On 1/10/07, Adam Maas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The primary reason for the massive population drop wasn't wholesale > slaughter. It was the unthinking introduction of several virulent and > deadly diseases to a population with essentially no resistances to them. > And frankly there was no way the Europeans would have had any inkling of > how dangerous that was. > > This isn't to say that the survivors weren't treated extremely badly. > But the population crash wasn't caused by wholesale slaughter. >
There was nothing unthinking about it. Blankets of sick white soldiers (sick from influenza, which the Europeans knew was much more deadly to the Native population than themselves) were distributed among the Natives in an early documented attempt at germ warfare. They may not have known what germs were, but they knew about passing on deadly illness. In addition, the slaughter, almost to extinction, of the American Bison was a conscientious attempt to eliminate something that, both physically and spiritually, was necessary to Native survival in the West. cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
