The Great Dying

1992

The claim

Some historians say the destruction of the Native peoples of the Americas was the worst human catastrophe in history, and that it was done to them. Guenter Lewy, who reports Stannard’s claim, accepts the loss and disputes the word. This story tests the claim against the record: who brought the diseases, when the loss came, how much was disease and how much war, removal and hunger, what governments did on purpose, and what is documented today. It does not rank this history against any other; the sources cover four centuries, two continents and many governments, and their estimates differ too widely for one ledger.

1492

1492

No one counted the whole hemisphere in 1492, so every figure here is an estimate. In 2019 Alexander Koch and colleagues pooled 119 published regional estimates and reached 60.5 million people. By their calculation about nine in ten were gone by 1600; other studies they review put the loss anywhere from 40 to 95 percent.

60.5 millionPeople in the Americas in 1492, by one 2019 estimate. The middle half of its range runs from 44.8 to 78.2 million

1992

Who counted

For the hemisphere in 1492: 40 to 41 million in an often-quoted 1967 review; 54 million from William Denevan in 1992; 60.5 million from Koch’s team, who pooled every published estimate without judging its quality; and 112 million from Henry Dobyns (1966, 1983), though Ostler gives his hemisphere total as 75 million. North of Mexico the range runs from 1,152,950 in a 1928 count by James Mooney, as Lewy reports it, and 900,000 to 2.4 million from tribe-by-tribe counts, to “well over 5 million” from Russell Thornton in 1987 and 18 million from Dobyns, whose assumptions about food Koch says have been criticized. The methods differ too: colonial censuses, houses counted at dig sites, the carrying capacity of the land.

1997

Who brought the germs

Europeans and Africans did, on European ships: Koch’s team write that the epidemics were introduced by European settlers and enslaved Africans, and yellow fever and malaria came later from Africa. Nobody created the germs for this. Measles split from a cattle virus, dated to around the 11th century by Furuse and colleagues and to as early as the sixth century BCE by Düx and colleagues, and when smallpox emerged in humans is disputed. Jones argues that “no immunity” is too simple, since Crosby stressed lack of childhood exposure, malnutrition and the social chaos of colonization, and Koch’s team add there is no evidence genetic differences made the diseases worse.

1493

Hispaniola

Ostler dates the first epidemic to Columbus’s second voyage, 1493 to 1496, when ill crewmen, probably with influenza, infected the island; Koch’s team date the first documented outbreak to 1497. The expedition’s aim was gold, Ostler writes, and to get it the Spanish enslaved people, and used violence to hold them; the governor Ovando massacred 600 to 700 Indians of Higüey in 1502. A census in 1508 counted 60,000, against 300,000 to 500,000 in most estimates before contact and as high as 8 million in others, so the starting figure is not agreed. Ostler adds that far more died of disease, malnutrition and starvation than of violence, and by 1542 only about 2,000 Tainos remained.

1520

Mexico and the Andes

Most of the people Koch’s team count lived in Mexico and the Andes, not on the islands. A smallpox epidemic in 1520 is estimated to have killed 30 to 50 percent of Mexico’s Native people. In the Inca heartland, about 670,000 remained by 1620, a fall of 93 percent from an estimated 9 million. The census figures start after the epidemics, so the earlier numbers rest on tribute records and calculation.

2.7 millionPeople counted in central Mexico in 1568. Estimates for 1519 run from 20 to 25.3 million

1696

More than disease

Jones warns that the “no immunity” story can deflect attention from moral and political questions; Ostler says the issue is less the first epidemics than what colonizers did, since war, displacement and want made people easier prey. In the Southeast, he writes, citing Paul Kelton, the smallpox of 1696 spread along networks shaped by the British slave trade; Kelton also says British forces cut corn and burned homes, which left people far more vulnerable than infected blankets did. Andrés Reséndez estimates that 2.5 to 5 million Native Americans were enslaved between Columbus and 1900: Europeans ran the trade first, with horses and firearms, and later Native societies such as the Comanches and Utes sold captives to other Indians and to Spaniards, Mexicans and Americans. Jones also holds that disease must take the dominant role, and Koch’s team say war, slavery and famine likely made the epidemics deadlier.

28 May 1830

Four governments

Spain’s Crown banned Indian slavery in 1542, yet colonists disguised the practice. An intendant of New France ruled in 1709 that “Panis,” the colonists’ word for any Native slave, and “Negroes” bought were their buyers’ property. Britain’s proclamation of 7 October 1763 reserved lands “for the use of the said Indians” and forbade settling them. The U.S. Indian Removal Act of 28 May 1830 provided for exchanges of land with nations “as may choose” to remove west; to secure compliance, Ostler writes, the federal government depended on threats.

24 Jun 1763

Fort Pitt, June 1763

Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo warriors surrounded the British fort that spring, and smallpox was in its hospital; Captain Ecuyer reported it on 16 June. On 24 June two Delaware envoys, Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee, urged the British to leave and were refused; they asked for provisions and liquor, and got them. Trent, a trader and militia captain, wrote that they were also given two blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox hospital; his journal does not say who conceived the act. A trader’s invoice, certified by Ecuyer and approved by General Gage, lists replacements for items taken from the hospital “to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians,” and Fenn writes that the account books show the British military sanctioned and paid for it.

13 Jul 1763

The letters, and the effect

General Amherst, in New York, asked Colonel Bouquet whether smallpox could be sent among the “Disaffected Tribes”; on 13 July Bouquet answered that he would try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, and on 16 July Amherst urged “Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race.” Fenn finds that the men at Fort Pitt had apparently already acted on their own, and the documents she saw do not show whether Bouquet ever tried it.

13 Jul 1763

Smallpox at Fort Pitt

Smallpox “struck hard” among the Indians around Fort Pitt that summer and the timing is “uncanny,” Fenn writes, but the epidemic may have had several sources, as Michael McConnell points out; Philip Ranlet says there is no evidence the scheme worked, and Paul Kelton, “We can’t be sure.” Ostler reports a scholarly consensus that deliberate infection was rare; Fenn suggests it may not have been as rare as it seems.

19 Jun 1837

Fort Clark, 1837

A crewman on the steamboat St. Peters, run by a firm that owned the American Fur Company’s Missouri branch, fell ill with smallpox; an Indian agent urged the captain to put him ashore, and the captain refused. The agent Pilcher left the boat on 5 June and warned others; the boat docked at Fort Clark on 19 June, and the Gros Ventre swore vengeance on the whites, Chardon wrote, as they said the steamboat brought it. A Colorado committee, citing Pearson, found that the U.S. Secretary of War had excluded the Mandan and the upper Missouri tribes from the 1832 vaccination program, which it called deliberate and reprehensible.

138 of about 2,000Mandans alive in the Knife River villages by October 1837, of about 2,000 that spring; the Colorado committee gives 1,600 to 2,000

19 Jun 1837

The blanket charge

Some writers charge that soldiers also spread it with infected blankets; Ostler writes that scholars accept intent at Fort Pitt but not here, and the committee found some basis for the general claim, made in essays by Ward Churchill, in early accounts and oral traditions, but none for details such as blankets from a St. Louis infirmary, and found misconduct in how he supported it; he was dismissed in 2007, a 2009 jury found the regents would not have fired him but for his comments on 9/11 and awarded $1, the judge set that aside on grounds of immunity, and the Colorado Supreme Court upheld it in 2012; he died in August 2026.

1779

War

From the Revolution, U.S. leaders spoke of destruction: Knox in 1790 ordered the army to “extirpate, utterly, if possible” a confederacy in Ohio, and Jefferson in 1807 told Indians near Detroit that a tribe he fought would be “exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi”; colonial Massachusetts had paid bounties for scalps in 1694. Troops and militias killed noncombatants at Ouiatenon in 1791, at Gnadenhütten in 1782, where militiamen voted to kill their captives, and at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, where at least 800 Red Sticks died, and Ostler lists Sand Creek, Bear River, the Marias River and Wounded Knee among the massacres of 1863 to 1890.

1779

Intent

Ostler concludes that the United States never intended to kill all Indians, so if that is the standard the word does not apply, but the threat of annihilation helped it take their land. Lewy argues that deaths of noncombatants in battles like the Washita were not intended, calls Wounded Knee, in Robert Utley’s words, “a regrettable, tragic accident of war,” and allows that Sand Creek might qualify.

29 Dec 1835

Removal

After the 1830 Removal Act, the first major step in forcibly relocating the eastern nations, about 2,000 Choctaws, 4,500 Creeks and 5,000 Cherokees died, close to 20 percent of each nation, Ostler writes, mostly of disease, starvation and exposure, and most in the camps and the first years after. The Cherokees were split: Principal Chief John Ross led the government and the majority, who opposed removal, while a minority “Treaty Party” under Major Ridge believed they could not stop it and signed at New Echota on 29 December 1835, while Ross was in Washington. The council petitioned the Senate not to ratify; Chief Smith calls the treaty “fraudulent on its face,” and in 1838 16,000 Cherokees were forced to leave under it, made to walk 800 miles in the dead of winter, Smith writes.

More than 4,000Cherokees who died in the removal of 1838, in Principal Chief Chadwick Smith's account. Ostler counts about 5,000

6 Jan 1851

California, 1851

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, told the legislature that a war of extermination “will continue to be waged,” adding that he anticipated it “with painful regret.” The state’s own 2019 account says governors called for militia campaigns in the 1850s and the state authorized $1.29 million for them; Ostler adds that Congress appropriated money too and that the army killed sixty or more Pomos at Bloody Island in 1850. The Native population fell from about 150,000 in 1848 to 30,000 in 1860, by Ostler’s account; more died of disease and malnutrition than of killing overall, though killing may explain most deaths for some nations, and USC’s summary of Benjamin Madley’s lecture says state and federal officials supported the killing campaigns. In 2019 Governor Newsom apologised by executive order for “violence, mistreatment and neglect,” and said: “Genocide. No other way to describe it.”

1882

Boarding schools

The U.S. government took Native children from their families to assimilate them. Army officer Richard Henry Pratt founded Carlisle in Pennsylvania in the late 1800s, the model for about 150 schools, with the aim to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man”; Congress funded the schools from 1882 and in 1893 let the Bureau of Indian Affairs withhold rations from parents who refused to enrol their children. The Interior Department’s 2024 report counts 417 institutions and at least 973 deaths, and on 25 October 2024 President Biden said: “I formally apologize.” Ostler writes that most scholars of the schools would accept “cultural genocide” for their aims, and that some call them outright genocide.

At least 973Deaths of Native children at federal boarding schools, in the Interior Department's 2024 report; it lists 417 institutions in 37 states or territories

1974

The word

Native activists did not use “genocide” much before 1974, when the First International Indian Treaty Council did; Governor Newsom used it in 2019. Jeffrey Ostler, who in 2019 wrote that the history should be called genocide, says that in 2015 most specialists in the field thought an overall indictment too extreme, while many held that California does qualify, and that some Native scholars fear the word reinforces ideas of Indians as vanishing.

1974

Scholars differ

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that U.S. authorities aimed to end Native nations as peoples; Gary Clayton Anderson, as she quotes him, says it will not become the accepted word because many Indians survived and mass murder on a European scale was not implemented, and his own term for removal is ethnic cleansing. David Stannard and Ward Churchill argued for equivalences with the Holocaust, which Ostler reports most historians ignored or dismissed, and scholars debate that comparison; Lewy argues the legal test of intent excludes the epidemic deaths.

9 Dec 1948

The definition

The 1948 Convention names five acts, from killing to forcibly transferring children, when done with “intent to destroy” a group; it is not retroactive, and the United States ratified it in the 1980s. Lewy reads the intent clause as excluding the epidemic deaths, since the diseases were introduced inadvertently, while allowing that some California massacres, and Sand Creek, might meet it. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called its residential-school policy “cultural genocide,” the destruction of the structures that let a group continue as a group, and wrote that removing children to destroy a people’s culture can be deemed genocide under Article 2(e).

1 Aug 1876

Who took

Named cases only. In the Creek treaty of Indian Springs in 1825, a minority led by William McIntosh agreed to a cession for $400,000, about half of which would go to McIntosh and his friends; the Creek National Council ordered him killed, and the treaty was nullified and replaced in 1826. For the Cherokee treaty of 1835 this research found no record of payments to the signers, and the reason the Archives gives is that they thought removal could not be stopped.

$66 millionPaid by six tribes to Scanlon's companies in three years, by the Senate committee's count

1 Aug 1876

Fort Sill

In the Senate’s own account, the trading-post licence at Fort Sill in Indian Territory brought kickbacks to the trader Marsh and payments of over $20,000 to Secretary of War Belknap, who had made the appointment; the House impeached him unanimously in 1876, and the Senate voted against him on all five articles but short of two-thirds, so he was acquitted and never prosecuted, and the account does not say what the post’s Native customers lost. In 2006 a Senate committee found that the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon secretly split fees tribes paid Scanlon, and Abramoff pleaded guilty to tax evasion, wire fraud and a conspiracy involving bribery and honest-services fraud, and was sentenced in 2008 to 48 months.

13 Nov 1992

A chairman

Peter MacDonald chaired the Navajo Nation from 1971 to 1983 and 1987 to 1989. In 1989 its Tribal Council suspended him after corruption accusations in U.S. Senate hearings, and his supporters marched on the tribal headquarters on 20 July, where tribal police shot five, two fatally, and three officers were wounded. A tribal court sentenced him in October 1990 to nearly six years for bribery, conspiracy and ethics violations; a federal jury convicted him in May 1992 of fraud, racketeering and extortion in the tribe’s dealings with a computer company, and in November 1992 of conspiracy and burglary over the riot, though his lawyer argued he was absent and had urged his followers not to march. A sentence of his was commuted on 20 January 2001, the Clinton Library records; this is one case, not a claim about anyone else.

Oct 2021

Today: missing and murdered

The survey counted sexual violence, physical violence by partners, stalking and partners’ psychological aggression, and found Native women 1.2 times as likely as White women to have experienced violence in their lifetime and 1.7 times as likely in the past year; 96 percent of Native women who suffered sexual violence had a perpetrator of another race. The Government Accountability Office found in 2021 that the total number of missing or murdered Indigenous women is unknown, because federal databases lack complete national data. Congress passed the Not Invisible Act in October 2020, telling the Interior Secretary, with the Attorney General, to appoint a joint commission by 7 February 2021; by 15 October 2021 no members had been appointed. The commission later made recommendations, and in March 2024 the two departments published their response.

84.3%American Indian and Alaska Native women who have experienced violence in their lifetime, in a 2016 National Institute of Justice survey report

20 Dec 2018

Today: money, land and trust

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in 2018 that Indian Health Service funding is “inequitable and unequal”: $2,834 per person in 2016, against $9,990 for national health spending, $9,404 at Veterans Health and $7,492 in Medicaid; on economic development it found that the federal government “has failed to honor its trust responsibility to promote Native American self-determination.”

$2,834 vs. $9,990Health spending per person in 2016: Indian Health Service, and the report's national figure

20 Dec 2018

Land and trust

Under the Dawes Act of 1887, 90 million acres of tribal land were lost through sales to non-Indians, and Stacy Bohlen told the commission that over 400 million acres were exchanged for treaty promises. Elouise Cobell sued the Interior Department over the trust accounts in 1996; in 1999 the Interior and Treasury secretaries were held in contempt for failing to produce records and the judge stated that Interior had breached its trust responsibilities. Congress approved the $3.4 billion settlement on 30 November 2010, $1.5 billion for class members and $1.9 billion for buying back fractionated land, and it became final on 24 November 2012.

21 May 2026

Today: water

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued over the Dakota Access Pipeline’s crossing of Lake Oahe, which supplies water for drinking and sacred cultural practices. In January 2021 the D.C. Circuit held that the Corps had acted unlawfully in granting the easement without an environmental impact statement, but reversed the order to shut the pipeline down. The Corps published its final statement in December 2025 and on 21 May 2026 granted the easement, with added leak-detection requirements; the Tribe’s response is not in the sources read here. In June 2023 the Supreme Court held, five to four, that the 1868 treaty reserved water for the Navajo Nation but did not require the United States to take affirmative steps to secure it; the dissent said the Tribe asked only that the government identify the water rights it holds for the Navajo.

9 Jul 2020

Today: who prosecutes

In 2013 Congress recognized tribes’ inherent power to prosecute some domestic-violence crimes by non-Indians, with exceptions such as cases where neither defendant nor victim is Indian. In McGirt (2020) the Supreme Court held that land reserved for the Creek Nation remains “Indian country” for federal criminal law, and the Chief Justice’s dissent warned it “profoundly destabilized” the governance of eastern Oklahoma. In 2022, in Castro-Huerta, the Court held that the federal government and the state share jurisdiction over crimes by non-Indians against Indians in Indian country; Justice Gorsuch’s dissent, joined by three others, said: “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts.”

1900

The claim, tested

Who brought the diseases: Europeans and the Africans they carried; nobody made them for this. When: Koch’s team put the loss of about nine in ten at 1600, and the wars, removals and schools in this story came after. How much was disease: between 75 and 90 percent of deaths, Lewy writes it is thought, but disease took hold under conditions colonizers made, and war, enslavement, removal and hunger are in every account here.

about 250,000Native population within the United States at its low point, around 1900, in Jeffrey Ostler's account