Native Life: Communicable Disease

There was an enemy that not even the bravest warriors or most skillful war leaders could overcome because it was unseen.  Disease decimated Native populations beginning in 1492, and some of those effects are still being felt today.  Soon after Jean Cabot's voyages of exploration in 1497, and Spanish contact with Florida in 1539, fishermen and explorers regularly visited North America, interacting with local inhabitants.  Invariably, during or after these contacts, disease broke out among the Native population.  Some of the worst killers were:

Smallpox: now eradicated by the use of vaccines worldwide, it was a common plague in both the Old and New Worlds.  However, Europeans who had some immunity to the disease stood a better chance of surviving.  Native peoples weren't so fortunate.   A drastic example is the smallpox epidemic that swept through what is now Massachusetts Bay in 1617-1619, destroying Squanto's people, the Patuxet.  Call the Great Dying in local memory, it was responsible for wiping out entire villages of men, women and children.

Influenza: a disease that could be death-dealing for Europeans, but not always, it wrought havoc among Native peoples.  An epidemic of influenza in 1647 spread from New England throughout the Northeast.

Measles: a routine childhood disease of the time, but one to which Natives had no natural immunity.  Measles epidemics struck in New England in 1658 and 1692.

Bubonic Plague: waves of plague had swept through Europe since Medieval times.  Even as the disease began to die out there, it was making itself felt across the Atlantic.  Bubonic plague swept through Natives living near missions in Florida in 1613. 

Other diseases included typhoid fever, scarlet fever, malaria and diphtheria, each killing more Native inhabitants than arrows or bullets could possibly reach.  Allegations of biological warfare in the form of infested clothing or blankets has already been discussed in a previous post on Lord Jeffrey Amherst during Pontiac's War 1764.