Seriously, I've seen post-apocalyptic horror movies with more conservative death tolls than that. That's the end of the world as far as the natives are concerned. The Wikipedia entry about the spread of smallpox (and numerous other sources) report that somewhere between 90-95% of the native population of the Americas were killed by Old World diseases. Please keep in mind that even these could each have whole books written about them, so I'm aiming for the broad strokes here, just to give you an idea of why those points you made didn't stem the tide of European conquest. However, the three points you listed in your question can be addressed, and I've tried to do so below. This is a huge question, one that cannot possibly be covered entirely in a single answer on a website. Are there other factors I'm not aware of? What would others consider the most relevant tactical advantages? I'm wondering how accurate any/all of these explanations are. The colonists technology included better understanding of tactics and fighting as a cohesive unit, which allowed great tactical victories despite otherwise equal forces.the Americans were recovering from their own epidemic about the time that the colonists arrived, thus thinning their numbers out (not sure where I heard this, but swear I heard it once?).The American's didn't fight back, they attempted to work with the colonists and be all buddy buddy until the evil Europeans betrayed them (yeah, I suspect this view is also biased, but I don't know).The Americans were very tribal and thus did not present a united front against the Colonists, in fighting and cooperating with the colonists assisted the colonists in taking over the Americas.the American people were not nearly as densely populated as Europeans were at this time, thus making the number's difference between the colonists and the Americans closer to equal.What other advantages did the smaller number of European colonists have? I've heard the following explanations, but don't know how true any of them are:
Still, Is this the whole story? I don't know how accurate the above explanations are, and I feel that the US-centric view may have been biased on this front. This would also imply that it's possible Europeans of that time had stronger immune systems from the extra pressures of having to face disease on a regular basis (Not on a genetic race level, but on a "the more you use it the stronger it gets" individual person level). This ensured that Europeans were already carriers for some previously very deadly diseases, while the less compact Americans usually allowed diseases to die out entirely after they ran their course. I've also been told that European diseases were more deadly then Native American ones as a side effect of Europeans living so tightly packed in cities, allowing spread of both disease and immunities to these diseases. You can't do that with archery, which takes years of practice just to build up the muscle strength to fire an arrow a decent distance. With muskets you could mass produce them, give a novice basic training, and have them be somewhat-deadly in short order, making a bunch of quickly trained up conscripts/militia a decent fighting force. I've been told that while a trained musketeer was not necessarily drastically superior to a trained archer, an untrained musketeer was vastly superior to an untrained archer. I now realize that bullet point 2 and 3 aren't entirely accurate. shouldn't Europeans be just as susceptible to Native American diseases as the other way around?.A trained musketeer was not that superior to a trained archer, archers can fire volleys much faster.there were way more native Americans then Europeans.Even as a kid this never seemed to make sense to me because: In school we (US centric students) were taught that the european settlers won over the Native Americans due to our superior technology (aka guns) and the native american's susceptibility to our disease.