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Most Indians did not die because of any human action. As in the famous H.G. Welles / Orson Wells classic War of the Worlds, it was disease that wiped them out. Indeed, but for that, European settlement might have been impossible: the Americas would have been like India or China, not the largely empty wilderness our history records.A shocking 80% to 90% of the inhabitants of the Americas were wiped out by disease, very early in their contact with Europeans. There were roughly 37 million natives in what became Latin America immediately prior to Columbus, including 6 million in the Aztec Empire, 8 million in the Mayan States, 11 million in what is now Brazil, and 12 million in the Inca Empire. There were probably about 7 million more to the north, in all of what became the United States and Canada.While it is true that smallpox was a disproportionately large part of this catastrophe, other deadly diseases inadvertently introduced by the Europeans included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever, and pertussis (whooping cough). All of these were chronic in Eurasia, and while deadly there too, the natives of those continents had built up significant resistance over time. The Indians, far less numerous, far more spread out, and isolated to a great degree from each other and, up to that time, entirely from Eurasia, had developed no resistance whatsoever...That post-apocalyptic aspect is highly relevant to much of what came later. Of such civilization as existed before (and that was extremely variable from region to region), the vast majority broke down. Contact changed groups in other ways too: it's hard to imagine the Comanches, Apaches or Sioux other than on horseback, but no horses existed in the Americas before the Spanish brought them. Those tribes' "ancient" hunting cultures did not exist before Columbus, at least not in any form recognizable to moderns. Whatever they had been before (and many of them weren't much to start with), most of them were either assimilated or reduced to abject primitivism and barbarism of a sort that was and is highly incompatible with any settled society, Indian, European or otherwise.In any case, the net effect, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in what became the United States, was that Indians existed in smallish, disconnected xenophobic groups at a subsistence level, constantly at war with each other and anyone else in reach. There was little concept of boundaries or real property, for the same reason that Mongols had little such concept and (much later) ranchers felt no need to fence the open range. That much land used by that few people simply didn't require such concepts. The flip side of that, of course, is that it's very hard to "steal" what no one owns; but that's an issue for another day, fraught with many complications. Suffice it to say that when fences came, there were range wars between ranchers too.
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Topic: Did America Commit Genocide Against the Indians? (Read 841 times)
