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304 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2008
...gripping his hatchet, stepped over to Jumonville and said something. Then he sank his weapon into the Frenchman's skull.This account is disputed, and we will likely never know if it or one of the other versions of the story is true, but murdering an adversary and washing one's hands in his brains was a common Indian practice. So was slowly torturing a captive over the course of several days until he died, then wearing the fingers and toes of the victim in one's hatband. Scalping was also par for the course, and the Europeans even got in on the action when they offered bounties for Indian scalps which became a lucrative business for some. The Europeans and colonists were just as horrible, but in a different way: "For Amerindians and English alike, warfare in seventeenth-century North America was characterized by shocking excess. If the Puritans were horrified by the native penchant for mutilation and scalping, the Indians found the European willingness to wage total war with enormous casualties almost insane."
The tense quiet of the glen suddenly vanished with the noise of slaughter. As his warriors set upon the wounded French and began scalping them, the Iroquios Half-King reached into Jumonville's yawning cranium and ritually washed his hands in the gray matter. With awesome quickness, as the English stood frozen and agape, all but one of the wounded French were murdered.
The Pequots, nonplussed by the issue over Stone's nationality, were further hampered by an inability to comprehend why a whole people would push the death of an unpopular sea captain to the point of war. Stone's murder, after all, was merely the final in a series of retaliatory slayings - personal vendettas that were ubiquitous in Algonquin culture. What did this have to do with war?We don't seem to have evolved very much in the past 400 years, and there is nothing new under the sun. In 2020 George Floyd, hardly an upstanding citizen, was needlessly murdered and the US tore itself apart. (I'm sorry if such a comparison is too soon for some of you, but it crossed my mind, and I call it like I see it.)
Smallpox, influenza, measles, typhus, malaria, bubonic and pneumonic plague, and yellow fever - this was the rogue's gallery that fell so hard upon the Amerindians, brought unwittingly from Eurasia by Christian adventurers who had no reason to suspect that their own germs could wreak such havoc...Population loss estimates actually range between 50-90%, but that was certainly enough. There simply weren't enough people to fight back effectively should they have chosen to fight, but this book makes quite clear that yes, indeed, the Indians were willing to fight. The Indians got us back, though, when they introduced syphilis to the Europeans which started wreaking havoc in the old world a mere three years after Columbus' first journey. This hardly seems like an even trade, but whatcha gonna do?
Up to 90 percent of the population of the Americas died within two generations of 1492, the diseases racing from one village to the next, running wild among populations with no defense whatsoever against them. In much of North America, this fate befell peoples for whom white-skinned travelers from afar were still the stuff of rumors.