nineteenth centuries, the local Amerindian societies were relatively egalitarian, their population sparse, their arts and crafts admirable but no longer superb, their trade networks regional; these people knew nothing of the mounds and ceremonial centers, abandoned generations before. The whites credited them to Vikings, or to the lost tribes of Israel, or to prehistoric races now gone from the earth.
The builders of the mounds had been Amerindians, of course, in some cases, no doubt, the ancestors of the people who were living near the sites when the Old World settlers arrived. These ancestors had been alive in large numbers when the Europeans first approached the coasts of the Americas. They were the people through whose lands and bodies Hernando de Soto hacked a path from 1539 to 1542 in his search for wealth equal to what he had seen in Peru. His chroniclers give us a clear impression of regions of dense population and many villages in the midst of vast cultivated fields, of stratified societies ruled with an iron hand from the top, and of scores of temples resting on truncated pyramids, which, though often stubby and made of earth rather than masonry, remind one of similar structures in Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.
Where in the images of North American native societies that we share today is there a place for De Soto’s wily opponent, the “Señora of Cofachiqui,” a province that probably contained the present site of Augusta, Georgia. She traveled by sedan chair borne by noblemen and was accompanied by a retinue of slaves. For a distance of a hundred leagues “she was greatly obeyed, whatsoever she ordered being performed with diligence and efficacy.”10 Seeking to deflect the greed of the Spaniards away from her living subjects, she sent the former off to sack a burial house or temple that was 30 m long and 12 or so wide, with a roof decorated with marine shells and fresh-water pearls, which “made a splendid sight in the brilliance of the sun.” Inside were chests containing the dead, and for each chest a statue carved in the likeness of the deceased. The walls and ceiling were hung with art work, and the rooms filled with finely carved maces, battle-axes, pikes, bows, and arrows inlaid with fresh-water pearls. The building and its contents were, in the opinion of one of the grave robbers, Alonso de Carmona, who had lived in both Mexico and Peru, among the finest things he had ever seen in the New World.
The Amerindians of Cofachiqui and of much of what is now the southeastern United States were impressive country cousins of the civilized Mexicans, perhaps comparable to the immediate predecessors of the Sumerians in general culture, and there were a lot of them. The latest scholarly work estimates that the population of one marginal area, Florida, may have been as high as 900,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Even if we skeptically subtract half from that figure, the remainder is impressively large. The southeastern United States, relative to what it had been, was vacant circa 1700 when the French came to stay.
Something eliminated or drove off most of the population of Cofachiqui by the eighteenth century, as well as a number of other areas where heavy populations of people of similar cultural achievements had lived two centuries before: along the Gulf Coast between Mobile Bay and Tampa Bay, along the Georgia coast, and on the banks of the Mississippi above the mouth of the Red River. In eastern and southern Arkansas and northeastern Louisiana, where De Soto had found 30 towns and provinces, the French found only a handful of villages. Where De Soto had been able to stand on one temple mound and see several villages with their mounds and little else but fields of maize between, there was now wilderness. Whatever had afflicted the country through which he had passed may have reached far to the north as well. The region of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, among the richest in natural food resources on the continent, was nearly deserted when whites first penetrated from New France and Virginia.
There had even been a major ecological change in the regions adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico and for tens of kilometers back from the coast, a change paralleling and probably associated with the decline in Amerindian numbers. In the sixteenth century, De Soto’s chroniclers saw no buffalo along their route from Florida to Tennessee and back to the coast, or if they did see these wonderful beasts, they did not mention them – which seems highly improbable. Archeological evidence and examination of Amerindian place names also indicate that there were no buffalo along the De Soto route, nor between it and salt water. A century and a half later, when the French and English arrived, they found the shaggy animals present in at least scattered herds from the mountains almost to the Gulf and even to the Atlantic. What had happened in the interim is easy to explain in the abstract: An econiche opened up, and the buffalo moved into it. Something had kept these animals out of the expanses of parklike clearings in the forest that periodic Amerindian use of fire and hoe had created. That something declined or disappeared after 1540. That something was, in all likelihood, the Amerindians themselves, who naturally would have killed the buffalo for food and to protect their crops.
The cause of that decline and disappearance was probably epidemic disease. No other factor seems capable of having exterminated so many people over such a large part of North America. The dismal genocidal process had already begun before De Soto arrived in Cofachiqui. A year or two before, a pestilence had threshed through that province, killing many. Talomeco, where the Spanish raided the burial temple mentioned earlier, was one of several towns without inhabitants because an epidemic had killed and driven off so many. The intruders found four large houses there filled with the bodies of people who had perished of the pestilence. The Spanish judged Cofachiqui heavily populated, but its citizens said their number had been much greater before the epidemic. De Soto entered Cofachiqui on the heels of a medical disaster, just as he had with Pizarro in Peru….
The epidemics continued to arrive and to do their work of extermination, as they did in every part of the Americas we know anything about in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To cite but one, in 1585–6, Sir Francis Drake led a large fleet to the Cape Verdes, where his men picked up a dangerous communicable disease, and then sailed off to raid the Spanish Main, but so many of the English were sick and dying that the venture failed miserably. Seeking redress, he attacked the Spanish colony at St. Augustine, Florida, infecting the local people with the Cape Verde epidemic. The Amerindians, “at first coming of our men died very fast, and said amongst themselves, it was the English god that made them die so fast.” Presumably the disease proceeded on into the interior.11
When the French penetrated into the hinterlands behind the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where De Soto had fought so many battles with so many peoples, they found few to oppose their intrusion. And the decline in Amerindian numbers continued; indeed, it probably accelerated. In six years, the last of the Mound Builders, the Natchez, with their pyramid-top temples and their supreme leader, the Great Sun, diminished by a third. One of the Frenchmen wrote, unintentionally echoing the Protestant, John Winthrop, “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you, it is that it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.”12
The exchange of infectious diseases – that is, of germs, of living things having geographical points of origin just like visible creatures – between the Old World and its American and Australasian colonies has been wondrously one-sided, as one-sided and one-way as the exchanges of people, weeds, and animals. Australasia, as far as science can tell us, has exported not one of its human diseases to the outside world, presuming that it has any uniquely its own. The Americas do have their own distinctive pathogens, those of at least Carrion’s disease and Chagas’ disease. Oddly, these very unpleasant and sometimes fatal diseases do not travel well and have never established themselves in the Old World… Niguas, as Fernándo de Oviedo called the tropical American chigger causing barefoot Spaniards so much trouble in the sixteenth century, reached Africa in 1872 and spread across the continent as an epidemic of lost toes and fatal secondary infections of tetanus, but it has since retreated to the nuisance category and has never changed the Old World’s demographic history. Europe was magnanimous in the quantity and quality of the torments it sent across the seams of Pangaea. In contrast, its colonies, epidemiologically impecunious to begin with, were hesitant to export even the pathogens they did have. The unevenness of the exchange … operated to the overwhelming advantage of the European invaders, and to the crushing disadvantage of the peoples whose ancestral homes were on the losing side of the seams of Pangaea.
Notes
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