All this was thrown into chaos by the epidemics which accompanied the opening of the Gate, and which were renewed and worsened by the beginning of trans-Pacific trade by both the New Virginians and various East Asian peoples in the early 1960s.
By the twenty-first century, the population of the Americas had declined by about 90 percent from its peak in 1946, from around 35 to 45 million to about 3 to 4 million total, with less than half a million in North America above the FirstSide Mexican border. The percentage decline is roughly similar to that which the Americas suffered in the century after Columbus in our history. Losses were worse than that in the areas along the Pacific coast of North America, where the indigenous populations effectively ceased to exist.
There were also ecological upheavals, partly through the inadvertent introduction of new weeds and microorganisms—this begins almost immediately, as the horses brought over for the first expedition to the goldfields scatter grass seeds in their dung. Within a few years, even more radical changes result from John Rolfe’s program of deliberately introducing African and Eurasian animals and plants over huge areas. This is comparable to the post-Columbian exchange in our timeline, but faster and larger-scale, since it is conscious rather than inadvertent and the New Virginians have much better transportation technology than Renaissance-era Europeans.
Remnants of the western tribes move east, encouraged by the Commonwealth authorites. With them go horses, and via trade, steel tools and trade firearms (replica flintlocks).
By the twenty-first century, there is a horse-nomad culture on the Great Plains and in the southwestern basin and range area; most of them are hunters, in a rather close analogue of the mounted buffalo hunters of our timeline’s Old West, but some have become herders of cattle and sheep as well. Technology transfer is rather swifter; for example, most tribes learn to use wheeled carts and saddles with stirrups almost as soon as they adopt the horse.
The higher neolithic farming societies of the central and eastern parts of the continent collapse back into a simpler village-based culture under the hammer of the plagues, losing most of their complex social hierarchies. As yet they have had little contact with the New Virginians, except in the immediate vicinity of their trading posts and small settlements on the east coast.
By 2009, the New Virginians are dominant all along the Pacific coast from southern Alaska to Baja, and are steadily pushing inland as their numbers increase. They have also colonized Hawaii (the survivors there migrated to Tahiti by agreement) and are making a beginning in Australasia.
There are surviving Mexica-Zapotec-Mayan city states in Mesoamerica, and ditto in Peru, in contact with the New Virginians, trading with them and learning a good deal. The New Virginians have trading posts there, and small colonies on the eastern coasts—at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, Rio, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic coast of North America.
APPENDIX FOUR
The Demographics of the Commonwealth of New Virginia
John Rolfe always intended that the new land beyond the Gate should become an autonomous, self-reproducing community, rather than merely a source of wealth. Much of his initial profit, and at his encouragement a good deal of that made by his associates, went into promoting this growth.
The initial immigration got off to a slow start in 1946 (less than 200), but built up rapidly—by 1950, the Settler population was over 15,000. Then immigration remained at an average of around 1,000 to 1,500 a year for the next twenty years or so, but with wide fluctuations: big spikes in the early 1950s, the early 1960s; smaller ones in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s.
The “steady” part of the influx is Americans, usually recruited by chain migration (people sponsoring friends and relatives) or very careful approaches by Commission agents. There were a sprinkling of “involuntaries,” people who stumbled on the Gate secret or looked likely to do so—Gate Security usually abducted them to New Virginia.
Punctuating the steady inflow of Americans are bursts of quasi-refugees: in the 1940s Germans, Italians, Dutch from Indonesia, and Balts; French colons from North Africa and British settlers from Kenya in the 1950s and early 1960s; Rhodesians later; and Russians and Afrikaners in the 1990s.
By 2009, the population is 150,000, not counting 40,000 or so temporary Gastarbeiter on five-year contracts, who don’t have children. The Commonwealth’s TFR (total fertility rate) fluctuates between 3.7 and 4; about like the United States at the height of the baby boom in 1957, but stable, and it has been since the 1950s; the death rate is slightly below 8 per 1,000. Median age is around 26. There is a slight surplus of males among adults because of immigration effects—that happens anywhere with substantial immigration.
The shape of the population pyramid is more like that of Malaysia or other upper-income developing countries than that of the contemporary United States—or even that of the United States in the 1950s, since the baby boom there followed a period of very low fertility in the 1930s. The Commonwealth of New Virginia started out with a fairly high TFR and has maintained it unchanged, so the pyramid slopes out sharply—each age-cohort is about double the size of the one above.
With the continuing trickle of immigration, the annual population increase is about 3 percent.
Note that immigration tends to distort the population pyramid by increasing the percentage of the total in their prime reproductive years—there is a bulge in the 20 to 40 age group. Thus natural increase is higher than would be expected with the TFR and mortality rates, despite the fact that immigrants tend to have a lower TFR than the native born.
Doubling time for the Settler population is (as of 2009) about 23 years. This is lower than it was in earlier periods because immigration has remained static or declined slightly and is therefore smaller relative to the total population.
Population distribution is about:
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