"inoculating" against smallpox in the old days

[David Gene Lewis]

I have begun a second archive of just historical perspectives of the PNW
so I too think this it is all relavent. But, from my understanding There
may have been some resources in some areas of Europe but considering that
the intensive colonial powers needed increased resources to continue their
wars against one another, they needed to exploit other areas. Spain,
Britain, France, portugal, and later Germany needed these added resources.
The relative undisturbed nature of the "New World" allowed for the
exploitation of vast old growth forests and newly discovered mining
deposits to built ships, armadas, and pay infantry, and also rebuild
cities in Europe, allow for a greater standard of living more easily
accessible to a larger population base and to people closer to the
"middle" class. One good example is the availability of sugar to more
people, where originally it had been a luxury, priced out of the range of
the average European.

(the manufacture of sugar and the distribution
industry os the resource has interesting implications for the West Coast
of the US, with Hawaii having exclusive exportation rights to this area.
And the reality that Portland, OR was a central distribution site. What
impacts did the industry have on the formation of Oregon, and the influx
of Kanakas to the PNW and further impacts on the PNW cultures and
languages, ie; Chinook, a trade language probably used somewhere in
connection with all trade goods.)

So, these world trade and resource distributions and exploitations allowed
for  the prosperity of Europe. The reality is that Europe was rebuilt
using resources which did not belong to them. Using our relatives efforts
and historical lagacies of forest management and resource preservation
skills to further some other cultures need to wage war and exploit others.



On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Mike Cleven wrote:

> At 12:31 AM 2/5/99 -0800, David Lewis wrote:
> >-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.
>
> [wow is this getting far from Chinoook ..... ;-)......but ultimately the
> history of the region is also at issue, so therefore this is "on topic"]
>
> I agree with your comments about the suddenness and severity of the plagues
> in North America vs. the centuries of repetition and resilience in Eurasia.
>  However, your last comment about Europe already being nearly resource
> depleted does not apply to the 14th Century; if there had not still been
> abundant resources in Europe in the 18th and 19th Century, the Industrial
> Revolution would simply not have happened.  Somewhere here in my library I
> have a book left over from an old cultural geography course called "The
> Making of the English Landscape", which chronicles the precise changes in
> the vegetation and land qualities of England over the centuries from
> ancient times to modern.  It appears that right into Elizabethan years,
> even into the Restoration and the early Industrial Revolution, that great
> swathes of England were still wilderness - whether heath or deep oak forest
> depending on the county and terrain.  The same was true of continental
> Europe, where (as in Tolkien's description of the ancient forests) it was
> supposed to have been possible for a squirrel to jump from tree to tree all
> the way from Madrid to Moscow - right into the 1800s.  The same is also
> true, of course, from the Mississippi to New England not so long ago......
>
> Spain was denuded of its once-lush forests (similar to the NWs) for the
> Spanish Armada and the legions of galleons of the Spanish Main; France and
> England followed suit in their own time, with wood-burning for industry
> adding to the demands of the fleets.  Growing populations meant growing
> agricultural needs, and hence greater land clearing measures; but all this
> happened well after the Middle Ages; even well after the Renaissance,
> despite the antiquity of human presence on the European landscape.
>
> Europe was stripped of its natural splendours almost as rapidly as were the
> settled parts of North America.  British Columbia and other frontier areas
> are being stripped even faster because of larger markets and more efficient
> industrialization.  But before industrialization and the larger populations
> that followed upon it, human change upon the land was a slow-going process,
> and the Earth did not give up its glories easily......
>


"laska-lulu yaka kanamaqst" (we carry it together)

 "I am alive." Scott Momaday

"We must continue to struggle until we defeat those who have crowned
themselves, those who have helped to take the land from others, those who
make much money with the labor of people like us, those who mock us in
their estates."
>From the:Fourth Declaration of the Lancandon Jungle, 1/1/96.

"haias-masi" (many thanks)

David Lewis
coyotez at oregon.uoregon.edu