american-holocaust

24 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTthan two centuries after initial Spanish incursions into the region. Even atthe time of Cabrillo's voyage in 1542, however, the Indians reported tohim the presence of other Spaniards in the area who, he wrote, "werekilling many natives." And there is clear evidence that European diseaseshad a serious impact on California's native peoples throughout the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. 16 Since, as we shall see in a later chapter,during those same two centuries the native population of Florida was reducedby more than 95 percent, primarily by Spanish-introduced diseasesbut also by Spanish violence, it is likely that the indigenous population ofCalifornia also was vastly larger in the early sixteenth century than it wasin 1769. A population of 300,000 for all of California, after all, worksout to a population density somewhere between that of the Western Saharaand Mongolia today-hardly suggestive of Cabrillo's "thickly settled"and "densely populated" environs. Indeed, 700,000-rather than being excessive-willin time likely turn out to have been an excessively conservativeestimate.To the east of California lay the vast, dry spaces of the southwest,what is now southern Utah and Colorado, parts of northwestern Mexico,southern Nevada, west Texas, and all of Arizona and New Mexico. ThePapago, the Pima, 'the Yuma, the Mojave, the Yavapai, the Havasupai, theHualapai, the Paiute, the Zuni, the Tewa, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Towa,the Cocopa, the Tiwa, the Keres, the Piro, the Suma, the Coahuiltec, andvarious Apache peoples (the Aravaipa, the Coyotera, the Chiricahua, theMimbreno, the Jicarella, the Mescalero, the Lipan) are just some of themajor extant cultures of the southwest. And all these large cultural designationscontain within them numerous smaller, but distinctive, indigenouscommunities. Thus, for example, the Coahuiltecs of the Texas-Mexicoborderlands actually are more than 100 different independent peoples whoare grouped together only because they speak the Coahuiltec language. 17The major ancient cultural traditions of this region were those of theAnasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. Together, these cultures influencedthe lives of peoples living, from east to west, across the virtual entiretyof modern-day Arizona and New Mexico, and from middle Utahand Colorado in the north to Mexico's Sonora and Chihuahua deserts inthe south. This area has supported human populations for millennia, populationsthat were growing maize and squash more than 3000 years ago. 18Indeed, agriculture in the pre-Columbian era attained a higher level ofdevelopment among the people of the southwest than among any othergroup north of Mesoamerica. Beginning 1700 years ago, the Hohokam,for example, built a huge and elaborate network of canals to irrigate theircrops; just one of these canals alone was 8 feet deep, 30 feet wide, 8 mileslong, and was able to bring precious life to 8000 acres of arid desert land.Other canals carried water over distances of more than 20 miles. 19 Thegeneral lingering fame of these societies, however, rests predominantly on