“Virgil Soil Epidemics” and the Depopulation of Native Americans in North America
When European colonists arrived at North America, they also brought European diseases to the New World, which caused the reduction of the population of Native Americans. But why Europeans conquered America so easily? And why the depopulation of American Indians occurred during the first hundred years of contact with the Europeans and Africans? Crosby believed that the epidemic diseases exchanged between Europeans and Native Americans played very important role in it. According to him, “migration of man and his maladies is the chief cause of epidemics. And when migration takes place, those creatures who have been longest in isolation suffer most, for their genetic material has been least tempered by the variety of world diseases.”[1] Moreover, he pointed out the greatest killer for the depopulation of the Native Americans since the Columbian Exchange could be explained in terms of “Virgin Soil epidemics.”[2] To support his arguments, he defined the “Virgin Soil epidemics are those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically almost defenseless.”[3] In his opinion, the concept of a "Virgin Soil" epidemic can help historians to understand the devastating impact of disease on indigenous Americans, as well as colonization of the Americas by Europeans.
When Crosby proposed his assumption on the “Virgin soil epidemics,” it was very challenging. However, David Jones thinks that Crosby’s assumption on the “Virgin Soils epidemics” has greatly been misunderstood by his followers. He points out that later historians have reduced the complexity of Crosby's model and believe that American Indians had “no immunity” to the new epidemics. While in fact, the decimation of the Native Americans was rather a complex question. Moreover, Jones criticizes the insufficiency of Crosby’s “Virgin Soils epidemics.”According to him, Crosby downplayed the "genetic weakness hypothesis" and instead emphasized the many environmental factors that might have contributed to American Indian susceptibility to Old World diseases, including lack of childhood exposure, malnutrition, and the social chaos generated by European colonization.[4] Moreover, Karen Kupperman also notices the insufficiency of Crosby’s model. Through examining the Jamestown project, she finds the synergy of malnutrition, deficiency diseases, and despair at Jamestown, where 80 percent of the colonists died between 1607 and I625.[5]
Although later historians question Crosby’s “Virgin Soils Epidemics,” it is still an undeniable a fact that early American historians attempt to pay more attention to diseases and their impacts on colonists, as well as Native Americans. Colin Gordon Calloway considers epidemic diseases brought by Frenchmen like Jacques Cartier into the St. Lawrence River in the winter 1535-36, which caused the disappearance of Indian villages with extensive cornfields and rich orchards.[6] Elizabeth A. Fenn discusses how Variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, ravaged the great part of North America from Mexico to Massachusetts, from Pensacola to Puget Sound.[7] Through considering the movement of the great smallpox epidemic from one human being to another between 1775 and 1782, Fenn shows us how people actually lived in the late eighteenth century, as well as the untold history behind the American Revolution. In order to unravel the significance of American Indian mortality from the seventeenth century onward, David S. Jones examines the various ways how Americans understood the disparities between the health of citizen settlers and their native neighbors. Focusing on four themes: the arrival of Europeans and the virgin soil outbreaks of colonial New England; the transmission of smallpox on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century western frontier; the impact of tuberculosis on the Sioux of the Great Plains later in the nineteenth century; and finally, the catalogue of ill health that affected the Navajo of the American Southwest in the twentieth century, Jones argues persuasively that differences in health were not rooted in native genetic susceptibility, but “were produced by social forces, interpreted through social biases, and used to perpetuate social advantage.”[8] As these and other scholarships tell us, through examining the diseases epidemic, early American historians could offer new explanations to the depopulation of Native Americans.
[1] Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972), 37.
[2] Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), 289-299. Since Crosby's article appeared, controversy has flourished on the exact size of pre-European-contact North American populations. See John D. Daniels, “The Indian Population of North America in 1492,” The William and Mary Quarterly, XLIX (1992), 298-320.
[3] Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1976), 289.
[4] David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), 704; Alfred W. Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," The William and Mary Quarterly. 3 ser. 33 (April 1976), 292.
[5] Karen Kupperman, “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” Journal of American History, 66 (1979), 24-40.
[6] Colin Gordon Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 25.
[7] Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 23 and 27.
[8] David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7.
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