A Columbus Day Walk With The Indian Ghosts & My Arizona Sister In Village Creek Natural Historical Area

Today, with it being Columbus Day, that being the day we Americans celebrate Christopher Columbus landing in the year 1492 in what we now know as the Bahamas, I decided to walk among the Indian Ghosts of Village Creek in the Village Creek Natural Historical Area in Arlington.

Little did the Village Creek area Indians know that in that year of 1492 someone from another continent had landed on their side of the Atlantic, in search of the East Indies, which caused the natives found to be called "Indios," the Spanish name for Indians.

Columbus had convinced the Spanish crown to finance his expedition to find a more expeditious route to the lucrative Asian spice market. Columbus never claimed to have discovered a previously unknown continent. I guess he thought he'd found some really far East Indies.

Columbus made 3 more voyages to the Americas, never reaching the part of the New World now known as America. He did visit the part of South America now known as Venezuela.

On his voyage of 1492 Columbus kidnapped a couple dozen "Indians" to take back to Spain to show to the Spanish Royal Court. Most of the "Indians" did not make it to Spain alive.

Columbus was not the first European explorer to find the Americas. But the voyages of Columbus were what began the flood of Europeans on to the American continents, beginning the process of colonization and confiscation of native lands. Not to mention the genocide of the native population, with the worst invaders in that regard being the brutal Spanish with their fervor to convert the heathen savages to Catholicism, even if it meant murdering them to save their souls.

Three centuries after 1492, give or take a decade or two, the world change set in motion by Columbus had changed the world of one of the biggest Indian Villages in America, that being the huge village that existed for miles along the shores of Village Creek in what became Texas, after the Texans took the land from the Indians and then the Mexicans.

Changing the subject from a holiday I really think America needs to re-think celebrating, to my sister in Arizona. I'd not talked to my sister since her return from her visit to Washington. So, my sister went walking with me when I walked with the Village Creek Indian Ghosts today. It was a relatively interesting talk until my aching elbow could no longer hold the phone.