Native Americans in the United States reached the West Coast in the 1770s, smallpox rapidly killed at least 30% of Northwest Coast Native Americans. For the next eighty to one hundred years, smallpox and other diseases devastated native populations in the region. Puget Sound area populations, once estimated as high as 37,000 people, were reduced to only 9,000 survivors by the time settlers arrived en masse in the mid-19th century. Smallpox epidemics in 1780–82 and 1837–38 brought devastation and drastic depopulation among the Plains Indians. By 1832, the federal government established a smallpox vaccination program for Native Americans ("The Indian Vaccination Act of 1832"). It was
Dutch West Indian Americans Dutch West Indian Americans Dutch West Indian Americans or Dutch Antillean Americans are Americans of Dutch Antillean descent. According to the 2010 Census Bureau figures there 54,377 Americans under the category of "Dutch West Indian". In the 2000 US Census, the number of Americans reported whose origins are in the Dutch West Indian was of 35,359. In this Census (and to difference of the 2010 US Census whose Dutch West Indian ethnics were not mentioned of individual way) a total of 1,970 people affirmed just be of Aruban descent, while only 352 people claimed descent from people of St. Maarten.