GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

3 7 4 " GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
accomplished largely by germs alone, introduced by early European
explorers and advancing ahead of them. As Europeans spread throughout
the Americas, many other native societies, such as the Mandans of the
Great Plains and the Sadlermiut Eskimos of the Arctic, were also wiped
out by disease, without need for military action. Populous native societies
not thereby eliminated were destroyed in the same way the Aztecs and
Incas had been—by full-scale wars, increasingly waged by professional
European soldiers and their native allies. Those soldiers were backed by
the political organizations initially of the European mother countries, then
of the European colonial governments in the New World, and finally of
the independent neo-European states that succeeded the colonial governments.
Smaller native societies were destroyed more casually, by small-scale
raids and murders carried out by private citizens. For instance, California's
native hunter-gatherers initially numbered about 200,000 in aggregate,
but they were splintered among a hundred tribelets, none of which
required a war to be defeated. Most of those tribelets were killed off or
dispossessed during or soon after the California gold rush of 1848-52,
when large numbers of immigrants flooded the state. As one example, the
Yahi tribelet of northern California, numbering about 2,000 and lacking
firearms, was destroyed in four raids by armed white settlers: a dawn raid
on a Yahi village carried out by 17 settlers on August 6, 1865; a massacre
of Yahis surprised in a ravine in 1866; a massacre of 33 Yahis tracked to
a cave around 1867; and a final massacre of about 30 Yahis trapped in
another cave by 4 cowboys around 1868. Many Amazonian Indian groups
were similarly eliminated by private settlers during the rubber boom of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. The final stages of the conquest are
being played out in the present decade, as the Yanomamo and other Amazonian
Indian societies that remain independent are succumbing to disease,
being murdered by miners, or being brought under control by
missionaries or government agencies.
The end result has been the elimination of populous Native American
societies from most temperate areas suitable for European food production
and physiology. In North America those that survived as sizable intact
communities now live mostly on reservations or other lands considered
undesirable for European food production and mining, such as the Arctic
and arid areas of the U.S. West. Native Americans in many tropical areas
have been replaced by immigrants from the Old World tropics (especially