CORONADO

Herman J. Viola, Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of change: a quincentennial commemoration, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 87:

The epidemiology of England’s beginnings in America was similar to Iberia’s. When Sir Francis Drake raided Saint Augustine in the 1580s, he brought an epidemic with him. The local Florida Indians ‘died verie fast and said amongest themselves, it was the lnglisshe God that made them die so faste.’ Another (conceivably the same) epidemic swept the coastal tribes of Carolina and Virginia before the end of that decade, ‘the like by report of the oldest men in the countrey never happened before, time out of mind.’ The Pilgrim settlement to the north at Plymouth was preceded by an epidemic that began in 1616 and, said contemporary sources, killed 90 percent of the coastal Indians.

English colonists arriving on the Mayflower in 1620 didn’t meet with much resistance thanks to much of New England’s native population having been reduced by disease brought earlier by European fishermen.

Viola, p. 193:

As the scourge moved westward, it continued its carnage into the northern Great Plains. When it hit the Blackfeet in 1781, more than 50 percent of the tribe died. When it returned in 1837, the survivors suffered a 66 percent loss: six thousand perished (Ewers 1958).

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