Western historian Bruce Bethke once observed that if in 1860, the Nations had coordinated with each other instead of continuing their internecine feuds, and if Chief Joseph had had a decent number of modern rifles (think Pattern 1853 Enfields, never mind Spencers), by 1865 the United States of America would have ended abruptly on the east bank of the Big Muddy.
Look up “U.S. Army engagements Nez Perce 1861-65” just for starters.
Another theory is that what the difference between the Americas and Eurasia was that the early horses on this side of the world died out. What the people here lacked was a draft animal, which led to the wheel, the plow, and other inventions that made an agrarian, land-based economy possible. That provides the exit from the hunter-gatherer economy prevalent when Columbus landed.
October 14, 2023 at 7:59 am
Bren
There have been horse bones found in the US that are genetically identical to modern horses. The last of them looks to have died out around 10,000 years ago. There were people on the continent at that time, but whether they were on the same parts of the continent as the horses is up for grabs.
As far as draft animals, there were red deer all through the northeast. Those have been domesticated and trained to pull carts in Scandinavia (IIRC) or maybe Greenland.
I learned a lot about early north America doing research for a book set in 500AD.
What they didn’t have was metal in any meaningful quantities. Yes, there’s a lot here, but the distances involved in bringing everything together looks to have been a factor, even given there were trade networks ranging from the southwest to the northeast.
There are also a huge number of what we think of as common items these days that just didn’t exist here, from bees to pigs, to wheat.
I was never able to discover why the peoples living here never ventured out over the waters, but it doesn’t look like they did.
October 14, 2023 at 8:03 am
eon
@larry
Interestingly, the word for “horse” in the Sioux tongue translates into English as “large dog”. Horses in the service of the People initially pulled travois; riding came later.
As for “running” buffalo on horseback, it took the combination of the horse and the gun to make that feasible. The typical Indian “horse bow” didn’t have enough power for the job. A .60 caliber trade musket or .54 caliber plains rifle was a different story.
cheers
eon
October 14, 2023 at 9:59 am
Ed Maner
For a more realistic alternate history:
“The Indians Won” by Martin Cruz Smith
Tecumseh had a better shot in 1814. His problem was siding with the British
October 14, 2023 at 5:42 am
MadCat
It’s over 400 million, these days. Every month’s purchases breaks the previous month’s record. It’s been doing that since ‘bama took office. Democrats are the world’s greatest gun salesmen.
The debate is still ongoing since we still can’t pin down the actual state of human occupation of the Americas at the time of horse extinction.
Personally, I think humans were the culprit. Horse meat is considered a delicacy even today.
Horses evolved in North American, but the last died out 10,000-11,000 years ago. This overlapped with humans by about 8,000-10,000 years. Could have been hunted out or lost to the end of the ice age.
Whoops, guess I should have read through to the end before answering.
They didn’t have blast furnaces (continuing with the list from above), which goes back to the largest metal items being found even up to the Hopewell peoples being copper jewelry, although there’s evidence that some of that copper traveled thousands of miles from where it was excavated to where its eventual owner lived.
Near as I can figure, once they found out about subsistence farming, many tribes became more sedentary. Given the condition of the teeth archeologists were finding, the poor methods for grinding the grain adversely affected the immune system and made them susceptible to waves of epidemics even before the Europeans showed up.
The epidemic problem of the native Americans has at least two origins.
First may well be a lack of genetic diversity in the founding population.
Another may be more insidious. We don’t actually know how much contact the Americas had with the Old World.
One line of speculation even posits the destruction of the civilization of the Amazon basin to contact with the Phoenicians, with our only evidence being the existence of a peculiar type of soil linked with sedentary agriculture (as opposed to slash-and-burn) and trace amounts of cocaine in an Egyptian mummy.
At any rate the early European explorers of North America were such a scourge of the native population the we have no idea how many tribes were wiped out totally. Even the Seminole tribe is not really a tribe in the conventional sense. It’s a collection of survivors.
October 14, 2023 at 9:56 am
Ed Maner
The US is the least bad of all possible
world powers; The rest are worse:
Off topic. That didn’t take long, how about letting Israel take them in. “Progressives call for US to take in some of the expected 1 million Gaza refugees.”
Egypt has had their bad experiences with Gaza people and Is Not letting them in now. Even though many of them are related through linage to Egyptians. Then there is Jordan’s experience with the PLO. Many do not remember Black September. Point being that people living with and near Hamas and PLO types want Nothing to do with them. Our blue cities are now hell holes for regular citizens. It does not seem smart to import more violent crazed people on the govt. dole.
The fact that they No-Way-In-Hell won’t,/b>, and have refused to do so for three-quarters of a century, should tell you al you need to know.
clear ether
eon
October 14, 2023 at 11:23 am
JTC
That the bands didn’t band together was the reason for the demise of the aboriginals here?
Just not seeing it, with waves of New World explorers discovering them and their bounty, it is unlikely to the point of impossible that the injuns could have resisted the onslaught of modern and improving weapons for any period of time. There was a time though, when Indians that weren’t really a tribe but a band of misfits, the Seminole “Indians”, had a pretty good grip on survival, and while they themselves were never “defeated” in war, their expansion north and west, physically and through trade, was doomed through sheer numbers of both men and materiel. But at least in the period prior to that and with the availability and dispersal through trade of the latest shooting’ irons, there was a time…
There’s a modern lesson there, I assume as intended by the Muir…”banding together” of disparate groups or interests will not and cannot work to deter and defeat overwhelming numbers and force, and that is where our current enemies foreign and domestic are taking us right now. But for those with a shared vision and remembrance of the Republic and the desire to the death for it to live on for our children, -and not least with the availability and access to a firearm for every man woman and child- will the results of the War Between the Disunited States of America -the New Colonizers- and the Defenders of the rights and freedoms of Anglos as organized under the US Constitution be different or will we too end up on reservations or worse?
We are more than the Comanches. They went from peaceful farmers to warriors on horseback. My tribe did that in Europe and Asia. Geronimo did not add the tribes to his warriors as Genghis Khan did.
I would say worse given the general overall attitude towards us vs how the average colonist felt about the Indians (IMHO).
We already have the Queen of Hate and Division Killary stating MAGA supporters need to be reprogrammed,
What these idiots need to realize is we knew of corrupt elections, the division, hate and all the other terrible anti-American things the Dems\Left does long before Trump decided to run. We are not blindly following him; he articulates and expresses our points.
The high point of the Indian resistance to the white men was in 1791, with St Clair’s Defeat. (This is something that was omitted from my otherwise excellent history classes covering the American frontier in this era.) A coalition of tribes including the Miamis, Shawnees, Delawares (Lenape), Potawatomis, and more, had defeated earlier probes by the US Army and militias, so a larger force was assembled under General Arthur St. Clair. They were destroyed in a surprise attack at night, with only 24 men escaping out of 1,000.
This hit the US Army so hard that the next general, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, didn’t bother rebuilding it. Instead, he created a new formation just for this one war, the “Legion of the United States”. It was 2,600 strong and divided into 4 “sub-legions”, each a combined-arms team with infantry (carrying smoothbore muskets), riflemen, cavalry, and artillery. They were reinforced by 1,400 militia. The Indians might have initially outnumbered them, but Wayne dragged out the war for three years, building forts and fighting only skirmishes, and many Indians must have gone home, because eventually the Americans had the advantage, 3,000 troops to 1,300 warriors. Wayne kept slowly pushing into Indian territory until finally the Indians took a defensive position in a stand of “fallen timbers”, and Wayne attacked. In an hour and ten minute battle, only a few were killed on either side but the Indians scattered and never re-assembled.
Wayne couldn’t any more large group of Indians to fight, so he marched into the middle of their territory, built Fort Wayne (now a city in Indiana), and waited for the Indian leaders to show up and negotiate. The Indians gave up most of Ohio, but kept most of Indiana and Michigan – for a few years.
Then a Shawnee named Tecumseh, who was born in Ohio and pushed from that land, found white settlers moving into his new home all the way over in Missouri, and formed another coalition to fight back – but his army was destroyed at Tippecanoe in 1811. After that, the odds had tilted too much against the Indians. They lost most battles, and if they managed win once (like against Fetterman or Custer), it only brought a much more powerful army down on them.
Another off-topic:
A friend just bought a firearm and, while filling out the mandatory paperwork, noted that along with the standard name/DOB/address stuff there was a selection for sex: Male, Female, Non-binary.
WTF?
By memory, when that great hater of Christianity took control of Germany in the 1930’s, Western Civilization or Caucasians could be considered to make up anywhere from about 30% to 40% of the world’s population. But like any statistic on the internet, I expect that to be ravaged, as I defined no terms as to what is what. Definitions are crucial. My tribe only as 15 million now across the world. Definitions again.
Nice car. I liked mine. It was a non-worked on 350 V8 2 door
Interesting comments…Here, us ”Injuns” actually ”MONGOLS” came over to America at the same time they also invade China, Japan and Russia.
It would be curious what actually they looked liked at the time, all coming from Africa…What were they? Red, yellow, black or white?(They still have whites with round eyes in northern Japan!)
Probably they looked like round-eyed Asians. The slant-eye mutation seems to have occurred in eastern Asia (Siberia, Mongolia, or China) after the split between Asians and American Indians. So the Indians still look pretty much like Siberians but round-eyed (with a considerable mixture of Europeans and Africans by now), while slant-eyes rapidly spread across most of Asia.
Bren ~ I enjoyed your thought-provoking insights regarding the developmental shortcomings faced by New World cultures. Did your book get published? Do you have a link?
37 Comments
What are they out in the desert for, in a black muscle car of all things? Is there a game afoot?
Injuns didn’t have 350 million boomsticks.
Western historian Bruce Bethke once observed that if in 1860, the Nations had coordinated with each other instead of continuing their internecine feuds, and if Chief Joseph had had a decent number of modern rifles (think Pattern 1853 Enfields, never mind Spencers), by 1865 the United States of America would have ended abruptly on the east bank of the Big Muddy.
Look up “U.S. Army engagements Nez Perce 1861-65” just for starters.
clear ether
eon
Another theory is that what the difference between the Americas and Eurasia was that the early horses on this side of the world died out. What the people here lacked was a draft animal, which led to the wheel, the plow, and other inventions that made an agrarian, land-based economy possible. That provides the exit from the hunter-gatherer economy prevalent when Columbus landed.
There have been horse bones found in the US that are genetically identical to modern horses. The last of them looks to have died out around 10,000 years ago. There were people on the continent at that time, but whether they were on the same parts of the continent as the horses is up for grabs.
As far as draft animals, there were red deer all through the northeast. Those have been domesticated and trained to pull carts in Scandinavia (IIRC) or maybe Greenland.
I learned a lot about early north America doing research for a book set in 500AD.
What they didn’t have was metal in any meaningful quantities. Yes, there’s a lot here, but the distances involved in bringing everything together looks to have been a factor, even given there were trade networks ranging from the southwest to the northeast.
There are also a huge number of what we think of as common items these days that just didn’t exist here, from bees to pigs, to wheat.
I was never able to discover why the peoples living here never ventured out over the waters, but it doesn’t look like they did.
@larry
Interestingly, the word for “horse” in the Sioux tongue translates into English as “large dog”. Horses in the service of the People initially pulled travois; riding came later.
As for “running” buffalo on horseback, it took the combination of the horse and the gun to make that feasible. The typical Indian “horse bow” didn’t have enough power for the job. A .60 caliber trade musket or .54 caliber plains rifle was a different story.
cheers
eon
For a more realistic alternate history:
“The Indians Won” by Martin Cruz Smith
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/792851
Tecumseh had a better shot in 1814. His problem was siding with the British
It’s over 400 million, these days. Every month’s purchases breaks the previous month’s record. It’s been doing that since ‘bama took office. Democrats are the world’s greatest gun salesmen.
Larry, did the horses ‘die out’ or were they eaten?
They died out long before Man arrived; but something ate them into oblivion, I suppose. Darwin at work.
The debate is still ongoing since we still can’t pin down the actual state of human occupation of the Americas at the time of horse extinction.
Personally, I think humans were the culprit. Horse meat is considered a delicacy even today.
Horses evolved in North American, but the last died out 10,000-11,000 years ago. This overlapped with humans by about 8,000-10,000 years. Could have been hunted out or lost to the end of the ice age.
Whoops, guess I should have read through to the end before answering.
They didn’t have blast furnaces (continuing with the list from above), which goes back to the largest metal items being found even up to the Hopewell peoples being copper jewelry, although there’s evidence that some of that copper traveled thousands of miles from where it was excavated to where its eventual owner lived.
Near as I can figure, once they found out about subsistence farming, many tribes became more sedentary. Given the condition of the teeth archeologists were finding, the poor methods for grinding the grain adversely affected the immune system and made them susceptible to waves of epidemics even before the Europeans showed up.
The epidemic problem of the native Americans has at least two origins.
First may well be a lack of genetic diversity in the founding population.
Another may be more insidious. We don’t actually know how much contact the Americas had with the Old World.
One line of speculation even posits the destruction of the civilization of the Amazon basin to contact with the Phoenicians, with our only evidence being the existence of a peculiar type of soil linked with sedentary agriculture (as opposed to slash-and-burn) and trace amounts of cocaine in an Egyptian mummy.
At any rate the early European explorers of North America were such a scourge of the native population the we have no idea how many tribes were wiped out totally. Even the Seminole tribe is not really a tribe in the conventional sense. It’s a collection of survivors.
The US is the least bad of all possible
world powers; The rest are worse:
https://x.com/paraAax/status/1713184536341742066?s=20
Off topic. That didn’t take long, how about letting Israel take them in. “Progressives call for US to take in some of the expected 1 million Gaza refugees.”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4189572/posts
Egypt has had their bad experiences with Gaza people and Is Not letting them in now. Even though many of them are related through linage to Egyptians. Then there is Jordan’s experience with the PLO. Many do not remember Black September. Point being that people living with and near Hamas and PLO types want Nothing to do with them. Our blue cities are now hell holes for regular citizens. It does not seem smart to import more violent crazed people on the govt. dole.
It’s okay as long as you can keep them voting Democrat.
And Lebanon was a majority Christian country when many here were born. The “Palestinian’ refugee camps added to that. maybe greatly.
How about letting the Arab countries take in Arab refugees?
The fact that they No-Way-In-Hell won’t,/b>, and have refused to do so for three-quarters of a century, should tell you al you need to know.
clear ether
eon
That the bands didn’t band together was the reason for the demise of the aboriginals here?
Just not seeing it, with waves of New World explorers discovering them and their bounty, it is unlikely to the point of impossible that the injuns could have resisted the onslaught of modern and improving weapons for any period of time. There was a time though, when Indians that weren’t really a tribe but a band of misfits, the Seminole “Indians”, had a pretty good grip on survival, and while they themselves were never “defeated” in war, their expansion north and west, physically and through trade, was doomed through sheer numbers of both men and materiel. But at least in the period prior to that and with the availability and dispersal through trade of the latest shooting’ irons, there was a time…
There’s a modern lesson there, I assume as intended by the Muir…”banding together” of disparate groups or interests will not and cannot work to deter and defeat overwhelming numbers and force, and that is where our current enemies foreign and domestic are taking us right now. But for those with a shared vision and remembrance of the Republic and the desire to the death for it to live on for our children, -and not least with the availability and access to a firearm for every man woman and child- will the results of the War Between the Disunited States of America -the New Colonizers- and the Defenders of the rights and freedoms of Anglos as organized under the US Constitution be different or will we too end up on reservations or worse?
We are more than the Comanches. They went from peaceful farmers to warriors on horseback. My tribe did that in Europe and Asia. Geronimo did not add the tribes to his warriors as Genghis Khan did.
I would say worse given the general overall attitude towards us vs how the average colonist felt about the Indians (IMHO).
We already have the Queen of Hate and Division Killary stating MAGA supporters need to be reprogrammed,
What these idiots need to realize is we knew of corrupt elections, the division, hate and all the other terrible anti-American things the Dems\Left does long before Trump decided to run. We are not blindly following him; he articulates and expresses our points.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12603085/Hillary-Clinton-attacks-deplorables-Democrat-says-Trump-supporters-need-deprogrammed-calls-MAGA-army-bigots.html
The high point of the Indian resistance to the white men was in 1791, with St Clair’s Defeat. (This is something that was omitted from my otherwise excellent history classes covering the American frontier in this era.) A coalition of tribes including the Miamis, Shawnees, Delawares (Lenape), Potawatomis, and more, had defeated earlier probes by the US Army and militias, so a larger force was assembled under General Arthur St. Clair. They were destroyed in a surprise attack at night, with only 24 men escaping out of 1,000.
This hit the US Army so hard that the next general, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, didn’t bother rebuilding it. Instead, he created a new formation just for this one war, the “Legion of the United States”. It was 2,600 strong and divided into 4 “sub-legions”, each a combined-arms team with infantry (carrying smoothbore muskets), riflemen, cavalry, and artillery. They were reinforced by 1,400 militia. The Indians might have initially outnumbered them, but Wayne dragged out the war for three years, building forts and fighting only skirmishes, and many Indians must have gone home, because eventually the Americans had the advantage, 3,000 troops to 1,300 warriors. Wayne kept slowly pushing into Indian territory until finally the Indians took a defensive position in a stand of “fallen timbers”, and Wayne attacked. In an hour and ten minute battle, only a few were killed on either side but the Indians scattered and never re-assembled.
Wayne couldn’t any more large group of Indians to fight, so he marched into the middle of their territory, built Fort Wayne (now a city in Indiana), and waited for the Indian leaders to show up and negotiate. The Indians gave up most of Ohio, but kept most of Indiana and Michigan – for a few years.
Then a Shawnee named Tecumseh, who was born in Ohio and pushed from that land, found white settlers moving into his new home all the way over in Missouri, and formed another coalition to fight back – but his army was destroyed at Tippecanoe in 1811. After that, the odds had tilted too much against the Indians. They lost most battles, and if they managed win once (like against Fetterman or Custer), it only brought a much more powerful army down on them.
Another off-topic:
A friend just bought a firearm and, while filling out the mandatory paperwork, noted that along with the standard name/DOB/address stuff there was a selection for sex: Male, Female, Non-binary.
WTF?
By memory, when that great hater of Christianity took control of Germany in the 1930’s, Western Civilization or Caucasians could be considered to make up anywhere from about 30% to 40% of the world’s population. But like any statistic on the internet, I expect that to be ravaged, as I defined no terms as to what is what. Definitions are crucial. My tribe only as 15 million now across the world. Definitions again.
Nice car. I liked mine. It was a non-worked on 350 V8 2 door
Interesting comments…Here, us ”Injuns” actually ”MONGOLS” came over to America at the same time they also invade China, Japan and Russia.
It would be curious what actually they looked liked at the time, all coming from Africa…What were they? Red, yellow, black or white?(They still have whites with round eyes in northern Japan!)
Probably they looked like round-eyed Asians. The slant-eye mutation seems to have occurred in eastern Asia (Siberia, Mongolia, or China) after the split between Asians and American Indians. So the Indians still look pretty much like Siberians but round-eyed (with a considerable mixture of Europeans and Africans by now), while slant-eyes rapidly spread across most of Asia.
“The West suicides itself for diversity…”
Diversity Beheads Babies.
Bren ~ I enjoyed your thought-provoking insights regarding the developmental shortcomings faced by New World cultures. Did your book get published? Do you have a link?
It’s still in the works. I’m posting it up on one of the author sites. I’ll post a link when/if CR gives permission.
It’s very fictionalized, but I did some pretty deep research regarding what was available v what was not.
When/if Chris Muir gives permission.
The ‘Hopewell’ folks were interesting. A civilization I’d probably feel comfortable in.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Woodland-cultures
https://www.emerald.tv/p/the-mostly-peaceful-days-of-jihad
Typical. Several-against-one.
(One that wasn’t smart enough to bring his buddies and some melee weapons.)