![]() They had first arrived, probably over the Bering Land Bridge connecting Alaska and Russia, around 15,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, and they found a whole new world, with no humans at all, packed with huge beasts relatively easy to kill with spears, vast prairies, and natural resources that allowed a vibrant hunter-gatherer population to grow as they conquered a virgin continent. Those Native Americans had been the first to discover this continent and, with it, their own sort of American Dream - thousands of years before Europeans imagined theirs. Much of the terror of this experience is lost to us moderns because a great deal of the death and suffering occurred before Europeans were even able to witness and record it (though, of course, the trauma for the Indigenous reverberated for centuries). The residue from these sores was also terribly infectious and lingered on surfaces or cloth for years - but scholars now consider the vast majority of deaths, just like those from COVID-19, to have been from human-to-human transmission. The sores healed the pockmarks, highly visible on the face, remained. A human being would struggle for perhaps ten days, covered in these sores, erupting in bloody and pus-filled bumps - and then, with luck, the illness subsided. The virus Variola major incubated for two weeks, followed by an intense few days of fever, before the pustules emerged: first in the mouth, throat, and nasal passages, then all over the body, including around the eyes, where they often caused blindness. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the Native population in a relatively short amount of time - millions and maybe tens of millions died. It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind - surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist. It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Photo: © JOSÉ LUIZ BERNARDES RIBEIRO VIA CC VERSION 4.0 Death as a skeleton rides a wraithlike horse and tramples its victims.
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