| In the years from 1775 to 1783, an enormous wave of smallpox swept the North American continent. Political ferment and the Revolutionary War helped spark the disease on the east coast, where it struck colonists of European and African descent. Among those afflicted were residents of Canada, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. As the pestilence spread westward, however, Native Americans became its primary victims. When smallpox erupted in Mexico City in 1779, it quickly traveled northward to the Pueblos of the American Southwest. From there the epidemic extended itself further, ravaging the northern plains and wreaking havoc among the Cree and Assiniboine Indians engaged in the Hudson Bay fur trade. The pestilence finally ended in southeast Alaska.;"Pox Americana" argues that the colonial expansion of the European world economy resulted in a series of upheavals that enabled smallpox to engulf the continent in the years from 1775 to 1783. Warfare in the east stimulated ceaseless circulation of people and microbes. The acquisition of the horse by plains Indians allowed smallpox to spread northward rapidly from Mexico to the Canadian interior. Intertribal conflict, aggravated by access to guns, helped disperse the smallpox virus over the northern plains. Trade in furs and manufactured goods allowed the epidemic to extend not just to Hudson Bay, but very likely to the Pacific northwest as well. The end result may well have been the first continental epidemic to strike the western hemisphere. |
