According to John Sorenson, in 1560, Father Bartolome de Las Casas estimated that forty million native Americans had perished “unjustly and through tyranny” in New Spain in the two generations after Columbus’s discovery … [John L. Sorenson, “Digging into the Book of Mormon,” in the Ensign, Sept. 1984, p. 33] [See the commentary on Moroni 9:20]
1 Nephi 13:14 [The seed of my brethren] were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten ( [Illustration] “I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my brethren: and they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten,” by A&OR. [W. Cleon Skousen, Treasures from the Book of Mormon, Vol. 1, p. 1105]
1Nephi 13:15 [The Gentiles] did prosper ([Illustration] “And I beheld the spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the gentiles, and they did prosper and obtain the land,” by A&OR [W. Cleon Skousen, Treasures from the Book of Mormon, Vol. 1, p. 1107]
The Seed of My Brethren Were Scattered Before the Gentiles and Were Smitten
The fulfillment of Nephi’s prophecy concerning the scattering of the seed of his brethren is so vast a topic as to fill volumes and can be touched on here only briefly. It is one of the most tragic stories of history, equaling in many ways the persecution and suffering of the Jewish people through the centuries.
From the time Columbus landed in the West Indies, the destruction and driving of the Indian people began. The extent of this destruction has only recently started coming to full light. For example, in 1973 Wilbur R. Jacobs, a noted historian, refuted the earlier projections made by European and American scholars of the Indian population at the time Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. Previous estimates had placed the Indian population of North America at about a million, and in both North and South America at no more than 8 million. However, according to Jacobs, projections which are widely accepted today place the total at 90 million for the whole of the Western Hemisphere and nearly 10 million in North America alone. When this total of 10 million Indians living in North America is compared with the estimated 235,000 who were alive at the turn of the twentieth century, one begins to glimpse the scope of the tragedy.
Jacobs writes:
What happened to all those Indians? Cook and Dobyns, researchers in the spread of epidemic diseases among Indians, argue convincingly that millions of Indians were killed off by catastrophic disease frontiers in the form of epidemics of smallpox, bubonic plague, typhus, influenza, malaria, measles, yellow fever, and other diseases. (Besides bringing Old World strains of virus and bacteria, Europeans brought weeds, plants, rats, insects, domestic animals, liquor, and a new technology to alter Indian life and the ecological balance wheel.) Smallpox, caused by an air-borne virus, was and is about the most deadly of the contagious diseases. Virulent strains, transmitted by air, by clothing, blankets, or by slight contact (even by an immune individual), snuffed out whole tribes, often leaving only a handful of survivors. Although some kinds of epidemic diseases might be reduced to a mild virulence among Indians (as among whites) after generations of exposure, smallpox was undoubtedly the Indians’ worst killer because it returned time and again to attack surviving generations of Indians to kill them off too.
As terrible as it was, decimation by disease was not the only tragedy to befall the descendants of Lehi. The Indians as described by Columbus were “gentle beings, souls of hospitality, curious and merry, truthful and faithful, walking in beauty and possessors of a spiritual religion.” They were not prepared for the ruthless, predatory nature of the white men who came in search of gold and converts. “The situation was as if a mysterious stranger, announcing himself with words of love, welcomed with delight as a guest, embraced as a friend, given the run of the house and taken into the family’s bosom, had suddenly revealed himself as no man at all but a devouring werewolf.” Immediate exploitation of the Indians as a cheap source of slave labor took place. Thousands were shipped to Europe and thousands of Europeans came to America to receive “a grant of land with accompanying unpaid, forced, Indian labor for life.” Collier writes:
But in the West Indies it was not decimation that befell the Indians--the peoples whom Columbus had found to be gentle, merry and walking in beauty--it was annihilation. Since the supply was supposed to be unlimited in the beginning, these chattel slaves were worked to death. So terrible was their life that they were driven to mass suicide, to mass infanticide, to mass abstinence from sexual life in order that children should not be born into horror. Lethal epidemics followed upon the will to die. The murders and desolations exceeded those of the most pitiless tyrants of earlier history; nor have they been surpassed since."
Collier notes that the Indian population of Haiti and Santo Domingo, estimated to be between two and three hundred thousand when Columbus arrived, had plummeted to less than five hundred natives surviving in 1548, only fifty-six years later!
That story was repeated numerous times at the hands of men like Cortez, Pizzaro, and DeSoto, in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. The scenes viewed by Nephi six hundred years before Christ were fulfilled with horrible reality. As one author put it:
Here was a race in process of being engulfed in an irresistible flood of peoples of an utterly different culture. Dislocated from their accustomed seats, transplanted again and again, treated by whites as hostile encumbrances of the fertile earth to be brushed aside or destroyed, bewildered by a type of economy for which they were unprepared, decimated by disease and vices to which they had built up no resistance, repeatedly seeing solemn treaties violated, subject to shifting governmental policies, preyed upon by incompetent and greedy officials, and at times demoralized by an excess of well intentioned but ill directed paternalistic kindness, it is a wonder that the Indians survived.
[Church Educational System, Book of Mormon Student Manual, Religion 121-122, 1981, pp. 34-35]
Note* If we include the Polynesians as the children of Lehi, then the picture is even more bleak. According to Bruce Sutton, when Captain Cook visited the Marquesas in 1774, he estimated there had to be a teeming population of between 50,000 and 100,000. By the time the French extended thier control over the Islands, after years of wars, diseases and deaths, the population had dropped to 20,000. This decline in population continued. By 1872, there were only 6,200 inhabitants in the Islands. The 1902 census listed only 3,500, and the 1929 census listed only 2,075 native inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands. In varying degrees, a similar story could be repeated for most of the lands of Polynesia. This was a tragic era in the history of European settlements in the Pacific. [Bruce S. Sutton, Lehi, Father of Polynesia: Polynesians Are Nephites, p. 20]