Christopher Columbus’s three ships—the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria—first landed on a beach of a small island within the Bahama Islands, in the Caribbean Sea, on October 12, 1492. The natives called their tiny island, Guanahani, but Columbus re-christened it San Salvador.

     The ninety men aboard the three ships had sailed from Palos, Spain on August 3, 1492. Thus, Columbus had guided the men west across the Atlantic for 71 days, in mainly calm weather. 

     Columbus wanted to believe that he had stumbled upon the east Indies, perhaps Malaysia or Indonesia, so anxious was he to find a shorter trade route that linked India and China to Europe.

     Hence, Columbus called the natives “Indians,” a name that stuck most unfairly, because India lay thousands of miles west of the Bahamas. Although Columbus did not know it, he had bumped into two continents, North and South America, unknown then in Europe.

      What was the native population in 1492, of North America, including central America, Mexico, the United States, and Canada? The numbers are difficult to determine, because the natives kept no records, no books, no statistics.

     One historian named Alan Taylor explained in his 2001 book, “American Colonies: The Settling of North America,” that in early 20th century, certain “low counters” pegged the number at 10 million people in both North and South America. 

     By the late 20th century, the “high counters” doubled that number to 20 million. Some daring “high counters” insisted upon a number as high as 100 million.

     Most scholars today settle for a number near 50 million, which is half the number that the bold “high counters” had insisted upon, but five times the number that the former “low counters” had settled for. 

     As for the numbers north of the Rio Grande, in the future U.S. and Canada, researches argue that there were at least two million Native Americans, but perhaps as many as ten million.

     What happened during the 20th century that prodded scholars to revise their numbers higher?

     First, scholars pointed to evidence for a dramatic depopulation of the Native Americans that occurred throughout the 16th and into the 17th centuries, a cruel result of Columbus’s arrival..

     Second, they found evidence that proved that much of North America was more densely populated than was first believed.

     In 1890, the United States census recorded a total Native American population of 237,196, a number that stuns. It fell from between two and ten million down to a quarter of a million. 

     One environmental historian of the twentieth century, Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., said in his 1972 book, “The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492,” that this population collapse was “surely the greatest tragedy in the history of the human species.”

     What caused the collapse? Alan Taylor explains, “The breath, blood, sweat, and lice of the colonizers, and of their livestock and rats conveyed deadly pathogens that consumed Indians who lacked the immunological resistance of past experience. 

     “The greatest killers were eruptive fevers, smallpox, measles, and typhus, but Indians also suffered from respiratory infections, including whooping cough and pneumonia. Chickenpox killed Indians of all ages. One disease might weaken a victim, but another disease would kill.”

     Alfred W. Crosby labeled these Columbian exchanges of diseases, “virgin soil epidemics, those in which the populations at risk have had no previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore almost defenseless.” A fact, these exchanges were one-sided.

     Native Americans suffered and died in far greater numbers than did the Europeans.   

     On Monday, October 13, the nation celebrates Columbus Day. Four states, including Nebraska, co-celebrate Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day, a day to reflect upon what happened 533 years ago. 

Years ago, in these pages, I confessed that I have read Daniel Defoe’s 1719 fictional tale, “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” multiple times, as well as listened to the audio version.

     Crusoe’s ability to build a life alone on a deserted island in the Caribbean that lasted for over two decades I find fascinating. Scholars label the book “the father of the English novel.” 

     With a little digging and research, I learned that Daniel Defoe’s own life was as fascinating. 

     The man was in and out of legal trouble, often for writing libelous political comments about others. He was in and out of financial trouble, for insuring ships that failed to return to England with the goods, or for running a business into the ground, out of cash, out of profits.  

     Bankruptcy courts, arrest warrants, harsh judges, the pillory, and time spent in a debtors’ prison was part of Daniel Defoe’s resume. Misfortune hounded him. Of himself, he wrote, “No man has tasted differing fortunes more, and thirteen times I have been rich and poor.”

     He may have died when hiding out of sight from his creditors. 

     His marriage to Mary Tuffley though was stable, eight children and 47 years together.

     In 1692, at the age of 32, Defoe declared himself bankrupt because of a debt of 17,000 English pounds. For ten years he struggled to pull himself out of this predicament.

     Yet, Defoe was a prolific writer, 545 titles across a multitude of subjects over different genre: politics, religion, drama, pamphlets, tracts, travel, history, advice, satire, poetry, domesticity, science, technology, propaganda, war, and a host of others.

     Indeed, “The Oxford Handbook on Daniel DeFoe” lists 36 chapters, each written by a different modern scholar on some aspect of Defoe’s works. The first is entitled, “Defoe’s Life and Times,” and the last is “Defoe on Screen.”

     From 1704 until 1713, Defoe wrote and published a periodical, “A Review of the Affairs of France,” three times a week, reporting upon events during the War of the Spanish Succession. That meant he faced a deadline every couple of days, an unimaginable amount of stress.

     In 1702, Defoe published a 29-page pamphlet, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church” and fell into deep trouble.

     In it, Defoe argued that the English monarch and Anglican church officials must exterminate the Dissenters, those Protestants who refused to conform to the Church of England.

     He wrote, “If ever you will establish the best Christian Church in the world. If ever you will suppress the spirit of enthusiasm. If ever you will free the nation from this viperous brood. If you will leave your posterity free from faction and rebellion, this is the time.

     “This is the time to pull up this heretical weed of sedition, that has so long disturbed the peace of our church, and poisoned the good corn.”

     People read his words and felt outraged. Although no author’s name appeared in its pages, his enemies quickly identified Defoe and pressed charges against him for seditious libel. 

     He was arrested in May of 1703, and a judge found him guilty. Defoe was ordered to pay a stiff fine, to stand in the pillory three times, and to serve a lengthy jail sentence.

     Most literary scholars are convinced that Defoe wrote this pamphlet as tongue-in-cheek, not to be taken literally, but as a hoax to show how absurd political and religious leaders can act and think. However, “the irony blew up in Defoe’s face.”

     According to Daniel Defoe, September 30 was the day that Robinson Crusoe swam to shore from a sinking ship, once it stuck fast to a sand bar. The other ten men drowned. Each year on September 30, on a post, Robinson notched another mark, and thus kept a tentative calendar.

     For me, the final days of September marks another birthday, another anniversary. I married for the first and only time two days after my birthday, a convenient way to remind me.

Anthropologists divide the Lakota Sioux into seven bands. One band is called the Brulé or the Sicangu, or the Burnt Thighs. In August of 1854, a village of the Brulé people, led by chief Conquering Bear, were encamped along the North Platte River just into Wyoming.

     One day, a cow that belonged to a Mormon settler wandered into the Brulé camp and one of the band’s warriors, High Forehead, shot and killed the cow. He wanted to eat steak.

     Conquering Bear rode the ten miles to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, midway between Lingle and Guernsey, Wyoming, and offered a horse to the Mormon settler as compensation for his cow.

     Lieutenant John Grattan, 24-years-old and fresh out out West Point, was determined to arrest High Forehead. He and 29 soldiers marched to the Brulé camp, and demanded the warrior.

     One U.S. Army soldier panicked and fired a first shot. The Brulé warriors surrounded Grattan and the other 29 soldiers and shot them. Conquering Bear also was killed during the melee.  

     In November of 1854, three Brulé warriors assaulted a mail coach near Fort Laramie, and killed three white men, taking the coach’s gold.

     The Brulé, now led by Chief Little Thunder, headed east into Nebraska to hunt buffalo.

     Reports of these two incidents enraged government officials back east. President Franklin Pierce assigned Brigadier General William S. Harney to lead an attack upon the Lakota Brulé.     

     Blue Water Creek begins in central Garden County, Nebraska, and runs more or less straight south until it joins the North Platte River just west of Lewellen, Nebraska. North of that junction a mere three or so miles is where the Lakota Brulé were encamped in early September 1855.

     A sixteen-page article, with text and colored pictures about the Battle of Blue Water, appeared last November in the magazine, the Smithsonian, published by the Washington D.C. museum.

     Tim Madigan, the article’s author, wrote, 

     “Some 40 tepees, home to about 200 people, stood beside the water. Women would have been at work tanning hides for tepees, moccasins, shirts, and breeches, and drying and curing meat for the coming northern winter. Warriors would have seen to weapons and horses.”

     On September 3, the Lakota Brulé women and men looked to the southern horizon and saw General Harney and his troops riding their way. Fearing for their lives, the women pulled down their tepees, grabbed their buffalo hides and cured meat, and fled north. 

     Chief Little Thunder negotiated with Harney, but the General ordered his soldiers to attack. 

     By accounts written later, the Battle of Blue Water was a massacre, for 86 Lakota Brulé  men, women, and children were killed, but only four U.S. Army soldiers. 

     A 25-year-old officer and West Point graduate named Lieutenant Gouverneur K. Warren, a mapmaker who did not take part in the attack, recorded in his diary the atrocities he witnessed.

     “After getting to camp I dressed their wounds. The feeling of sympathy for the wounded women and children and deep regret for their being so, I found universal. It could not be helped.”

     At the massacre’s site, Warren collected dozens of Brulé handcrafted items, including dolls, moccasins, buckskin pants, feather bonnets, and war shirts, taken “from the bodies of the slain.”

     He carried the artifacts back east in 1856, and donated the 69 items to the Smithsonian.

     In recent years, the descendants of Chief Little Thunder—Karen, Phil, and Harry Little Thunder—have asked Smithsonian officials to return the Warren donations to the Lakota people. 

     On August 27, 2025, Tim Madigan wrote a followup article for the Smithsonian and reported that Smithsonian officials turned over the Warren donations to the Lakota people during that last week of August, just over two weeks ago, in time for the 170th anniversary of the Battle.

     For the next two years, the Lakota will store the donations in a building atop a hill at the Ash Hollow State Historical Park, perhaps a dozen miles south of the battle site, until “the Lakota people decide their ultimate disposition. Only the Lakota will have access to them.” 

  In “A Brief History of Time,” first published in 1988, the British physicist Stephen Hawking explained how space and time are connected, interwoven, interdependent with each other. Since the universe displays massive amounts of space, it also displays massive amounts of time. 

     When a massive object, like a planet, enters into spacetime, a warping, called gravity, results.

     Certain wise human beings on planet Earth noticed that nature gives us just three sets of time: a day based upon the sun rising and setting, a month based upon the moon’s transformation from full moon to full moon every 29.5 days, and a year based upon the completion of four seasons. 

     In an attempt to control and rein in time, certain other wise human beings chopped up time into segments: seconds, minutes, hours, and weeks.           

     It was the ancient Egyptians who decided to split daylight into twelve segments. How?

     They looked at a sundial that threw a shadow onto a plate, and then set a series of twelve stakes onto that plate that marked the shadow’s progress throughout the day. Why 12 and not ten? The reason is that those Egyptians used base 12, the duodecimal number system.

     The ancient Greeks made the hours uniform, the same length throughout the year. It was an ancient Greek named Hipparchus, who suggested that officials divide a day into 24 hours, based upon 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness that appear on the two equinoxes each year.

     The ancient Babylonians in Mesopotamia came up with the idea of splitting the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds. Why 60? Those ancient Babylonians used base 60, a sexagesimal system.

     They noticed that 60 is highly divisible, more so than 100. A total of 12 numbers can divide evenly into 60: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. However, only 9 numbers can divide evenly into 100: 1, 2, 4 5, 10, 20, 25, 50, and 100.

     The seven days for one week originated with the Babylonians and Sumerians, who gave seven celestial names to a sequence of seven days, including the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Three of those names, you and I still use: Sunday, Monday, and Saturday.

     Tyr, or Tiu, or Tiw was the Norse god of war and justice. Woden was an Anglo-Saxon god, similar to the Norse God, Odin. Thor was the Norse god of thunder, and Freyja was the Norse goddess of marriage. From the Norse gods, we have Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

     Because the year is 365 1/4 days long, every four years, the calendar-makers add one more day onto February, and call it leap year. Last year was leap year, and the next is 2028.

     If you divide 365 days by 7, you get 52.14 weeks. That fractional part of a week equals one day. Hence, in 2025, January 1 was on a Wednesday, and December 31 will fall on a Wednesday, 52 weeks and one day more. In 2026, the year begins on a Thursday, and will end on a Thursday.

     Each week contains 168 hours: 56 hours for sleep (8 hours x 7 days), 40 hours of work at the office or school or shop (8 hours x 5 days), 32 hours for the weekend (16 hours awake x 2 days), and 40 free-time hours, mornings and evenings when we eat, relax, and reconnect with family.

     Monday is Labor Day, a day when our country recognizes our work force with a day off from work. Throughout the year, an employee exchanges her or his time for a paycheck, a bargain. 

     Time moves forward, forcing more space between us today and our day of conception and birth. Time never stops sprinting. Indeed, it speeds up as we age. Ken Lange said, “Time is relentless, marching forever onward, stripping away everything it its path.”

     A quote on time. “Children and spouses spell the word ‘love’ with four letters t-i-m-e.” Our affection for children and spouses equals the time and space we give to them.

     Enjoy your day off on Monday. 

On Sunday, July 13, there appeared in the “New York Times Book Review” a quick look at Charlie English’s new non-fiction book, entitled, “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.” I have not read the book yet, but I will soon.

     Joseph Finder, author of the review, declares that “English’s book is a bracing reminder that, not so long ago, forbidden literature really could help tip the balance of history.”

     A startling idea: that literature can redirect history, topple dictatorships, and subdue tyrants.

     It is difficult for young Americans today to understand, that in the latter half of the twentieth century, millions of people who lived in the Soviet Union bloc, north and south across most of Eastern Europe, could not read what they wanted to read. Liberties to read and think were cut.

     Communist party officials, with their strong ties to Marxist-Leninist principles, prohibited Western books, from people either owning, selling, buying, copying, printing, publishing, or reading them. Hence the phrase, “forbidden literature.” The risk was imprisonment.

     Finder writes, “Even a volume about carrots might be banned if it hinted at the joys of gardening outside the collective [farm].” The people were starved into stupidity, lacking ideas. 

     Adam Michnik, a leading book smuggler in Poland, wrote, “A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity.”

     For me, a new word, “samizat.” It means, “The clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially in former Communist countries of Eastern Europe.”

     George Minden, an official at the CIA, based in Manhattan, worked to promote smuggling.  He and his colleagues formed QRHELPFUL, code name for CIA’s book smuggling operation. Together they shipped ten million books into the Soviet Union bloc over several decades.

     George Minden said, “Truth is contagious.” 

     Joseph Finder said of the smuggling, “This was spy craft as soul craft.”

     What books? the Bible, George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” spy novels by John LeCarre, mystery novels by Agatha Christie, stacks of “Cosmopolitan” magazines, plus “Three Hundred Years of American Painting.”

     Although those titles do not sound subversive, Communist Party officials thought otherwise.

     Minden also smuggled in typewriters, duplicators, printing presses, and copy machines.

      A single copy of “1984” may have been retyped or rewritten by hand multiple times, or it was printed on hidden printing presses. With copy machines, smugglers copied it countless times.

     Finder calls those copies, “flying libraries.” “They devoured them in a night, and then passed them on to their friends, so the circle of readers was far larger than the few thousand copies run off on hidden duplicators.” 

     Of the Soviet Bloc countries, Minden enjoyed the most success in Poland.

     Some CIA officials ridiculed Minden’s covert book-smuggling scheme. “Real men don’t sell books.” They refused to believe “the idea that books could topple regimes.” 

     Yet, please remember that Lenin said, “Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.”  

     The cost for Minden’s book smuggling was a fraction of the hundreds of millions that the American taxpayers, via the CIA, paid to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

     In 1980, Lech Walesa and his trade union, Solidarity, went on strike at the Gdansk shipyard and won the people’s support across Poland. In 1989, voters elected him President of Poland.

     Per Charlie English, “it was forbidden literature that helped to win the cold war.” Per Joseph Finder, “a paperback in the right hands helped crack the cement of totalitarian thinking.”