The Native Americans Encountered by the Pilgrims: History Revealed

 James W. Loewen is a sociology professor who has spent a lot of time reviewing and comparing the various history textbooks that our high school students are required to read.  He first reported his findings in 1995 in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.  His work created a stir and he felt compelled to return in 2007 with a look at a new set of textbooks.  He returned again in 2018 with a version that acknowledges the Trump era in a new Preface, but otherwise the book was unchanged.  This book is a revelation.  One is left with the realization that, by design, we are taught little about our history.  Instead, a collaboration between textbook publishers, politicians, and everyday citizens provides our children with history books not intended to provide knowledge but to induce patriotism.  This topic was discussed in Politics and Teaching History: Brainwashing Students.

Part of Loewen’s intent was to illustrate how inaccurate our knowledge of our own history had become.  Perhaps the most disturbing chapter was the one in which he compared the actual history of our interaction with Native Americans with what we have been taught.  We tend to assume that our pilgrims came to settle an uncivilized land inhabited by “savages.”  What actually happened was that “settlers” were invaders into a land that had been occupied for tens of thousands of years, that possessed civilizations that would excite enlightenment philosophers with thoughts of ways they could improve their own European nations.  What would allow the invaders to overwhelm the natives was not their advanced civilization, but the diseases they carried into the Americas.  The crowded European cities were perfect places to develop and propagate infectious diseases; the wide-open spaces in the Americas were not.

“Some areas in the Americas did have high social density.  Incan roads connected towns from northern Ecuador to Chile.  Fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago the population of Cahokia, Illinois, numbered about forty thousand.  Trade linked the Great Lakes to Florida, the Rockies to what is now New England.  We are therefore not dealing with isolated bands of ‘primitive’ peoples.  Nonetheless, most of the Western Hemisphere lacked the social density found in much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.  And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were there sinkholes of sickness like London or Cairo, with raw sewage running in the streets.”

“The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region’s inhabitants.  Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest.  Squanto, ‘tried without success, to teach them to bathe,’ according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.”

The invaders found it easy to dominate a region when over 90 percent of the native population is killed by the diseases one has imported.

“Europeans were never able to ‘settle’ China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there.  The crucial role played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe only had about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.  The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to ‘settle’ the hemisphere.  For that, the plague was required.  Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.”

The plagues would begin with the Spaniards in the 1500s and continue over the centuries.  Europeans understood what was going on before the Pilgrims took off for America.  They assumed that it was God’s will that the natives die so that white Europeans could take over their land.

“How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City?  ‘When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city.’  When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them.  Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.”

“In 1617, just before the pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England.  For decades, English and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast.  After filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few American Indians to sell into slavery in Europe.  It is likely these fishermen transmitted some illness to the people they met.  The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison.”

“Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England.  Native societies lay devastated.  Only ‘the twentieth person is scarce left alive,’ wrote Robert Cushman, an English eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience.”

It is more inspirational to think of the Pilgrims having to deal with hostile savages and a challenging environment, than to document what actually occurred.

“…the Pilgrims hardly ‘started from scratch’ in a ‘wilderness.’  Throughout southern New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a parklilke environment.  After landing at Provincetown, the Pilgrims assembled a boat for exploring and began looking for their new home.  They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn and its useful harbor and ‘brook of fresh water.’  It was a lovely site for a town.  Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for ‘New Plimoth’ was none other than Squanto’s village of Patuxet.  The invaders followed a pattern: throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of Native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago.  Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.  (This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field.)  ‘Errand into the wilderness’ may have made a lively sermon title in 1650, a popular book title in 1950, and an archetypal textbook phrase in 2000, but it was never accurate.  The new settlers encountered no wilderness: ‘In this bay wherein we live,’ one colonist noted in 1622, ‘in former time hath lived about two thousand Indians’.”

Loewen was outraged that no treatment of the repeated epidemics existed in the textbooks covered in his first edition.  By the second edition, some textbooks merely noted that smallpox existed among the Natives.

The American Natives did not all die.  They would gradually increase their numbers and reconstitute their societies, but by then it was too late to stem the invaders’ tide.  But it was not too late to set an example of a life without the constant stresses of hierarchical societies and illustrate a form of liberty of which the European philosophers had barely managed to dream.

The American Natives had a history and cultures that deserve to be recognized and studied.  But if you are a white invader intending to eliminate them, it is best to have them recognized as savages who will not be missed.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.