Columbus was a desperate person that had to find a way to repay a king and queen for the money that had been invested in his expedition. His desperate search for gold is impossible to defend, but any denial that he changed the world is equally futile. Prior to the introduction of American farm crops such as corn and potatoes, European farms produced far fewer calories per
acre. Without the increased farm production made possible by new types of crops, it would have been very difficult to support the growth of European cities. What would happen to Ireland if the potatoes were taken away?
Although it is not a high-calorie crop, can you imagine Italy without tomatoes?
Without corn, what would happen to the quality of beer and whisky? Oh, wait a minute. It would be a lot better. Damn Columbus! He ruined beer!
The farming relationship was synergistic. Just as European food production benefited from the introduction of new types of crops, farming in America also improved. Can you imagine farming without farm animals? Who's going to pull that plow? Are you going to use a buffalo? Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the American continent had no horses or cows. I think the same is true of
chickens. Why do you think we eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
Of course, the entire relationship was not synergistic. In addition to exchanging farming products, we also exchanged disease. The indigenous Americans had no immunity to European disease such as small pox. You can image the result of that particular
exchange. Of course, no one on earth today has immunity to the effects of an indigenous American scourge, tobacco.
Can you imagine the paradise that California must have been before the European Americans took it from Mexico? There must have been millions of happy Mexicans living here in an area that must have closely resembled heaven. Wrong. When I was researching my family history, I looked through the California census of 1850. I found that the vast majority of the citizens were European Americans that were living in mining camps. It was extremely difficult to find any families or even any women. Part of the reason is because the land produced very little food. It doesn't rain here in the summer, so it is not possible to grow anything without
irrigation. Since the Mexicans did not invest in irrigation, there were not a lot of Mexican farmers in California. Instead, there were a small number of ranchers that were granted enormous rancheros that were the size of modern cities or even counties. Each ranch had farm animals that would walk around eating dry brown
grass all through the summer. After California entered the union, those rancheros were opened up to homesteaders. In other words, the ranchers were told that they couldn't stop people from building homes on ranch lands. The city where I live was once Rancho Las Pasitas. Some may say that opening up those ranches to homesteaders was unfair to the Mexican-American land owners, but the Mexican revolution produced similar results in Mexico during the early years of the twentieth century. The only difference is that the Mexican revolution and the resulting redistribution of land was a very bloody process that reduced Mexico to a state of chaos for many years. In California, the ranch lands were distributed peacefully.