Did European viruses lay waste to North American Indians? Some considerations

 A Chairde,

As I keep saying, there's always a "Minority Report", always another side to any coin. We've been told for hundreds of years that European diseases wiped out Native Americans. How much truth is there to that claim? For example, consider the upper-midwest Mandan tribe. One a populous and successful farming tribe, the story is that in 1781 an epidemic decimated the Mandan villages. It was smallpox. It had broken out in Mexico City some decades before slowly traveled north. It badly affected settled populations, like the Mandan.

Some preliminary observations:

1. Smallpox has a record of breaking out in large population centers, such as Mexico City and many cities in Europe and elsewhere. It was less known among sparsely settled populations. (Same was true with the Medieval Black Death, of course, and contagious diseases in general.)
   
2. But the Mandan were successful agriculturalists living in large villages. Native North Americans sometimes developed large urban populations like Cahokia, the mounds of which stand across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Cahokia rivaled in sized some of the great cities of Meso-America and medieval Europe, during its greatest era.
3. But often these "cities" became what are called "population sinks". The more people crowded into these centers, the quicker they caught contagions and died. Whether European or America, they had no specific hygienic facilities. The necessity for these was not understood after the fall of the Roman Empire. Disease flourished. This is true in Medieval and early modern European cities as well as Native American ones.
   
4. This was very true of English cities in the 19th century. Despite the fame of Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine (1796), smallpox remained a plague in England for a long lifetime. Contrary to the Jenner legend, and despite of or because of England's vaccination laws, between 1871 and 1880, 57,016 smallpox deaths occurred in Britain. 57,016 people in nine years, mind you, with a famous vaccine being required by law. Something major changed, however, for between 1911 and 1920, only 110 English deaths occurred from smallpox. By that time, vaccination had evaporated as a national policy. But for years, vaccination had been national policy, for the British government made Smallpox vaccination a requirement in 1853, with the Compulsory Vaccination Act, with a more stringent version in 1867. (Does this sound familiar to anyone reading this today?) A Dr. Hadwen wrote: "After about 40 years of compulsory vaccination, Britain suffered the worst smallpox epidemic in its entire history, with the highest death rate in history."
5. What vaccine brought smallpox to an end? No vaccine at all. Rather, sanitation policies brought smallpox to an end. City reformers in Leicester set the example: they rejected vaccination in favor of sanitation. Yes, friends, this is true. Sanitation. I've always said that the invention and use of soap saved more human lives than any other thing in all history. With sewers and indoor plumbing and a ban on vaccination, smallpox disappeared from Leicester, and eventually from England. The same thing happened in Cleveland (of all places!). A Dr. Friedrich, in charge of the Health Board of Cleveland, abolished vaccination "absolutely" and promoted sanitation. Smallpox vanished. (As reported by a Dr. John Hodge in 1902.) Clearly, sanitation played the major role in ending Smallpox.
   
6. The Mandan didn't know this. The contagion arrived and killed a majority of them. Those who survived to moved north and put up two new villages and associated with a confederate tribe. Living as they had traditionally lived, the Mandan thus recuperated and slowly restored their population until 1837. In that year, another smallpox plague almost entirely wiped them out, leaving only 125 people. (They still survive today, amazingly, with a little over a thousand people registered officially as having some Mandan ancestry, while a little less than 400 claim to be full-bloods.)
   

So, with all that a necessary background, consider what this passage from the The Contagion Myth, by Dr. Tom Cowan, reveals. He discusses other possible causes of mass Native American death.

(Starting at page 61.)

In 1617-1608, just prior to the arrival of the Mayflower, a mysterious epidemic wiped out up to 90 percent of the Indian population along the Massachusetts coast. History books blame the epidemic on smallpox, but a recent analysis has concluded that it may have been a disease called leptospirosis. Even today, leptospirosis kills almost sixty thousand people per year.

Leptospirosis is a blood infection similar to malaria, associated with various forms of spirochaete bacteria. Other forms of spirochete parasites characterize syphilis, yaws, and Lyme disease. Humans encounter these spirochetes through animal urine or water and soil contaminated with animal urine coming into contact with the eyes, mouth, nose, or cuts. The disease is associated with poor sanitation. Both wild and domestic animals can transmit leptospirosis through their urine and other fluids; rodents are the most common vector, and the beaver is a rodent. [Image: Native Americans trade beaver skins with European colonists for liquor and other times that made them vulnerable to disease.]

One important factor omitted from discussions about Native American diseases is the disruption of the salt trade. The first European explorers in the New World did not come to the East Coast but to Florida and the southeastern part of the North America. During the 1540s, eighty years before Plymouth Rock, the explorer Hernando de Soto led the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States. They traversed Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and possibly Arkansas, and they saw the Mississippi River.

Some anthropologists have insisted that the Native Americans did not consume salt, but de Soto received "an abundance of good salt" as a gift from the Native Americans, and he observed the production and trade of salt in the southeastern part of the country. In the lower Mississippi Valley, he met traveling Native American merchants selling salt. According to de Soto records, lack of salt could lead to a most unfortunate death.

[And excerpt is included here from de Soto's records describing the most horrible deaths resulting from salt paucity in the native diet.]

The most important sources of salt were the salt springs that dotted northwestern Louisiana, western Arkansas, and the Ohio River Valley. Archeological remains in these areas indicate that the Native Americans evaporated the brine in shallow clay salt pans, most likely by adding hot rocks to the brackish water. They also retrieved salt from the ashes of certain plants and from salt-impregnated sand; they sometimes gathered rock salt. Well-defined salt trails allowed the transport of salt to the east. Coastal Native Americans generally got their salt through trade rather than the evaporation of seawater, as wood for making fire is sparse near ocean beaches, and the moist sea air is unconducive to evaporation.

Salt traders did not belong to any tribal group but traveled alone from tribe to tribe carrying baskets of salt gathered from salt lakes, along with other goods. As Native American cultural life crumbled in the face of the European invasion, the salt trade would have been an early victim of this disruption. Salt is critical for protection against parasites. We need the chloride in the salt to make hydrochloric acid; without salt the stomach will not be sufficiently acidic to kill parasites.

The point is that the so-called "infectious" diseases that caused so much suffering did not arrive until after a period of disruption and nutritional decline; and fear and despair almost certain played a role. When disease broke out in a village, the afflicted often found themselves abandoned by those still healthy, so they had no one to care for them. Unable to get water for themselves, they typically died of thirst. This may explain why the death rates during outbreaks were so much higher for the Native Americans (typically 90 percent) than for Europeans (typically 30 percent).

One disease blamed for Native American death was measles, considered to be a viral disease. But on February 16, 2016, the Federal Supreme Court of Germany (BGH) made a historic ruling: there is no evidence for the existence of a measles virus.

An P again: See a subsequent email discussing this measles court case.