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I'm not referring to the violent onslaught against the native peoples but "the Great Dying." The arrival of European (and African) diseases cut through native populations years ahead of the advancing line of white settlement. Entire sections of the Ohio valley that had supported an extensive population before imploded to a fraction of what they had been. Whites generally encountered no resident native populations in much of West Virginia and Kentucky, though there's plenty of archaeological evidence that there had been earlier. This population collapse was even more dramatic in the Deep South. The expedition of Hernando de Soto (ca. 1540-41) recorded the presence of dozens of stable, well-populated towns. Only a few were recorded when La Salle came through the region (around 1680) came through the same area. My point was that the game and the fish populations bounced back and then some. Buffalo turned up in parts of the country east of the Mississippi where it apparently hadn't been for many generations, if ever. The first whites in this part of the river talked about fish so thick in the river that you couldn't paddle a canoe without hitting them. For a concise overview of this, see Roger Kennedy's _Hidden Cities_, https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=SearchF-_-home-_-Results&an=Kennedy&tn=%22hidden+cities%22&kn=&isbn= But new material on this has been coming out for years, the latest I encountered being https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261 Cheers, Mark L. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
