One military expedition of the Cossack Yermak the son of Timothy used as a basis for the Czar laying claim to all of Siberia from the Urals to the Pacific. That is 6,000 miles of some of the most resource valuable land on the planet.

Yearly raids into Mexico on a monumental scale. The Comanche war trail into Mexico was about a mile wide and 1,000 miles long. For the better part of two centuries these raids done to acquire livestock and slaves. Comanche big into slavery. Those expeditions of Kit Carson in 1864 in actuality a part of the American Civil War? Stopping slavery in American territory and cross-border raids.

Texas: the Texans were *invited* into Texas by Mexico, because they needed somebody on the land to act as a buffer against the Comanches. They were considered expendable by the Mexican government, and very quickly noticed that. The Texan rebellion was the most reasonable and natural thing in the world; any population in that situation would have been inclined to the same thing.

The Mexican war: this was absolutely a war of aggression, but it was a war of aggression by Mexico against the USA. The various letters and communications between the American ambassador in Mexico City, the Mexican government, the Texan government, and Washington DC are absolutely fascinating reading and make it completely clear that Mexico was spoiling for a fight and finally got one. Polk and Slidell (the ambassador) went to quite a lot of effort to try to avoid war. Mexico was simply not willing to admit that Texas had actually beaten them and that they didn’t control it anymore. American troops in Mexico City was pretty much the only way to reconcile them to it.

The Indians: there’s been plenty written about the perfidy with which the settlers treated the tribes. One should also mention the astonishing forbearance with which the government treated them. The Comanches are an excellent example: for 40 years, they were slaughtering and raping and torturing and kidnapping settlers all across modern-day northwest Texas and Oklahoma, and it wasn’t until William Tecumseh Sherman personally escaped being the victim of one such raid by a narrow margin that the government decided enough was enough and to start systematically destroying Comanches instead of trying to be nice to them. (The mass slaughter of the buffalo was part of this: it was a deliberate policy, implemented at that point in time, as a way of cutting Comanche society off at the knees.) The settlers’ policy was absolutely aggressive. The government’s was not.

The Caddo were an agrarian tribe in east Texas and Arkansas. They were known for their unique architecture and tall homes. Their numbers were hit pretty hard after de Soto arrived.

The biggest pre-Columbian settlement was probably the Mississippian tribes near St. Louis that we now call Cahokia. By the 13th century it was one of the largest urban areas in the world. They grew corn and beans which is what’s still grown there today. They built huge earthen pyramids that were among the largest in the world. By 1500, before any European contact, they were completely gone.

Also, the plains Indians seem more proto-pastoralists than true herders, since they were still hunting wild bison, right? It’s amazing how little time it took for them to adopt abandoned Spanish horses though.

This really isn’t true. Almost every tribe east of the Mississippi were agriculturalists, and this was most common in the Southwest as well. California and the Oregon coast were settled by hunter-gatherers, but are far, far greater population densities than this suggests. They are famous actually for having the highest population densities of HG societies in recorded history. That lives the Great Basin, where HG was practiced and population density was low, as said. The Great Plains is its oqn category. Plenty of tribes were still farming at the time Americans came over, though all the ones who caused the American government problems lived off of Buffalo herds. Really they were pastoralists, eating buffalo but building empires one horse pasture at a time. The closest analogue for their federations were the Turkic and Mongol groups on the Eurasian plain. It was a pity the plains ecosystem could not support both the buffalo herds and the horse herds at the same time. The Comanche, Lakota, etc. pastured themselves into extinction. Not that farming would have made them any better off on the long term. It only took American settlers one generation–and one great big dustbowl–to discover what happens when you try to put 20,000 people on the prairie sod that used to support just 500.