1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

Far from being dependent on big-game hunting, most Indians lived on farms.

except for llamas in the Andes, the Western Hemisphere had no beasts of burden.

Beginning in 1616, the pestilence took at least three years to exhaust itself and killed as much as 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. “And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle,”

Governor Bradford is said to have attributed the plague to “the good hand of God,” which “favored our beginnings” by “sweeping away great multitudes of the natives … that he might make room for us.” Indeed, more than fifty of the first colonial villages in New England were located on Indian communities emptied by disease.

after the war Massachusetts sold more than a thousand Indians into slavery—perhaps one out of every ten native adults in the region.

Europeans routinely lost when they could not take advantage of disease and political fragmentation.

what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas.

Even the idea of contagion itself was novel. “We had no belief that one Man could give [a disease] to another,” the Blackfoot raider remembered, “any more than a wounded Man could give his wound to another.” Because they knew of no protective measures, the toll was even higher than it would have been.

The first European adventurers in the Western Hemisphere did not make careful population counts, but they repeatedly described indigenous America as a crowded, jostling place—“a beehive of people,” as Las Casas put it in 1542. To Las Casas, the Americas seemed so thick with people “that it looked as if God has placed all of or the greater part of the entire human race in these countries.”

it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years. As Cahokia shows, they made mistakes. But by and large they modified their landscapes in stable, supple, resilient ways.

The passenger pigeon remained an emblem of natural bounty, but now it also represented the squandering of that bounty. In 1947 the conservationist Aldo Leopold dedicated a monument to the pigeon near the site of its greatest recorded nesting, at which hunters slaughtered 1.5 million birds. The plaque read: “This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man.”