Life

by Tim Flannery

  There was a hidden cost in the trading business—a trade in germs—and it was one that favoured the Europeans, for continuing outbreaks of Eurasian diseases among the Indians emptied more and more land into the hands of the expanding European population. The manner in which this occurred was incredibly fortuitous for the newcomers.

  In 1634 a violent epidemic of smallpox broke out among the Pequots living inland along the Connecticut River. ‘It pleased God,’ William Bradford wrote, ‘to visit these Indians with a great sickness and such a mortality that of a thousand, above nine and a half hundred of them died, and many of them did rot above the ground for want of burial.’ Bradford goes on to describe that:

  for want of bedding and linen and other things they fall into a lamentable condition as they lie on their hard mats, the pox breaking and mattering and running one into another, their skin cleaving by reason thereof to the mats they lie on. When they turn them, a whole side will flay off at once as it were, and they will be all of a gore blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.5

  The utter dependence of many Europeans on the Indians is revealed by Bradford’s mention that ‘the three or four Dutchmen’ living among the Indians (and almost certainly the vector for the disease) ‘almost starved before they could get away’. The terrible affliction soon spread to other tribes. To the credit of the English, ‘though at first they were afraid of the infection’ they went to help the Indians ‘and daily fetched them wood and water and made them fires, got them victuals whilst they lived; and buried them when they died’.6

  The Mandan tribe, which lived along the upper Missouri River, was blighted by smallpox in the fall of 1837. The disease was carried to Fort Union in the body of one Jacob Halsey, a passenger aboard an American Fur Company steamboat. Halsey had been vaccinated and quickly recovered, but the Indians were not so fortunate. Although the European fur traders attempted to impose quarantine, they did not send the steamboat back. Within the course of two months this fatal decision was, according to one observer, to cost the lives of 1569 out of the 1600 Mandan. The thirty-one survivors were made slaves by the Riccarees, who settled on the newly vacated Mandan land, much as the pilgrims had done in Wampanoag territory a century and a half earlier. The last Mandans died pathetically, for when the Riccarees were attacked by the Sioux the Mandans ran through a defensive picket onto the prairie, calling out to the Sioux to kill them because ‘they were Riccaree dogs, that their friends were all dead, and that they did not wish to live’.7

  Tragically, the smallpox epidemic was to spread well beyond the Mandan, for during 1838 it would kill ten out of every twelve Assiniboin in the region of Fort Union, as well as about 6000 Blackfeet. Of the Assiniboin who survived, about half had been vaccinated by fur traders during visits to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s trading posts in Canadian territories. The Hudson’s Bay Company had been trading with Indians for nearly 200 years by the time of the epidemic, and well knew the importance of a healthy Indian population to its business. It sent supplies of smallpox vaccine to its traders for the benefit of their Indian trading partners. Perhaps predictably, the Americans failed to provide any such protection to the Indians on their frontier.8

  Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond lists in its title the three factors that permitted Eurasian supremacy in the Americas, Australia and other colonial arenas. But which—the guns, the germs or the steel—was the most important? The answer, Diamond has no doubt, is germs. Although estimates vary widely, by 1492 the human population of the Americas may have reached 57 million, of whom 21 million lived in Mesoamerica. Eighty years later it had shrunk to 18 million. Not even the most bloodthirsty conquistadors could have effected such carnage, for among the deadly trio only germs had the ability to kill on a scale like this. Indeed it is thought that disease had wiped out ninety per cent of the people living in Mesoamerica, Peru and the Caribbean by 1568.9

  For a long time it was believed that the Indians gifted at least one disease, syphilis, to the invading Europeans; and a most virulent pox it was in its early stages, turning penises and noses black and rotten and often killing its victims within weeks. After 1493 it raged through Europe, altering the course of dynasties and perhaps changing European morals before it assumed a less virulent form. New archaeological evidence, however, suggests that syphilis was long resident in Eurasia, for signs of treponemal (syphilitic) infection have been discovered in 1000-year-old human bones from southern Africa, and in 2500-year-old Greek skeletons from Italy. Just why syphilis became so deadly after 1493 remains unclear, but it seems probable that it had something to do with the arrival of a New World strain carried by Columbus’s crews.10 It is possible that when the New and Old World varieties came into contact, a more deadly manifestation of the disease was spawned. Why this happened in Eurasia and not the New World, however, remains unexplained.

  The extent to which disease assisted the European conquest of North America can be gauged by comparing experiences of European colonisation with those of Afro-Eurasia. European colonists in Africa and Asia were every bit as brutal as their counterparts in the Americas, but they almost never managed to extirpate the indigenous populations, who were often as poorly armed as the American Indians. As Diamond points out, Afro-Eurasia forms one vast cesspool of verminous microbes, for its human populations have been sharing diseases since time immemorial. The Americas, however, were microbially naive and the European victory there is testimony to the power of germs over guns and steel in shaping world history.

  Today attitudes to Indian health on the continent have changed and it is now a major concern to health professionals. Yet for all that modern medicine can offer, Indian death rates remain significantly higher than those of European Americans. As late as the 1960s the average age at death for Indians in North America was forty-three, and 500 out of every 1700 Indian infants died in their first year of ‘preventable diseases’.11

  The American frontier has a reputation for extreme violence against Indians, and one wonders if justice ever prevailed, and whether the hands that bore the guns and steel sometimes offered kindness. Surprisingly, even some Indian-hating Puritans showed themselves capable of compassion and justice towards those ‘cohorts of the devil’ and tended to Indians stricken with disease. On visiting the small Indian settlement of Cummaquid (now Barnstable, Massachusetts), one Puritan wrote:

  One thing was very grievous unto us at this place. There was an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than a hundred years old, which came to see us because she never saw English, yet could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us she had three sons who, when Master Hunt was in these parts, went aboard his ship to trade with him, and carried them captives into Spain…by which means she was deprived of the comfort of her children in her old age. We told them we were sorry that any Englishmen should give them that offence, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same; but for us, we would not offer them any such injury though it would gain us all the skins in the country. So we gave her some small trifles, which somewhat appeased her.12

  As early as 1638, two Englishmen were executed for murdering an Indian, yet such judgments became rare as the frontier moved west and the balance of power between European and Indian more one-sided. By the time of Pontiac’s war of 1763–64, unspeakable atrocities were being perpetrated on the Indians by ‘civilised’ men. Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of the English army, was perhaps the most fiendish, for it was he who began germ warfare in North America. When the English commander at Fort Pitt invited the Delaware Indians to negotiate a peace settlement under a flag of truce, Amherst ordered that they be given smallpox-infected blankets from the fort hospital. The resulting deaths of men, women and children were catastrophic.13

  After the War of Independence matters only got worse for the Indians. Most fo
ught on the side of the British because its government offered them future protection from frontier violence and because it intended to limit European settlement to the east of the Appalachians. The land hunger of young America, however, was insatiable. Americans were literally willing to wade through Indian blood in order to take land. Settled Indians were sometimes befriended by whites, who had themselves written into the red men’s wills before killing their ‘friends’ in cold blood. Tragically, straightforward murder was even more common, for again and again whole groups of Indians were rounded up and killed simply for their land.

  The white land hunger was indissolubly linked with patriotism in a doctrine of manifest destiny—a sense that God and fate had destined them to inherit the New World in its entirety. This supreme expression of self-confidence had been fostered by the effect of germs on the Indians, by the ecological and social release experienced by the Americans and by the vast bounty reaped on their soil frontier. It was such a heady mix that for a while the Americans imagined that they were God’s chosen people—a people perhaps who could do no wrong on their frontier.

  As the European frontier advanced, the Indians acquired all manner of European material goods, ideas and institutions along with the diseases that decimated them. Some of these acquisitions were to transform Indian cultures and to provide last-minute defences. An outstanding example of cultural change resulting from diffusion of European influence concerns the last tribes to maintain their autonomy—the plains Indians. When first contacted by the Spaniard Coronado in 1541, the Apaches were living in small family groups, hunting and travelling on foot and using dogs rather than horses to carry their limited possessions on a travois (a hide slung between two poles). In the travois we see an echo of the Arctic ancestry of these Athabaskan people and their boreal relatives’ dog sleds. The Apache economy was based entirely on bison. They used bison skins for their housing, clothing and ropes, bison bones for tools, dung for firewood, bladders for jugs and meat for food. Killing bison on foot must have been hard work and the eventual acquisition of horses and guns by the plains Indians led to a lifestyle revolution.

  So profound was the change brought by horses that by the 1830s the artist George Catlin wrote, ‘A Comanche on his feet is out of his element…almost as awkward as a monkey on the ground…but the moment he lays hand upon his horse, his face even becomes handsome, and he gracefully flies away like a different being.’14 Although their economy remained centred on bison, the plains Indians could now forage over larger areas and hunt more effectively. This led to a population explosion as well as to the development of larger groups. Horses and guns, along with the demographic changes they wrought, gave the plains tribes resilience in the face of European oppression that was unmatched in other Indian groups. It was a change much resented by the homesteaders, for as Frederick Jackson Turner noted, ‘long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns.’15

  Few Indian groups adopted European lifestyles as wholeheartedly as the Cherokee, who lived in what is now Georgia. The Cherokee genius Sequoyah, after whom the stately redwoods are named, developed a written form of the Cherokee language. Soon they were publishing newspapers in their own languages and had opened their own schools. Some Cherokee became highly successful entrepreneurs. Lewis Ross, for example, lived in an elegant white plantation house and owned a mill, stores, ferryboats and over forty black slaves.16

  Despite their adoption of Western culture the fate of the Cherokee was particularly dismal. In 1830, prompted by the perfidious President Andrew Jackson, whose life had once been saved by a Cherokee, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee fought the Act in the Supreme Court and, in 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall found in their favour. The whites, encouraged by Jackson, chose to ignore the highest judicial power in their land and began the process of dispossessing the Indians.

  Many Americans were horrified by what followed. A New York newspaper agonised:

  We know of no subject, at the present moment, of more importance to the character of our country for justice and integrity than that which relates to the Indian tribes in Georgia and Alabama, and particularly the Cherokees in the former state. The Act passed by Congress, just at the end of session, co-operating with the tyrannical and iniquitous statute of Georgia, strikes a formidable blow at the reputation of the United States, in respect to their faith, pledged in almost innumerable instances, in the most solemn treaties and compacts.17

  Within a year the fine Cherokee mansions, schools and businesses were surrounded by ‘white men…like vultures…watching, ready to pounce upon their prey and strip them of everything’. Ahead lay the ‘trail of tears’, as the Cherokees’ trek westward to their appointed reservation in ‘Indian Territory’ became known. They were forced to march at the most dangerous time of year, and between 4000 and 8000 died of starvation, exposure and despair. Their suffering did not stop there, however, and they were subject to subsequent relocation as their ‘Indian Territory’ repeatedly turned into white man’s land.

  Guns, germs and steel were not always the most potent weapons in appropriating land—the pen had its uses too. By 1871, when the North Americans decided that the ‘treaty’ was no longer a useful weapon in their Indian wars, the United States had made more than 370 individual treaties with various Indian groups, every single one of which had been violated by European Americans.18

  The final phases of the Indian war were just as shameful and unrelenting. In the twenty-five years between 1865 and 1890 the United States Army alone killed 6000 Indian men, women and children. It was an expensive business, for by 1870 the campaign was costing approximately one million dollars for every dead Indian. Such a high ratio of effort for return has not been matched in any other North American extermination program, except perhaps the campaign against the last wolves in the US.19

  Guns and steel had their last substantial use in the Indian wars three days after Christmas Day 1890, at a place known as Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. There, about 300 unarmed Sioux men, women and children were murdered by the Seventh Cavalry, George Custer’s unit, which had been shamed at Little Bighorn in 1876. In their frenzy for revenge they even cut down thirteen of their own men in the crossfire. Several of these gallants received congressional medals of honour for their heroic deeds in action.20 As a codicil to this tale, two more Indians were to die under European fire at Wounded Knee—this time in 1973 when Indians protesting at the site were surrounded by 300 national guardsmen and US marshals who opened fire on them. Progress in race relations is evident, however, for this time no medals for heroism were issued to the men holding the guns.

  Even the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek did not extinguish autonomous Indian America. In California a tiny band of southern Yahi Indians had escaped the numerous massacres that blight that state’s history and found refuge in the hills near Oroville, north of Sacramento. In 1911 the last survivor of this group made contact with the Europeans. The man was ‘emaciated to starvation’, and when found was cringing in a corral at a rural slaughterhouse. His name was Ishi, and for the next four and a half years of his life he occupied a room in a museum in San Francisco. Ishi’s death in 1916, at a time when Europeans were slaughtering each other in a frenzy of mustard gas, cannonades and barbed wire, marks the end of ‘savage’ America.

  America Under the Gun

  2001

  AS THE REACH of the United States spread west, much of the native fauna and flora of the continent came to be seen either as a resource to be exploited to the full, or as a pest to be gotten rid of. In the process, men blind to nature would blast marvels from the face of the Earth, destroying forever the best of America’s wildlife. If one creature is emblematic of the vitality, fecundity and sheer exuberance that was North America at this time it is the passenger pigeon, for it was a species that seemed to have lived life with the same energy as the young nation itself. In a sense it inhabited its own self-renewin
g frontier; nomadic flocks would strip an area before moving on, allowing the forest to recover before they came again.

  Two centuries ago the passenger pigeon was the most abundant bird on the planet. Perhaps four North American birds out of every ten belonged to this single species. So huge were their numbers that as the great flocks passed overhead their droppings would fall like snow, leaving a whitened landscape in their wake. These gregarious birds were denizens of the great deciduous forests of the eastern half of the continent, and there they pursued an extravagant lifestyle that only a continent as rich in resources as North America could afford. Their every activity, it seems, was performed at an octane-charged rate.

  The sleek, swift birds sped through the forests at nearly 100 kilometres per hour; the ornithologist John Audubon wrote somewhat prophetically ‘when an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone’. To fuel their flight they would eat almost anything that would fit down their gullet—acorns, nuts and caterpillars were favourites—but if they found a tastier morsel they would eject from their crop whatever was already there to make room for the new. Pioneers wrote of flocks wheeling as they fed like a giant threshing machine, stripping the ground before them as they went, the circling action giving each bird a fair chance to feed. Their breeding was also frenzied; the single egg hatched after just twelve or thirteen days and the squab was fed by the parents for just two weeks. The adults then left and the young was on its own. It scrambled to the ground, fending for itself as best it could and, if it survived, was flying and feeding independently thirty days after the egg had been laid.