Last night, I watched a sick western movie w/ Natives scalping settlers

[GulfCoast66]

40. Not really. By the time Europeans arrived in North America the damage had been done.

When DeSoto landed in 1539 in Florida and marched his men up to the Carolinas and maybe even into Tennessee he found highly populated centers of civilization with huge swaths of land cleared and being farmed.

A hundred or so years later when the next Europeans ventured there they found what we think of as Native America settlements. Scattered hunter gathers based on few permanent population centers.

In Central and South America the Spanish quickly followed up contact with conquest and everywhere they found densely and highly developed societies. But in a North America conquest lagged contact by over 100 years. It seems almost insulting to me to suggest the Native Americans in North America were not at least as developed as those in Central and South America.
By the time our forebears got here over 90% of the population was dead. And society wrecked. A society that looses over 90% of it population can’t pick up the pieces when the illness subsides. And realize that each time the Native population was exposed to a new disease, as benign to us as the common cold, it happened all over again.

By the time the Pilgrims in NE and John Smith in Virginia arrived they were met by a unstable remnent population. Had they faced the population from 100 years earlier they would have been quickly overwhelmed since unlike the Spanish they did not lead an army.

And the whole smallpox blanked story is really suspect, both in its accuracy and effect. By the mid 1800’s Native Americans in the east would have had about as about as much resistance to the disease as Americans of European descent. They had been living with it for 300 years. It was pretty much continuous in both populations.

It’s a complicated and extremely sad history that defies simple explanations. Well except the obvious: humans are really good at killing each other. Too good.