DogBoxer

He seems nice.

How Native Americans Shaped the Land to Meet Their Needs The popular image of a pristine continent left untouched until 1492 does not hold up. Long before European contact, Native peoples across North America actively managed the land with fire, farming, and careful harvesting. They did not simply live inside the landscape. They shaped it to produce more food, better hunting, and safer travel. Fire was among the most effective tools. In many regions people set low, slow-burning surface fires every one to three years, usually in late fall or early spring when the flames stayed close to the ground and could be controlled. Hunters carried fire sticks or torches and lit the grass and leaf litter as they moved through the country, or they burned larger patches around camps and gathering places. The fires cleared thick underbrush, killed young trees that would have closed the canopy, and returned nutrients to the soil. Within days or weeks, tender green shoots appeared. Deer, elk, and other game moved into the open ground to feed, making them easier to hunt. Berries, nuts, and other useful plants also grew more thickly in the cleared spaces. The methods differed by region. In northern California the Karuk (kah-ROOK), Yurok (YOO-rok), and Hupa (HOO-pah) burned tanoak groves and nearby slopes to increase acorn yields, reduce competing brush, and encourage hazelnut and other plants they valued. Farther south, Pomo (POH-moh) and Coast Miwok (MEE-wok) groups set annual or near-annual fires across grasslands and oak savannas. These burns kept the ground open for collecting seeds, improved deer habitat, and lowered the risk of larger, more destructive wildfires. In the Southeast, Muscogee (muh-SKOH-gee) (Creek), Choctaw (CHOK-taw), and related peoples regularly burned longleaf pine forests. The low fires maintained a grassy understory, drew game to the new growth, and prevented hardwoods from crowding out the pines. Similar patterns appear in early accounts from the eastern woodlands, where Algonquian-speaking (al-GON-kwee-an) groups used fire to open the forest floor and create meadows. Early European travelers often described the results: open, park-like woods in the East and Southeast, broad grasslands in California, and fire-maintained prairies along the edges of the Plains. When Native populations collapsed from disease in the 1500s and 1600s, most of the burning stopped. Within a few generations many of those open landscapes filled with denser forest and brush. Farming produced equally large changes. Maize, beans, squash, sunflower, and other crops supported substantial settled populations from the Mississippi Valley to the Southwest. Mississippian towns and later Haudenosaunee (hoh-dee-noh-SHOW-nee) and Pueblo communities cleared fields, built raised or irrigated plots, and altered soils and plant communities on a scale still visible today. Even groups that relied more heavily on hunting and gathering protected or transplanted useful plants, harvested in ways that encouraged regrowth, and used fire and driving techniques to move game. None of this was random destruction. It was skilled, repeated work aimed at feeding families and communities. At the same time, it was not a system that left every ecosystem unchanged. Near larger settlements some preferred game declined, and people adjusted by traveling farther or shifting to other resources. The landscape later called wilderness had already been thinned, burned, planted, and harvested for centuries. Disease altered the picture before most settlers arrived. When populations fell sharply, active management largely ceased. Forests regrew and some prairies shrank. The “pristine” appearance recorded by later explorers was often the result of recent abandonment, not an ancient, untouched state. Native peoples were practical land managers who used the tools at hand to shape the environments they depended on. The romantic image of a continent left completely wild until European contact is a later story. The ground and the early records tell a different one. The first image shows a longleaf pine savanna with widely spaced trees and a continuous grassy understory. This is the open, park-like landscape that regular low-intensity burning maintained for centuries among Southeastern peoples such as the Muscogee and Choctaw. The second image shows a low surface fire moving through a woodland understory while people tend it. This is the kind of controlled cultural burn used by California groups including the Karuk to clear brush, open the forest floor, and improve conditions for acorns and other useful plants.

Why Native Americans Did Not Ride the Native Horses Horses lived in North America for millions of years and were still present when the first people arrived near the end of the Ice Age. Those native horses disappeared around the same time as the other megafauna, roughly 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. After that the continent had no horses until the Spanish brought them back in the 1500s. A common misconception holds that these native horses were small, pony-like animals. Some species were modest in size, but others were not. Late Pleistocene horses such as Equus occidentalis reached sizes comparable to modern horses. The idea that all of them were undersized is incorrect. Size alone does not explain why they were never ridden. No one anywhere rode horses in the deep past. Domestication and riding developed much later, on the Eurasian steppe, several thousand years after the American horses had already gone extinct. The earliest solid evidence of horse domestication appears around 5,500 to 5,000 years ago, and clear signs of regular riding come later still. By the time people in Eurasia began riding, the native horses of the Americas had been gone for thousands of years. Archaeology shows that early peoples in North America hunted the native horses. Cut marks appear on horse bones at a few sites, and people used the bones for tools. There is no evidence they domesticated or rode them. No bridles, no saddle wear on vertebrae, no changes in bone structure that come from regular riding, and no horse remains showing the kinds of management seen later with domestic animals. The window of overlap between people and the native horses was relatively short, and the animals were already under the same climate stress that affected the rest of the megafauna. Some oral traditions speak of horses as present “since time immemorial” or describe a deep ancestral relationship. These accounts are culturally important, but they do not match the archaeological or genetic record. Horse remains from the historic period show clear Iberian ancestry. They are descendants of the animals the Spanish brought, not survivors of the Ice Age herds. Recent work has shown that Native peoples adopted and raised these reintroduced horses earlier and more widely than older colonial records claimed, in some places by the early 1600s. That history is real. It is not evidence that the Pleistocene horses were ridden. The first peoples of North America were capable hunters who took horses when they could. They did not develop a riding culture with the native animals before those animals went extinct. The horse nations that later shaped the Plains and the West grew from the Spanish reintroduction, not from an unbroken tradition stretching back to the Ice Age. Image: Artistic reconstruction of a late Pleistocene North American horse (often associated with forms such as Equus occidentalis). Credit: Science Photo Library.

The Black Hills Were Taken by Conquest Long Before Custer The Black Hills have been used by people for at least 11,500 years. Paleoindian hunters left Clovis, Folsom, and later points across the region. Nearby sites contain the remains of butchered mammoth and early bison, and multicomponent camps show repeated visits for hunting and toolmaking. The Hills also hold some of the richest rock art on the Great Plains. Pecked panels of humans, animals, and hunting scenes, including one of the earliest artistic traditions recorded in the Americas, span from the late Paleoindian into the Archaic. Later Archaic groups, especially those of the Middle Archaic McKean Complex several thousand years ago, used the Hills more intensively than any earlier people. They left larger camps, roasting pits, grinding stones, and evidence of hide working and communal hunts. Some of these groups may have spent much of the year inside the Hills. Peoples tied to the later Missouri River villages also traveled there for wood, stone, and game. Nothing in the ground shows any single tribe holding the place as an unbroken ancient homeland. By the early 1700s the Crow and their Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache allies controlled much of the Hills. Cheyenne and Suhtai also used the country, and Arikara and Mandan from the Missouri River visited regularly. Several groups treated places such as Bear Butte as sacred. Then the Lakota, moving west from the Minnesota region and newly mounted on horses, expanded into the rich buffalo range. They drove the Kiowa south and steadily displaced the Crow through sustained fighting. In the winter of 1830 Lakota warriors killed about twenty Crow at Bear Butte after detecting a raid. That clash opened a war that continued, with pauses, for nearly half a century over the Hills, Bear Butte, and the hunting grounds stretching west. The Crow, skilled horsemen, resisted for decades, but Lakota numbers and growing mobility eventually prevailed. By the early 1800s the Lakota held clear control. Their claim rested on recent conquest, not ancient continuous occupation. Lakota control was only a few generations old when the United States arrived. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie placed the Hills inside the Great Sioux Reservation. After gold was confirmed in 1874 and the Great Sioux War followed, Congress removed the Hills in 1877 on the basis of limited signatures. The Supreme Court later ruled the taking illegal. The Lakota have refused the awarded compensation and continue to assert a moral claim rooted in sacred attachment and treaty rights. Human groups have expanded into better country and displaced neighbors for as long as the record exists, on every continent. The Lakota did the same when horses and numbers favored them, taking the Hills from the Crow, Kiowa, and others after thousands of years of earlier use. Conquest was not a European invention. Framing the later American taking as uniquely unjust, while treating the Lakota’s own recent conquest as a settled foundation for permanent moral ownership, sits uneasily with that longer pattern. The same pressures of mobility, resources, and power that put the Lakota in the Hills later displaced them just as they had displaced those who came before them.

My concern for 2028: GOP voters will see 2 years of Republicans screeching at the Democrat majority and forget that the GOP is in the minority because they ignored their voters when they had power. GOP voters are like black people voting for Democrats who ignore them and import foreigners to replace them as soon as the election is over.

Can we make the GOP extinct like the Whig Party and get a party that represents American citizen voters?

Are you effing kidding me!!!!!!!!!!!

You can get your penis lopped off but you can’t buy creatine until you’re 18 in California. 🤣🤣🤣