Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus: What Your History Books Got Wrong (12 page)

Today, as we compare European technology with that of the “primitive” Indians, we may conclude that European conquest of America was inevitable, but it did not appear so at the time. The historian Karen Kupperman speculates:

The technology and culture of Indians on America's east coast were genuine rivals to those of the English, and the eventual outcome of the rivalry was not at first clear. . . , One can only speculate what the outcome of the rivalry would have been if the impact of European diseases on the American population had not been so devastating. If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.

After all, Native Americans had driven off Samuel de Champlain when he had tried to settle in Massachusetts in 1606. The following year, Abenakis had helped expel the first Plymouth Company settlement from Maine.30 Alfred Crosby has speculated that the Norse might have succeeded in colonizing New foundland and Labrador if they had not had the bad luck to emigrate from Greenland and Iceland, distant from European disease centers.51 But this is “what if” history. The New England plagues were no “if.” They continued west, racing in advance of the line of culture contact.

Everywhere in America, the first European explorers encountered many more Indians than did their successors. A century and a half after Hernando De Soto traveled the southeastern United States, French explorers there found the population less than a quarter of what it had been when De Soto had passed through, with attendant catastrophic effects on Native culture and social organization.52 Likewise, on their famous 1806 expedition, Lewis and Clark encountered far more Natives in Oregon than lived there a mere twenty years later.

Henry Dobyns has put together a heartbreaking list of ninety-three epidemics among Native Americans between 1520 and 1918. He has recorded forty-one eruptions of smallpox, four of bubonic plague, seventeen of measles and ten of influenza (both often deadly among Native Americans), and twentyfive of tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, and other diseases. Many of these outbreaks reached truly pandemic proportions, beginning in Florida or Mexico and stopping only when they reached the Pacific and Arctic oceans,34 Disease played the same crucial role in Mexico and Peru as it did in Massachusetts, How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City? “When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city.” When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them. Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.

The pestilence continues today. Miners and loggers have recently introduced European diseases to the Yanotnamos of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, killing a fourth of their total population in 1991. Charles Darwin, writing in 1839, put it almost poetically; “Wherever the European had trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.”

Europeans were never able to “settle” China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there. The crucial role played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe had only about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.37 The Europeans' advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to “settle” the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required. Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.

The first epidemics wreaked havoc, not only with Indian societies, but also with estimates of pre-Columbian Native American population. The result has been continuing controversy among historians and anthropologists. In 1840 George Catlin estimated aboriginal numbers in the United States and Canada at the time of white contact to be perhaps fourteen million. He believed only two million still survived. By 1880, owing to warfare and deculturation as well as illness, Native numbers had dropped to 250,000, a decline of 98 percent.38 In 1921 James Mooney asserted that only one million Native Americans had lived in the Americas in 1492, Mooney's estimate was accepted until the 1960s and 1970s, even though the arguments supporting it, based largely on inference rather than evidence, were not convincing. Colin McEvedy provided an example ofthe argument:

The high rollers, of course, claim that native numbers had been reduced to these low levels [between one million and two million] by epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases introduced from Europeand indeed they could have been. But there is no record of any continental [European] population being cut back by the sort of percentages needed to get from twenty million to two or one million. Even the Black Death reduced the population of Europe by only a third.

Note that McEvedy has ignored both the data and also the reasoning about illness summarized above, relying on what amounts to common sense to disprove both. Indeed, he contended, “No good can come of affronting common sense.” But pre-Pilgrim American epidemiology is not a field of everyday knowledge in which “common sense” can be allowed to substitute for years of relevant research. By “common sense” what McEvedy really meant was tradition.

“The American Republic,” the authors of The American Pageant tell us on page one, “was from the outset uniquely favored. It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they were able to be eliminated or shouldered aside.” Henry Dobyns and Francis Jennings have pointed out that this archetype of the “virgin continent” and its corollary, the “primitive tribe,” have subtly influenced estimates of Native population: scholars who viewed Native American cultures as primitive reduced their estimates of precontact populations to match the stereotype. The tiny Mooney estimate thus “made sense”resonated with the archetype. Never mind that the land was, in reality, not a virgin wilderness but recently widowed.

The very death races that some historians and geographers now find hard to believe, the Pilgrims knew to be true. For example, William Bradford described how the Dutch, rivals of Plymouth, traveled to an Indian village in Connecticut to trade. “But their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to afflict these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of 1,000, over 950 of them died, and many of them lay rotting above ground for want of burial.. ,”41 This is precisely the 95 percent mortality that McEvedy rejected. On the opposite coast, the Native population of California sank from 300,000 in 1769 (by which time it had already been cut in half by various Spanish-borne diseases) to 30,000 a century later, owing mainly to the gold rush, which brought "disease,

starvation, homicide, and a declining birthrate,“42 For a century after Catlin, historians and anthropologists ”overlooked the evidence offered by the Pilgrims and other early chroniclers. Beginning with P. M. Ashburn in 1947, however, research has established more accurate estimates based on careful continentwide compilations of small-scale studies of first contact and on evidence of early plagues. Most current estimates of the precontact population of the United States and Canada range from ten to twenty mill ion.“ How do the twelve textbooks, most of which were published in the 1980s, treat this topic? Their authors might let readers in on the furious debate of the 1960s and early 1970s, telling how and why estimates changed. Instead, the textbooks simply state numbersvery different numbers! ”As many as ten million,“ American Adventures proposes. ”There were only about 1,000,000 North American Indians,“ opines The American Tradition, ”Scattered across the North American continent were about 500 different groups, many of them nomadic.“ Like other Americans who have not studied the literature, the authors of history textbooks are Still under the thrall of the ”virgin land" and “primitive tribe” archetypes; their most common Indian population estimate is the discredited figure of one million, which five textbooks supply. Only two of the textbooks provide estimates often to twelve million, in the range supported by contemporary scholarship. Two of the textbooks hedge their bets by suggesting one to twelve million, which might reasonably prompt classroom discussion of why estimates are so vague. Three of the textbooks omit the subject altogether. The problem is not so much the estimates as the attitude. Only one book,

The American Adventure, acknowledges that there is a controversy, and this only in a footnote. The other textbooks seem bent on presenting “facts” for children to “learn.” Such an approach keeps students ignorant of the reasoning, arguments, and weighing of evidence that go into social science. About the plagues the textbooks tell even less. Only three of the twelve textbooks even mention Indian disease as a factor at Plymouth or anywhere in New England.04 Life and Liberty does quite a good job. The American Way is the only book that draws the appropriate geopolitical inference about the Plymouth outbreak, but it doesn't discuss any of the other plagues that beset Indians throughout the hemisphere. According to Triumph of the American Nation: “If the Pilgrims had arrived at Plymouth a few years earlier, they would have found a busy Indian village surrounded by farmland. As it was, an epidemic had wiped out most of the Indians. Those who survived had abandoned the village,“ ”Fortunately for the Pilgrims,“ Triumph goes on, ”the cleared fields remained, and a brook of fresh water flowed into the harbor.“ These four sentences exemplify what Michael W. Apple and Linda K. Christian-Smith call dominance through mentioning.45 The passage can hardly offend Pilgrim descendants, yet it gives the publisher deniabilityTriumph cannot be accused of omitting the plague. But the sentences bury the plague within a description of the beautiful harbor at Plymouth. Therefore, even though gory details of disease and death are exactly the kinds of things that high school students remember best, the plague won't ”stick.” I know, because I never remembered the plague, and my college textbook mentioned itin a fourteen-word passage nestled within a paragraph about the Pilgrims' beliefin God.

In colonial times, everyone knew about the plague. Even before the Mayftowtr sailed, King James of England gave thanks to “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us” for sending “this wonderful plague among the salvages [j/c].”47 Two hundred years later the oldest American history in my collection]. W. Barber's Interesting Events in the History ofthe United States, published in 1829still recalled the plague.

A few years before the arrival of the Plymouth settlers, a very mortal sickness raged with great violence among the Indians inhabiting the eastern parts of New England. “Whole towns were depopulated. The living were not able to bury the dead; and their bodies were found lying above ground, many years after. The Massachusetts Indians are said to have been reduced from 30,000 to 300 fighting meti. In 1633, the small pox swept off great numbers,”'

Today it is no surprise that not one in a hundred of my college students has ever heard of the plague. Unless they have read Life and Liberty, students could scarcely come away from these books thinking of Indians as people who made an impact on North America, who lived here in considerable numbers, who settled, in short, and were then killed by disease or arms. Textbook authors have retreated from the candor of Barber. Treatments like that in Triumph guatantee our collective amnesia.

Having mistreated the plague, the textbooks proceed to mistreat the Pilgrims. Their arrival in Massachusetts poses another historical controversy that textbook authors take pains to duck. The textbooks say the Pilgrims intended to go to Virginia, where there existed a British settlement already. But “the little party on the Mayflower” explains American History, “never reached Virginia. On November 9, they sighted land on Cape Cod.” How did the Pilgrims wind up in Massachusetts when they set out for Virginia? “Violent storms blew their ship off course,” according to some textbooks; others blame an “error in navi gation.” Both explanations may be wrong. Some historians believe the Dutch bribed the captain of the Mayflower to sail north so the Pilgrims would not settle near New Amsterdam. Others hold that the Pilgrims went to Cape Cod on purpose.

Bear in mind that the Pilgrims numbered only about 35 of the 102 settlers aboard the May/lower; the rest were ordinary folk seeking their fortunes in the new Virginia colony. George Willison has argued that the Pilgrim leaders, wanting to be far from Anglican control, never planned to settle in Virginia. They had debated the relative merits of Guiana, in South America, versus the Massachusetts coast, and, according to Willison, they intended a hijacking.

Certainly the Pilgrims already knew quite a bit about what Massachusetts could offer them, from the fine fishing along Cape Cod to that “wonderful plague,” which offered an unusual opportunity for British settlement. According to some historians, Squanto, an Indian from the village of Patuxet, Massachusetts, had provided Ferdinando Gorges, a leader of the Plymouth Company in England, with a detailed description of the area. Gorges may even have sent Squanto and Capt. Thomas Dermer as advance men to wait for the Pilgrims, although Dermer sailed away when the Pilgrims were delayed in England. In any event, the Pilgrims were familiar with the area's topography. Recently published maps that Samuel de Champlain had drawn when he had toured the area in 1605 supplemented the information that had been passed on by sixteenth-century explorers, John Smith had studied the region and named it “New England” in 1614, and he even offered to guide the Pilgrim leaders. They rejected his services as too expensive and carried his guidebook along instead.