Reply #62: Exactly.

[cosmicaug]

Blue Wally wrote:

Most of the Amerind die off occurred years earlier before massive European immigration to North America. Read McNeil's "Plagues and Peoples". The societies didn't die, but the loss of the buffalo caused them to become government wards.

Exactly! And the extermination of the bison was not an accident but a deliberate policy to produce that result. For that matter, I would speculate (because I'm not well read on the subject), that the heavier reliance on the bison might, in itself, have been a post-Columbus innovation (as I'd imagine a lot of it would have been made much easier by the introduction of horsemanship --something that they, naturally, did not have before horses came on the scene). Just as well, their way of life had evolved a dependence on bison and it was purposefully destroyed by exterminating the bison.