North America All things US of A.

[John]

As the thread says all things US of A so those with a tendency to wander keep it on track please.

I was interested to notice a post on this board the other day that claimed that 100 million first nation peoples had been slain during the Indian wars and then also recalled this comment made to me in the same thread "Even if some highly educated history expert writes it. They can never know for sure. That include numbers too."

So I looked back and thought to myself "what do I know about this subject?" and the answer is very little. My US history is very much WW2 and little else but I do recall Dee Browns Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee though I read that a long time ago. I recall thinking it was an exceptional book and as with these type of books it brought home man's usual inhumanity to man.

So with the 100 million in mind and that fact that we can never know for sure I have had a delve into this and so far found that "deatholagist" Matthew White has a figure of 350,000. He cites Russel Thornton's American Indian Holocaust and Survival who claimed an overall decline from 600,000 in 1800 to 250,000 in 1890s.

Wiki states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars

As the direct result of infectious diseases, wars between tribes, wars with Europeans, migration to Canada and Mexico, declining birth rates, and of assimilation, the numbers of Native Americans dropped to below one million in the 19th century. Scholars believe that the overwhelming main causes were new infectious diseases carried by European explorers and traders. Native Americans had no acquired immunity to such diseases, which had been chronic in Eurasian populations for over five centuries.[4] For instance, some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80–90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics.[5]

The U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894) provided an estimate of deaths:

"The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..."[6]

Wiki tends to be frowned upon as a source so I looked further.

I have found American Holocaust by David Stannard cites 100 million but is a history of the North and South American continent and the deaths of all from the time of Columbus. The Wiki about Stannard states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stannard

Stannard's research on the indigenous peoples of North and South America (including [URL='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii']Hawaii

)[1] has produced the conclusion that Native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people."[2] While acknowledging that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust.[3] In response to Stannard's figures, political scientist Rudolph Rummel has estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide, which excludes military battles and unintentional deaths in Rummel's definition. The vast majority of the victims of democide were in Latin America. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."[4] According to Guenter Lewy, Stannard's perspective has been joined by scholars Kirkpatrick Sale, Ben Kiernan, Lenore A. Stiffarm, Phil Lane, Jr., and Ward Churchill.[2]

[/URL]

I would not mind reading American Holocaust.

I have also found this link that tends to support the wiki about Stannard.
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/7302

This is also a useful read.
http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/americanindians.htm

The subject itself becomes skinny as a discussion point and I find that disappointing. IMO it is the usual issue that is confronted with ones own feelings as to their own nation and patriotism, political views etc that are challenged. There is no doubt in my mind that genocide happened to Native North Americans. As to the numbers to quote someone else we "can never know for sure". I do not think that this approximate number of 100 million is the US alone but do feel that it could cover the Americas from Columbus onwards.

 

[little graham]

http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html

Jeffrey Amherst's name became tarnished by stories of smallpox-infected blankets used as germ warfare against American Indians. These stories are reported, for example, in Carl Waldman's Atlas of the North American Indian [NY: Facts on File, 1985]. Waldman writes, in reference to a siege of Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) by Chief Pontiac's forces during the summer of 1763: ... Captain Simeon Ecuyer had bought time by sending smallpox-infected blankets and handkerchiefs to the Indians surrounding the fort -- an early example of biological warfare -- which started an epidemic among them. Amherst himself had encouraged this tactic in a letter to Ecuyer. [p. 108]

The town of Amherst, Massachusetts, was named for Lord Jeff even before he became a Lord. Amherst Collegewas later named after the town. It is said the local inhabitants who formed the town preferred another name, Norwottuck, after the Indians whose land it had been; the colonial governor substituted his choice for theirs. Frank Prentice Rand, in his book, The Village of Amherst: A Landmark of Light [Amherst, MA: Amherst Historical Society, 1958], says that at the time of the naming, Amherst was "the most glamorous military hero in the New World. ... ...the name was so obvious in 1759 as to be almost inevitable." [p. 15]

If guys who used germ warfare are considered military heros, how can you expect a true reflection of their destruction to a race be recorded?

 

[little graham]

http://rt.com/usa/210899-fbi-investigation-petraeus-cia/

Current and former US intelligence officials say the FBI still has an open investigation into whether David Petraeus improperly provided highly classified documents to a mistress

He lost control of that surge, didn't he?

 

[LanceRomance]

100 million... highly unlikely.

The population of the entire world in 1850 was around 500 million.

Granted the "war" went on for a couple of hundred years but this guy must have used projected populations or something?

 

[Happy Mastenator]

The numbers killed in the Indian Wars were quite low. The real damage was done much earlier. 100 million is still overly high though by the looks of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
While it is difficult to determine exactly how many Natives lived in North America before Columbus,[6] estimates range from a low of 2.1 million (Ubelaker 1976) to 7 million people (Russell Thornton) to a high of 18 million (Dobyns 1983).[7]

Soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of Europe and Africa, observers noted immense numbers of indigenous Americans began to die from these diseases. One reason this death toll was overlooked is that once introduced, the diseases raced ahead of European immigration in many areas. Disease killed off a sizable portion of the populations before European observations (and thus written records) were made. After the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of natives, many newer European immigrants assumed that there had always been relatively few indigenous peoples. The scope of the epidemics over the years was tremendous, killing millions of people—possibly in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating one of "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe",[26] which had killed up to one-third of the people in Europe and Asia between 1347 and 1351. The Black Death occurred to a European population which also had not been exposed and had little or no resistance to a new disease.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

 

[FredLeDeux]

I can think of at least half a dozen threads where this would fit perfectly.

And be ignored by those who would most benefit from watching it.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

I can think of at least half a dozen threads where this would fit perfectly.

And be ignored by those who would most benefit from watching it.

Parts of it would fit over James Cook.

 

[FredLeDeux]

Parts of it would fit over James Cook.

And Anzac Day

And Australia Day

 

[Cookie]

Not sure if we have anything similar here but I'd be pretty disappointed if we did.

 

[Bomberboyokay]

 

[Augmented Boat]

I played Age of Empires the other day. A 1v1v1 match.

Me and another player fought all game while America sat back and built their resources. This is called turtling. An hour later America comes in with an army of 100 elite war elephants and we both have nothing left. America then won the game after doing nothing. A truly great player he was

 

[Bomberboyokay]