In this paper I will examine how Europeans brought smallpox to the United States. In addition to smallpox, they brought a whole slew of diseases with them, including measles, scarlet fever, influenza, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, chicken pox and sexually transmitted diseases. However, smallpox was the primary silent killer of the Native Americans.
I am interested in investigating how smallpox contributed to the depopulation of Native Americans, particularly the Plains Indians. Discovering why smallpox led to the decrease of the Native American population will shed light on how the European immigrants started gaining control of American land, eventually taking all of it from the indigenous people. Historians have contended that smallpox, as well as other harmful diseases, were not always transmitted accidentally, but were purposely used to pare down the Native American tribes. In other words, it is plausible these diseases, specifically smallpox, were used as secret weapons. Battling Anglos for their land and being dislocated also contributed to their dwindling numbers, but nothing decimated them like the foreign diseases. Because the indigenous population was immunologically naïve, being collectively exposed to a new disease increased the fatalities and made it an epidemic. Oddly enough, some scholars have suggested that the annihilation of the Native American population was fitting because it was done by the power of natural selection, which is a baseless defense for this genocide.

To develop my Historiographical paper, I will read Elizabeth A. Finn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic 1775-82, Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Norman Bancroft-Hunt and Werner Forman, The Indians of the Great Plains, and Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism.