In the cities, speculation could quickly drive land prices up, causing property bubbles like the one that inflated Chicago real estate values by 40,000 percent in the early 1830s, driving land prices to New York City levels before bursting in a storm of foreclosures in 1841.
It's pretty interesting to see how all this new land is being purchased for very cheap prices and everything is all happy and good, and then the government learns the hard way about how economics work in their new country.
landed an expedition in Florida in 1539 and explored territory now in the states of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Everywhere he went, the conquistador reported the land was “thickly settled with large towns.” De Soto didn’t stay. He died of fever in Louisiana in 1542, and the region wasn’t visited again by Europeans until the French aristocrat, La Salle, traveled down the Mississippi River in 1670. Where De Soto had seen fortified towns, La Salle saw no one.
I wonder what was going through the mind of La Salle as he heard about all the towns and civilizations, and seeing empty towns without any population.
The Black Death killed probably half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, reducing world population by over a hundred million.
We have had and still are dealing with Covid-19 which has infected and killed many people, but not has done near anything close to this damage. Imagine how big of a deal dealing with the Black Death must've been for Europeans.
Whooping cough and influenza came from pigs; measles and smallpox from cattle; malaria and avian flu from chickens. The people who domesticated these species and lived with the animals for generations co-evolved with them.
It's no wonder why the Native people suffered so greatly from the different viruses from the people of the old world, all these diseases that are easily spread and can be deadly were put on them in a short period of time.