Jack of Harts

When the Europeans first came to the Central Americas, they brought with them centuries of the worst germs and plagues known to man in their blood. Multiple pandemics flew up and down the Americas a few hundred years ago, each one wiping out a quarter or half of the local populations. Estimates suggest that the populations of the Americas were in the millions to tens of millions when the plagues began. That is how many died in the end.

By the time settlers arrived in New England, scattered Indian tribes numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands were all that was left of those who tended and gardened the ruins of the civilization their fathers, grandfathers, or great grandfathers remembered. The religious exiles that would later create the United States of America found a new-to-them Promised Land of immense riches and very few Indians to defend it all. That made our colonization of the Americas one of the more successful mass migrations in known history.