Glad you mentioned the above Birdy. I don't know how it could ever be proven but I would venture to bet that introduced white diseases killed more Indians than white bullets by a ratio of ten to one.
At least, these threads all run together in memory and I dunno if I mentioned it earlier, but estimates run that the Indian population in the Southeast at the beginning of the 18th was still only about 20% of what it was when DeSoto, his men and his hogs infected the place 260 years earlier.
I knew the 18th Century Creeks were regarded as surviving remnants, but I was surprised to learn recently that even the Cherokees as we know them in our own history were assembled as a tribe from the remnants of earlier peoples in the aftermath of the catastrophic post-DeSoto round of epidemics (Kaywoodie, feel free to step in here if I err).
Not always Euro bugs either, the CDC estimates 20 million dead Indians in Mexico in the 20 years after Cortez landed, much of it caused by a native rodent borne virus ...
http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article.htm![[Linked Image]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/Megadeath.jpg)
After disease, prob'ly other Indians, right up until the end.
Again, I dunno the last time I posted it but referencing the famous Little Big Horn.... the Crows guided Custer in on the Lakotas and Cheyennes because those tribes were even then killing more Crows than the Whites ever did.
That winter after Custer's defeat, when the last Lakota holdouts were living a fugitive existence, chased relentlessly all over, their days clearly numbered, Crook was able to catch one camp by surprise because the Lakotas had been up late celebrating the taking of thirty Shoshone scalps.
Really, one has to wonder, what on earth were they thinking?
Sorta like that, we know that rather than Adobe Walls, Quanah Parker had wanted to go after the Tonkawas in revenge for their guiding MacKenzie onto them so many times. But he got out-voted on that occasion, and the rest as they say, is history.
On another topic...
Down in Texas, one thing I find interesting about those "anti-Comanche Infantry" you mentioned is that at least some of them got minie rifle conversions of the smoothbore 1842 Springfield Musket (wiki has a good description of this strange and forgotten arm).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1842 Like the earlier Model 1840, the Model 1842 was produced with an intentionally thicker barrel than necessary, with the assumption that it would likely be rifled later. As the designers anticipated, many of the Model 1842 muskets had their barrels rifled later so that they could fire the newly developed Minie Ball.
This was not a round ball, as the name implies, but was in fact a conical shaped bullet with a skirt which inflated when fired so that it tightly gripped the barrel to take advantage of the rifling. The conical shape of the bullet, combined with the spin imparted by a rifled barrel, made the Minie Ball much more accurate than the round ball that it replaced. Tests conducted by the U.S. Army showed that the .69 caliber musket was not as accurate as the smaller bore rifled muskets. Also, the Minie Ball, being conical and elongated, had much more mass than a round ball of the same caliber.
A smaller caliber Minie Ball could be used to provide as much mass on target as the larger .69 caliber round ball. For these reasons, the Model 1842 was the last .69 caliber musket. The Army later standardized on the .58 caliber Minie Ball, as used in the Springfield Model 1855 and Springfield Model 1861. McBride's in Austin had a Pedersoli (??) repro of one of these interestingly odd weapons in stock for some time, someone finally bought it tho...
Birdwatcher
