An alternate history, IOW, in which the whole concept of manifest destiny was defeated or decided against or for some other reason derailed at some early stage (1600s? 1700s?) so that European culture made slow or halting provisional headway in establishing itself on this continent, and native cultures continued more or less autonomously and were still to this day healthy thriving forces in some form or another.
I’d be interested in reading a book that described something like this.
It’d be reasonably easy to do: Vikings bring smallpox & contagious diseases + horses to Vinland, which enables the diseases to become endemic and (most important) the population crash to happen a few hundred years before Europeans arrive en masse for conquest. You could even plausibly posit Chinese trade on the west coast or in South America, but add that gunpowder / metallurgy was brought in that way.
Between the end of the Revolutenary War and the War of 1812 the Native Americans did almost stop manifest destiniy before it began by siding with the British along the western frontier of the United States. Had they succeded the face of the North American continent would have been entirely changed.
Very likely the northern portion of what is now the United States would have been some type of Canadian/Native American confederation with strong British support. Perhaps the Americans could have maintained control of the eastern portion containing the 13 original colonies and avoided becoming a vassel state to Britan again, but maybe not. And France may have been able to reneg on the Lousiana purchase, which was thier intent all along.
The outcome could have actually been fair to the Native American nations, but then as we know history isn’t actually fair.
That was what I thought of, but most of the novel happens pre-that.
Plot summary:
Earth’s ecology is in terminal decline, soon to be uninhabitable. The remaining human population is mostly in the Southern hemisphere (I think the US and USSR nuked each other.) Someone has invented a machine capable of seeing into (but not visiting) the past. While broswing around, they are shocked to see an angel visit Christopher Columbus and tell him to look for an ocean route to India. More examination shows that is was actually a self-destructing hologram emitter sent back from an alternative timeline where instead Columbus had went on a Crusade and things had gone really bad in that future.
The scientists go on a crash course to figure out how to send someone back in time. They find that it is possible, but can only be done once because the changes to the past will wipe out their timeline. So they put it to a vote to the remaining population if they would be willing to have the last few hundred years of history (and themselves) erased rather than have Columbus discover America. People agreed, three people were sent back to pre-Columbian America. One pretended to be Quetzalcoatl and warned the Aztecs to resist European explorers. One pretended to be an Arab terrorist and blew up one of Columbus’s ship after the fleet landed in the Americas. And one convinced the natives of the island to kill Columbus and his remaining men in their sleep while on the island. The book ends with a scene of a fleet of ships from a Native American coalition sailing into the ports of Europe.
Kind of sort of in William Sanders’ “The Wild Blue and the Gray” and “Journey to Fusang”.
In the first, a victorious CSA gives the Indians who sided with them an autonomous land. In the second, the Chinese settle America and the natives pretty much do their own thing.
Philip Jose Farmer’s The Gate of Time features a Navajo fighter pilot who travels to a world where North America doesn’t exist and the ancestors of native Americans never crossed into the new world and live in eastern Europe.
I hated it. Contrived, implausible, unrealistic. For one, we are expected to think that Columbus would be reasonably and easily swayed morally by a time traveler and her antics. The real CC wouldn’t, and didn’t, shed a single empty tear over any of the genocide that he perpetrated. [Contrary to Darren’s statement he did survive to the end of the novel IIRC, becoming an ally of the NA forces] Plus the next future timeline will likely have someone come along and try to f. with the timeline again, so it was all futile anyway.
Early on, the TOM STRONG comic book features our hero’s world getting invaded by Aztecs from an alternate timeline: one where Cortez had arrived in front of guys already manning machine guns…
I am not sure smallpox existed at the time of the Vikings’ explorations, but I’d have to look that up. Another thought in the same vein: what if European diseases were tolerated better by Native Americans, such that North America still had large and healthy nations present instead of scattered and decimated tribes? What if diseases of the Americas were more lethal to the Europeans and colonists?
This has always been my problem with a lot of these alternate history suggestions. Unless you can contrive a way for the Americas to be almost entirely cut off from Europe and Asia until after the development of the germ theory of disease, and the invention of vaccines, how could we have possibly avoided the plagues that wiped out most of the people in the Americas?
I could see a story being written of triumphant American Native tall ships sailing into a port in Europe, and returning with all sorts of exotic trade goods, and then accidentally wiping out their own civilization because they also brought back all those diseases as well.
Dr.Drake provides what I think is a good scenario earlier in the thread.
If the early Viking visitors had been more frequent or established slightly more of a presence, they might have introduced European contagions at a slower rate and/or made the Native population crash happen earlier, so they could have recovered by the time European colonizers arrived in force.
But that’s not really how diseases work, though. Sure, if we introduced them one at a time, we wouldn’t have a single massive die-off, but a series of smaller die-offs over the span of a few hundred years wouldn’t be much better. Googling around, it looks like Europe took about 200 years to recover, population-wise, from the Black Death. It seems to me that you’d be having a plague of similar size more often than that in the Americas. They’d just be recovering from one when the next one hits.
With the overall lower population density of the Americas compared to Europe and Asia, they’d still be at a huge disadvantage. And that’s not even beginning to address how a centuries-long series of massive disease outbreaks would impact their culture. I suspect they’d become incredibly xenophobic, because every time they meet a new crew of visitors, 30% of their population dies off.
ETA: @Horatius tackles sorta the same issue from a different POV while I was posting. Great minds …
Endemic diseases generally require a sustained population density to form. Isolated bands simply don’t have the numbers for such diseases to arise in them often enough to matter. Once in 10,000 or 100,000 years maybe?
OTOH, very high population density and high interconnectedness gives exponentially more opportunities for novel diseases to arise and then to spread. COVID-19 being the recent poster child thereof.
For there to be a counter-Black Death common in the Americas that could be exported to Europe during the Age of Sail, the populations and densities of the Native Americans, from “eskimos” to Mayans, would have had to have been much greater than they actually were. And to have been so for centuries already when the Europeans showed up.
Which in turn raises the question of how those societies got to the place where they had large populations living in dense fixed settlements. Pretty quickly you get a civilization that is ethnically like the real Native Americans but culturally nothing like them.
Isn’t there some evidence that Christopher Columbus’s crew brought syphilis to Eurasia? Not that it led to a population crash or anything. But some other disease could have.
Re: syphilis, I just read an article positing archaeological evidence of the disease pre-Columbus. The theory that it had a new world origin is out there, but I think it’s recently been conclusively disproved. I’ll try to dig up the cite later today. The point about the difficulty of endemic smallpox with low population density is quite a good stumbling block, though.
Terry Pratchett’s Strata has a coalition of descendants of Vikings and Native Americans conquering Europe around 1350. But it’s not quite as simple as just alternate history.