Indigenous Peoples Day

The invasion/migration of Europeans into the Americas had astonishing consequences. From populations to environment to politics, things would never be the same. One impact was on native American demographics; large numbers died, not from combat but from the vulnerability of what infectious disease people call the "immunologically naïve." We, as a species, need to have our immunologic system working to increase our ability to fight new threats in the future. Sort of like exercise. The theory is that the native American did not have that and consequently was overwhelmed by the diseases that the Europeans lived with. Smallpox and cholera were particularly murderous. The entire continent was devastated by the new European illnesses.

How much of an impact? How can we tell? The Comanche did not take notes. This is where things get provocative. A recent historian in an interview said that some people estimate the deaths of native Americans in the first one hundred years after Columbus to be two hundred million people. 200,000,000.

That's just nuts.

Columbus built his first town on the island of Hispaniola in 1493, where the  local Taino numbered at least 60,000 and possibly as many as 8 million, according to some estimates. 60 thousand --or  8 million? (Its current population supported by modern agriculture and technology, including the wheel, is 21 million.) But by 1548, the Taino population there had plummeted to less than 500.

In April 1520, Spanish forces landed in what is now Veracruz, Mexico, unwittingly bringing along an African slave infected with smallpox. Two months later, Spanish troops entered the capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán, and by mid-October the virus was sweeping through the city (depicted in images from the Florentine codex, a document written by a 16th century Spanish friar), killing nearly half of the population, which scholars today estimate at 50,000 to 300,000 people. 50 thousand to 300 thousand? The dead included the Aztec ruler, Cuitláhuac, and many of his senior advisers. By the time Hernán Cortés and his troops began their final assault on Tenochtitlán, bodies lay scattered over the city, allowing the small Spanish force to overwhelm the shocked defenders.

Native American Aztec people of Mexico dying of smallpox introduced by the Spaniards, copied from the Codex Florentine.

Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

So how many died in the migration to the West? Plenty. But not 200,000,000. Even if that big number feeds your animosity toward the West, it is just not true. A more realistic number might be 8 million as suggested by the epidemiologist from Hopkins--still a large number, especially when it was probably a huge proportion of the population.

But people can be as unforgiving as their narrative. And we need our prejudices and mythologies.