How the Arrival of the Europeans Alter the Environment for Native Americans

Justine Hertwig HIS 416 Exam 1 How did the arrival of the Europeans alter the environment of Native Americans? Documentation and oral history help historians piece together the past. We know when and who arrived in early America, but we don’t have the most detailed idea of what the now United States actually looked like because technology was at a bare minimum. Columbus arrived in1492 and reported vast empty lands ripe for the taking. If America was properly surveyed at that time, Columbus may have had something else to tell the rest of his people.Perhaps he would have described huge civilizations and cities, massive agricultural centers capable of feeding thousands, and domesticated beasts in giant herds. When discussing the involvement of destruction on the early America, it’s easy to point a finger at the Europeans as wasteful and intrusive. Louis S. Warren’s â€Å"American Environmental History† gives points that support the idea that American Indians had already made a significant carbon footprint on the land.According to Warren, Bartolome de las Casa, a Spanish priest and author of many items of literature that demonized the Spanish for their cruelty to the natives, believed that more than 40 million American Indians had died before colonial America had even begun to spread west. The fact that very little population censuses were performed on the native peoples means that that number could be far more or far less. Either way 40 million people would need massive amounts of resources to allow their civilizations to thrive.Warren suggests â€Å"a New World total of 53. 9 million. †-pg. 6 This notion would make Columbus’s claim of vast empty lands ripe for the taking as a gross exaggeration. What we do know is that there are many physical land features that are greatly altered at the hands of the Native peoples not just the invading Europeans. Warren describes evidence that fire had been used as a means of clearing ou t land and pushing back forest lines for agricultural use in the early Americas long before Europeans arrived.Lightning alone could not have been the cause for these massive fires suggesting the American Indians as the culprits. We also know that as the fur trade began to explode, many feuds erupted over hunting lands needed to supply the Europeans with pelts. The Native peoples became dependent on foreign goods such as; copper pots and pans, guns, gun powder, and bullets, and tools offered by the European traders in return for huge numbers of pelts. This trade sparked the Beaver Wars which laid waste to many American Indian tribes and made the trade business even more competitive and cut throat.Besides the unwanted intrusion on enormous areas of â€Å"pre-owned† land and the spread of lethal disease, Warren describes the European settlers cutting down too many trees, over fishing the seafood population, and being generally wasteful of the resources that, at the time, seemed infinite as their primary offense. Yet this claim wasn’t until colonial America was concretely established and westward expansion began for an ever growing population and economic market. Pastoralism was the trend for settlers causing more and more land to be obtained questionably by unknowing American Indians.The European expansion pushed indigenous further and further out of their lands disrupting their ancient tradition forever. The environment became hostile immediately after the first Europeans arrived, not just from fighting over land ownership but because of the death brought on by foreign disease and threat of being captured during raids from enemy tribes and sold to the Europeans as slaves. It’s obvious that European arrival greatly impacted and altered the physical environment for the American Indians, but to say that they were the only people that laid waste to forests and herds of animals is just egregious.Warren suggests that the land was significantly alt ered with soil erosion as well as a growing medium left with little nutrients for further growing seasons. -pg. 90 Yet the question of â€Å"Which civilization decimated the land the most? † remains. If disease, forced relocation and war hadn’t all but destroyed the American Indians by the 1700’s who’s to say that they wouldn’t have ravaged the land and its resources to support the massive native population. 100 years after first European contact the native population was reduced by over 90%.This gives convincing evidence that the landscape that colonial settlers described as lush, wild and unused was once extremely modified by natives a few hundred years before European arrival. How has disease shaped the historical development in the United States? Until the arrival of the Europeans, the New World was free of measles, typhus, cholera, and smallpox. When the Spanish invaded Mexico, they brought with them a silent killer more potent than any army. The infectious diseases ravaged the American Indians because they had no immunity.By the early 1600’s, the indigenous population was decimated from smallpox, mumps, measles and other European diseases. The large-scale epidemics that followed devastated native communities creating cultural disruption. This greatly weakened their capacity for military response and inadvertently paved the way for rapid European expansion and cultural dominance. Disease didn’t just give the Europeans the upper hand for domination by reducing American Indians ability to fight back with numbers, it deeply disturbed the native religion.American Indians had shamans or medicine men that, for centuries, provided all that was needed to treat their ailments. Warren lists the diseases not foreign to the natives as; pinta, yaws, venereal syphilis, hepatitis, encephalitis, polio, some varieties of tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. -pg. 51 As Old World disease took hold of the American Indians th ey turned to their shamans and medicine men for solution. Like the Puritans, American Indians first believed sickness was caused by sin.Their God, or in American Indian sense their spirit world, was giving ailment to punish those not living correctly. The shamans gave instruction on proper ritual and ceremony execution to rid the infected of sickness. After this didn’t work the tribes people began to lose faith. Their traditional medicine wasn’t working and the disease seemed to be indiscriminate to man and woman of any age. This caused the American Indians to look at the European’s state of health. They weren’t affected as harshly because of immunity.Not knowing the concept of immunity, the indigenous began to forsake old ways and assimilate European culture into daily life in hopes to gain strength from the European God that spared his people from sickness and death. Europeans brought catastrophic death to the American Indians as well as the seeds that sprouted a loss of faith in their traditional native ways. The native population wasn’t the only peoples greatly affected by disease. Warren illustrates the devastating effects of cholera and dysentery on colonial America. Many of the colonists just weren’t educated enough to take proper care of themselves when sick.Warren describes the few doctors that lost more patients then they saved. -pgs. 141-147. Many colonists also believed that many sicknesses were due to punishments by God or the doings of evil spirits. Colonial America had major problems with sanitation. They didn’t even know that poor sanitation was the cause for most of the illnesses ailing their people. Colonial homes had no bathrooms or running water. Their toilets were either a chamber pot they kept under beds or a privy. Drinking wells were contaminated by discarding toilet waste into streams and creeks.A lack of understanding pathogens and how they survive caused many, who were able to recover, to get sick all over again. Another problem was that the colonials rarely bathed. They felt that bathing washed away the layer of dirt that was their protection against germs and disease. When they did bathe, it consisted of washing with a cloth dipped into a basin of water. We know now that this could actually spread germs and bacteria instead of ridding them, especially when using the same infected washcloth to bath the sick and the healthy.Cholera itself won’t kill a person, but lack of hydration while expelling most of one’s body fluids while sick will. In hopes to escape the disease that ravaged people in close living quarters, colonists moved to what Warren describes as â€Å"open air and waters of the countryside. †-pg. 154 This caused many to expand their communities to areas unaffected by pathogens and inadvertently â€Å"kicking out† American Indians through manipulation while simultaneously introducing them to more sickness.