This article talks about more the smallpox outbreak.
Smallpox in the New World:
Some of the African slaves brought by Columbus to be used on the sugar plantation of the West Indies carried the smallpox virus. In 1495, fifty-seven to eighty percent of the native population of Santa Domingo, and in 1515, two-thirds of the Indians of Puerto Rico were wiped out by smallpox. Ten years after Cortez arrived in Mexico, the native population dropped from twenty-five million to six million five hundred thousand a reduction of seventy-four percent.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, various sources estimate native population in North and South America at ninety to one hundred million. It is impossible to arrive at the number of Indians in the Americas killed by European diseases with smallpox the deadliest by far. Even the most conservative estimates place the deaths from smallpox above sixty-five percent (Bray).
Stearn and Stearn estimated there were approximately one million Indians living north of the Rio Grande in the early sixteenth-century. By the end of the sixteen hundreds, smallpox had spread up and down the eastern seaboard and as far west as the Great Lakes. Bray estimated by 1907 there were less than four hundred thousand Indians north of the Rio Grande. This precipitous decline was not due to smallpox alone. Other diseases played a role, as did intertribal warfare and conflicts with the United States army.
The first major outbreak of an infectious disease on the eastern coast of North America was between 1616-19. The Massachusetts and other Algonquin tribes in the area were reduced from an estimated thirty thousand to three hundred(Bray). When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, there were few Indians left to greet them. Many observers believe this infectious disease was smallpox.
Researchers believe smallpox reached the Atlantic Coast of what was to become the United States either from Canada or the West Indies.
It was inevitable European diseases would run rampant through the indigenous populations of the Americas.
The native populations of North and South America had no immunities, or genetic tolerance, to any of the European diseases, and not all white Americans had immunities to them either. The estimate is about twenty-five percent of the emigrants lacked immunity to the smallpox virus.
http://www.thefurtrapper.com/indian_smallpox.htm
