smithsonian translation, "The eruption and pains in the stomach and bowels; smallpox used them up winter" — and marks smallpox again for 1780–81 (Greene & Thornton, 2007): the Lakota record of the wave traced in §6.
• Tradition — the people's own account — Lone Dog. Lone Dog's count (Yanktonai; 1800–1871, Smithsonian) marks 1801–02 with a figure covered in red blotches — "Many died of smallpox" — the epidemic Lewis and Clark still saw the effects of in 1804; it also carries 1813–14 (whooping cough) and 1818–19 (measles) (Mallery, 1886; Calloway, 2006; Greene & Thornton, 2007).
• Documented fact — the comparative finding. Greene & Thornton's corpus, with Linea Sundstrom's comparative work, finds epidemic entries recurring — smallpox repeatedly, later measles, whooping cough and influenza — at roughly generational intervals, the signature of §8's reseeding (Greene & Thornton, 2007). Counts are dated by shared markers — famously the Leonid storm, "the year the stars fell," 1833–34.

10. Consequences, in Brief — Cross-References

• Documented fact — scale. Epidemic disease was, on the consensus, the largest single cause of the hemispheric collapse — ahead of direct killing — without dissolving the policies that magnified it. Figures: ../genocide/demographic-collapse.md; intent: ../genocide/disease-and-intent.md.
• Documented fact — the school era. The waves changed address rather than ending. In Canada's residential schools, tuberculosis and other disease in overcrowded, underfunded institutions were the principal documented drivers of student deaths: Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce reported in 1907 that 24 per cent of pupils at the schools he surveyed had died. Full record: ../genocide/schools.md §§1–2.
• Documented fact — survival. Every people named here exists today, and the Okak dead are still commemorated by the Nunatsiavut Government (2018). See the extinction strand.

Sources

• Acuña-Soto, R., et al. (2004). "When half of the population died," FEMS Microbiology Letters 240.
• Boyd, R. T. (1994). "The Pacific Northwest Measles Epidemic of 1847–1848," Oregon Historical Quarterly. — (1999). The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence. UBC Press.
• Brown, T. (2006). "Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians?" Univ. of Michigan repository.
• Budgell, A. (2018). We All Expected to Die: Spanish Influenza in Labrador, 1918–1919. ISER Books.
• Calloway, C. G. (2006). One Vast Winter Count. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
• Cameron, C. M., Kelton, P. & Swedlund, A. C., eds. (2015). Beyond Germs. Univ. of Arizona Press.
• Cook, N. D. (1998). Born to Die. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Crosby, A. W. (1972). The Columbian Exchange. — (1976). "Virgin Soil Epidemics," William and Mary Quarterly. — (1986). Ecological Imperialism. — (1989). America's Forgotten Pandemic.
• Denevan, W. M., ed. (1992). The Native Population of the Americas in 1492, 2nd ed. [Via demographic-collapse.md.]
• Dobyns, H. F. (1966). Current Anthropology. — (1983). Their Number Become Thinned.
• Fenn, E. A. (2000). "Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America," Journal of American History. — (2001). Pox Americana. — (2014). Encounters at the Heart of the World.
• Greene, C. S. & Thornton, R. (2007). The Year the Stars Fell: Lakota Winter Counts at the Smithsonian. Smithsonian / Univ. of Nebraska Press.
• Henige, D. (1998). Numbers from Nowhere. Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
• Jones, D. S. (2003). "Virgin Soils Revisited," William and Mary Quarterly 60(4). — (2004). Rationalizing Epidemics. Harvard Univ. Press.
• Kelton, P. (2007). Epidemics and Enslavement. Univ. of Nebraska Press.
• Koch, A., et al. (2019). Quaternary Science Reviews 207. [Via demographic-collapse.md.]
• Mallery, G. (1886; 1893). Winter-count reports, Bureau of American Ethnology [primary corpus].
• Marr, J. S. & Cathey, J. T. (2010). "New Hypothesis for Cause of Epidemic among Native Americans, New England, 1616–1619," Emerging Infectious Diseases 16(2).
• Nunatsiavut Government (2018). Okak Spanish-flu commemoration release, 15 Nov. 2018.
• Nunn, N. & Qian, N. (2010). "The Columbian Exchange," Journal of Economic Perspectives 24(2).
• Thompson, D. Narrative (Saukamappee account) [primary, in Fenn, 2001].
• Thornton, R. (1987). American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Univ. of Oklahoma Press.
• Trigger, B. G. (1976). The Children of Aataentsic. McGill-Queen's Univ. Press.
• Trimble, M. K. (1985). 1837 upper-Missouri reconstruction [via disease-and-intent.md].
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015). Final Report, Vol. 4 [via schools.md].
• Vågene, Å. J., et al. (2018). "Salmonella enterica genomes… sixteenth-century epidemic in Mexico," Nature Ecology & Evolution.
• Warrick, G. (2007). "European Infectious Disease and the Depopulation of the Wendat-Tionontaté," in Kerber, ed., Archaeology of the Iroquois.
• Chardon journal; Fulkerson report; Pilcher report (1837) [primary, via Trimble, 1985].

Flagged claims / weakest-sourced points: (1) 1616–19 pathogen unidentified — every candidate is a retrospective hypothesis; its mortality range (one-third to 90 per cent) rests on sources its literature calls unreliable. (2) Cocoliztli — both identifications stand; the DNA finding is from one Oaxacan cemetery and settles neither 1545 everywhere nor 1576. (3) Huayna Capac's epidemic — "likely smallpox" is inference from chronicle timing. (4) Wendat identifications by year differ between sources; the 1640 convergence (10,000–12,000) is firmer than any single diagnosis. (5) Tomison's "not one in fifty" is a trader's report; Bancroft's 5,025 a nineteenth-century calculation. (6) The Cayuse figure (c. 40 per cent) rests on sparse records, per Boyd. (7) Okak differs by three between Budgell/Moravian (207 of 263) and Nunatsiavut Government (204 of 263); both printed. (8) The 1837 Mandan survivor range (a few dozen to c. 125) is the strand's fixed range; its counts cannot be reconciled to one number.