raised forearm, Smallpox pushed the dust off his face, and Saynday saw the scars that disfigured it.
For a moment Saynday shut his eyes against the sight, and then he opened them again. “Does that happen to all the people you visit?” he inquired.
“Every one of them,” said Smallpox. “It will happen to your Kiowa people, too. Where do they live? Take me to them, and then I will spare you, although you have seen my face. If you do not lead me to your people, I will breathe on you and you will die, no matter whose Old Uncle you are.” And although he did not breathe on Saynday, Saynday smelled the reek of death that surrounded him.
“My Kiowa people are few and poor already,” Saynday said, thinking fast as he talked. “They aren’t worth your time and trouble.”
“I have time and I don’t have to take any trouble,” Smallpox told him.
“Even one person whom I blot out, I can count.”
“Oh,” said Saynday. “Some of your ways are like the Kiowas’, then.
You count the enemies that you touch.”
“I have no enemies,” said Smallpox. “Man, woman, or child – humanity is all alike to me. I was brought here to kill. But, yes, I count those I destroy. White men always count: cattle, sheep, chickens, children, the living and the dead. You say the Kiowas do the same thing?”
“Only the enemies they touch,” Saynday insisted. “They never count living people – men are not cattle, any more than women and children are.”
“Then how do you know the Kiowas are so few and poor?” Smallpox demanded.
“Oh, anybody can see that for himself,” Saynday said. “You can look at a Kiowa camp and tell how small it is. We’re not like the Pawnees. They have great houses, half underground, in big villages by the rivers, and every house is full of people.”
“I like that,” Smallpox observed. “I can do my best work when people are crowded together.”
“Then you’d like the Pawnees,” Saynday assured him. “They’re the ones that almost wiped out the Kiowas; that’s why we’re so few and so poor. Now we run away whenever we see a stranger coming, because he might be a Pawnee.”
“I suppose the Pawnees never run away,” Smallpox sneered.
“They couldn’t if they wanted to,” Saynday replied. “The Pawnees are rich. They have piles of robes, they have lots of cooking pots and plenty of bedding – they keep all kinds of things in those underground houses of theirs. The Pawnees can’t run away and leave all their wealth.”
“Where did you say they live?” Smallpox asked thoughtfully.
“Oh, over there,” Saynday said, jerking his chin to the north.
“And they are rich, and live in houses, with piles of robes to creep into and hide?”
“That’s the Pawnees,” Saynday said jauntily. He began to feel better. The deathly smell was not so strong now. “I think I’ll go and visit the Pawnees first,” Smallpox remarked. “Later on, perhaps, I can get back to the Kiowas.”
“You do that,” directed Saynday. “Go and visit the Pawnees, and when you grow tired there from all the work you have to do, come back and visit my poor people. They’ll do all they can for you.”
“Good,” said Smallpox. He picked up his reins and jerked his weary horse awake. “Tell your people when I come to be ready for me. Tell them to put out all their fires. Fire is the only thing in the whole world that I’m afraid of. It’s the only thing in God’s world that can destroy me.”
Saynday watched Smallpox and his death horse traveling north, away from the Kiowas. Then he took out his flint and steel, and set fire to the spindly prairie grass at his feet. The winds came and picked up the fire, and carried it to make a ring of safety around the Kiowas’ camps.
“Perhaps I can still be some good to my people after all,” Saynday said to himself, feeling better.
And that’s the way it was, and that’s the way it is, to this good day.
Told to Alice Marriott by Frank Givens (Eagle Plume).
Rethinking Virgin Soil Epidemics: COVID-19 Death Rates by Age and Race
It may seem strange to include a document from recent US experience in a chapter where so much of the material comes from centuries past. But the emergence in 2019 of a new virgin soil pandemic, COVID-19, raises important questions about how epidemics unfold in history. COVID-19, like many other pathogens, originated in an animal, probably a bat, and passed into an intermediate host, perhaps a pangolin, or scaly anteater. From there, it seems, it leapt into human beings, possibly through the sale and consumption of the animal in urban meat markets. The virus entered a human population with no experience of it, and therefore no antibodies to it. Exactly how deadly the virus is also remains a subject of some debate, in part because different peoples in different places seem to experience it in different ways. The racial disparities in COVID-19 death rates are depicted as ratios in Figure 2.1, which make it clear that white Americans have been far less likely to die of the disease than Hispanic/Latino or Black Americans. (Native Americans, too, have suffered higher death rates than white patients, although their experience is not recorded on this chart.)
Figure 2.1 COVID-19 death rates by age and race.
(Source: CDC data from 2/1/20–6/6/20 and 2018. Census population estimates for USA. Brookings.)
Note that it is impossible to explain these differences as the result of missing antibodies in one population or another. In modern America, white, Black, Latino, and Native Americans have about the same level of exposure to known disease pathogens, including COVID-19. What, then, makes Latino and Black people more likely to die from COVID? Medical specialists cite pre-existing health problems – diabetes, pulmonary ailments, and obesity among them – that stem from higher rates of poverty in minority communities. If higher poverty rates among minority peoples are a product of America’s racist past, then COVID-19 death rates are also, in part, artifacts of historic inequalities. Knowing this, how might we think about other virgin soil epidemics in the past? In recent years, historians and other scholars have begun to question the role of virgin soil epidemics in America’s colonial-era depopulation. Closer research (see Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America (2015) edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Allen C. Swedlund. Tucson: University of Arizona Press) indicates that death rates from disease alone were not as high as once thought. Alfred Crosby himself has sought to modify some of his claims, and now says that death rates even from smallpox probably did not exceed 30 percent, and that deaths from virgin soil epidemics were increased by war, enslavement, and dispossession. How do such findings change our larger narrative of American history? If violence made virgin soil epidemics deadlier, what mix of biology and cultural choices – war, slavery, and so forth – created the world of colonial America?
Thomas James, “Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans”
While