Both of these books were fiction, and deliberately written, to a certain extent, to show how white folks with the right stuff could overwhelm their problems with gunpowder and metal blades. In reality, it doesn't work that way. Technological societies show up in he wilderness bringing everything with them, even their energy sources, they don't conquer the environment, they just ignore it and bring their own. And as soon as their supply line is cut they have to withdraw or die...or go native.

The real success stories are not those of technological societies, but neolithic ones, who were able to move into hostile environments like the polar regions, the deserts, rain forests, the empty praries and savannas of the world, and even the boreal forests. My favorite is the Polynesians, who used stone tools and the scarce resources of their islands to build fleets of ocean-crossing canoes and developed the technology to settle the Pacific Basin.

The trick is not to use your machines to conquer an environment, but to develop an indigenous technology from the local resources which can be used to occupy a harsh place. This is what human beings are really good at. But they can't do it overnight, and they have to move into the area gradually and learn as they go long. If they show up with too much technology, I suspect they will expend all their resources trying to keep it running instead of
developing the simpler techniques the new home demands.

This is not to say an injection of a new technology can't help turn a corner. My favorite example there is the Plains Indians, who lived a marginal and subsistence existence on the borders of the prarie, and when suddenly discovering the introduced European horse, quickly developed a technology based on it and the bison that allowed them to master that environment and for them to flourish there. And they still did it with stone tools! Firearms, woven cloth and forged metal blades came later as trade items, and were quickly adopted as a convenience, but they could have prospered without them. It was the horse that was the catalyst. But they did everything else on their own, in only a couple of centuries. Like the Polynesians and their blue water canoes, the Inuit and their dog sleds in the North, and the desert nomads with their flocks, these are achievements the naked ape can take pride in.