I was watching American Experience, “The Donner Party”, and I got to thinking about the whole wiping out the native Americans thing.
While there was certainly plenty of animosity and war going on between the Europeans and the natives, there was also a fair amount of what I will call PLA: Peace, love, and understanding. I think this was the key mistake of the natives.
Imagine this: (and I’m not saying it was actually do-able, because getting everyone to agree would not have been possible. So just play along anyway) the native americans, every single tribe, every single person, man, woman, and child alike, committed to brutally murdering every single European they saw, sparing no one. They just became death machines. Ship lands, people get off, people die. Next ship, more dying. NO native EVER lets ANYONE who isn’t a native american EVER live.
It would have prevented colonization, and America would be populated exclusively by the natives forever, don’t you think? Without some degree of cooperation from the natives, the europeans would never have managed to get enough of a safe toehold to remain, would they?
Small pox wouldn’t care about Native American aggression. I sure think they could delay settlement a century or two, how long did it take White settlers to colonize the small headhunter islands in the South Pacific?
The only way they could have stopped colonization would have been if the vikings had lived in the new world long enough to spread smallpox and other diseases to the Native Americans back around 1000AD. It’s possible that 500 years would have been enough time for them to recover from the initial devastation, so that they would have been populous again by the time of Columbus et al. Without disease resistance, no chance whatsoever.
Even without the help of disease the technological edge of the Europeans would have carried the day in the end. Look at the 19th Century European carve-up of Africa. The Africans were as technologically advanced at the Native Americans, and they had indigenous diseases that worked in their favor, and they still eventually succumbed to colonialism. India and China were urban societies and they were dominated as well. There wasn’t anything the Native Americans could have done to stop the European onslaught.
But if they were murdered on sight, without exception, how would disease have spread? Hell, how would anyone even have KNOWN that the Americas existed? Didn’t every explorer encounter people? If every explorer was murdered, wouldn’t the rest of the world have come to the conclusion that sailing off to find other places just led to death?
You’re talking as if aboriginal Americans were one great big happy family. There were (are) many different tribes and tribal affiliations, widely ranging in both culture and geography. To have united them as one against European settlers would have been a nearly (if not completely) impossible task.
And they didn’t really know what was going on. Communication was limited to .03 Baud smokesignals. And remember, we have the benefit of hindsight. What would make natives think that one ship would be followed by two, three, then five thousand?
So, unfortunately, the answer to the OP then is yes, they could and did, when the Skraelings drove away the Vikings the first time, which set them up the the next time. If they’d let the Vikings stay, with less of a technological gap to jump, they might have caught up before the Europeans before real colonization kicked into high gear.
The Iroquois Confederation with swords, shields and horses, fighting off a European invasion in 1500. That would rock.
Blood aerosols are really, really good for transmitting disease.
Many Indians were cannibals. Butchering corpses is also a great way to catch diseases.
European explorers weren’t stupid. They landed shore parties in long boats, and if they were killed the ship sailed away. The only way the Indians could prevent discovery was to lull the explorers into a false sense of security so most of the sailors came ashore, and then killed them all and set fire to the ship.
While physically possible that;s even less plausible than the OP’s scenario of killing settlers.
Read the journals of explorers in the South Pacific, where many native were hostile. Shore parties were wiped out and ships were attacked regularly. It didn;t do anything at all to stop the exploration of the South Pacific. It just made the explorers cautious.
Which brings us to the next problem. If Indians went around attacking envoys and ambassadors, that would be considered intolerable to the Europeans. The Europeans already knew how to mount a naval invasion, they had centuries of practice and plenty of gunboats and marines. Rest assured, they would have shelled the shit out of any coastal or riverine villages, then landed companies of soldiers and engineers to establish beachheads. Even without the impact of disease, No Indian group Indians could possibly have successfully prevented such a landing.
And after the beachhead and fort is established, the rest is scripted. Either the Indians concede, in which case history follows its current path, or they attack the fort. If they succeed in wiping it out then the outrage of the European power concerned will guarantee that they return with even more men and better arms and tactics and an even more aggressive mindset. And if they fail then they will either be so weakened that their Indian enemies wipe them out, or they will be forced to concede.
The simple fat is that Europeans successfully forced colonisation onto China and Africa despite their isolationist desires and willingness to kill invaders. There is simply no way in hell that Americans could possibly have prevented it.
They tried, several times, without success. There were too many Europeans with too much technology. The susceptibility to European diseases definitely ddn’t help, but I doubt that it alone would have done the job. They really don’t teach about this well in school. King Phillip’s War was a major effort to push the Europeans out of New England, and the casualty rate, on both sides, was said to be the worst of any war in our history. It did not turn out well for the Indians.
During the colonial period, the European powers allowed Indian states as buffers, and kept supplying them. After the French and Insian War that started to break down, and the Americans started pushing into the Northwest. The tribes in the area noted the push and the lack of gifts from the Americans, and I don’t doubt that they knew the political situation. The organized and tried to resist. This is today called Pontiac’s Rebellion, but Francis Parkman’s book gave it the loaded name it was known by for years – The Conspiracy of Pontiac. That name puts the Indians on the wrong side and suggests they had dark and evil motives, and used sneakiness instead of straightforward open fighting (all of which was OK when the colonists used it against Britain). Again, overwhelming numbers and technology gave the Europeans the edge.
Until the late 19th century as others have said the operative words were population and disease (disease, partially caused by population, at that.) But if they had managed to survive into the late 19th century they wouldn’t have stood a chance against the modern armies.
Then again if one posits a degree of coordination they didn’t have, one could also posit a degree of advanced technology in the 19th century they also didn’t have, since one could lead to the other (they’d either trade or buy the tech if they couldn’t develop it themselves.)
Disease nonwithstanding I think you guys are seriously overestimating European preparation and underestimating their logistical problems. Technology is important but I didn’t count for dick in the beginning. Early settlers didn’t know what native plants to grow or how to grow them, what game there was and where it was. Transporting people to the New world was very expensive and once they were there difficult to support. Companies and monarchs would have no financial incentive to outfit expeditions that never came back. Early settlers numbers were always low at the start and they were exposed to alien diseases themselves and the whims of their native neighbors. Martini-Enfields and Quinine conquered Africa, but Europe already had a good foothold long before that…the OP assumes Europe doesn’t even get that. We have the technology to go to the moon and we haven’t colonized it, imagine if our astronauts were attacked at Eagle One as well.
As Blake rightly pointed out, they could not kill all on sight. just those that landed in the long boats. Also the European could have still established bases in the Caribbean Islands to build up large enough forces and infrastructure to attack the mainland. The Natives had no hope.
If the Aztecs were not judged to be worse than the Spanish as neighbors the Aztecs probably could have repulsed the first few attacks completely. What finished off the Aztecs where their oppressed neighbors siding with the Spanish against the Aztecs. However, eventually they too would have fallen.
I’ve read Jennings’ boomk on how the Indians did indeed help the Europeans settle uin the New World, and others on the advantage that the plague in New England made in allowing the Euiropeans to jusyt move in.
But there were simply too many Europeans, too well equipped and too technologically superior and too few Indians (despite recent arguments about relative numbers) to effectively repulse them. North America wasn’t the moon -0- they didn’t have to carry their own air. Despite the difficulties and the deaths (despite native american indian help, the death rate in the first colonies was appallingly high), the Europeans simply kept coming. Even with Indian resistance, I have no doubt that they’d have bullied their way in eventually. and once they did, they fought ruthlessly and were generally bad neighbors. I mean that literally – even in times of peace, Indians were second-class citizens, or no citizens at all. Colonists insisted on legal hearings in colonial courts, not indian courts. Indian testimony was discounted. colonists more often than not were given the benefit of doubt in land cases. The result was slow but irrevocable encroachment onto Indian land. That’s the sort of thing that instigated King Phillip’s War.
the Aztecs did fight back, and it’s true that their neighbors hated them. But from my reading of Bernal Diaz, the Spaniards didn’t rely on their Indian allies. They were helped enormously by disease, but they also relied on ruthless battle tactics (the levelled Mexico City in conquering it) and European technology (using guns and cannon. They tried using catapults, but didn’t know enough about them to make them effective).
From items like blankets, that the Native Americans might loot from dead Europeans. Some diseases can survive outside the human body for a while. Smallpox germs can survive for literally years this way.