1491 . . . Europeans-borne pestilences wiped out Native cultures soon after Columbus

A 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, "1491," by Charles Mann--whose book of the same name was published shortly after the article--summarizes how ominous awareness grew over decades in academia of the horrible truth that a pestilential, near-total extermination of Native American populations struck when early European explorer-invaders brought viruses to the shores of the Western Hemisphere.

One of many consequences was Europeans' inaccurately simplistic impression of ancient Native American cultures' scope and achievements. (Click to enlarge image at right of an artist's rendering of Cahokia, in present-day Illinois. It was the only prehistoric Indian city north of Mexico. "At its peak from 1,100 to 1,200 A.D., the city covered nearly six square miles and boasted a population of as many as 20,000 people.")

James W. Loewen points out that

In 1492, more than 3,000,000 Indians lived on the island of Haiti. Forty years later, fewer than 300 remained. The earliest Portuguese found that Labrador teemed with hospitable Indians who could easily be enslaved. It teems no more. In about 1780, smallpox reduced the Mandans of North Dakota from nine villages to two; then in 1837, a second smallpox epidemic reduced them from 1600 persons to just 31. The pestilence continues: a fourth of the Yanomamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela died in the year prior to my writing this sentence.

And consider just the case in point of Hernando de Soto. He landed on May 30, 1539, near Tampa Bay, in Florida with 200 horses, 600 soldiers, and 300 pigs. (An approximation of his route is shown at right.) From Mann's article cited earlier:

The calamity wrought by Soto apparently extended across the whole Southeast. The Coosa city-states, in western Georgia, and the Caddoan-speaking civilization, centered on the Texas-Arkansas border, disintegrated soon after Soto appeared. The Caddo had had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After Soto's army left, notes Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddo stopped building community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between Soto's and La Salle's visits, Perttula believes, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent [in about 100 years]. In the eighteenth century the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today in the population of New York City would reduce it to 56,000—not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters," says Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out."

(Why this post now? On August 7, 1679, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, "La Salle," embarked on the Le Griffon, which, incidentally, is almost certainly the vessel discovered near Green Bay not long ago. Its crew, which he led, became the first white men to navigate the Great Lakes by sailing ship. They sailed to Lake Erie, then Lake Huron, then to Michilimackinac (Mackinac), and finally to Green Bay, Wisconsin. La Salle would late provide what is now understood to be written evidence for the destruction of the Caddo people.)