AH Challenge: Another North American Indian Tribe Grows Like The Navaho

The title says it all. The Navaho grew from around 4000 people to multiple hundreds of thousands in the roughly 500 years of European contact. Figure out a plausible scenario that allows some other North American Indian tribe to have the same percentage population growth in spite of virgin field European diseases, wars, etc.
 
One of the reasons the Navajo grew in numbers is because they became shepherds and still kept gardens. The introduced horses are also the reason the Plains Indians became so numerous. So have more tribes adopt some sort of livestock and their numbers'll probably grow.
 
Well the main reason they grew was that they adapted European methods while having the advantage of being on marginal lands for European agriculture.
 
To get it out of the way, I don't believe this path would have been available to the Great Plains tribes, because steel plows capable of plowing the thick prairie land of the Plains were a late invention.
 
Could the Plains tribes have taken up bison herding?

At first it'd probable just be following them around, killing off predators, if they figure it out maybe killing the more aggressive bulls, etc.

Would they have the time to turn it into actual herding?


Or perhaps easier, when horses get onto the plains cattle do as well. A ready made nomadic herding package.
 
Could the Plains tribes have taken up bison herding?

At first it'd probable just be following them around, killing off predators, if they figure it out maybe killing the more aggressive bulls, etc.

Would they have the time to turn it into actual herding?


Or perhaps easier, when horses get onto the plains cattle do as well. A ready made nomadic herding package.

Domestication takes centuries if not longer, the second problem was that they didn't have the time left, the third was that they were in no shape given all the disruptions they suffered.

Mind you it's not impossible but as stated earlier you need a culture ready to adopt and adapt to new conditions, on land Europeans won't kill them for, avoid massive disruptions from diseases, whiskey, and guns, ready to work with Europeans, and so on all at once.
 
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I suspect that Utah might be a workable location. It's fertile enough that a lot could be done, but isolated enough that its not really practical to encroach on it in the way that worked elsewhere. Nor does it have the massive mineral strikes waiting that will flood a place like California or Nevada in pretty much any timeline.

If a large and organized settler movement hadn't targeted it specifically, it might have been quite a while before pressure built up on the natives there. And if the area had already seen the native population grow substantially, it might be possible to maintain that indefinitely.
 
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