People don't realize how sparsely populated North America was when Europeans arrived. Historians talk about the "500 nations" of natives, but it was more like 500 villages spread across the whole continent. The majority of natives lived in Central and South America. The weather and climate everywhere north of modern Mexico was too intense for large populations without the White man's inventions, with the exception of California. The only Injun life I'd be jealous of was those. The natives of the Orange County area were described as idyllic, carefree and welcoming as they were living in essentially Paradise. The Northern Cali area tribes also lived in great abundance, especially the Hupa Valley tribe, although like all the natives, are a shadow of themselves today, being greatly challenged by and ill-adapted to the modern world. North and South America were the last places to be settled, and they were thousands of years behind the Old World in terms of development. I will always give them credit for learning the land first, but there was no way they were going to survive the way they were. Natives take a lot of heat for their failures, but growing up in the "Cowboys and Indians" storytelling era we gave them respect for how hard they fought back. Ulysses Grant fought the Indians in NorCal, and had their asses handed back to them so hard the troops had to retreat for a whole year to remuster. Eventually Grant gained enough respect for them to lobby Congress for a peace policy, which was the beginning of Federal funding for the natives.