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By Root 1959 0

during the epidemic that revolutionary leaders feared that the disease would bring an end to their revolt. “The small Pox! The small Pox!” John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. “What shall We do with it?” His worries were on target: the virus, not the British, stopped the Continental army’s drive into Quebec in 1776. In retrospect, Fenn told me, “One of George Washington’s most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of ’78.” Without inoculation, she said, the smallpox epidemic could easily have handed the colonies back to the British.

Even as the first outbreak faded, Fenn wrote, a second, apparently unrelated epidemic burned through Mexico City. The first cases occurred in August 1779. By year’s end perhaps eighteen thousand had died in the city area and the disease was racing through the countryside in every direction. Communications in those days were too poor to permit us to document a transmission chain, but records show smallpox flaring in separate explosions to the south like a chain of firecrackers: Guatemala (1780–81), Colombia (1781–83), Ecuador (1783). Was the virus retracing a journey to Tawantinsuyu it had taken before? “It seems likely,” decided Calloway, the Dartmouth historian. Fenn tried to trace the virus as it went north. Like Dobyns, she examined parish burial records. In 1780 a telltale surge of mortality traveled north along the heavily traveled road to Santa Fe. From there, smallpox apparently exploded into most of western North America.

First to suffer, or so the sketchy evidence suggests, were the Hopi. Already reeling from a drought, they were blasted by smallpox—as many as nine out of ten may have died. When the Spanish governor tried to recruit the Hopi to live in missions, their leaders told him not to bother: the epidemic soon would expunge them from the earth. As if drought and contagion were not enough, the Hopi were constantly under attack by the Nermernuh (or Nemene), a fluid collection of hunting bands known today as the Comanche (the name, awarded by an enemy group, means “people who fight us all the time”). Originally based north of Santa Fe, the Nermernuh were on their way to dominating the southern plains; they had driven away their Apache and Hopi rivals with trip-hammer ambushes and deadly incursions and were bent on doing the same to any European colonists who ventured in. In 1781 the raiding abruptly stopped. Silence for eighteen months. Was the ceasefire due to Mexico City smallpox that had been transmitted by the Hopi? Four years afterward, a traveler noted in his diary that the Nermernuh lived in fear of disease because they had been recently struck by smallpox—tenuous but suggestive evidence.

What is certain is that both Hopi and Nermernuh were part of a network of exchange that had hummed with vitality since ancient times and had recently grown more intense with the arrival of horses, which sped up communication. Smallpox raced along the network through the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, ricocheting among the Mandans, Hidatsas, Ojibwes, Crows, Blackfoot, and Shoshone, a helter-skelter progress in which a virus leapfrogged from central Mexico to the shore of Hudson Bay in less than two years. Indians in the northern Great Plains kept “winter counts,” oral chronologies of the most important events in each year. Often the counts were accompanied by a spiraling sequence of drawings on a hide, with each year summarized by a drawing as an aide-mémoire. In several Lakota (Sioux) counts 1780–81 was bleakly summed as the year of Smallpox Used Them Up; and the Lakota were not the only ones affected.

In 1781 a company of Blackfoot stumbled across a Shoshone camp at dawn near the Red Deer River in Alberta. The Blackfoot were a tightly organized confederation of groups that inhabited the plains between the Missouri and Saskatchewan Rivers. Equipped with guns and horses from French traders, they had pushed their southern neighbors, the Shoshone—left at a disadvantage because they had no access to the French and their goods, and