General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If we were to demolish statues of Robert Lee but not statues of Christopher Columbus [View all]Warpy
(114,620 posts)90% were dead within a few years of first contact. Patuxent had been abandoned, the Wampanoags taking the diseases with them as they fled from them, leaving the colonists cleared fields and shelter that they eventually spurned in favor of European style houses, animals on the first floor and humans in the loft, mud and wattle chimneys that burned the places down in a couple of years. The colonists fared better, only 50% succumbing to disease and starvation the first year until they got desperate enough to eat the food the locals slowed them was edible.
At that, the truce didn't last long, the cultures were just too different and the newcomers just too full of themselves and religious righteousness.
Of course, tribes at full strength would have kicked them out, especially fishing/farming/hunting tribes like the Wampanoags with their semipermanent settlements. Europeans desperate for land away from things like primogeniture and an aristocracy fixed in stone would likely have returned with military forces and fought their way in soon after. With superior hardware plus horses, they'd likely have won.
It would have been easier to abolish the aristocracy, but that didn't occur to them for a few hundred years.