Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.
> Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.
Have you read Rousseau? The man never met a native American, and what accounts he read of their lives were certainly exaggerations, if not fabrications. In his own life, he was notoriously irresponsible. He fathered and abandoned for the orphanage -- a death sentence in those days -- five children. He was habitually leeching off friends and nobles who were susceptible to his charms, until he exhausted their patience and good will, including by e.g. seducing their wives at times.
In short, he was a scoundrel, and he saw in the the story of the natives something which he desperately wanted for himself, but which wasn't there: the possibility of a life free from societal constraint, obligations to be decent, to use one's life productively, to be responsible for others, to live morally. The man confabulated for the natives a lifestyle free of the bonds under which he chafed in France -- and we have been laboring under his romantic "noble savage" delusion ever since.
I mention all this to say, anyone who would read about the lives of natives would do well to read a little Rousseau, then read a little about the man, and mentally subtract his influence which is virtually omnipresent in all subsequent popular thought about natives.
TLDR; nobody wants to consider that the colonel may have been the good guy in Avatar, and Sully a delusional loner.