Indigenous medicine proved helpless—and lost credibility—against these infectious killers that often hit hardest at more densely-peopled farming societies like the Massachusetts, Huron, and Iroquois, and gave a relative advantage to the more remote and to scattered hunter-gatherers. Spasmodically repeating the devastation, migrants, traders, and armies brought recurring epidemics. These sudden losses created a frightening new world for American Indian survivors even before invading people, animals, and plants brought other revolutions and wars. Depopulation and war prompted the creation of new communities, like the Choctaw, Creek, and Powhatan confederacies. Some decimated societies made room for European strangers in places such as Québec (1608), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts (1630); the Iroquois Confederacy reacted to epidemics with a series of successful wars to replace their dead with captives.
Florida Indians Confront the Spanish, 1513–1565
American Indians defeated all the early Spanish "explorers" of Florida. The Calusa and Timucua of south Florida were likely the first North Americans to meet Europeans when Spanish slavers raided to replace rapidly-dying Arawak workers at their new Caribbean gold mines, farms, and ranches. Timucua and Calusa archers repelled all three attempts of Juan Ponce de León's well-equipped fleet attempting to land in Florida in 1513, and drove off other Spanish fleets in 1517 and 1521.
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