I have seen the theory that after first contact with Europeans and the introduction of their diseases, there was a massive die off of the indigenous population of NA before colonization started in earnest. I think I’ve seen estimates that up to 90% of the population died.
A lot of the supposed evidence isn’t that convincing(colonists remarking how the land was easy to plant, lots of garden plots in forests) and I would think that there would have been some verbal history of this apocalypse.
Is there any hard evidence?(Not that European diseases were devastating, but that there was a true massive die off).
This is a fairly huge topic, especially since the evidence spans a great geographical area and comes in many forms.
Just following the cites from this Wikipedia article, you can read excerpts of this book which cites some primary sources for population estimates.
Note that not all populations were equally affected. Some groups completely disappeared. Other were hit badly but managed to rebound. The disruptions caused survivors to join other groups or form new ones.
There’s a vast body of research on the topic and the evidence, whether historical or archeological, is overwhelming in its support of a sudden and dramatic drop in Native American populations following contact with Europeans. Here’s a small sample:
You can’t have a “verbal” history if there is nobody left to talk about it. Perhaps 90% is not the right figure, but many Native Americans died from European diseases–over centuries. Follow some of the links above for details…
Between first contact and European colonization starting in earnest (especially in North America) you have about a 100-150 year span. Jamestown was 1602 and Plymouth Rock was 1620 that’s just two small east coast settlements. St. Augustine was earlier (1565) and it doesn’t look as though the French got a permanent foothold in Canada until somewhere in the mid 1600s.
That’s plenty of time for a rapid die-off (and high infant mortality) without the need for a single pit full of a million skeletons. Especially when you consider the length of time for European expansion to move past the east coast and further inland. It also means you don’t need stories of a single massive apocalyptic event. Everyone didn’t die over a single weekend.
IIRC it was National Geographic that had a feature on the massive towns in the Mississippi valley.
De Soto reported encountering a huge number of these “cities” on his travels in the 1540’s. The theory is that between him and the pigs (he brought along food on the trotter) they passed enough infections on to these groups that when the east coast settlers arrived almost 200 years later, these cities and their inhabitants were long gone.
An article I recall about a smallpox epidemic in British Columbia in the late 1800’s said that without the help of some immune caregivers (i.e. missionaries, locals who had spent time with the white man) 90% of the infected people died. Given proper food and water during the sickness, natives survived at the same rate as europeans. So it’s not that the natives died easier - just that when the whole town got sick at once, within a few days, there was no care and everyone died of starvation or dehydration.
As can be expected, when 90% of a population dies, the urban and tribal systems pretty much crash and it’s every man for himself. It didn’t help that at the same time, horses were making their way from tribe to tribe from Mexico; this created a more mobile warrior culture, further making recovery of any urban civilization harder.
And I’ve seen forest recovery in northern Canada, where a cleared area returned to forest within 30 years. Given the more friendly climate of the Mississippi basin, I suspect any abandoned fields and even pallisaded towns would be buried in the undergrowth in 100 years. 100 or 200 years is a long time for a decimated culture to remember details of oral traditions.
But whether the population declined by 10% or 90%, whether it crshed all at once or over a century - who knows? All estimates are hand-waving.
Of course, you are correct! But the Maya were the only literate culture native to the continent, so “verbal” meant “oral” nearly everywhere…
The Norse settlement wasn’t confirmed until recently. But their numbers were small & the Norse came from an outlying region of the Old World–far from Civilization & most diseases. And their contact with the Skraelings was mostly limited to dodging their arrows…
The 90%+ numbers are for the reduction in population over that time period, not fatality rates. It wasn’t a matter of one plague knocking out 90% of the population, but rather of wave after wave of disease running through, leaving each generation smaller than the last. A great deal of that 90% is babies that were never born because a sick, much-reduced population could not manage to replace itself.
Writings from early colonists showed a penchant for looting and destroying Native American graves and building settlements on abandoned settlements (read; already cleared land). Between that and the funeral practices of many natives peoples, as well as the long time line of the decline and you weren’t going to find tons of large, empty villages full of corpses laying about into the 18- and 1900’s.
But yes, there were mass deaths in short periods of time. The settlement at Plymouth was on top of a very recently depopulated settlement. Squanto, the Native American who helped the Plymouth colonists, had in fact been kidnapped and taken to England years before, made his way back to America and back to the Plymouth area only to find his people had all died in the intervening time. It’s a very interesting story.
I know it wasn’t a single plague or event (and was unclear about fatality vs basic depopulation). Which goes back into my main point: there was no singular “apocalypse” to talk about. The depopulation of the Americas was an event that happened over the course of over a century or more. The OP is looking for accounts of “Then one day we woke up and everyone was dead” but that just isn’t how it happened.