Granted. And what happened to them?
For the most part they are still there if you look. Except for the mound builders of the Ohio Valley who over farmed their land and starved to death or left about 100 years before Columbus arrived.
The point I am trying to make, perhaps poorly, is that Tocqueville one-dimensional simple noble savage never existed. And basically it was Europeans sitting around their salons in Paris that created him.
a.cricket