A virgin soil epidemic occurs when bacteria or viruses are introduced into an area where no similar diseases have ever occurred before. Lacking even partial immunity, populations are devastated by such epidemics. Many scholars believe that the severity of Native American loss of life during the first decades of European colonization was due to the fact that these were virgin soil epidemics.
Hopewell culture, a prehistoric American Indian culture of mound builders in east-central North America, prospered ca. 500–1000. Named for a farm in southern Ohio where related artifacts were discovered, Hopewell culture developed along waterways and relied upon agriculture as well as hunting and gathering.
Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor exposed the federal government’s harsh and duplicitous treatment of American Indians in the West.
In the war against western Sioux, General George Custer and more than two hundred of his men died along Montana’s Little Bighorn River at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.
General Anthony Wayne defeated American Indians, including warriors of the Miami, Delaware, and Shawnee tribes, at the battle of Fallen Timbers, opening the Ohio country to white settlement.
US troops slaughtered about 200 Sioux, many of whom were women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.
American Indians from several tribes signed the Treaty of Greenville, ceding lands in the Ohio Valley to the United States in exchange for the federal government’s protection of remaining tribal lands from further white incursion.
Congress adopted a policy of “termination” toward American Indians with the intention of “as rapidly as possible mak[ing] Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States.”
On November 29, 1969, a group of American Indians sailed to Alcatraz, the island in San Francisco Bay that formerly housed a federal prison. Led by Russell Means, they intended to occupy Alcatraz to protest the government’s treatment of Native peoples. The protestors demanded the return of the island to American Indians. They also sought funding for its development and maintenance. The government refused and, after nineteen months, removed the protestors from the island on June 11, 1971.
Bartolomé de Las Casas published A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a record of the mistreatment of American Indians in colonial Spanish America.