News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
It has become a family tradition in my household during the Thanksgiving weekend to gather before the electronic hearth to watch the PBS American Experience documentary "We Shall Remain - After the Mayflower." In it, the saga of the first Thanksgiving unfolds from the point of view of the Wampanoag, who greeted the arrival of the Pilgrims as an opportunity to forge an alliance in the face of destruction.
The film well captures an aspect of the story that generally escapes mainstream history: The people of the Wampanoag Confederacy were living in a post-apocalyptic world. A scant few years before the Pilgrims landed, this numerous and prosperous people was ravaged by a series of disease outbreaks lasting about two years. Half or more of the Wampanoag died. In some villages, mortality approached 100 percent. The village of Patuxet was abandoned. Here was the site of New Plymouth.
The diseases, which were probably a strain of plague, were likely acquired through glancing or indirect contact with European sailors, traders and fishermen, who were poking along that coast (and in the case of the French, exploring the north country) for many decades before the Pilgrims ventured there. The Indian populations had little to no resistance to these diseases, and the result was like something out of Stephen King's "The Stand."
Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," promotes the thesis that a variety of variables, often seemingly minor in themselves, combine to shape the success or destruction of societies throughout history. Weather and crops, domestication of certain animals, the development of certain technologies (steel and writing) and the ability or inability to cope with or resist disease are the true hinges of fate. The website for the PBS series based on Diamond's work notes:
"Much of the credit for European military success in the New World can be handed to the superiority of their weapons, their literary heritage, even the fact they had unique load-bearing mammals, like horses. These factors combined, gave the conquistadors a massive advantage over the sophisticated civilizations of the Aztec and Inca empires.
"But weapons alone can't account for the breathtaking speed with which the indigenous population of the New World were completely wiped out.
"Within just a few generations, the continents of the Americas were virtually emptied of their native inhabitants - some academics estimate that approximately 20 million people may have died in the years following the European invasion - up to 95 percent of the population of the Americas.
"No medieval force, no matter how bloodthirsty, could have achieved such enormous levels of genocide. Instead, Europeans were aided by a deadly secret weapon they weren't even aware they were carrying: Smallpox."
Smallpox probably wasn't the culprit in the case of the Wampanoag, but the point remains valid: The land was cleared for the Pilgrims and other European settlers in large part by germs. The Pilgrims, as was their wont, attributed this to God. The Wampanoag, no less metaphysical in their orientation, may have done the same.
Of course it is important to recognize that there is no agency here. Although there were later plots to infect Indian populations with smallpox deliberately, the massive destruction wrought by germs was biological happenstance. As the Black Plague reshaped Europe, killing a third of its population, so germs reshaped North America. Lack of resistance to European diseases doomed the native peoples, greatly reducing their populations and weakening their base of resistance before the intruders even arrived in force.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag did, in fact, forge a viable friendship and mutually beneficial alliance - for a time. That moment of friendship we celebrate in our Thanksgiving iconography was real enough.
"We Shall Remain - After the Mayflower" documents the gradual - and probably inevitable - breakdown of that Puritan/Wampanoag alliance, which ended in King Philip's War in the 1670s - the bloodiest conflict in American history. Per capita casualties were not equaled even in the American Civil War.
The path established in the "First Thanksgiving" was a path abandoned.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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