You forgot “and bows”. I suspect with enough people with bows gunpowder offered no advantage with the limited supplies, the crappy firearms and Man power they had. Disease did them in. I also suspect that psychic shock had a lot to do with it. It was like the world was ending. All these people die and White Men come with firearms. Bad mojo. What to do…drink!

“The Indians, along the lower Columbia as far as the Cascades and on the lower Willamette, died off very fast during the year I spent in that section; for besides acquiring the vices of the white people they had acquired also their diseases. The measles and the small-pox were both amazingly fatal. In their wild state, before the appearance of the white man among them, the principal complaints they were subject to were those produced by long involuntary fasting, violent exercise in pursuit of game, and over-eating. Instinct more than reason had taught them a remedy for these ills. It was the steam bath. Something like a bake-oven was built, large enough to admit a man lying down. Bushes were stuck in the ground in two rows, about six feet long and some two or three feet apart; other bushes connected the rows at one end. The tops of the bushes were drawn together to interlace, and confined in that position; the whole was then plastered over with wet clay until every opening was filled. Just inside the open end of the oven the floor was scooped out so as to make a hole that would hold a bucket or two of water. These ovens were always built on the banks of a stream, a big spring, or pool of water. When a patient required a bath, a fire was built near the oven and a pile of stones put upon it. The cavity at the front was then filled with water. When the stones were sufficiently heated, the patient would draw himself into the oven; a blanket would be thrown over the open end, and hot stones put into the water until the patient could stand it no longer. He was then withdrawn from his steam bath and doused into the cold stream near by. This treatment may have answered with the early ailments of the Indians. With the measles or small-pox it would kill every time.

During my year on the Columbia River, the small-pox exterminated one small remnant of a band of Indians entirely, and reduced others materially. I do not think there was a case of recovery among them, until the doctor with the Hudson Bay Company took the matter in hand and established a hospital. Nearly every case he treated recovered. I never, myself, saw the treatment described in the preceding paragraph, but have heard it described by persons who have witnessed it. The decimation among the Indians I knew of personally, and the hospital, established for their benefit, was a Hudson’s Bay building not a stone’s throw from my own quarters.”

This story raises the question of whether the response to new diseases may have been as killing as genetics. Further, might the people who died have been the more settled of the tribe? For instance, given an airborne disease, I’d bet on hunters surviving over those in farm huts.

Another striking thing about this story from the early 1850′s is that smallpox had been in the Americas for over 300 years. And apparently neither the disease nor word about it had spread 3000 miles.

Why did the Eastern hemisphere people walk over the Western? Alcohol? Disease? Horses? Sure. But I’d put as #1: The easterners were a larger, more tightly integrated, cooperative group.

Central America had their mescal and pulques; North America had some experience with weak beers in the Southwest, but limited to no use outside of ceremonial functions in the rest of the continent. Certainly, it was not done on the scale you found in stone age Europe, which was why the majority of the North American tribes experienced “green field” issues with alcohol when it was introduced to them. We Europeans had already culled the susceptible from the gene pool, mostly.

Diseases.

Alcohol hurts to be sure, but doesn’t destroy whole civilizations and cultures and kill more than three quarters of a given population

This is one of the things Jared Diamond got right in his “Guns Germs and Steel”. He was right about “germs”.

What Kirk rightly points out is that the “germs” work both ways.

Everyone knows that in the new world, the “germs” favored the invaders, whereas in Africa, it was the other way around.

“Beware and take heed of the Bight of Benin. Where few come out but many go in”

Up until the early industrial age, say about the level of 18th Century England, the numbers and distances involved would have meant that European attempts to dominate the Americas would have likely gone very badly, much as they did for the Norse.

Yeah, it’s stone-age tech vs. steel and the arquebus, but the problem is that the Europeans weren’t exactly going to be able to transport entire regiments of Swiss halberdiers and Spanish tercios to North America, land them, and support them effectively. There was no damn infrastructure, and the same thing would have happened to them that happened to the Norse–Nibbled to death by ducks, so to speak. And, to what benefit? Would any of what eventually became the New England colonies have paid off, sufficiently, to make it worthwhile?

Absent the ineptitude of the Aztec rulers and disease, how likely would the conquest of Mexico have been? Cortez had advantages, certainly, but they’d have been drowned out in a sea of Amerindian warriors that could overwhelm him. Once he’d lost the advantage of novelty, the Aztec fairly rapidly figured out how to deal with him, and without the European diseases coming along to wipe out the indigenous populations, they’d have had his number in short order.

At any point up to where the Europeans could effectively transport large numbers of troops and be able to effectively support them, colonizing the Americas was an unlikely thing. You can’t drop a regiment into a howling wilderness and make it pay against any real resistance like the Norse found. You have to also remember that the Norse weren’t exactly going up against the main territories of the Amerindians, either–The areas they got thrown the hell out of were out on the periphery of it all, and they still got hammered by numerical superiority. The sort of military technology that was around during the Jamestown period was insufficient to what they’d have needed in order to deal with the severe numerical disadvantage that they would have been at, and no amount of “superior weapons” would have helped them.

Absent the disease factor, I think that the Americas would have likely sucked in the Europeans, figured out the technology or traded for it, and we’d be living in a much different world than we are. The Europeans would have certainly hacked out trade enclaves, but moving in and taking over the entire continent? Not ‘effing likely. It would have wound up looking more like China or India than what we actually had, which was a total replacement of the indigenous population.

Do note that the South African experience was a much different thing–The locals had the disease advantage, there, and the Europeans were never able to really overmatch them until late in the game with the Maxim gun. Even then, they still couldn’t make it work without going to a “manual genocide” rather than an accidental one. The European settlers in South Africa could have made it work, were they sufficiently ruthless to do for themselves what disease did in the Americas. They weren’t, so South Africa is what it is.

Look, I’m not even saying that the Puritans mightn’t have been rebuffed — initially. But once they had established themselves — say, a decade or two in — the die was cast. The Amerinds were finished, they just didn’t know it yet.

There’s also the whole disease load argument, but it is unpersuasive. The Boers in Africa (95% N. Euro) were pushing across Africa until they were stabbed in the back by Communists. If they had been left alone, there would be several tens of millions of them by now, many in Botswana, perhaps as far north as Zambia or Angola.

Of all of the founding peoples of all of the European colonies between 1500 and 1800, only the Puritans succeeded at completely repopulating their territory. Even Canada and Australia were incomplete and (I would argue) mostly accidents of history.

That is not to say that the Puritans were capable of keeping their winnings — by 1900 their capital city had been repopulated by foreigners.

That’s in some ways my reaction, too.

Guns, steel armour and weapons, horses, ocean-going ships, and so on. And there’s something in it. And the Europeans of earl modern times could send far more people over at once and had better weapons than the Vikings ever could have. So the Europeans would have been less exposed to Indian pushback than the Vikings almost, not quite, from the start of settlement.

Even so, the Vikings were pushed out by a not very advanced Indian people on the fringes of North Ameria. The more numerous and better equipped European colonists would have been facing somewhat more settled peoples, so possibly more numerous, in richer lands like Mass and Virginia. Or even the St Lawrence.

Give them back likely higher pre-disease populations, lands under heavier cultivation supporting more people, probably less disrupted social structures, maybe they push those first colonies into the sea.

Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they trade with them and war with them as they did, but from a stronger position, and with the kind of numbers that buy time.

If their populations are high, how much time does that buy? How does it shape their ability to manage diplomacy both with the Euros and among Indians? How does it affect their ability to play Euros against one another for advantage, goods, arms, technology?

They showed some skill in all those areas even as they were.

I don’t think they’d develop societies to copy Europe overnight or send ships to raid England or France. I don’t even think they’d prove as durable as the societies of Asia, which only fell behind late in the day, were colonized ultimately briefly and superficially, and survived in more recognizable forms. They certainly would not be the Middle East, colonized at the last minute and quickly abandoned and mainly just getting a taste of its own medicine.

But based on what Indian peoples did show they could do in North America, for that matter how much they could demographically survive in Latin America, they could at least have done as well as Africans. Colonized, sure, traumatized, maybe, but ultimately still the population of the continent.

The Africans had some advantages- many even below the Sahara had metal technology , there had been large polities all over, and a worse disease package in some ways that kept Europeans out of the interior until the last minute.