Posted on Wednesday 01 August 2012 at 11:22 am in category: USA
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Back in 1492, there was a pretty crazy dude called Christopher Columbus (or actually Cristóbal Colón). He was one of those guys that went out on a ship to go discover stuff, which was pretty lucrative business. Anyway, he thought he'd do something else, and instead of leaving Spain and going around Africa to get to the East, he decided to keep going west. What he did not know yet, is that you run into the Americas if you do that.
Eventually he arrived in what is now the Bahamas. He loaded up the boats with all the funny things he found there, and a bunch of funny people, called Arawaks. That was not too hard, since these Arawaks didn't have guns. He killed a couple, and the rest was scared shitless so he could make them servants. All in all a pretty succesful trip.
But let's skip ahead a little bit, because I wanted to talk about North America specifically, what is now the good old US of A. Sometime in the 17th century, the French, the Dutch and the English started claiming ownership of North America.
For example, there was a bunch of people known as the Pilgrims, who settled somewhere in the north east of North America, early in the 17th century. The people that lived there pretty much ran away from them, because they had already seen English people before, and kinda knew what was going to happen. They'd kill some, take some as slaves, and then chase them away. Of course this pissed them off, but you can't win with a bow and arrow against a gun.
Pretty soon, the English more or less 'owned' the place. They thought this country was given to them by their god, so they had the right to do with it whatever they wanted. There was a little problem though, and that was these 'Indians' that kept popping up everywhere. But they just did what every good Christian would do, they killed them, or made them slaves. Actually, it turned out it was not too hard to convert them to Christianity. As long as you kept a gun pointed at them, they'd pretty much believe anything you said. The problem here is, once they are Christians, you can't really kill them anymore. Since these people didn't make good slaves, they'd have to go. Over time, they were driven back farther West, a little bit at a time.
The main food source of the native people was the bison. Now, a bison is more or less a big brown cow. And it likes to roam around in big herds. The fun thing about that is, that if you can reload your gun quick enough, you can kill like a thousand a day. So that's what the white man did. They killed them. All of them. Now, the natives didn't really have much to eat anymore, so they pretty much died. Problem solved. The few that did survive, somehow could not withstand all the new diseases the Europeans had brought to the New World, and died in big numbers as well.