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introduction of European diseases to the Wabanaki was
devastating. The years from 1616 to 1619 are known as
the “Great Dying.” During this time, a deadly
disease swept coastal New England from Cape Cod through
Maine. In Massachusetts, the death rate among Native
people was as high as 90-95%. Among the Wabanaki, even
with a more spread out population, the death rate was
more than 75%. The specific agent responsible for this
epidemic has not been specifically identified, but it
may have been plague, small pox or viral hepatitis.
At the end of the Great Dying, many coastal villages
were entirely abandoned, and the land was left virtually
empty of its original inhabitants. In
1634, Maine Native people were hit by another epidemic,
this time of small pox, which began at Plymouth Colony
the preceding year. Small pox struck again in 1639,
and in 1646 the Wabanaki were overtaken by an epidemic
disease which has not been identified but which caused
its victims to vomit blood. Smaller epidemics and
outbreaks of infections and often fatal diseases continued
throughout the rest of the 1600s, and small pox epidemics
reoccurred in the 1730s and 1750s.
There is also evidence of deliberate
distribution of blankets infected with smallpox to
Native communities. For instance in a series of letters
to Colonel Henry Bouquet, Commanding British General
Jeffrey Amherst, for whom the town of Amherst, Massachusetts
is named, talked about infecting Native people with
smallpox through gifts of blankets exposed to the
disease, as a way to end the 1763 Native revolt known
as Pontiac’s Rebellion.
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