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one of the ways European colonizers were able to solve the now-infamous local knowledge problems (I.E. being reliant on indigenous peoples for survival) was by more or less bringing European ecosystems with them.
Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon goes hand in hand with the world-historical mass genocide of indigenes, and the always-troublesome “wilderness myth” haunting conservation movements to this day.
As indigenous people across North America were killed by germ and blade, their very particular un-European environmental management techniques stopped with them. Thus, most American forests & plains were no longer being continually cut back. A lot more space for plants to grow.
However, this opened niche was not entirely filled in by rebounding American flora. No, it was filled in by plants & animals that Europeans brought over with them!
There are a bunch of records of Europeans, as they continued to spread westward and so on, being shocked to find that America wasn’t just filled with wildlife too much to move, but with wildlife *that they recognized from Europe*.
The settlers hadn’t gone that far west before, so they often thought 1) that no human beings had ever tried to live in these (actually just rebounding) environments, and 2) that divers European flora, really just colonizing faster than they, was native to the new world.
Such ecological invasion didn’t just benefit the Europeans, it also harmed indigenes. The flora and fauna they would spend their lives learning to identify and hunt was suddenly supplanted by a variety of wildlife foreign to America, whose secrets were jealously kept by settlers.
For the most part! Some invaders turned out to be easy allies of indigenous Americans (the introduction of the horse, for example, was extremely beneficial for the Sioux), but overall Europeans gained and indigenes lost.
