Picture, if you will, a little Methodist church in a rural setting. The year is 1890. It is the first day in January. Saturday afternoon. The church bell peals a welcome to family and friends celebrating the marriage of John Albert Salsbury and Alberta Effa Edgar. Some arrive on foot and others in horse-drawn vehicles. The horses are tied to the hitching-post and left to munch oats from their feed bags.

The people enter the church, and the minister greets each by name. A good turnout. Camden East is a close-knit community, and yet the preacher notes sadly that the congregation is getting smaller every year. Soft organ music plays as the people take their places. Then all becomes quiet: a short lull before the Wedding March begins. Everyone turns around to look at the smiling bride being led down the aisle by her proud father.

There are considerable differences regarding the estimates of pre-Columbian population in America, but everybody agrees that a dramatic reduction occurred after the discovery of the New World. Smallpox has usually been blamed for much of this reduction. Yet historians agree that this disease was not introduced into the Isle of Santo Domingo until 1518. By then, the Indians of the Antilles had practically disappeared and the importation of an African labor force was underway to replace them.

No documented explanation has been offered for the causes of this earliest demographic disaster. The basic clinical signs, however, of the first American epidemic in contemporary descriptions, along with the concordance of the accounts, strongly suggest one conclusion. The epidemic that broke out in 1493 at the Isle of Santo Domingo and was responsible for the disappearance of the American Indians in the Antilles during the first quarter of a century after the discovery was swine influenza.