Native American Old World Disease

The Invisible Enemy – How Old World diseases destroyed Indian America and created Colonial America.
In the years prior to the Pilgrims establishing Plymouth colony in 1620, the area had been ravaged by an epidemic of disease which had wiped out the original Indian inhabitants. The Pilgrims believed that God had sent the disease among the Indians to clear the site for his ‘chosen people’. This is but one example of how the introduction of disease would forever change the existing Indian America into a ‘new’ America the Natives would barely recognize and would face an everlasting struggle to be part of. The impact of Old World diseases is one of the most critical aspects to understanding the history of Native American Indians.
Old World pathogens
Sweat lodge ceremonies to purify the body required convening people in a confined space and therefore making the airborne transmission of viruses easier. The profuse sweating brought about dangerous dehydration as did the use of customary herbal medicines, many of which contained cathartic and emetic properties. With the Indians resorting in anguish to curing societies and community rituals to combat new diseases; shamans explored new and more effective rituals through fasting and
They ranged from the head of the Missouri River to the Black Hills until driven southward by the Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux to the region near the Arkansas River in the early nineteenth century. At this time the Kiowa numbered around 2,000. Plains Indians being more dispersed, had a lesser chance of infection and greater chance of survival, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, epidemics of smallpox struck the Indians of the West hard. Up to half of the Plains Indians may have died in the smallpox pandemic of 1779-81, which had advanced along trade routes that the Indians followed to trade horses. The Dohasan calendar (1832-92) was begun by the Kiowa chief named Dohasan and continued until 1892 by his nephew when Dohasan died in 1866, chronicles sixty years of devastating change for the Kiowa. Using a copy of the calendar drawn by Dohasan himself, anthropologist James Mooney compiled an account of the events depicted by the calendar, from information supplied by Dohasan and supplemented with information from other Kiowa chronicles. The calendar accounts epidemics among the Kiowas in the winter of 1839-40 and 1861-62, and in the summer of 1849, cholera. By the summer of 1879, buffalo were so scarce that to keep from starving the Kiowas had to kill and eat their horses. The calendar ends in 1892 with a measles epidemic, which broke out at the reservation school, and once the school superintendent sent the sick