Ready to talk about my experience at Chaco Canyon

[Ninurta]

I love to hear about your experiences. Thank you for sharing. Can't wait for the rest. Glad you guys has a safe trip.

I would venture to say the Native American history is just as brutal as any place else in the world. I don't know why the whole sunshine and rainbows thing still permeates coffee table history about the matter.

Yup. All indications are that it was a pretty rough life, and rainbows and unicorns were in short supply.

A tribe out west is alleged to have trapped a race of red haired giants in a cave, and burned their entire tribe to death.

Shawnees tell a tale of having eradicated an entire tribe that they called "Azgens" from Kentucky, An entire tribe, POOF! Gone.

And that is not to mention to continual raiding and endemic warfare between tribes that was a matter of daily life. Things like "The Beaver Wars" where the Iroquois claim to have conquered multiple tribes and taken over their lands made the history books whether they ever really happened or not, but the countless minor actions of raid and counter raid were too numerous and common place to get a mention.

Archaeology in this area can actually watch the progression of native America inter-tribal warfare. We have old, old village sites that have no discernible protection, and then at a particular point in time, palisade walls and hilltop villages become a thing all of the sudden, when warfare between tribes became a serious problem - and that happened before white folks even entered the picture. The first Englishmen arrived to find villages that already had their palisades in place. 

Spaniards attacked a village at Saltville or Chilhowie, VA, in 1567, and burned it to the ground, killing as many of it's inhabitants as they could find. The Powhatan Indians returned the favor in 1572, and utterly destroyed a Spanish Jesuit mission near Yorktown, VA (in what the Spaniards called "Ajacan" or "Axacan"), ending Spanish aspirations to conquer North America, and opening the door for the later British invasion thereof. 

The first English colony at Roanoke in NC simply vanished, never to be heard from again. The NC Indians, a scant 16 years before the Roanoke attempt, completely destroyed 6 Spanish forts in NC, SC, and possibly East Tennessee, killing all of the Spaniard defenders of those forts except one, who lived to escape and tell the tale. Entire garrisons of Spanish soldiers put to the fire.

Nope, Walt Disney's version of an idyllic paradise in pre-columbian America is a fantasy, and never was.

ETA: - I have to wonder if there is any correspondence between the Shawnee tale of the Azgens, and the Powhatan destruction of Ajacan... there does seem to be a linguistic similarity there, and both of those tribes were in the Algonquian language group.

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