1634-1635 — Smallpox Epidemic, Five Nations, especially Mohawks, Upper NY –>2000
— 1000s Hopkins. A New Landscape: Changing Iroquois Settlement…1630-1783. 2010, p. 21.
— 1000s Keesler. “Iroquois,” Chap. 5, Mohawk: Discovering the Valley of the Crystals. 2004.
Narrative Information
Bogaert:[1] “None of the chiefs was at home, but the principal chief is named Adriochten, who lived a quarter of a mile from the fort[2] in a small house, because a good many savages here in the castle died of smallpox…. I could see nothing but graves…” (Bogaert. “Narrative of a Journey Into the Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635.” Chapter 13, “Van Den Bogaert’s Journal – 1634-5.” Pp. 220-239 in Greene, Nelson (Ed.). History of the Mohawk Valley: Gateway to the West 1613-1925. 1925; from Schenectady Digital History Archive.)
Hopkins: “Early contact with European traders, missionaries, and diplomats also caused unprecedented social changes. European bodies carried deadly pathogens to which Native Americans had no immunity. As a result, the Five Nations weathered dramatic population losses as men and women of all ages died from repeated epidemics. Indian villages suffered death rates of at least fifty percent, and even as high as seventy percent, from exposure to new epidemics. After a smallpox epidemic struck the Mohawk in 1634, Dean Snow estimated their total population dropped from a pre-epidemic high of 7,740 to only 2,835, a sixty-three percent decline.”[3] (Hopkins, Kelly Yvonne. A New Landscape: Changing Iroquois Settlement Patterns, Subsistence Strategies, and Environmental Use, 1630-1783 (Doctoral dissertation). Davis, CA: University of California, Davis, 2010, pp. 20-21.)
Keesler: “Dutch Children’s Disease Kills Thousands of Mohawks….The Dutch built Fort Orange at present day Albany in 1624, but didn’t bring children until the 1630s….
“Having survived smallpox in their youth, adult Europeans were immune to the disease, so early adult-only contacts did not cause an epidemic. However, when the Dutch brought children to the area, many of them developed smallpox, and the disease spread among the native peoples who had no immunity. A series of smallpox epidemics swept up the Mohawk Valley reducing the population of the Mohawks from over 7000 to some 3000. To put this in perspective, imagine half of your family and half of your community dying in just a few short years. The loss of so many children, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles would literally tear families apart, and the loss of community leaders and officials would tear villages, towns and cities apart.
“Early on the Mohawks suffered the most because they lived the closest to the Dutch settlement. However, in a relatively short time all of the Iroquois nations were devastated by smallpox epidemics. No segment of their society was spared. Entire families were lost. Children that survived were orphaned. Some of the best tool and weapon makers, medicine men and healers were no more. Many traditional leaders—men and women whose wisdom and status had bound communities together and influenced almost every major decision—were gone forever. New families were formed; orphans—young and old—were adopted, and new leaders emerged. When villages were constructed in locations well away from “infected” villages and burial grounds, they were much smaller, and 3-hearth longhouses were built instead of the traditional 5-hearth longhouses.
“When all this happened it seems incredible that the Dutch didn’t know about it. But unlike the French who traveled among the Indians to trade for furs, the Dutch were content to stay at their trading post and let the Indians come to them. When the Mohawks and Oneidas stopped coming to Fort Orange in the 1630s, the Dutch suspected they were trading with the French. Three men were sent into Mohawk and Oneida territory in the winter of 1634-35 to investigate. They discovered the Mohawks were in the midst of a smallpox epidemic.
“At the time they didn’t realize the dire consequences of the epidemic, but the information they and subsequent travelers provided, plus archaeological evidence, revealed that villages were being abandoned and others established. Where 7,000 Mohawks lived in 4 large and a couple of small villages spread throughout the valley, they were transitioning to 3 or 4 small villages with a combined population of some 3,000 individuals.
“Incidentally, the journal kept by the leader of that first expedition was the first written description of the Mohawk Valley and its people. It was discovered in 1895 in Holland. Of course it was written in Dutch, so after a copy was brought to America it was translated to English. Its contents have been studied and hotly debated by historians, authors and scholars. Perhaps the most controversial data were the exact locations of the Mohawk villages. Over the years, additional translations of the journal and new archaeological evidence added to the furor. Fortunately, linguist Charles T. Gehring, and archaeologists Dean R. Snow and William A. Starna joined forces in 1988 to edit and translate, A Journey Into Mohawk and Oneida Country 1634-1635 – The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert.” (Keesler. “Iroquois,” Chapter 5 in: Mohawk: Discovering the Valley of the Crystals (a book-in-progress website). 2004.)
Meuwese: “In the winter of 1634-1635, a smallpox epidemic, possibly transmitted by French traders to the Wendats, struck hard at the Five Nations and other indigenous peoples in the Upper Saint Lawrence Valley. Although the exact death toll of this ‘virgin soil’ epidemic remains debatable, the Five Nations and their neighbors all suffered great losses, particularly among the young and the old who were most susceptible to the deadly disease….Most ethnohistorians agree that the Five Nations and their Wendat neighbors suffered a severe population decline of more than 50% in the wake of the deadly epidemics of the 1630s.” (Meuwese, Mark. Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595-1674. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2012, p. 264.
Trigger: “Fenton (1940: 175)[4] has reasonably suggested that epidemics in the sixteenth century may have played a role in the dispersal of the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, although there are no clear references to such epidemics in the Iroquoian area prior to 1634-1635, when Harmen van den Bogaert reported that many Mohawks had died of smallpox (Jameson 1909: 140[5])”. (Trigger, Bruce G. “Early Iroquoian Contacts with Europeans,” pp. 344-356 in: Sturtevant William C. (Ed.). Handbook of North American Indians. Washington DC: GPO, Smithsonian Institution, 1978, p. 352.)
Sources
Bogaert, Van Den. “Narrative of a Journey Into the Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634-1635.” Chapter 13, “Van Den Bogaert’s Journal – 1634-5.” Pp. 220-239 in Greene, Nelson (Ed.). History of the Mohawk Valley: Gateway to the West 1613-1925. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co. 1925. Accessed from the Schenectady Digital History Archive 1-24-2013 at: http://www.schenectadyhistory.org/resources/mvgw/history/013.html
Hopkins, Kelly Yvonne. A New Landscape: Changing Iroquois Settlement Patterns, Subsistence Strategies, and Environmental Use, 1630-1783 (Doctoral dissertation). Davis, CA: University of California, Davis, 2010. Accessed 1-24-2013: http://gradworks.umi.com/3422771.pdf
Keesler, M. Paul. “Iroquois,” Chapter 5 in: Mohawk: Discovering the Valley of the Crystals (a book-in-progress website). 2004. Accessed 1-24-2013: http://www.mpaulkeeslerbooks.com/Mohawk.htm
Meuwese, Mark. Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595-1674. Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2012. Partially Google digitized. Accessed 1-24-2013: http://books.google.com/books?id=vvQIqfGffWgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Trigger, Bruce G. “Early Iroquoian Contacts with Europeans,” pp. 344-356 in: Sturtevant William C. (Ed.). Handbook of North American Indians. Washington DC: GPO, Smithsonian Institution, 1978. Partially Google digitized. Accessed 1-24-2013 at: http://books.google.com/books?id=PHXIeG6JyKEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
[1] Van Den Bogaert, thought to be the author of this journal, was the surgeon at the Dutch settlement of Fort Orange, present day Albany, NY. He and two countrymen, accompanied by a Mohawk escort, visited Mohawk and Oneida sites during a 200 mile midwinter trip from Dec 11, 1634 to Jan 21, 1635.
[2] Thought by author of Schenectady History website to be Onekagonka, or Lower Castle “(probably at the Turtle Clan) on the hill on (1912) the Vrooman farm on the west bank of Wasontha Creek, west of the village of Randall [NY].”
[3] Cites: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols., (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), 17:223; Conrad Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600-1650, (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 97-98; Dean R. Snow, “The Ethnohistoric Baseline of the Eastern Abenaki,” Ethnohistory, vol. 23, no. 3 (1976):291-306; Ted J. Brasser, “Early Indian-European Contacts,” in William C. Sturtevant, gen. ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast, edited by Bruce G. Trigger, (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1978), 78-88; Dean R. Snow, Mohawk Valley Archaeology: The Sites, Occasional Papers in
Anthropology, Number 23, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1995), 4, 279-359. William A. Starna estimated a far higher pre- and post-epidemic Mohawk population because he calculated Mohawk longhouses and villages (180 longhouses in eight villages) filled to capacity, see his “Mohawk Iroquois Populations: A Revision,” Ethnohistory, vol. 27, no. 4, (1980):371-382.
[4] Fenton, William N. “Problems Arising from the Historic Northeastern Position of the Iroquois. Pp. 159-251 in Essays in Historical Anthropology of North America. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 100. Washington, DC.
[5] Jameson, J. Franklin (Ed.). Narratives of New Netherlands 1609-1664. NY: Scribner, 1909.