Europeans hardly acted like saints, but it's still true that orders of magnitude more natives - perhaps as many as 90% - were killed by disease than by direct action of the colonists.
I highly recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann which talks about this (and much else). He explains how scientific estimates of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas keep getting revised upwards as we discover more evidence of just how many natives were wiped out by disease. It took Europeans hundreds of years to explore the entire continent; by the time they arrived in, say, the American West, the land was largely empty and the Indian population was very low. Only more recently have we started to figure out that European diseases spread through the continent much faster than European settlers did. It's likely that some of these "sparsely populated" areas were in fact much more populated in 1492, but the population collapsed through disease many generations before Europeans came into contact.
I don't think we can fault Europeans too severely for this; the germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the late 19th century, and Europeans suffered greatly from epidemics too (when Colombus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 it was only about 150 years after the Black Death had killed a third of the population of the Europe.) But it's a fascinating book, and it's mysterious and sad to think that so many complex societies were devastated and erased while leaving so little trace of their existence.
I highly recommend the book 1491 by Charles Mann which talks about this (and much else). He explains how scientific estimates of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas keep getting revised upwards as we discover more evidence of just how many natives were wiped out by disease. It took Europeans hundreds of years to explore the entire continent; by the time they arrived in, say, the American West, the land was largely empty and the Indian population was very low. Only more recently have we started to figure out that European diseases spread through the continent much faster than European settlers did. It's likely that some of these "sparsely populated" areas were in fact much more populated in 1492, but the population collapsed through disease many generations before Europeans came into contact.
I don't think we can fault Europeans too severely for this; the germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the late 19th century, and Europeans suffered greatly from epidemics too (when Colombus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 it was only about 150 years after the Black Death had killed a third of the population of the Europe.) But it's a fascinating book, and it's mysterious and sad to think that so many complex societies were devastated and erased while leaving so little trace of their existence.