United States Smallpox Typhus and Measles Were Probably The Deadliest Disease.

Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present David Michael Smith University of Houston-Downtown

It is true, in a plainly quantitative sense of body counting, that the barrage of disease unleashed by the Europeans among the so-called “virgin soil” populations of the Americas caused more deaths than any other single force of destruction. However, by focusing almost entirely on disease, by displacing responsibility for the mass killing onto an army of invading microbes, contemporary authors increasingly have created the impression that the eradication of those tens of millions of people was inadvertent—a sad, but both inevitable and “unintended consequence” of human migration and progress… In fact, however, the near-total destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s native people was neither inadvertent nor inevitable.34 10 Counting the Dead Stannard has insisted that “microbial pestilence” and “purposeful genocide” at times operated independently after 1492 but more often “disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically” and it was their interrelated, combined impact that led to the deaths of so many Indigenous people.35 Like Stannard, Thornton has recognized that European and African diseases were the most important cause of the catastrophic “demographic collapse” of the Indigenous population in what is today the United States. Smallpox, typhus, and measles were probably the deadliest diseases for Indigenous people, and Thornton has cited Dobyns’ estimate that a “serious contagious disease causing significant mortality invaded Native American peoples at intervals of four years and two and a half months, on the average, from 1520 to 1900.”36 But Thornton has insisted on the importance of other vital factors, as well.37