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<p>[QUOTE="komokwa, post: 9471552, member: 301"]a microcosm....</p><p><br /></p><p>It was May 1792. The lush environs of the Georgia Strait had once been among the most densely populated corners of the land that is now Canada, with humming villages, harbours swarming with canoes and valleys so packed with cookfires that they had smog.</p><p><br /></p><p>Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Abandoned, overgrown villages were littered with skulls; whole sections of coastline strewn with bleached, decayed bodies.</p><p><br /></p><p>“The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” wrote explorer George Vancouver in what is now Port Discovery, Wash.</p><p><br /></p><p>But the Vancouver Expedition experienced only eerie quiet.</p><p><br /></p><p>They kept seeing rotting houses and massive clearings cut out of the Pacific forest — evidence that whoever lived here had been able to muster armies of labourers.</p><p><br /></p><p>And yet the only locals the sailors encountered were small groups of desperately poor people, many of them horribly scarred and missing an eye.</p><p><br /></p><p>“There are reasons to believe that (this land) has been infinitely more populous,” wrote Vancouver in an account of the voyage published after his death.</p><p><br /></p><p>But the 40-year-old Englishman seemed to have gone to his grave never grasping the full gravity of what he witnessed in British Columbia: The “docile” and “cordial” people he met were the shattered survivors of an apocalypse.</p><p><br /></p><p>The people of the Pacific Northwest had just been hit with the tail end of one of the most devastating plagues in human history.</p><p><br /></p><p>It’s possible that smallpox killed as many as 95 per cent of the population of the Georgia Strait. Given that estimate, as many as 100,000 people may have lived in the area at a time when the entire state of New York counted barely 200,000.</p><p><br /></p><p>In British Columbia, as with depopulated regions across the continent, Europeans were literally stepping over the bones of the dead to find vast landscapes populated by small bands of traumatized survivors.</p><p><br /></p><p>“Here was an almost empty land, so it seemed, for the taking,” wrote Cole Harris.</p><p><br /></p><p>As George Vancouver steered HMS Discovery north from the the Strait of Georgia in the spring of 1792, his eyes glimmered with what could be done with the seemingly empty forests surrounding him.</p><p><br /></p><p>“The innumerable pleasing landscapes … require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined,” he wrote.</p><p><br /></p><p>And indeed, that’s exactly what happened.</p><p><br /></p><p>....... ......... .......... </p><p><br /></p><p>The peoples of the West Coast were well-versed in war: Accustomed to raiding and invasion, they maintained Viking-like fleets of war canoes, lived in fortified cities and went to battle in terrifying suits of armour complemented with trade metals from Russian Alaska.</p><p><br /></p><p>Against a well-prepared and well-coordinated native population, any invaders could have expected epic battles followed by years of guerrilla warfare. Before smallpox, West Coast oral history contained accounts of rivers being made “black” by the canoes of invaders.</p><p><br /></p><p>............</p><p><br /></p><p>Instead, as wave after wave of epidemic hit the area, the emptied landscape became one of the easiest conquests in British history.</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1862, just as the colony of British Columbia was getting its footing, the indigenous descendants of the 1782 survivors were hit again. Another smallpox epidemic once again killed more than half of B.C.’s native population and peppered the landscape with mass graves and abandoned settlements.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>.( credit Tristin Hopper....The National Post ..)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="komokwa, post: 9471552, member: 301"]a microcosm.... It was May 1792. The lush environs of the Georgia Strait had once been among the most densely populated corners of the land that is now Canada, with humming villages, harbours swarming with canoes and valleys so packed with cookfires that they had smog. Everywhere they looked, there were corpses. Abandoned, overgrown villages were littered with skulls; whole sections of coastline strewn with bleached, decayed bodies. “The skull, limbs, ribs and backbones, or some other vestiges of the human body, were found in many places, promiscuously scattered about the beach in great numbers,” wrote explorer George Vancouver in what is now Port Discovery, Wash. But the Vancouver Expedition experienced only eerie quiet. They kept seeing rotting houses and massive clearings cut out of the Pacific forest — evidence that whoever lived here had been able to muster armies of labourers. And yet the only locals the sailors encountered were small groups of desperately poor people, many of them horribly scarred and missing an eye. “There are reasons to believe that (this land) has been infinitely more populous,” wrote Vancouver in an account of the voyage published after his death. But the 40-year-old Englishman seemed to have gone to his grave never grasping the full gravity of what he witnessed in British Columbia: The “docile” and “cordial” people he met were the shattered survivors of an apocalypse. The people of the Pacific Northwest had just been hit with the tail end of one of the most devastating plagues in human history. It’s possible that smallpox killed as many as 95 per cent of the population of the Georgia Strait. Given that estimate, as many as 100,000 people may have lived in the area at a time when the entire state of New York counted barely 200,000. In British Columbia, as with depopulated regions across the continent, Europeans were literally stepping over the bones of the dead to find vast landscapes populated by small bands of traumatized survivors. “Here was an almost empty land, so it seemed, for the taking,” wrote Cole Harris. As George Vancouver steered HMS Discovery north from the the Strait of Georgia in the spring of 1792, his eyes glimmered with what could be done with the seemingly empty forests surrounding him. “The innumerable pleasing landscapes … require only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages and other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined,” he wrote. And indeed, that’s exactly what happened. ....... ......... .......... The peoples of the West Coast were well-versed in war: Accustomed to raiding and invasion, they maintained Viking-like fleets of war canoes, lived in fortified cities and went to battle in terrifying suits of armour complemented with trade metals from Russian Alaska. Against a well-prepared and well-coordinated native population, any invaders could have expected epic battles followed by years of guerrilla warfare. Before smallpox, West Coast oral history contained accounts of rivers being made “black” by the canoes of invaders. ............ Instead, as wave after wave of epidemic hit the area, the emptied landscape became one of the easiest conquests in British history. In 1862, just as the colony of British Columbia was getting its footing, the indigenous descendants of the 1782 survivors were hit again. Another smallpox epidemic once again killed more than half of B.C.’s native population and peppered the landscape with mass graves and abandoned settlements. .( credit Tristin Hopper....The National Post ..)[/QUOTE]
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