The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence

David Mardiros is a lawyer and anthropological consultant in Terrace,
British Columbia.

While it is well known that diseases introduced by Europeans had
important impacts on the indigenous populations of the New World, the
timing and nature of the impacts on particular culture groups is still
little understood. In this important and comprehensive work, Robert Boyd
shows how successive waves of introduced diseases not only decimated
many of the societies of the Northwest Coast, but also had significant
impacts on those societies’ ability to cope with the changes wrought
by contact with the very groups who introduced the diseases.

One of the most important aspects of this book is the insight it
provides into the role that introduced infectious diseases may have
played in other parts of the Americas. Because contact with Europeans
occurred much later on the West Coast than in other places, Boyd is able
to draw on the extensive written records left by explorers, traders, and
missionaries in his analysis to provide precise records of the range of
diseases that were introduced, the timing of epidemics, and the extent
of population decline. Furthermore, by demonstrating the rapidity of the
impact of such diseases as smallpox, measles, and influenza, Boyd shows
how weakened populations would have found it difficult (and in some
cases impossible) to maintain viable societies (the numbers of people
lost would mean that subsistence activities, to say nothing of cultural
and social life, could barely be carried on by the weakened and
demoralized survivors).

The book describes how diseases affected on different regions of the
Pacific Northwest at different times, from the early epidemics on the
Columbia Plateau to what Boyd has called the “final disaster” of the
smallpox epidemic that began in coastal British Columbia in the 1860s.
As a model for studies of other parts of North and South America, this
engaging, scholarly work provides important insights into understanding
what has historically been portrayed as the “conquest.” Boyd has
effectively demonstrated how densely populated and highly organized
societies could virtually collapse as a result of introduced infectious
disease even before the arrival of relatively small groups of Europeans.