A Difference of Philosophy

The Indians generally displayed a gracious and trusting hospitality toward those first white Europeans.  One record states, "They are hospitable, friendly and civil to an immense degree, in good breeding, they surpass the French."

Most white men fueled by land hunger, saw the Native Americans as an obstacle to overcome.  The philosophies of life differed 180 degrees from that of the Native Americans.

To the white European, the land, forests, and  rivers of the New World were resources to be exploited and divided for profit.  To the Native American the land and its resources should be shared by the entire community and passed to succeeding generations without change.

Yes, tribes could clash over hunting grounds, but to own a portion of nature was an alien concept.  To the Indians there was a vast spiritual force inherent in living things called "orenda" by the Iroquois.

The struggle to possess the land became a battle fought with superior weapons and technology of the Europeans against the Indians' simple, primitive ways.  One of the most destructive weapons inflicted on the Indians was disease. 

The Europeans had contracted and developed an immunity or resistance to such diseases as measles, malaria, typhus, influenza, the bubonic plague, and small pox.  Small pox, for example, wiped out entire Indian villages.  Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Indians died, victims of bacteria and viruses introduced by the first white man. 

Next time...The Invasions of the 16th century.

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On This Day in Pioneer History:  On July 22, 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Euro-American to complete a transcontinental crossing north of Mexico,  more than a decade before Lewis and Clark.

Long Ago in America...

We have spent some time in the 1800s pioneer era of the West.  I thought it might be interesting to go back, way back to when North America was unsettled and start from there...

In the imaginations of millions of Americans is the image of the 19th century Old West, with cowboys, covered wagons and log cabins.  The whole story of the West begins hundreds of years before when Europeans came from Mexico and the eastern seaboard in the 15th century in search of gold, furs, souls and the land.  The first explorers in America came from Spain, France and England.

But long long before the first explorers came to the Americas...the Indians lived in the land.  So named "Indians" because Columbus thought he had found the "Indies".  Even in the 1400s, these natives lived in substantial villages and tended well-kept fields.  They had complex social societies and religious forms that suited their environment.

But where did these "Indians" come from?  Where the the first "American" originate from?  The ancestors of the first Indian arrived from Siberia between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.  They were hunters who followed the migrations of the bison, mammoths, and mastadons across the Bering Strait during the last ice age. 

From Alaska, they spanned out across North America, down to South America.  They evolved from merely hunters to farmers.  By 1400 AD at least 5 million of these first Americans lived in what is now the United States.

Next time...the evolution into tribes
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On This Day in Pioneer History: On July 15,1888, the Bandai volcano erupts on the Japanese island of Honshu, killing hundreds and burying many nearby villages in ash.  Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago.