I have posted on thistopic in the past and it is good to see someone else step up andsupport an original population of between 30 to 100 million for theAmericas before Columbus. This has been put out of our collectiveconsciousness for way too long.
What we are sharplyreminded of is that the occupation of the Americas took place a stepbehind the population decimation brought on by the plague broughtwith the initial visitors. One needs to merely recall that Columbushimself benighted directly from this effect. The island he landed onhad thousands who easily would have overcome the Europeans sooner orlater. Yet they went extinct almost immediately.
Once this had happened,European slaving eliminated much of the remaining populations whileoccasional fresh plagues stalked the those out of touch. It was allpretty horrible, but the Americas were depopulated by plagues andnothing else. As also hinted at here, the Indians themselvessurvived largely through hybridization.
As also discussed herepremodern European society made the settled Indian life wayattractive if only because they took baths.
Without the plagues,European trading factories would have soon emerged and perhaps ahistory comparable to the rest of western so called colonization. That is an elitist enterprise at best. No great movement of peopleswould ever have taken place.
6 Ridiculous LiesYou Believe About the Founding of America
By:JackO'Brien, ElfordAlley May 15, 2012 2,891,610 views
When it comes to thebirth of America, most of us are working from a stew of elementaryschool history lessons, Westerns and vague Thanksgiving mythology.And while it's not surprising those sources might biff a coupledetails, what's shocking is how much less interesting the version welearned was. It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we gotour Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America'sorigin story far more boring than it actually was for some verydisturbing reasons. For instance ...
#6. The IndiansWeren't Defeated by White Settlers
The Myth:
Our history booksdon't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became anendangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ...death by broken heart?
When American Indiansshow up in movies made by conscientious white people like OliverStone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. Theimplication is that Native Americans died off like a species oftree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitatwas paved over.
But if we had to putthe whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'dsay the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the whiteman's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rocksmashes scissors, gun beats arrow.
That's just how itworks.
The Truth:
There's a prettyimportant detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handofffrom Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in theimmediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In thedecades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflowerlanding at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in humanhistory raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before thepilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's writtenhistory, theplague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.
[Thispretty well explains the long gap between the direct discovery of theEast coast and the first direct settlement - arclein]
In the years beforethe plague turned America into The Stand, a sailornamed Giovannida Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "denselypopulated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" thatyou could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea.Using your history books to understand what America was like in the100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understandwhat modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalypticscenes from I Am Legend.
Historiansestimate that before the plague, America's population was anywherebetween 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). Theplague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent ofthe native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plaguekilled off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.
While this all mightseem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, yourhigh school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry totell you the full story.
Which is strange,because many historians believe it is the single most important eventin American history. But it's just more fun to believe that yourancestors won the land by being the superior culture.
European settlers hada hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of theonce huge Native American population, even with superior technology.You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength wouldhave made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settlethe country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really needto assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it,thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance,if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should knowthat you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because thatshit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Vikingass, you probably need to know that ...
#5. Native CultureWasn't Primitive
The Myth:
American Indians livedin balance with mother earth, father moon, brother coyote and sister... bear? Does that just sound right because of the Berenstain Bears?Whichever animal they thought was their sister, the point is, theIndians were leaving behind a small carbon footprint before elementswere wearing shoes. If the government was taken over by hippiestomorrow, the directionless, ecologically friendly society they'dinstitute is about what we picture the Native Americans as havinglived like.
The Truth:
The Indians were sogood at killing trees that a team of Stanford environmentalscientists think they caused a mini ice age in Europe. When all ofthe tree-clearing Indians died in the plague, so many trees grew backthat it had a reverse global warming effect. More carbon dioxide wassucked from the air, the Earth's atmosphere held on to less heat, andAl Gore cried a single tear of joy.
One of the bestexamples of how we got Native Americans all wrong isCahokia, a massive Native American city located in modern day EastSt. Louis. In 1250, it was bigger than London, and featured asophisticated society with an urban center,satellite villages and thatched-roof houses lining the centralplazas. While the city was abandoned by the time whitepeople got to it, the evidence they left behind suggests a complexeconomy with trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way down tothe Gulf of Mexico.
And that's not evenmentioning America's version of the Great Pyramid: Monk's Mound. Youknow how people treat the very existence of the Great Pyramid inEgypt as one of history's most confounding mysteries? Well, Cahokia'spyramid dwarfs that one, bothin size and in degree of difficulty. The moundcontains more than 2.16 billion pounds of soil, some of which had tobe carried from hundreds of miles away, to make sure the city's giantmonument was vividly colored. To put that in perspective, all 13million people who live in the state of Illinois today would have tocarry three 50-pound baskets of soil from as far away as Indiana toconstruct another one.
So why does Egyptget millions of dollars of tourism and Time Life documentariesdedicated to their boring old sand pyramids, while you didn't evenknow about the giant blue, red, white, black, gray, brown and orangetestament to engineering and human willpower just outside of St.Louis? Well, because the Egyptians know how to treat one of the EightWonders of the World. America, on the other hand, appears to betrying to figure out how to turn it into a parking lot.
In the realm ofpersonal hygiene, the Europeans out-hippied the Indians by a foulsmelling mile. Europeans at the time thought baths attracted theblack humors, or some such bullshit, because they never washed andwere amazed by the Indians' interest in personal cleanliness. Thenatives, for their part, viewed Europeans as "just plain smelly"according to first hand records.
The Native Americansdidn't hate Europeans just for the clouds of shit-smelling awfulnessthey dragged around behind them. Missionaries met Indians who thoughtEuropeans were "physically weak, sexually untrustworthy,atrociously ugly" and "possessed little intelligence incomparison to themselves." The Europeans didn't domuch to debunk the comparison in the physical beauty department.Verrazzano, the sailor who witnessed the densely populated EastCoast, called a native who boarded his ship "as beautiful instature and build as I can possibly describe," before presumablyadding, "you know, for a dude." This man-crush wasn't anisolated incident. British fisherman William Wood described theIndians in New England as "more amiable to behold, thoughdressed only in Adam's finery, than ... an English dandy in thenewest fashion." Or, with the bullshit removed, "Betterlooking than any of us, and they're not even fucking trying."OK, now that we gotthat out of the way, we can tell you about the historicalslash-fiction your history teacher forgot to tell you actuallyfreaking happened.
#4. Columbus Didn'tDiscover America: Vikings vs. Indians
The Myth:
America was discoveredin 1492 because Europeans were starting to get curious about theoutside world thanks to the Renaissance and Enlightenment andEuropeans of the time just generally being the first smart peopleever. Columbus named the people who already lived there Indians,presumably because he was being charmingly self-deprecating.
TheTruth:
Here's what we know. Abunch of vikings set up a successful colony in Greenland that lastedfor 518 years (982-1500). To put that intoperspective, the white European settlement currently known as theUnited States will need to wait until the year 2125 to match thatlongevity. The vikings spent a good portion of that timesending expeditions down south to try to settle what they calledVineland -- which historians nowbelieve was the East Coast of North America.Some place the vikings as far south as modern day North Carolina.
After spending acouple decades sneaking ashore to raid Vineland of its ample woodpulp, the vikings made a go of settling North America in 1005. Afterlanding there with livestock, supplies and between 100 and 300settlers, they set up the first successful European American colony... for two years. And then the Native Americans kicked their assout of the country, shooting the head viking in the heart with anarrow.
So to recap, thevikings discovered America. They were camping off the coast ofAmerica, and had every reason to settle America for about 500 years.Despite being the biggest badasses in European history, one tanglewith the natives was enough to convince the vikings that settlingAmerica wasn't worth the trouble. If you think the pilgrims wouldhave fared any better than the vikings against an East Coastchock-full of Native Americans, you either don't know what a vikingis or you're placing entirely too much stock in the strategicimportance of having belt buckles on your shoes.
If the Indians hadbeen at full strength in 1640, white people might still be sneakingonto the East Coast to steal wood pulp. That's as far as the vikingsgot in 500 years, and they were sailing from much closer than Europeand desperately needed the resources -- the two competing theoriesfor why the viking settlements on Greenland eventually died out arelack of resources and getting killed by natives -- and, perhaps mostimportantly, they were goddamned vikings.
So why did yourhistory teachers lie? This should have been history teachers' versionof dinosaurs: a mostly unknown period of violent awesomeness theynevertheless told you about because they knew it would hook everymale between the ages of 5 and 12 forever.It turns out that manyof the awesomest stories had to be paved over by the bullshit youmemorized in order to protect your teachers and parents from awkwardconversations. Like the one about how ...
#3. Everything YouKnow About Columbus Is a Calculated Lie
The Myth:
Columbus discoveredAmerica thanks to a daring journey across the Atlantic. His crew wasabout to throw him overboard when land was spotted. Even after helanded in America, Columbus didn't realize he'd discovered an entirecontinent because maps of America were far less reliable back then.In one of the great tragedies of history, Columbus went to his gravepoor, believing he'd merely discovered India. Nobody really "got"America's potential until the pilgrims showed up and successfullysettled the country for the first time. Nearly 150 years might seemlike a long time between trips, but boats were really slow back inthose days, and they'd just learned that the Atlantic Ocean went thatfar.
The Truth:
First of all, Columbuswasn't the first to cross the Atlantic. Nor were the vikings. TwoNative Americans landed in Holland in 60 B.C. andwere promptly not given a national holiday by anyone. Columbus didn'tsee the enormous significance of his ability to cross the Atlanticbecause it wasn't especially significant. His voyage wasn'tparticularly difficult. They enjoyed smooth sailing, and nobody wasthreatening to throw him overboard. Despite what history books tellkids (and theInternet apparently believes), Columbus diedwealthy, and with a pretty good idea of what he'd found -- on histhird voyage to America, he wrote inhis journal, "I have come tobelieve that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown."
The myths surroundinghim cover up the fact that Columbus was calculating, shrewd and ashungry for gold as the voice over guy in the Cash4Gold ads. When hecouldn't find enough of the yellow stuff to make his voyageprofitable, he focusedon enslaving Native Americans forprofit. That's how efficient Columbus was -- he discovered Americaand invented American slavery in the same 15-year span.
There were plenty ofunsuccessful, mostly horrible attempts to settle America betweenColumbus' discovery and the pilgrims' arrival. We only hear these two"settling of America" stories because history books andmovies aren't huge fans of what white people got up to between 1492and 1620 in America -- mostly digging for gold and eating each other.
They alsoshow us white Europeans being unable to easily defeat a nativepopulation that hadn't yet been ravaged by plague. Itwasn't coincidence that the pilgrims settled America two years afterNew England was emptied of 96 percent of the Indians who lived there.According to James W. Loewen's LiesMy Teacher Told Me, that's generally how thesettling process went: The plague acted as a lead blocker for whiteEuropean settlers, clearing the land of all the natives. TheEuropeans had superior weapons, but they also had superior guns whenthey tried to colonize China, India, Africa and basically every otherregion on the planet. When you picture Chinese or Indian or Africanpeople today, they're not white because those lands were alreadyinhabited when the Europeans showed up. And so was America.
American history goesto almost comical lengths to ignore that fact. For instance, if yourreading comprehension was strong in middle school, you might rememberthe lost colony of Roanoke, where the people mysteriouslydisappeared, leaving behind only one cryptic clue: the word "Croatan"carved into the town post. As we'vecovered before, this is only a mystery if youare the worst detective ever. Croatan was the name of a nearby islandpopulated by friendly Native Americans. In the years after the peopleof Roanoke "disappeared," geneticallyimpossible Native Americans with gray eyes andan "astounding" familiarity with distinctly Europeancustoms began to pop up in the tribes that moved between Croatan andRoanoke islands.
#2. White SettlersDid Not Carve America Out of the Untamed Wilderness
The Myth:
The pilgrims were thefirst in a parade of brave settlers who pushed civilization westwardalong the frontier with elbow grease and sheer grizzled-old-manstrength.
The Truth:
In written recordsfrom early colonial times, you constantly come across "settlers"being shocked at how convenient the American wilderness made thingsfor them. The eastern forests, generally portrayed by greatAmerican writers as a "thick, unbroken snarl of trees" nolonger existed by the time the white European settlers actuallyshowed up. The pilgrims couldn't believetheir luck when they found that American forests just naturallycontained "an ecological kaleidosocope of garden plots,blackberry rambles, pine barrens and spacious groves of chestnut,hickory and oak."
The puzzlinglyobedient wilderness didn't stop in New England. Frontiersmen whosettled what is today Ohio were psyched to find that the forestthere naturally grew in a way that "resembled English parks."You could drive carriages through the untamed frontier withoutburning a single calorie clearing rocks, trees and shrubbery.
Whether they honestlybelieved they'd lucked into the 17th century equivalent of Candylandor were being willfully ignorant about how the land got so tamed, thetruth about the presettled wilderness didn't make it into theofficial account. It's the same reason every extraordinarily luckyCEO of the past 100 years has written a book about leadership. It'salways a better idea to credit hard work and intelligence than toacknowledge that you just got luckier than any group of people hasever gotten in the history of the world.
Nobody's role insettling America has been quite as overplayed as the pilgrims'.Despite famous sermons with titles like "Into the Wilderness,"the pilgrims cherry-picked Plymouth specifically because it was arecently abandoned town. After sailing up and down the coast of CapeCod, they chose Plymouth Rock because of "its beautiful clearedfields, recently planted in corn, and its useful harbor."
We're always told thatthe pilgrims were helped by an Indian named Squanto who spokeEnglish. How the hell did that happen? Had he taken AP English inhigh school? The answer to that question is the greatest story yourhistory teachers didn't bother to teach you. Squanto was from thetown that would become Plymouth, but between being born there and thepilgrims' arrival, he'd undergone an epic journey that putsHomer's Odyssey to shame.
Squanto had beenkidnapped from Cape Cod as a child and sold into slavery in Spain. Heescaped like the boy Maximus he was, and spent his better yearshoofing it west until he hit the Atlantic Ocean. Deciding thatswimming back to America would take too much time, he learned enoughEnglish to convince someone to let him hitch a ride to "the NewWorld." When he finally got back home, he found his towndeserted. The plague had swept through two years before, takingeveryone but him with it.
when the pilgrimsshowed up, instead of being pissed at the people from the Continentwho had stolen his ability to grow up with his family, he decidedthat since nobody else was using it, he might as well show them howto make his town work.
This is especiallycharitable of him when you realize that, while the pilgrims werenicer than past settlers, they weren't exactly sensitive to Squanto'splight. According to a pilgrim journal from the days immediatelyafter they arrived, they raided Indian graves for "bowls, trays,dishes and things like that. We took several of the prettiest thingsto carry away with us, and covered the body up again." And yetSquanto taught them how to make it through a winter without turningto cannibalism -- a landmark accomplishment for the British to thatpoint.
Compare that toJamestown, the first successful settlement in American history. Youdon't know the name of the ship that landed there because thesettlers antagonized the natives, just like the vikings who camebefore them. The Native Americans didn't have to actively kill them.They just sat back and laughed as the English spent the harvestseasons digging holes for gold. The first Virginians were sodesperate without a Squanto that they went from taking Indian slavesto offering themselves up as slaves to the Indians in exchange forfood. Enough English managed to survive there to make Jamestown theoldest successful colonial settlement in America. But it's hard toturn it into a religious allegory in which white people are the goodguys, so we get the pilgrims instead.
The Myth:
After the nativeshelped the pilgrims get through that first winter, all playing nicedisappeared until Dances with Wolves. Even the movies that do portraywhite people going native portray it as a shocking exception to therule. Otherwise, the only influence the natives seem to have on theNew World and the frontiersmen is giving them moving targets to shootat, and eventually a plot outline for Avatar.
The Truth:
The fake mystery ofRoanoke is a pretty good key for understanding the difference betweenhow white settlers actually felt about American Indians and how hardyour history books had to ignore that reality. Settlers defecting tojoin native society was so common that it became a major issue forcolonial leaders -- think the modern immigration debate, except withall the white people risking their lives to get out of Americansociety. Accordingto Loewen, "Europeans werealways trying to stop the outflow. Hernando De Soto had to postguards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies."Pilgrims were so scared of Indian influence that theyoutlawed the wearing of long hair.
BenFranklin noted that, "NoEuropean who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live inour societies." While "always bet on black"might have been sound financial advice by the time Wesley Snipesoffered it, Ben Franklin knew that for much of American history, itwas equally advisable to bet on red.
Franklin wasn'tpointing this out as a critique of the settlers who defected -- hebelieved that Indian societies provided greater opportunities forhappiness than European cultures -- and he wasn't the only FoundingFather who thought settlers could learn a thing or two from them.They didn't dress up like Indians at the Boston Tea Party ironically.That was common protesting gear during the American revolutions.
For a hundred yearsafter the American Revolution, none of this was a secret. Politicalcartoonists used Indians to represent the colonial side. Colonialsoldiers dressed up like Indians when fighting the British. Documentsfrom the time indicate that the design of the U.S. government was atleast partially inspired by native tribal society. Historians thinkthe Iroquois Confederacy had a direct influence on the U.S.Constitution, and the Senateeven passed a resolution acknowledgingthat "the confederation of the original thirteen colonies intoone republic was influenced ... by the Iroquois Confederacy, as weremany of the democratic principles which were incorporated into theconstitution itself."
That wasn't justCongress trying to get some Indian casino money. The colonists camefrom European countries that had spent most of their time asmonarchies and much of their resources fighting religious wars witheach other. They initially tried to set up the colonies exactly likeWestern Europe -- a series of small, in-fighting nations stacked ontop of each other. The idea of an overarching confederacy ofdifferent independent states was completely foreign to them. Or itwould have been. But as Ben Franklin noted in a letter about thefailure to integrate with one another:
"It would be astrange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable offorming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such amanner as that it has subsisted ages and appears insoluble; and yetthat a like union should be impracticable for 10 or a dozen Englishcolonies."
In 1987, CornellUniversity held a conference on the linkbetween the Iroquois' government and the U.S. Constitution.It was noted that the Iroquois Great Law of Peace "includes'freedom of speech, freedom of religion ... separation of power ingovernment and checks and balances."
Wow, checks andbalances, freedom of speech and religion. Sounds awfully familiar.
One of the strangestlegacies of America's founding is our national obsession with theapocalypse. There's a new JJ Abrams show coming this fall called TheRevolution about a post-apocalyptic America, and of course TheHunger Games. We go to a gift shop in Arizona and see dug-up Indianarrowheads, and never think "this is the same thing as the stufflaying around in Terminator or The Road or thatpart in The Road Warrior where the feral kid finds a musicbox and doesn't know what it is."
We love the apocalypseas long as nobody acknowledges the truth: It's not a mythical event.We live on top of one.
Jack O'Brien is theEditor in Chief of Cracked.com. You can follow him on Twitter.
6Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America |Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america_p2.html#ixzz2BDnx0yPo
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