1. Please complete this response in paragraph form. The native population of the Spanish colonies declined by as much as 90 percent between 1519 and 1605. Why did the native population deceline so dramatically? Include at least three reasons in your explanation. How did the Spanish government respond to the dramatic decline? My answer: The native population of the Spanish colonies declined by as much as 90 percent between 1519 and 1605 because disease, the lack of good, and poor treatment. When the Spanish colonists came to the Americas they brought measles, typhus, chicken pox, smallpox, mumps, and other diseases from Europe that the Indians had no resistance to. The diseases killed Indians rapidly and even decreased a native town's population from sixteen thousand, to a mere four hundred. The poor living spaces didn't help the situation either. Unaware of the consequences, the government drove the Indians from their spaced villages and made them live in towns. The result of less space made the epidemics kill more people since they lived so close to each other. If any Indian did live, there wasn't much time for them to recover and get all of their strength back. The Spanish colonists needed someone to work their fields, but with the limited amount of healthy and able-bodied workers a wave of hunger followed, which only made living even harder. The colonists would beat the Indians to force them to work their already energy drained bodies even harder, decreasing the ever-waning population of natives down even more. Once again, not thinking of the consequences the colonists made things worse. The colonists would chop down whole forests for lumber and firewood, leaving bare hillside sand fertile topsoil. When it would rain, the rich soil would be washed away, destroying any chance of using it. The colonists let their cows graze wherever they wanted, but the cows would eventually walk into the Indians' fields, destroying their hard work by trampling their corn and squash. With all of these negative things occurring, the native population was getting lower and lower every year at an alarming rate. Unfortunately, instead of seeing this as a problem, the Spanish government saw it as an opportunity. Their hunger for land was impossible to fulfill so they started to use sneaky tricks on the Indians to get more land. They would say that the Indians needed to show legal documents that entitled them to their land, knowing that before the colonists had come, the Indians would haven't thought of it. As they had suspected, the Indians didn't have the documents so the Spanish would take their lands away and combine a bunch of land into one huge one known as a hacienda. Having no other place to live and being very poor between the little money they made from farming and the taxes and fees the Indians had to pay, the Indians would move onto the haciendas. Eventually, the workers would become independent on the landlords and occasionally gain debts that locked them, and sometimes their children, to the estate for good.
