In Colonial America, the environment led the deaths of millions of Native Americans and colonists and was a key factor in sparking the battles between the natives and colonists. Natural disasters, disease, and unclean water riddled the lands of colonists, making the land extremely difficult to live on and grow food on. The Indians faced the same weather difficulties as the colonists, but they had established crops already and had created deep storage pits to protect their food. The Indians also had a much broader diet than the colonists, whose diets consisted of beef and grain, making it easier for the Indians to find food. Although the Indians were somewhat abundant in food, they began to die off because of diseases brought by the colonists …show more content…
such as small pox, malaria, and measles. The environment would prove to be brutal to both the colonists and the Indians and would be the main contributor to death and misfortune. The first arrival of colonists in America was in Jamestown, Virginia in April of 1607, where the colonists experienced many hardships because of the unforgiving environment.
Jamestown was not an ideal place to settle a colony because of its location. Jamestown was very swampy with “fresh waters running through the woods,” making it a haven for mosquitoes and difficult to plant crops and create housing. The colonists ate cans of barley because they arrived too late in the year to plant crops, and five men had to share one can to save food. In addition to the scarcity of food, the water in Jamestown was undrinkable because it was salty, creating a huge problem for the colonists, as clean water was essential to survival. Although many colonists died of diseases such as swellings, fluxes, and burning fevers, most of the deaths in Jamestown were caused by famine. When winter came, the mortality rate rose greatly because of the freezing temperature, and by the beginning of 1608, over seventy percent of the original settlers were dead. The settlement of Jamestown was a disaster because not only was the land inhabitable but also the colonists were not willing to work to make food and …show more content…
housing. Similarly, in New England in the 1630s, colonists starved because the brutal winters, storms, and droughts hindered them from being able to cultivate crops successfully.
When it was established in 1620, New England suffered almost no problems despite a huge influx of colonists, as they were able to establish crops in their land. Their good luck caught up with them when a catastrophe struck in August of 1635. A “mighty hurricane” destroyed most of the crops, many houses, and most of the forestation around the colonists in New England. Directly after the hurricane, winter began as “extreme frost” hit the colonists. With twenty thousand colonists having come to New England during the Great Migration during a short span of time, there was a major shortage of food. The Indians had more food than the colonists because of their extensive storage systems, angering the colonists who were starving. Hunger ignited the Pequot war in 1636 between the Pequot Indians and New England colonists. The relationship between the colonists and Indians was already simmering because the Pequots had supposedly killed English traders. The battles of the war amounted in corn raids, where the colonists would burn villages and corn or steal the corn. The war ended in 1637 when the English burned hundreds of Pequot Indians alive and took many more captive. Famine led to desperation and made colonists do unspeakable things in
war. The settlement of the Americas led to the deaths of over 40 million people, both Indians and colonists. The environment caused most of these deaths by famine, drought, wreckage, disease, and war. Disease brought over to America by the colonists infected the Indians who were not immune to foreign diseases and in addition killed many colonists. Famine and drought, caused by natural disasters and harsh winters, led to desperate situations, which made colonists kill Indians for food. The brutal environment made colonists and Indians, do disgusting things to each other to survive and better their own people. The environment dictated the lives of the colonists and Indians in the early 1600s and hindered their ability to grow successfully, and, eventually, led to the downfall of the Native Americans.
For example, in Document A, it states “Fish are present in local streams, but only in the spring and early summer are they there in impressive abundance”. This means that there was only lots of food limited times per year and there would not have been much food in fall and winter time. Also, they had just experienced failure of a colony nearby who all of the colonists of Roanoke Island mysteriously disappeared. This could have had an affect on the number of people who died because they might not have been ready to build another colony and might have benefited from waiting a few more years to build a new colony. Disease would spread quickly among all of the colonists. This is because Jamestown was not huge meaning that if one person or a few people had a disease of illness, it would spread around quickly.
Have you ever wondered why so many settlers died in the Jamestown settlement? In the Jamestown settlement they faced many problems like diseases and the Powhatans. I think most of the settlers died because of diseases, the Indians, and the people they brought to settle in Jamestown. The English settled in Jamestown in 1607. The goal when they came to Jamestown was to find riches. When the English got to America they had many troubles living there. One of the troubles was lack of water and food. Many of the settlers died from starvation and dehydration. Most of the people in the colonies died from a mysterious death. I think the main reasons why the settlers died were diseases they got, the people they brought on the ship to america and the
English colonists that came to settle the New World had one conception of what property was; in their minds, property equaled money. This differed greatly from the Native Americans’ perspective, where property equaled survival. When the English colonists took land that naturally belonged to the Indians under the rights of the charter given to them by the English Crown, they misconstrued many of the conceptions of property that the Natives’ had. Even though the English were similar to the Natives in certain aspects, in most, such as who had the right to the land, how the land should be farmed, what value property actually had, and who pre-owned and could distribute the land, both cultures differed greatly, leading to eventual conflict between the English and Native Americans.
In document F, you can see that there is such a shortage of food that people resort to stealing their fellow colonists' clothes to pay for things like “butter and beef out of a ship”. You can also use the example of a resource shortage in document B, which shows a graph of the average rainfall during the first few years that the colonists lived there. From 1605-1612, Jamestown went through it’s longest, harshest drought. This meant there was very little food and water during that time. When you remember that the time period we are looking at is only from 1607 to 1610, it seems like that drought could have been a major factor in why a lot of the colonists died. Lastly, document D shows us that it was not just the colonists struggling. Native people also were having trouble finding food. An expedition of colonists was sent out to try to trade with some of the natives, but they had to force them to give anything. All the colonists got was a small shipload of grain and some very angry natives. The crew of that ship determined that the amount of grain they had would not do anything substantial for the colony, so they headed back to England, eating the grain along the way. So the colony never even got the grain, but they did have to deal with some very angry natives, which on its own is another reason that a lot of them didn’t
The first reason Jamestown colonist died is because of the environmental issues. The colonist first arrived in the area at the start of a long drought. The drought lasted six years, from 1607-1613. (Doc. B). This was about the third longest drought Jamestown has had in about a century. When there is not enough water for crops, people starve because there is no longer any food (Doc B). Therefore, water was a major issue in the Jamestown colony. Not only di...
The environment was one of the main causes of death at Jamestown (Doc. A, B). One of the examples is water. The water they drink were salty water, which is not for drinking. This caused many people to get sick. Their location is where they set up is where freshwater and saltwater met so the human
The clash between the Native Americans and the colonists did not start off tumultuous. In the early days of the exploration and settlement of the New World they lived in peace. The Indians taught them how to farm and live off the land. In a strange land the colonists made an ally. However, the subsequent turn of events was inevitable. Perhaps the chaos that ensued could have been postponed but there was never going to be a peaceful cohabitation between the colonists and the indigenous people. There were so many vast differences between the religious views and ultimate goals of the two groups. The Native Americans had established trade relationships with various tribes, they had their own religions, and their way of life was a stark contrast to that of the colonists. The worldview of the respective peoples was foreign to the other and the idea of a holistic and unbiased approach to the life of others was foreign.
The majority of us Americans know some basic things about how our nation came to be. We came from our mother country, Europe, and took over the native’s land. However, did the Native Americans have a fighting chance against the English?
Considering historical evidence, the notion: Native –Americans was not the first inhabitant of America is a complete false. For centuries, history kept accurate and vivid accounts of the first set of people who domiciled the western hemisphere. Judging by those records, below are the first set of Native-American people who inhabited America before the arrival of another human race; the Iroquois: The Iroquois of Native Americans was one of the tribes that lived in America before other people came. Based on historical evidence, it is believed that the Native Americans came from Asia way back during the Ice Age through a land bridge of the Bering Strait. When the Europeans first set foot in America, there were about 10 million Native Americans
A lot of the colonists died because of starvation. In document B it shows a timeline that shows about how long they went with it raining and not raining. The longest unbroken time they went without rain was year 1610. Due to the drought none of their crops could grow because they needed to keep some of the rainwater to drink. During this time they barely had food for everyone to eat and they barely had enough water for everyone to drink. According to document B this time period was known as the ‘starving time”. In document D Francis West sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to hopefully trade corn with the Patawomkeke Indians. In document D they knew that the supply would last them to their way back to Jamestown. But no one thought that the
As white settlers poured across the mountains, the Cherokee tried once again to compensate themselves with territory taken by war with a neighboring tribe. This time their intended victim was the Chickasaw, but this was a mistake. Anyone who tried to take something from the Chickasaw regretted it, if he survived. After eleven years of sporadic warfare ended with a major defeat at Chickasaw Oldfields (1769), the Cherokee gave up and began to explore the possibility of new alliances to resist the whites. Both the Cherokee and Creek attended the 1770 and 1771 meetings with the Ohio tribes at Sciota but did not participate in Lord Dunnmore's War (1773-74) because the disputed territory was not theirs. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British government scrambled to appease the colonists and negotiate treaties with the Cherokee ceding land already taken from them by white settlers. To this end, all means, including outright bribery and extortion, were employed: Lochaber Treaty (1770); and the Augusta Treaty (1773) ceding 2 million acres in Georgia to pay for debts to white traders. For the same reasons as the Iroquois cession of Ohio in 1768, the Cherokee tried to protect their homeland from white settlement by selling land they did not really control. In the Watonga Treaty (1774) and the Overhill Cherokee Treaty (Sycamore Shoals) (1775), they sold all of eastern and central Kentucky to the Transylvania Land Company (Henderson Purchase).
These mosquitoes carried diseases such as malaria which killed many man during the starving time. Also, since the fort was built by the water the men drank, drainage such as sewer tainted the men’s already dirty water. Another, different, poor choice made by the settlers was being engrossed in finding gold and not basic survival needs when they arrived. One reason that the starving time came was that the men did not have ample food when winter time came. Without food, diseases such as scurvy became ample along with starvation. They came to Jamestown on a charter from the Virginia Company and, consequently, became caught up in earning a profit and finding gold in order to appease the people who gave them the Charter. They did not focus on their basic needs such as food but rather focused on finding gold which turned out to be a poor choice. The men also made unfortunate decisions when it came to the relationships with the Native Americans. Although the men interacted and traded with the Natives, the relationships with the Natives were tense. The Powhatan attacked the men on several occasions as the settlers became more and more greedy for
When Europeans first began exploring New England they brought back tales of an abundance of natural resources which resulted in settlers believing that minimal work was needed to survive. The idea of merchantable commodities was introduced further signifying the materialistic shift from Indian to European dominant. The Indians were also observed to be lazy, and yet were still able to survive, which further misinformed the settlers of life in New England. Starvation levels were much higher in settler populations than in Indian populations as the settlers had not yet realized the amount of work and effort required to survive.
The Effects of Colonization on the Native Americans Native Americans had inherited the land now called America and eventually their lives were destroyed due to European colonization. When the Europeans arrived and settled, they changed the Native American way of life for the worse. These changes were caused by a number of factors including disease, loss of land, attempts to export religion, and laws, which violated Native American culture. Native Americans never came in contact with diseases that developed in the Old World because they were separated from Asia, Africa, and Europe when ocean levels rose following the end of the last Ice Age. Diseases like smallpox, measles, pneumonia, influenza, and malaria were unknown to the Native Americans until the Europeans brought these diseases over time to them.
Believed by the colonists, animals were a staple of their personal property and in essence, transformed people. In the Chesapeake region, the staple crop, tobacco, caused many unexpected problems for both sides. Due to minimal man-power, expense, and time, colonists in the region were unable to devote the necessary means of keeping track of their livestock. They accommodated this issue by relinquishing their fauna from an enclosed pen and allowed them to roam freely. With the newfound freedom, the animals would wander far from the plantations in which they originated, into native lands and often precious cornfields. When in contact with the cornfields, the instinctually wild animals would rampage the land, and cause havoc on Indian crops. This initiated justified retaliations from the Indians by killing the livestock; however, colonists deemed the backlash unjustified on the principality of the hierarchical status their animals still had. In the New England region, the nature of geography and closer sense of community due to lack of a vital crop allowed the colonists to keep better track of their valuable animals. However, with the influx of fresh immigrants and compounding livestock, the colonists scarcity and expense of labor due to long-fallow farming and free-range husbandry, drastically increased the unanticipated growing demand for land. In response to the rapidly expanding colonial boundaries, Indians “scrambled to mount a defense,” as Anderson writes (218). “Colonists coveted land around as well as within the boundaries of Indian settlements,” and were in essence unstoppable (219). During this time, Indians recognized that their bartering goods were becoming less and less valuable, essentially causing diplomatic relations with the colonists to deteriorate. Coinciding with the shift in diplomatic attention, colonists in both regions devoted less