In an interview on Rewriting America

Your third book is by Bartolomé de las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. This is the same man who transcribed Columbus’s journal?

Yes. He arrived in the New World as a young man and was so horrified by the Spanish campaign to conquer Cuba in the early 16th century that he became a Dominican friar. He preached a lot in the New World but he also presented his case to the Spanish crown and became a champion for the Indians. He tried to set up utopian communities of Indians he’d converted to Christianity and he was famous for engaging in a public political debate in Spain on the side of the Indians. He argued that they were human beings with souls who should be treated as citizens of the crown. Sepulveda, his adversary, argued the opposite and that both moral and theological law allowed the enslavement of the Indians. So this is his polemic against the Spanish brutality. He sent it to the Spanish crown saying how barbarous the Spanish conquistadors were.

How barbarous were they?

Very barbarous indeed, according to las Casas anyway. They were eviscerating random villagers and massacring whole villages. This was grist to the mill of Protestant anti-Catholics right up to the 19th century. He helped create the image of barbarous Spanish Catholics that persists even now. He was only right up to a point, really, but what I find interesting is that in the history of European America it is easy to forget the Indians, but until the West was won in the 19th century, the Indians were the single most important factor in America, most of the country was populated by them and yet they fade into the background of history like the landscape, as though they were bison or something. In fact, they were a variety of differently sophisticated and unsophisticated political units. They were the people in North and South America who the Spaniards met. The Protestants tended to move them along, but the Spanish took thousands of concubines and inter-married like mad.