'Nits Make Lice': The final eradication of Native Americans and their wild places

Eliminationism in America, Part 5: After pandemics did most of their dirty work, European settlers considered wiping out the remnant as a simple matter of Manifest Destiny.

Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Dec. 29, 1890.

Part 5 of 12. [Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.]

For much of their early history on the American continent, white Europeans saw the Enemy as being Wilderness: the implacable, alien, deadly swamp whose subjugation it was their mission to impose.

The European conception of wilderness which white immigrants brought to the Ameri…