While this event has been documented, it wasn't an everyday occurence. "Normal" violence and raids were much more typical during the 400 years of the conquest of both Americas.
The first infectious diseases were introduced onto the continent in early 16th century. At that time, neither Europeans nor Natives had much understanding about the root causes and applied magical thinking (witches, wrath of heaven, acts of God/Satan, punishment for sins).
Western understanding of epidemics has been a mess, arguably until today - see contemporary Covid deniers etc. I have just read a report about a Slovak member of government (Labor Minister) wanting to open the churches and arguing with a 1710 wave of black plague in Trnava that was purportedly stopped by the citizens praying to the Holy Virgin. And this is a Central European EU member state in 2021! Now try 1521.
And massive die-outs of native population was a cause for concern in the Spanish parts of the empire; the Spanish took two well-operated indigenous empires (Aztec and Incan) with all the infrastructure, resources and mines to get rich off, only to see their workforce melting away. They weren't happy about that - any more than today's Facebook would be about half of their users dying.
That's certainly horrific, but the diseases that the colonists brought killed 90% of the indigenous population at the time, most of whom died without ever setting eyes on a European.
As for "which people group was the most evil", that seems like an exercise in subjectivity and bias or worse, so I don't see what good could come from debating it, but I am a little surprised you don't locate it anywhere in the 20th century with its hundreds of millions of deaths between fascism and communism.
> The loss of the population was so high that it was partially responsible for the myth of the Americas as "virgin wilderness." By the time significant European colonization was underway, native populations had already been reduced by 90%. This resulted in settlements vanishing and cultivated fields being abandoned. Since forests were recovering, the colonists had an impression of a land that was an untamed wilderness
> Many Native American tribes suffered high mortality and depopulation, averaging 25–50% of the tribes' members lost to disease.
The line you've linked is discussing the Northeastern colonization and it links to Denevan, who isn't looking at the actual mechanics of depopulation, but rather the pristine myth.
Luckily we can look at this with some simple modeling. Assuming persistent epidemics with constant 25% mortality every 10 years and no developed immunity (big assumptions), while maintaining a 2% growth rate in-between (this is low), over 2 centuries the population would shrink by 88%. At that point, the epidemics stop and populations begin to recover. Using the same numbers, it would recover to pre-epidemic levels in only 85 years. If the growth rate is merely 3%, population actually grows the whole time.
Let's pay closer attention to the Mexican population graph though. Notice the 3 waves of disease? Two of those, labeled "cocolizti", are thought to be (at least partially) Salmonella. You know, that disease of failing sanitation infrastructure? Hopefully it's clear why sanitation issues might have surfaced around then.
I interpret that as "many tribes lost 25-50%" but that doesn't necessarily mean that this generalizes to all Native Americans, so I took the 90% figure which made the more precise (if inaccurate) claim.
> The line you've linked is discussing the Northeastern colonization and it links to Denevan, who isn't looking at the actual mechanics of depopulation, but rather the pristine myth.
Fair enough, I'm not a subject matter expert. I'm at the mercy of Wikipedia editors here.
> Let's pay closer attention to the Mexican population graph though. Notice the 3 waves of disease? Two of those, labeled "cocolizti", are thought to be (at least partially) Salmonella. You know, that disease of failing sanitation infrastructure? Hopefully it's clear why sanitation issues might have surfaced around then.
Assuming that cocolizti was directly caused by failing sanitation infrastructure, looking at the graph I would assume that the infrastructure failed due to the preceding smallpox-induced population crash. At least without more information there's nothing clearly pointing to Spanish violence, if that's your implication. Of course, the Spanish conquest was abhorrent and devastating, but I don't have any reason to believe that the Spanish military was more effective than disease at devastating the Mexican population. To answer the disease vs violence question, maybe we could find good points of comparison in the Old World Spanish conquests, where disease was presumably much less significant?
Curiously, the Viking are often portrayed as bloodthirsty brutes raping, pillaging, and burning their way through towns.
The reality is different. There was brutality, but it was generally limited. Vikings were more likely to conquer and settle than to burn things down to the ground. They were vengeful though, so any killing of Viking captives or civilians could result in a disproportionate and brutal retaliation. For example, Aella, the King of Northumbria killed Viking King Ragnar Lothbrok not by combat, but by having him thrown into a pit of poisonous snakes. As a result, when Ragnar's son Ivar the Boneless sought revenge and captured Aella a quick death wasn't deemed appropriate. Instead, Ivar created the Blood Eagle ritual and used it on Aella. It was a gruesome and painful method of execution, but one the Viking probably felt justified in using giving the cowardly death Aella gave Ragnar.
This is not to say they weren't brutal, but much of what we know about the Vikings comes from their enemies, which colors the history.
Some links for more information, the first is a really good rundown by a history professor specializing in Vikings:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dzioe8/were_...
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26431858
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/140926-vi...
My own amateur research shows England and English-colonies had the most violent behavior (Norman raids, Irish subjugation, Botany Bay, violence against Indians, American violence against indigenous peoples (including trail or tears, smallpox blankets, etc.), etc.
Essentially, any time a culture sets up a belief in itself as superior to all others a violence against those believed inferior often occurs, sometimes even in the name of helping those believed inferior. E.g., we'll take these poor children from them and give them to god-fearing Christian homes - I could be talking about events during colonial times with native americans, or I could be talking about separating of children at the detention centers.