The great majority of Native Americans who had made what is now America their home for tens of thousands of years were killed outright by European colonists. Diseases brought to the Americas from Europe, including small pox and the plague, also decimated the indigenous tribes. Furthermore inter-tribal warfare, spurred on by the political interests of Europeans, enslavement, and the mass killing and forced relocation in the nineteenth century of the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who still managed to survive all conspired to nearly destroy native tribes and their cultures.