Yeah. Hot women started swarmin' all over 'em.
Free trade apparently worked in America long before the ‘rats arrived.
The curse of living past 30. The curse of not having the neighboring tribe come in and kill every male and making slaves of the women and children. The curse of the horse. The curse of hospitals and regular meals and a warm place to sleep. The curse of dentistry. The curse of retirement homes instead of letting the old people starve to death. Man, if only they could go back to the good old days.
Still, when DeSota made his journey of discovery, 1541 was still in the 16th Century, not the 17th Century!
The writer of that piece sure messed up ~ plus, the Indians didn't die out from European germs ~ they were killed by hanta virus. That particular virus depends on a major increase in food supply for rodents, and that almost always happens within a few years of the end of a major drought.
The plagues finally reached the Iroquois homegrounds in the 1640s.
BTW, I hadn't realized these Indians had managed to collect so much European stuff ~ but then again, the Mayans had reached that area by maybe the 12th or 13th century ~ so the cultural levels in the SE were much higher than most folk imagine ~ life was still hard, but they had manufacturing operations underway for long shelf life smoked meats, cured tobacco, cured marijuana, dried root crops, cured hides, stone hand axes, arrowheads, and pottery. One larger pottery making site is located right near here at Fort Belvoir. There were 20,000 folks living there who paid their way making pottery sold all over Eastern America. With the coming of the Europeans the Indians shifted to making European style pottery!
Seniors and the very young were the first to succumb to the European diseases...when the Europeans arrived in the interior and discovered vacant Indian settlements...no-one knew who built them. Most knowledge had been lost when the elders died a generation earlier.
Yeah. Hot women started swarmin' all over 'em.
By 1797, supposedly the year for first settlement in this town site area almost none of the surveyors were using magnetic compass readings for N to lay out a baseline from which to draw all the other surveying for an area ~ but in the 1500s and early 1600s there were parts of Spanish North America there were using magnetic compasses!
This was part of Spanish North America back before the mid 1700s and as late as the Revolution there were Spaniards in the region who felt that way ~ and probably still do.
let me suggest this site began quite a bit earlier, the Indians didn't do all the collecting, and there are probably still some Spanish design grinding wheel segments buried in the soil thereabouts. That would be for the grist mill for grinding corn to make mash to make alcohol to boil off in a still and use as a trade good with the indians.
To the degree possible these European settlements with stills were uphill. That way if the Indians down hill got to whooping and hollering you were relatively safe.
I was dying to write “Never bring an ax to a gun fight”, but after reading the article, there is nothing about the ax.
