Why is Columbus Day still a holiday?

[Scootaloo]

134. Disease doesn't work like that.

For most diseases, you don't remain infectious after your immune system "beats" it. Even if you have absolutely no immune system, you won't catch smallpox from a guy who had it years ago.

For a disease to persist, it needs harbors, stable populations that serve as hosts. Rabies with bats, influenza with waterfowl, rinderpest (smallpox / chickenpox) with cattle, that sort of thing. And for a disease to spread, it needs large populations living in close quarters (which the three aforementioned animals do, as humans frequently do as well)

By the time the Norse (Well, descendants of the Norse) reached Vinland, there were no livestock to serve as harbors. The populations had been winnowed and pared down over several stops and sea voyages. And the people they first encountered also had no livestock and apparently lived in small villages (Even during the warm period, Labrador was a pretty hard place to live, I imagine.)

With the sailing technology of the time, the northerly route by northerly people, and the frequent island-hopping between point A and point B, it seems likely that a medieval period colonization of Norse would have been very different from the early Renaissance colonization from Spain / Africa (not willing colonization on the latter's part, granted). Odds are such an attempt by the Norse would have either failed due to the natives being a strong force to reckon with (as the Vinland colony found out) or it would simply melt into said Indian population (as happened everywhere else the Norse settled that had a native population).

Now, an interesting thing about that whole "disease needs a large population to spread," is that it can dispel one of the longest myths of Indian peoples in America. In school, and in popular culture, Indians are portrayed as nomads, living off the land, in small villages or bands. However, if this were the case; small bands living in the middle of the woods - then they would have simply died from these diseases. Outbreaks would come in shallow-ranged fits and starts where contact with the foreigners occurred, and burn out quickly.

That's not what happened.

Instead, these diseases swept the western hemisphere like a prairie fire. Save for a few isolated areas (the far north, the west coast, Patagonia, etc.) smallpox and influenza swept in like crazy, and the consistent report is nine out of ten people died from it.

For instance, the Inka empire. Pizarro was only able to conquer the Inka because they had just spent twenty years in a civil war, fighting over succession. What happened? The emperor and most of his court had died from smallpox... twenty years before ANY contact with or knowledge of the Europeans. A measles epidemic took his designated heir shortly after that, and things fell to fighting between his other sons and military commanders. measles outbreaks continued to plague the empire. And yet, when Pizarro landed, twenty years later, this nation, which had spent twenty years dying of disease and warfare... was still a fairly cohesive nation, and the population was large enough that Pizarro basically shits himself in terror at the thought of having to face them.

The Americas were thickly peopled when the Spanish first arrived... and the Spanish recorded such. People weren't living in huts in the woods, chasing deer and singing with all the colors of the wind. They lived in towns and villages in the midst of extensively farmed land, and identified themselves as the collected people of nations, kingdoms, and empires.