"...buffalo were fast getting scarce." (p. 278)
We remember that they were being killed in increasing numbers in XII.
The Battle of Appomattox, i.e., the end of the Civil War, is seven years in the past. There were still slave states in XIII.
Rufus Bullen has a hook instead of a right hand. Rufus had lost his right hand in VI. He has lost two front teeth but they are growing back. He and Jack Tarrant converse in Latin:
"'Inutilis est...'" (p. 278)
We infer that Tarrant, in charge of the expedition, is Hanno. Their Mexican guide recognizes some words of their speech from the Latin liturgy. The guide is a Comanchero and shoots a peccary. His sons light a fire of buffalo chips and mesquite.
Read and learn.
18 comments:
Incidentally, buffalo numbers on the American plains started declining as soon as the Indian tribes got horses. That drastically increased their hunting efficiency, and as humans usually do they concentrated on the prey with "maximum return for minimum effort" -- ie., buffalo. In fact, some tribal groups abandoned agriculture to take up full-time nomadic hunting.
This shouldn't surprise. The Pleistocene megafauna here in the Western Hemisphere were probably wiped out by the first waves of humans in the Americas.
In fact, the further away from the place we evolved, the faster the first humans destroyed the big photogenic animals. Hunting -big- animals is cost-effective.
In Africa, they co-evolved with us and so were better at avoiding getting exterminated... until guns came in.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I thought it interesting that Rufus still speaking Latin. Aside from Patulcius he was the last man speaking Latin as his birth tongue.
Mr. Stirling: There are sentimental types who like to talk of how noble, wise, and "ecologically balanced" the Indians were before the Evil White Man spoiled the Earthly Paradise. Bull twaddle, of course, as you explained above.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Don't take the argument too far the other way, though. White men have done some evil things.
Paul.
I've long thought that there is lots of overlap in the skills to hunt buffalo from horseback & the skills to herd cattle from horseback. So given lots more goodwill than there was, converting the plains 'Indians' from buffalo hunters to cattle ranchers (on the land that is poor for crops) would have been the least bad option for them.
Part of the goodwill would have been less insistence on converting the natives into imitation whites. Teaching them how to speak, read and write English, would be useful to them, but the deliberate suppression of native ways was just bad policy.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: Of course!
Jim: Regrettably, your scenario seems unlikely. The land hunger so dominant in the early US means people would be more interested in sweeping aside obstacles like the Indians, not persuading them to switch from nomadic hunting to ranching. Also, it took hard experience before it was realized much of the West was not really suitable for agriculture.
Ad astra! Sean
True it is unlikely, thus my comment about "lots more goodwill than there was".
Kaor, Jim!
It's what human beings are like.
Ad astra! Sean
Farmers and pastoralists usually sweep hunter-gatherers aside in any environment that will support farming or herding.
This has been consistent since the invention of agriculture and the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats and horses.
So it's probably inevitable. If one group of farmers doesn't do it, another will.
Which is why I was thinking in terms of the hunters *becoming* herders.
Note: I read a book on the Palliser Expedition, which was investigating the poorly known parts of British North America south of the N. Saskatchewan River in the 1850s. (That river was used by the fur traders of the Hudson Bay company so that & points north were relatively well known.
There is mention of the Indians near Fort Edmonton being worried about the declining buffalo herds & inquiring about how this agriculture thing works.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: Absolutely! The general pattern after the invention of agriculture has been for nomads/hunter gathers to be swept away or conquered. The Mongols united by Genghis Khan was the last time we saw a really powerful tribal confederation of nomads. And their empire lasted less than a century before it broke up.
Jim: Good! What you wrote shows some Indians were able to think ahead and wonder if it was time to make changes.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that the Mongols lived mostly by herding with hunting being a relatively minor supplement. It's remarkable that the plains Indians put up as much resistance as they did.
Kaor, Jim!
I sit corrected. The Mongols were herders, not nomadic hunters. But neither were they a settled, agricultural people with cities, towns, villages, etc. Their skills as herders were easily transferred to military uses once Temujin, Genghis Khan, unified them. They were certainly a devastating shock to the Chinese, Persians, Arabs, and Europeans.
Europe was lucky, the Mongols "only" advanced as far west as Poland and Hungary. If the reigning Kha Khan had not died (about 1254?) the Mongols might have gone much further west.
Ad astra! Sean
Jim: herding requires a different mind-set from hunting. Hunter-gatherers usually don't adopt agriculture or pastoralism unless forced to do so, and then they do it badly. Agriculture was invented in a few places, and then people from those places supplanted hunter-gatherers -- in Europe, for example, colonizers from Anatolia introduced farming in a wave of population replacements.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I'm willing to bet those "population replacements" were genocidal!
Ad astra!! Sean
Sean: yeah, probably.
Farmers pushed hunter-gatherers out of the optimum environments, cut down a lot of forests, and then the hunter-gatherers starved. If they objected, the farmers would kill them -- and while individually hunter-gatherers were better, farmers outnumbered them.
Also farmers introduced 'crowding' diseases to which they'd acquired some degree of immunity and hunter-gatherers had none.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The common cold alone would kill off a lot of hunter/gatherers with no prior exposure/resistance to it, as you demonstrated in CONQUISTADOR.
Ad astra! Sean
That is also portrayed in "Island in the Sea of Time".
Though fiction isn't actually an argument for a position, just those fictions are based on a lot of real life.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree with the points you made. I know "crowding" diseases like smallpox and measles were more dramatic killers of the Indians after 1492, but I'm sure the common cold did its share of killing.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment