whole side will flay off at once, as it were, and they will be all of a gore
blood, most fearful to behold. And then being very sore, what with cold
and other distempers, they die like rotten sheep.Once thriving and powerful Indian communities collapsed. Casualties
ranged upward from five out of ten inhabitants. Some populations may
have declined by a factor of twenty to one. In Virginia, the Indian popula-
tion fell from more than 30,000 when the colonists arrived to about 3,000
divided among nineteen tribes in 1670. Everywhere the whites ventured,
such disasters were repeated: The population of the Pequots of southern
Connecticut dropped from 13,000 to 3,000; and that of the Kanienkahaka
(known to their enemies as Mohawks) of eastern New York from 8,000 to
less than 3,000. Half the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws
were gone by 1738, and about the same proportion of a group of tribes
known as the Catawbas in the Carolinas in 1759. Florida, in Amy Turner
Bushnell’s arresting phrase, had become “a hollow peninsula.” As Colin
Calloway noted, Indian America was turned “into a graveyard.”
Large as they are, the numbers do not tell the whole story. Because
older people were less likely to survive, and because in communities with-
out written records elders were the guardians of heritage, society after soci-
ety in the Indian world foundered culturally as well as demographically.
Thus, providentially, much of the land was cleared for the incoming whites.
Before the arrival of the whites, warfare was common among Indian
societies: the powerful often attacked weaker neighbors, kidnapping them,
taking their possessions, and sometimes driving them off their lands.
Warfare was not a sport, but as many early European visitors described it, it
was more ceremonial than lethal, more a matter of “violent theater” than
true combat. With the coming of the whites, the scale and intensity of con-
flict changed. As the Indians began to learn to use muskets, they found that
the soft lead slug of a 50- or 60-caliber musket inflicted often unhealable
wounds. For the first time, Indian societies could destroy one another.
Those who had guns won. Getting guns became absolutely vital. By 1643,
the Mohawks had nearly 300 arquebuses. Their enemies had to have this
weapon also.
As we have seen in chapter 6, roughly the same process was at work in
Whites, Indians, and Land 191