"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[David Lewis]

-snip-
dropped from an estimated 22 million to 15 million
>-- it wouldn't reach that level until the beginning of the 18th century.
-snip-

I think a good proportion could be useful in understanding the magnitude of
the plagues of the world. I wish I had all of the figures in front of me
but I don't.  The European plagues were ongoing, over a period of
centuries. This allowed for their populations to rebound and for their
societies and cultures to survive. In the Americas the native people were
inundated with differing plagues in a matter of years. the result is that
native populations were not given the chance to rebound. When historians
talk about  the great plagues of Europe and of the percentage of people
killed, mortallity rates, they are primarily talking about mortallities
over centuries of successive plagues. In the Americas, when we talk about
genocide by plague, we are talking about nations being nearly wholely wiped
out, with no one able to carry on the traditions, in a matter of years, a
time so fast that whole villages were found deserted, with the remains of
dead people lying around. This is the difference between some resistance
and zero resistance. few people survived such that in the one hundred years
of settlement of Oregon, 97% of the native people were dead. ( I think this
is from Beckham somewhere.) If we look further into what was not allowing a
 population rebound, we see settlement and mining and wars of extermination
in the way of cultural survival. This same situation did not occur in
Europe, a place already nearly resource depleted.