About this ebook
The same sequence repeated across two continents. In 1527, smallpox killed the Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his chosen heir, and civil war split the empire five years before Pizarro reached Cajamarca. Along the Mississippi, the towns Hernando de Soto marched past in 1539 were nearly empty within a generation. Between 1616 and 1619, plague stripped the New England coast so completely that the Pilgrims of 1620 walked into cleared fields with no one left to defend them.
The Plague Years follows this catastrophe from Cahokia, a city of twenty thousand people around 1100, through five centuries of outbreaks to the Navajo Nation in 2020. You will read the surviving letters between General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1763, and the trader's ledger from Fort Pitt that records infected blankets handed to Delaware envoys. You will see exactly what the evidence proves, and what it does not.
You will follow the Mandan of 1837, when a single steamboat brought smallpox up the Missouri River and left a few hundred survivors. You will stand on the Plains as the Comanche and Lakota rebuild their nations on horseback and defeat armies sent to crush them.
Built on Crosby, Mann, Fenn, Pauketat, Hämäläinen and Thornton, this is history with the sources on the table and no comfortable myths left standing.
