In 1518 smallpox, long a scourge in Europe, ravaged the native peoples of the New World. This drawing shows Aztec victims being attended by a medicine man."Those who did survive," reported Cortes's secretary,"having scratched themselves, were left in such a condition that they frightened the others with the many deep pits on their faces, hands, and bodies."
To calculate the magnitude of Indian losses, scholars had to determine the population at first contact with Europeans, a difficult task in the absence of Indian records. Early in the twentieth century, James Mooney, an ethnologist for the Smithsonian, gathered fragmentary population statistics as compiled by Catholic priests, Spanish officials, travelers, and soldiers. By tabulating this data, including guesses for tribes for which no data was available, he concluded that the Indian population in the continent north of Mexico was a little more than 1 million.
By the 1960s and 1970s, some thought this estimate far too low. They complained that it minimized both the achievements of Indian civilizations as well as the extent of the destruction wrought by European diseases and guns.
Anthropologist Henry Dobyns (1983) found that when small-pox, measles, or tuberculosis struck some Indian villages, nineteen out of twenty Indians died. He thought this ratio characteristic of populations that lacked immunity to such diseases. He therefore multiplied the earlier population figures by twenty. After a few adjustments he calculated the Indian population of the United States and Canada at 10-12 million, and of the entire Western Hemisphere at over 100 million.
Dobyns's methodology came under fire, but Thornton (1987) and others devised pre-contact estimates ranging from 4 to 8 million. Since then, mathematicians have concluded that the data are so riddled with guesswork that no numerical estimates are reliable. But it is probably safe to conclude that Indian losses north of the Rio Grande numbered in the millions, and in the remainder of the Western Hemisphere, tens of millions.
Source: James Mooney, The Aboriginal Population of America North of Mexico (1928, although Mooney died in 1921); Henry Dobyns, Their Number Became Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (1983); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (1987).
Horses (blindfolded) were loaded onto Spanish warships for shipment to the Americas. Native peoples had never seen horses (which had been extinct in the Americas for over 10,000 years). Nor had they seen enormous wooden warships, powered by sails and carrying heavy cannons, or warriors, seated on horses and encased in armor.
Western Hemisphere, European conquerors imported African slaves to do more of the work.
Indians nevertheless benefited from some aspects of the ecological transformation of the Western Hemisphere. Horses were among the many big mammals that became extinct in the Americas over
10,000 years ago. When Spanish conquistadors brought horses back to the Americas, the Indians were terrified by the strange beasts. The horses, however, thrived in the vast grasslands of North America. Plains Indians used horses to hunt buffalo and harass Europeans. Farming Indians such as the Navajo profited from sheep cultivation by learning to weave fine woolen cloth.
The Columbian Exchange of plants and animals went both ways, yet it remained unequal. American Indians usually fared far worse than Europeans. The best indicator is the shift in population: During the 300 years after Columbus, Europe’s share of the world’s population nearly doubled, increasing from about 11 percent to 20 percent. During the same period, the American Indian’s share declined from about 7 percent to 1 percent.
World History
