Pre-1600: Americas: The People: Overview

Ancient North America. North America has been home to humans for tens of thousands of years. The first people came from Asia, and they brought with them a Stone Age culture called Clovis that they spread from coast to coast and from pole to pole during their pursuit of the giant mammals that roamed the continent. Thousands of years after the first settlement of North America, the common Clovis culture that the immigrants had brought from Asia splintered into hundreds of different Archaic cultures based on hunting and gathering. The Archaic cultures reflected the particular demands of the different environments in which the people lived. For example, in the arid Southwest, Archaic peoples hunted the fauna of the desert and gathered roots to feed themselves while the inhabitants of the forests of the East subsisted on white-tailed deer and various berries, fruits, and roots. Over time the gathering of wild plants developed into a rudimentary form of horticulture that enabled Archaic societies to grow larger and larger. Horticulture ultimately gave rise to many of the Classical cultures of North America that the first Europeans encountered during their voyages of exploration. In the Southwest, Classical Indians developed methods of irrigation to grow corn and other crops, and they invented the adobe tradition of home construction to shelter them from the hot days and keep them warm during the cool nights. The Classical Mound Builders who lived east of the Mississippi River grew corn on river floodplains and built great ceremonial mounds to honor the sun god. On the plains people combined farming with buffalo hunting in a lifestyle attuned to the seasons, and in the Pacific Northwest salmon, not corn or buffalo, was the native inhabitants’ staff of life.

First Contacts. There are several theories as to who actually discovered North America. Questionable evidence has put navigators from Polynesia, sailors from ancient Egypt and Phoenicia, fishermen from China and Japan, and priests from Ireland in touch with the native population. A more substantial case can be made for fishermen from the Basque region of Spain, who, while dipping their fishing nets into the waters off the coast of Newfoundland, may have traded with the local inhabitants for furs. While it may be interesting to speculate about such early undocumented visits, the first verifiable landfall by nonnatives was made by the Vikings at the end of the eleventh century A.D.

The Age of Exploration. Not until the fifteenth century, however, did oceanic exploration and the building of overseas colonies capture the imagination of Europeans. How historians have approached the so-called Age of Discovery has changed over time, and the terms historians have used to describe the colonization of North America have undergone substantial revision over the past several decades. The voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot as well as the overland expeditions of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Hernando de Soto were once lauded as milestones in an age of epic adventure. But the recent commemoration of the quincentenary of Columbus’s landfall has reoriented scholars’ and the public’s appreciation of the pivotal events in the early history of what Europeans called the “New World.”

The New World. The Europeans who first visited the shores of North America in the decades following Columbus’s landfall were as diverse as the native inhabitants. The Spanish had built on earlier advances in sailing and navigation made by their neighbors the Portuguese and gradually worked their way west across the Atlantic Ocean until Columbus found land in the Caribbean in October 1492. While he had not been the first European to set foot in the New World, Columbus was the first to make a case through various published books and pamphlets that Europeans could open regular channels of contact and colonization with the land he believed to be Asia. France also sought to participate in the rush for colonies, but religious strife and an inability to colonize successfully the St. Lawrence River Valley militated against the creation of a strong French presence in North America before 1600. Unwilling to allow the Pope and his secular agents to dominate the New World, the English brought the might of Protestantism to bear on the race for colonies. Their decisions on where to explore and settle and when to do it were as much dictated by what their Spanish and French counterparts were doing as they were by their own needs. Nevertheless, England’s initial forays in colonization were no more successful than France’s efforts.

Consequences of Spanish Colonization. The Spanish attempted to pattern their colonies in North America on organizational models developed in the conquest of Central and South America. Stiff resistance from the native population as well as the inability of Spain to finance and outfit adequately its colonial enterprises frustrated the Crown’s ambitions. While explorers chased after the mythic lands of Chicora, Cibola, and Quivira, friars and settlers eked out a life in the harsh environments of Florida and New Mexico. Despite their lack of success they did exert a profound influence on the Native Americans who prayed in the missions and who labored on the estates of the Spanish landowners. By far the greatest impact of Spanish colonization, however, was the spread of European diseases among the native populations. On the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus established the first permanent Spanish colony, the native Arawak population plummeted from eight million in 1492 to two hundred in 1550. In Florida, Indian populations declined by 95 percent between 1565 and the mid 1600s. Among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, the story was no different; in four decades of contact with the Spanish, their numbers declined by one-half. Spanish North America, to borrow a phrase from one historian, was “a widowed land.”

Consequences of French Colonization. Fears that Spain might replicate the success of its southern colonies in North America caused France to enter the Age of Discovery. Early exploration of the North American coast and several ill-fated attempts to settle the St. Lawrence River Valley and Florida laid the foundations of what became in the 1600s a far-flung and profitable empire. Still, as of 1600 there was no permanent French presence in North America. But if they had failed to fulfill their imperial ambitions, their presence in the New World, unlike that of the Spanish, was not associated with the catastrophic Native American population losses that characterized Florida and New Mexico.

Consequences of English Colonization. It is easy to assume that the English beat the Spanish and the French in the race to colonize North America because the history of colonization after 1600 is largely the story of English growth and expansion. Before the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, however, the English experienced the same problems as the Spanish and the French. They were unable to build viable colonies, and they could not overcome native resistance. Although the two attempts to settle Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina were dismal failures, they nevertheless only whetted the English appetite for the gold, silver, and other riches that they believed they would discover in the New World.

The People of North America in 1600. By the end of the Age of Discovery, North America was still firmly in native hands. Neither the French nor the English had been able to found a permanent settlement. The Spanish had been more successful, but only barely. Roughly six hundred soldiers, priests, and settlers and a handful of slaves lived in Florida, and a little more than one thousand colonists maintained a tentative grip on the Pueblos in New Mexico. Native North America, however, contained hundreds of different cultures. Some groups had witnessed firsthand European attempts to settle the continent, but most others had only experienced contact with Europeans through word of mouth or through the new diseases that raced inland along indigenous trade routes. The total native population north of the Rio Grande at the time of Columbus’s landing has been a topic of great debate. Early estimates made by anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s placed the figure at around one million, which fit well with the population of Native Americans living at that time. Subsequent revisions, however, have suggested that the number was somewhere between seven and eighteen million around 1500. How many natives died of disease, starvation, and war-related causes between 1500 and 1600 is impossible to determine.