Weren't a significant portion of the natives dead when the colonists moved inland? I've heard it, but I'm not sure. It'd be pretty difficult repelling the invadors while undergoing a huge pandemic ripping across the land.
Of course, all history gets uncomfortable at some point, and it goes unexpected places, at times.
Yes -- IIRC the leading explanation for that is that a plague was set loose in one of the initial contacts. By the time Europeans started settling, they were encountering basically the battered remnants of the east-coast civilizations. When the Mayflower expedition landed, they were able to be so successful because they were literally moving onto cleared, planted land where the local population had recently died off. As in, they took over fields full of growing corn, that's how fresh a lot of the deaths were. The notion of the American "wilderness" is entirely fabricated, most of it was practically fucking parkland that was only thinly peopled because of how many had died to disease.
Until World War II, there was probably not a single real war where humans killed more than disease and famine.
Not that the colonists didn't totally genocide the natives literally and then culturally, but they would have lost that conflict if not for the pandemics. Hell, the US nearly got in trouble as it was, fighting the western natives and the Seminole.
World War I or the American Civil War, maybe. If you count deaths from botched surgery and infection as battlefield casualties. But yes, this is why pre-modern warfare sucked massive dick, most of the deaths came on the march and in camp/siege. You were already statistically lucky if you lived to die in a battle.
Oh yeah. Americans have conveniently forgotten that we spent something like a century constantly at war with different tribes and nations. So much of our history has been thoroughly whitewashed of
that bit of guilt. The Louisiana Purchase wasn't a purchase of
land, but of a fabricated paper-claim to land. The French-Indian war was fought predominantly through Amerindian proxies. There's also the slightly more positive stuff -- the Boston Tea Partiers didn't dress up as Amerindians to deflect blame (really? Are people today imposing their stupidity on the past? Nobody's
that dumb, right?), but because at the time they were seen as a symbol of freedom from central control and oppression (incidentally, this was why a surprising number of European settlers ran off to join local communities, and why authorities worked so hard to suppress knowledge of that pattern of behavior).
It's like, there's historical revision and whitewashing and propaganda everywhere, but America's history with native populations is both incredibly more complex and interesting than it's made out to be, and also almost totally suppressed and forgotten. For good goddamn reason, too: it's as large a stain on our past glory, founding myths, and delusions of morality as fucking
slavery. Remember that one of the main reasons the Spanish started the trend of bringing over African slaves is because they enslaved local populations and literally worked them to death.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14953983 times)