Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[B]y most accounts, the year 1609 marked the first time Europeans laid eyes on what is today Vermont. That’s when Samuel de Champlain and two French compatriots were escorted south on Lake Champlain by a group of Algonquin men as part of a raiding party against the Mohawks on the New York shore.
In reality, however, by the time Champlain reached the lake he would name for himself, a European influx of another sort had likely already devastated Vermont’s native population. This invasion didn’t come in the form of armies attacking Indian villages or settlers squatting on Indian lands, but in the form of deadly microorganisms.
The early European settlers in New England and Canada carried with them virulent diseases to which Indians had no immunity. These deadly illnesses would serve as the shock troops of a centuries-long invasion that led to the end of Native American control of Vermont.
Knowing specifically what happened in Vermont during the 1600s and first half of the 1700s is impossible — the Indians who lived here had no written language and Europeans, who might have chronicled events, were rarely on the scene. The best scholars can do is make educated guesses based on documented events elsewhere in the region.
Plagues brought by Europeans struck northeastern North America as early as 1535. Before that time, researchers estimate that the native population of New England numbered more than 90,000. That figure is small by today’s standards, but the world was a much less populated place half a millennium ago. For comparison, by 1650, the French population in the New World stood at only about 2,000, and the English population of New England would not match the pre-epidemic Indian population until about 1700.
Among those 90,000 Native Americans were roughly 10,000 Abenaki living in what is today Vermont and New Hampshire. Those Abenaki included an estimated 4,200 living in the Champlain Valley, and another 3,800 living in the upper Connecticut River Valley, according to the estimates of Dean Snow, an archaeologist at Penn State University.
The Abenaki of Vermont were linked with the larger region at the time of the European’s arrival. Using waterways and an extensive web of trails, they maintained social, political and trade connections with distant Indian populations that had already encountered Europeans. These deep connections ultimately proved ruinous for the Abenaki, as germs and viruses traveled these routes back into Vermont inside their human hosts.
We have no figures of how many Native Americans in Vermont these epidemics killed. Scholars can only extrapolate from what happened elsewhere.
The history of epidemics during the early settlement period makes for grim reading. Plagues struck New England in seemingly endless waves. That first epidemic in 1535 traveled along the St. Lawrence Valley; others hit the region in 1564 and 1570 and caused a significant death toll as far south as New England. New England suffered another outbreak, apparently typhus, in 1586.
Worse yet was a series of epidemics that hit coastal New England from 1616 to 1619. The Pilgrims, who arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1620, found wigwams filled with dead bodies; many of the survivors had fled their homes and fields, leaving behind a depopulated landscape. Rather than see this as a tragedy, the Pilgrims assumed God had sent the plague, since it left them cleared land to settle. King James of England chillingly thanked “Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty toward us” for “this wonderful plague among the savages.”
Scholars estimate the mortality rate from this outbreak at about 75 percent. Some researchers believe the outbreak was a yellow fever epidemic, while others point to smallpox, chickenpox, plague or trichinosis. A more recent theory is that rodent-infected water from European ships contaminated local water supplies, leading to an outbreak of leptospirosis.
Several smallpox epidemics hit the region during the 1630s. Gov. William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony received a report that so many Indians had died in one village on the Connecticut River that there weren’t enough survivors to bury the victims, and that dogs were eating the dead. Out of a total village population of 1,000, Bradford learned, roughly 950 had died — an astonishing mortality rate of 95 percent.
While that figure might seem overblown, it is actually in line with the estimates of Snow and other scholars. Snow believes that the recurring epidemics might have diminished the Indian population in Vermont by nearly 98 percent by the mid-1600s, leaving a mere 250.
That number seems too low to Colin Calloway, a history professor at Dartmouth College, who has written extensively about the Abenaki. Calloway writes that the Abenaki had a long history of leaving their villages behind during times of trouble and scattering into smaller bands. That practice would have served them well during times of plague, and would have caused Europeans, who noticed the apparently abandoned villages, to underreport the number of Abenaki survivors. Calloway also notes that reports of numerous Abenakis seeking refuge in French mission villages in Canada supports the idea that more survived the epidemics than Snow estimates.
Still, Calloway believes that mortality rates might have reached 90 percent in Vermont, given the high death tolls seen elsewhere.
Because of the large numbers of Abenaki who succumbed to European diseases, the tribe had to find ways to supplement its numbers. The tribe gained members when Indians from other tribes fled north, fearing disease and attack from Europeans. The Abenaki also occasionally took captives to replace members lost to war and disease.
Just as the threat of epidemics began to subside, the region was engulfed in a series of armed conflicts that became known as the French and Indian Wars. Through it all, Calloway believes, the Abenaki have managed to keep a foothold in Vermont, using their habit of breaking into small bands during times of trouble and then coalescing again when times were better.
Still, Calloway notes, it is hard to overestimate the impact of the plagues had on the Abenaki. “Epidemics left social and economic chaos in their wake and caused immeasurable spiritual and psychological damage,” he writes in his book “The Western Abenaki of Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People.”
“Killer diseases tore holes in the fabric of Indian societies held together by extensive networks of kinship and reciprocity, disrupted time-honored cycles of hunting, planting, and fishing, discouraged social and ceremonial gatherings, and drained confidence in the old certainties of life and the shamans who mediated with the spirit world.”
