Chill out. It wasn’t represented as an exhaustive list - (notice the etc., etc.....?). I even said that the hunting skills of even the agricultural tribes was nothing to sneer at. (Plus, last I looked the Iroquois were an eastern woodlands tribe.)

My whole point in this thread is defending/highlighting the hunting prowess of Native Americans in the face of those who would basically paint them as hand-to-mouth scavengers, yet I’m the one you want to take issue with? OK....

I do know that Indians gave up on the bows when they got ahold of Sharps and Winchester’s....

I would be interested to know how good of woodsman they were pre-European influence.

Must have been a tough, tough life

they were not near as buffalo dependent or efficient, that’s for sure. Introduction of the horse drastically changed the land scape. With out the horse they where more like bears extremely good at optimization of give freebies...

You take game laws out of the equation and playing field gets a lot less even for animals.

This was my whole point when I posted up, was just how tough it must have been and how skilled they had to be to survive. I was a cultural way of life that was exactly that, life or death. If this country ever goes back to the days of hunter/gatherers, most of population will perish after a short time.

The Comanche, which were expert horseman, were very pretty much opportunistic feeders prior to the introduction of the horse according to the experts on the subject. if you have absolutely nothing to do all day, but look for food in pre-European North America, I think it would range from pretty easy to get a belly full of food to pretty dismal depending on the season.

I also think prior to horseback they didn't eat near the amount of big game as we think and sustained themselves on a lot of small game, birds, fish and reptiles.

it would be interesting for sure.

I for one would head west. Forget hunting deer i'm knocking off as many meat goats and calves as I can. Deer and pigs would be a last resort

There is a cave in Europe in which anthropologists have found the remains of over 20,000 fallow deer. 20,000.

The ancients were not just dumpster divers.

And they didn’t “Give up on the bows when they got ahold of Sharps and Winchesters.” Guns (and moreso ammunition) were hard to come by even in the latter days just before their extirpation. Bows/arrows were still used extensively as late as in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 - even though they also used firearms to great effect in the battle. Many Comanches never opted for firearms - and eyewitness accounts provide a testament to their effectiveness with a bow. Did the Native Americans use firearms? Yes. Sometimes extensively when they could gather them and ammunition in quantity. But it’s an oversimplified myth that they substituted them for their primitive weapons en masse at any point, because that’s not what happened. Their primitive weapons were used extensively to the end.

See Ishi as Exhibit 1.

The grizzly, the eagle, the coyote (and many other animals) will take advantage of any food opportunities that come their way, even carrion - because they are survivors.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t still wonderfully skilled hunters of the first order. It’s not a binary proposition.

The mountain lion is an extremely good hunter, the wolf is also I highly skilled and thought out pack hunting animal.

The Bear is a seasonal calf killer, that’s spends more time scavenging just like the yote,

Lol it’s a wonder them dang Native Americans and bears survived before us white people came along with our Winchesters and cattle to help them out.

Did we teach them how to hunt too?

Having spent a lot of time around fallow deer....I can certainly believe that!

Very wary critters here for sure!

2 authors, Eve Ball and CL Sonnichsen, these 2 wrote about the Apache Indians. Eve Ball was a hands on interviewer of some of the Mescalero Elders. CL Sonnichsen, was more pf an academic author, since he was part of teh faculty at El Paso School of Mines, now UTEP. Both had quite a bit of word of mouth history of the Apache, If you have read the history of the Comanches, you will find a similarity of the them and the Apache and their "Gods" of the North. The same info will als surface if studying the other tribes, from the all over the country.

Did the Indians migrate through the Bering Straits? Too much similarities in the old stories of the Great North, Some believe they came over the North Pole during a warming period, eons ago. All tribes probably came near the same time frame, maybe as one tribe.

Eve Ball was a school teacher,, that moved to New Mexico to teach, then retired to Ruidoso, her life is a story in itself. She wrote a lot of books, they are easy reading and readily available on the used book market. A WWII widow and has an interesting Wiki page Sonnichsen, from Iowa that taught English at UTEP, a sort of "dry" read, but has backup to his sources that is sometimes cited in his books.

My partner had a great grandfather that met his end at a mission south of San Antonio by an arrow fired from a Indian, can’t remember if it was an Apache or a Comanche.


I am not saying that Indians were bumbling fools that lived day to day by the string of their moccasins. I’m just saying I’m of the opinions that life wasn’t all peaches and cream and they had struggles hunting game just like anyone else would have.

No denying that they had skill sets Europeans did not and would not ever have.

Take a look at some of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon , that should give a person a pretty good idea.


I’ve also read that plains Indians ( don’t know about the eastern tribes) were quite a bit taller than the European settlers. It was not uncommon to find 6’ Indians when your avg. European was 5’5-5’7

Can y’all just imagine if Indians had suppressed Tikka 6.5 creedmoors?

It’s very interesting to me the very different paths to “civilization” that took place on the various continents. Especially the contrasts of the others compared to Europe/Middle East/Asia Minor.

Yes, it’s very interesting.

How we could have the Roman and Ottoman Empire on one side of the world and pretty much Stone Age nomads on the other

Reason #1 why the North American Genocide wasn't a more difficult or time-consuming venture for our European ancestors. The first people Columbus met cut themselves on Spanish swords, having absolutely no understanding of what they were.

By the time they figured out that "manifest destiny" meant "state-sponsored genocide" it was too late.

Don't forget that many Indians were cannibalistic, food any way they could get it. Don't see much of that in history books.

My FIL have had this conversation...

I married a all natural, hippie wanna be, eat healthy, excericse gal

So...

Two years running, I’ve tried (her, not me) an all natural garden

Lemme tell ya, it ain’t much.

I’ve sprung into action and saved it w Miracle Grow

If they grew any type of garden, idk how they got by

The numbers 1 and 2 reasons we overwhelmed them were:

1)Sheer numbers; and
2)European diseases we brought to which they had no resistance;

It helped that in the years preceding the arrival of Columbus that the majority of the east coast population was wiped out by a plague that historians say had a greater fatality rate than the black plague in Europe. Our European ancestors essentially had lucky timing, arriving during a time when the east coast population was low enough to gain a foothold. At least, that's how I remember it being taught, who knows if it's really true.

That doesn’t mean much. Indigenous people of the Amazon made incredibly fertile soils from nothing without Miracle Grow. Soils nearly ten times as fertile as the most productive soils in the Midwest of America. They just happened to know what they were doing.

Indigenous Americans domesticated the "three sisters" over around 6000 years in Central America, and it spread north and was adapted to local climates to become a core survival technique for virtually everyone. The three sisters are corn, beans, and squash, all planted in a symbiotic plot.

Corn provides a stalk for the beans to climb, beans feed nitrogen to the soil, and squash keeps weeds from popping up. It's nature's Miracle Gro.

Disease was the main undoing of the American Indian.


Also, I’d read a lot of research that it was actually bovine TB that did the buffalo in, not bullets

I doubt you would want to go up against this lone guy, or a bunch of guys like him!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GLk1mMZqDc&t=762s