Shaving was already part of European culture in Columbus' time. In the 15th century, it was customary for the elite to have barber-surgeons who shaved their beards. These professionals would flit between shaving their steel straight razors on the scalps of the nobles to lancing the wounds of the sick and injured.
However, no one is sure whether Columbus wore a beard throughout his years as an explorer. That is because nobody today knows what he looks like. But if we think of him, we picture a tall, vigorous Italian guy with a blonde beard and hair and blue eyes.
No beard, no problem
When Columbus and his bros reached the American coast, you best believe they were relieved to see the natives having no manly facial manes.
Alex Kerner, in his paper Beard and Conquest: the Role of Hair in the Construction of Gendered Spanish Attitudes towards the American Indians in the Sixteenth Century, said that the absence of beards among Native Americans gave the conquistadores a sense of superiority that ultimately fueled their perception of the natives as beings that could legitimately be subdued.
He wrote that:
“The reference to hair is sometimes made in conjunction with or right next to a description of what in the view of the Christians, was the natives’ low moral standards, as if the natives’ different attitude to hair also expressed their lack of virtue, their non-observance of moral codes pertaining to sex, and even worse, as an expression of the male natives’ natural tendency towards homosexuality.”
The general absence of facial hair among Native Americans showed their weakness as a race because he thought it characterized submissiveness and inferiority. His European beard, meanwhile, gave him moral superiority and the license to subdue just about everyone in the New World.
On the other hand, the natives are probably looking at them in disgust as in their culture. These intruders looked barbaric and unclean.
So, no. Columbus was not accountable for influencing the Native Americans to have clean-shaven faces. But he and his ilk sure did modernize the way Native Americans groomed their hairs.
Just looking at the preview pics, looks pretty clean and hygienic for the late 19th century and not a pube in sight.
Peer pressure is always something to take into acount.
This is not Vikings/Bikers/street whores galore, you should know by now, had you played the game.