For the next installment, see Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia.
Imagine a more Habsburg-involved colonization of the New World (at least before the very late French-driven attempt that inspired the Cinco de Mayo holiday.) Charles V (Carlos Quinto) was, after all, both the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor - and you might imagine that the settlement of California especially would have gone very differently.
The Spanish, thinking more in practical imperial terms rather than as conquistadors eager to repeat the glories of the recent Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors, would gather and train troops from the native nations up and down the West Coast of the New World. Picture an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission natives, complete with cavalry and infantry units, with German-speaking white officers - wearing Czarist uniforms from the nearby Russian colonies on the northern coast. They would be the elite men of the empire, the Holy Roman Empire's answer to Britain's Gurkhas, dispatched from a central location to defend the imperial governor in the event of a revolt.
Outlandish? There's this from Wikipedia, about New Helvetia, which would later become Sacramento:
The settlement was defended by an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission Indians, all consisting of 150 infantry, 50 cavalry, and German-speaking white officers. This group, wearing Russian uniforms purchased from Fort Ross, marched to the Pueblo of Los Angeles area and briefly defended Governor Manuel Micheltorena from the revolt of the Californios.The difference is that the German-speakers were Swiss and not Austrian, as John Sutter founded New Helvetia and named it after his ancestral homeland. Perhaps most unlikely of all, Sutter is today buried in Lititz, Pennsylvania, in good old Pennsylvania Dutch country. More on strange north European involvement in the Pacific - Russian Hawai'i here, and an almost-war in Samoa between American and Germany in the late 1800s.
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