WI: Black Death introduced to the Americas?

Also, this would wipe out the ancestors of a lot of important leaders. I don't think the death toll would be quite as high as you are suggesting, mainly because of a lack of domesticated animals, but the effects would definately be drastic.
 
I'm aware of that --hence the term 'up until the Mississippi Valley' that I used. As I pointed out in the first sentence -- I'm assuming that it starts on the east coast. Getting from the east Coast to the Mississippi Valley is going to be tricky and essentially a numbers games. I don't see how it can spread fast enough in the animal population fast enough to get there.


Doctor What,

Your worries about transmission being "tricky" and a "numbers game" are groundless. Eurasian diseases routinely passed rapidly inland from the coasts. The reason is that the coasts as far north as what would become New England had large populations with settled agriculture too. Yes, there was nothing like Cahokia, but local populations were relatively dense. (May I suggest you read "1491"? You'll find fascinating.)

As a way to illustrate this, let me point out that the Pilgrims didn't have to clear land for their villages when they arrived. Instead, they simply built on the plots already cleared by local Amerinds, Amerinds who had already died within the previous decade from the various Eurasian diseases. Those diseases were passed to them mostly from other Amerinds because at that period European contact along that coast was rare to the point of vanishing.

Population density needn't be as high as you presume either. A smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1775 crossed the entire, partially depopulated continent rather easily only to "burn out" in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1790s. Cholera did much the same thing across the Mexican (soon to be American) Southwest in the 1830s and 40s.

The populations needed for transmission was there and, as already pointed out by Hendryk, suitable animal vectors were there too.

Your "tricky" transmission qualms are somewhat overblown. ;)


Bill
 
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