Ponce de Leon famously landed in northeastern Florida in April . Later,
down in southern Florida, Ponce’s men were immediately attacked on at
least two occasions when their longboats touched shore. And later yet,
when Ponce met the Calusa chieftain Carlos (perhaps at Port Charlotte),
a Spanish-speaking native appeared. Despite a translation that sounded
friendly, Calusas attacked the intruders. These incidents suggest to many
scholars that previous slave-getting expeditions from Cuba must have an-
gered Floridian natives of several polities, who were prepared to resist. A
generation later came the de Soto expedition that, begun in Florida, swept
ultimately through hundreds of miles of the lowland, piedmont, and moun-
tain South, encountering dozens of peoples. In another brief generation
came Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’s permanent settlement at St. Augustine,
along with a French colony at the mouth of St. Johns River—a settlement
rendered temporary by Menéndez at a place and by a river the Spanish
named Matanzas, or slaughter. Shortly after Menéndez’s success, in –
Juan Pardo led another Spanish expedition to coastal South Carolina,
then overland to the mountains, to present-day Asheville, where he spent
time with Cherokee-speaking peoples. Hardly a decade and a half later
came John White and the English to Roanoke Island; in another genera-
tion came John Smith and more English to the lower Chesapeake and the
French to the Gulf coast, Canada, and down the Mississippi, and so on. In
sum, probably as early as , Europeans and their pathogens were at least
stopping briefly on the coastal mainland, then traveling far inland. If de
Soto and Pardo had stayed home, native trade and war would doubtlessly
have transmitted smallpox, measles, whooping cough, mumps, and other
infections against which the Indians, having been isolated from the Eur-
asian landmass for many thousands of years, had no immunities.^28
Late in the twentieth century, scholars and others argued passionately,
almost violently, about pre-Columbian native populations. Estimates
ranged from only half a million to all of million, with million more
or less prevailing until the anthropologist Henry Dobyns, extrapolating the
credible historical demography of Mexico and the Caribbean, declared that
North America (north of the Rio Grande) contained to million inhabi-
tants when Columbus first landed. Shortly after Dobyns published his fig-
ures in , native Americans and many ‘‘Anglo’’ collaborators organized
not only a civil rights movement but a burgeoning popular and political lit-
erature that was invested in Dobyns’s and others’ larger numbers. Buildup
to the Columbian Quincentennial in represented a climax of politi-
cizing historical demography, especially with the publication of a book