EARTHWORKS ON HARPETH RIVERS. 91 



town of Cutifachiqui, " there were great towus dispeopled, and overgrown with 

 grass ; which showed that they had long been without inhabitants. The Indians 

 said that two years before there was a plague in that country, and that they 

 removed to other towns." 



A terrible pestilence wasted the American Indians in 1G18 and 1619, a short 

 time before the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Massachusetts. Captain Dermer, an 

 English adventurer, who had come to America in a fishing vessel a year or two 

 before, passed the winter of 1618-19 in Moliiggan, an Indian town on the northern 

 coast. On the 19th of May, 1619, he sailed along the coast on his way to 

 Virginia, and landed at several places where he had been the year before ; and he 

 found many Indian towns totally depopulated — in others only a few natives 

 remained alive, " but not free from sickness, their disease being the plague, for 

 we might perceive the sores of some that had escaped, who described the spots of 

 such as usually die." He found some of the villages, which in his former visit 

 were populous, all deserted, " the Indians all dead."^ 



Richard Vines and his companions, who had been sent by Fernando Gorges to 

 explore the country, wintered among the Indians during tlie pestilence, and 

 remained untouched, the disease attacking none of the English.^ 



Gookin,^ in his account of the Indians, places this pestilence in 16 12-1 3, and 

 about seven or eight years before the English arrived at Plymouth. It would 

 appear from this statement that the disease began to rage a number of years 

 previously to 1618. In a sermon preached by Elder Cushman at Plymouth, in 

 1620, just after the colony arrived, he states that the Indians " were very much 

 wasted of late, by a great mortality that fell amongst them three years since, 

 which, with their own civil dissensions and bloody war, hath so wasted them as, I 

 think, the twentieth person is scarce left alive."^ This pestilential distemper 

 continued for a number of years, for some of the Plymouth settlers who went to 

 Massachusetts (now Boston) in 1622, to procure corn of the natives, "found 

 among the Indians a great sickness, not rmlike the plague, if not the same." It 

 raged in winter, and affected the Indians only." 



So fatal was the pestilence in North America, that the warriors, from Naragan- 

 sett to Penobscot, were reduced from nine thousand to a few hundreds. Hutcliinson 

 says thirty thousand of the Massachusetts tribes alone were supposed to have been 

 reduced to three hundred. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they found the 

 bones of those who had perished, in many places, unburied.'' Dermer seems to 

 think that this disease was a species of plague, and he saw some of the sores of 

 those who had survived. Hutchinson says, " some have supposed it to have been 

 the smallpox, but the Indians who were perfectly acquainted with this disease, after 

 the English arrived, always gave a different account of it, and described it as a pesti- 

 lential putrid fever." General Gookin says, " What the disease was, Avhich so gene- 

 rally and mortally swept them away, I cannot learn; doubtless it was some pestilential 



' Purchas, vol iv, 17T8. ^ Belknap's Life of Gorges, American Biography, vol. i, p. 355. 



» Historical Collections, p. 8. * Hazard's Collection, vol. i, p. US. 

 * Prince's Chron., p. 124. * Magnolia, Book 1, p. 7. 



