Gregory Bodenhamer In telling the history of the United States and also of the nations of the Western Hemisphere in general, historians have wrestled with the problem of what to call the hemisphere's first inhabitants. Under the mistaken impression he had reached the “Indies,” explorer Christopher Columbus called the people he met “Indians.” This was an error in identification that has persisted for more than five hundred years, for the inhabitants of North and South America had no collective name by which they called themselves.

In telling the history of the United States and also of the nations of the Western Hemisphere in general, historians have wrestled with the problem of what to call the hemisphere's first inhabitants. Under the mistaken impression he had reached the “Indies,” explorer Christopher Columbus called the people he met “Indians.” This was an error in identification that has persisted for more than five hundred years, for the inhabitants of North and South America had no collective name by which they called themselves.

Historians, anthropologists, and political activists have offered various names, none fully satisfactory. Anthropologists have used “aborigine,” but the term suggests a primitive level of existence inconsistent with the cultural level of many tribes. Another term, “Amerindian,” which combines Columbus's error with the name of another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci (whose name was the source of “America”), lacks any historical context. Since the 1960s, “Native American” has come into popular favor, though some activists prefer “American Indian.” In the absence of a truly representative term, descriptive references such as “native peoples” or “indigenous peoples,” though vague, avoid European influence. In recent years, some argument has developed over whether to refer to tribes in the singular or plural—Apache or Apaches—with supporters on both sides demanding political correctness.

Arrival of the first inhabitants. Apart from the brief visit of the Scandinavians in the early eleventh century, the Western Hemisphere remained unknown to Europe until Columbus's voyage in 1492. However, the native peoples of North and South America arrived from Asia long before, in a series of migrations that began perhaps as early as forty thousand years ago across the land bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska.

The first Americans found a hunter's paradise. Mammoths and mastodons, ancestors of the elephant, and elk, moose, and caribou abounded on the North American continent. Millions of bison lived on the Great Plains, as did antelope, deer, and other game animals, providing the earliest inhabitants of the Americas, the Paleo-Indians, with a land rich in food sources. Because food was abundant, the population grew, and human settlement spread throughout the Western Hemisphere rather quickly.

The Paleo-Indians were hunter-gatherers who lived in small groups of not more than fifty people. They were constantly on the move, following the herds of big game, apparently recognizing the rights of other bands to hunting grounds. These early native people developed a fluted stone point for spears that made their hunting more efficient. Evidence of such fluted points has surfaced throughout the Americas.

Life on the North American continent. Anthropologists have found an astonishing variety of culture and language groups among the native peoples of North America. Tribes living in close proximity might have spoken totally unrelated languages, while tribes living hundreds of miles from each other might have shared similar languages. Regions in which a population shares a similar lifestyle based on environmental conditions are known as culture areas. Although North America can be divided into many such regions, the most significant are the Southwest, Great Plains, and Eastern Woodlands.

The Southwest. Following the climate changes after the end of the last ice age (about ten thousand years ago), agriculture gradually developed in North America. The native peoples of central Mexico began planting maize, beans, and squash around 5000 B.C., and the cultivation of these crops slowly spread northward. In the desert Southwest, the Hohokam culture (southern Arizona) constructed an elaborate network of irrigation canals to water their fields. Farming meant a settled life, and the Hohokam lived in permanent villages with as many as several hundred residents. The villages served as economic, religious, and political centers.

East of the Hohokam, the Anasazi lived where the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah meet at the Four Corners. The Anasazi built permanent homes and developed villages with as many as fifteen hundred people. At the high point of Anasazi culture, Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico had twelve villages sustaining some fifteen thousand people, with straight roads connecting outlying settlements. Both the Hohokam and Anasazi established trade connections with tribes in what would become Mexico and California.

A major and dramatic change affected the Hohokam and Anasazi societies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however. At that time, a prolonged drought drastically reduced the water supply in the region. The area could no longer provide for a large population, and the villages were abandoned as the people left in search of more hospitable areas, many settling along the upper Rio Grande and establishing the pueblos that continue to this day.

The Great Plains. In contrast to the Southwest tribes, early native peoples of the Great Plains were hunters, relying on bison and other Plains animals to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Tribes followed the large bison herds and claimed extensive areas as their hunting grounds. Conflicts over territory led to a perpetual rivalry among the tribes that bordered on warfare.

With their dependence on hunting, Plains tribes had difficulty maintaining their standard of living. Of necessity nomadic, they were compelled to keep material possessions to a minimum. Their only domesticated animal was the dog. Limited to what they could carry with them, Plains peoples lived a harsh existence. The horse, introduced with the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century, transformed the culture of the Great Plains.

The Eastern Woodlands. The “Eastern Woodlands” refers to the large, heavily forested area extending from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic seacoast, where several important cultures flourished. The Adena of the Ohio River Valley (fifth century B.C.), who left hundreds of burial mounds, developed into a larger cultural group known as the Hopewell, which continued to build elaborate earthen works. Although the Adena-Hopewell peoples remained primarily hunter-gatherers, archeological evidence indicates that they had an extensive trading network stretching to the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.

The first true farmers of the Eastern Woodlands were the Mississippians of the central Mississippi River Valley. The most important Mississippian center was Cahokia, which was located near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (St. Louis, Missouri). Cahokia had as many as forty thousand residents in a six-square-mile area, and by the thirteenth century its large population was straining to grow enough food to sustain itself. Aggressive neighbors also contributed to the instability of Cahokia, and the people finally scattered to form smaller villages.

Early North American society and culture. Estimates of the population of North America at the time of European contact have been revised upward by modern scholarship to as many as ten million. Although the native peoples varied widely, they did share some important social and cultural traits.

In modern America, society is chiefly based on the nuclear family (mother, father, and children), but kinship groups—the extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins—were key to the social relations among the native peoples. Among tribes as different as the Pueblo of the Southwest and the Iroquois of the Northeast, kinship was determined by the female line. The clan was composed of several kinship groups that claimed descent from a common ancestor, often a woman. The roles assigned to men and women were clearly defined. The men hunted, engaged in trade, made war, and were the tribal leaders, while the women cared for the children, gathered food, and cultivated crops. The exception to this pattern was in the Southwest where men also worked the fields. In societies where matrilineal descent was important, women had more responsibilities. They controlled property, distributed food, and either advised or were the real power in tribal councils.

Native peoples believed that nature was sacred. The sun, moon, stars, mountains, rivers, trees, and animals had spiritual power and were either the gods themselves or the abode of gods. Tribal creation myths were most often based on the interplay of these natural forces. While some tribes accepted the idea of a supreme being, polytheism was the rule. The shaman was considered the intermediary between the people and the gods in the spirit world. He or she also interpreted the visions and dreams that were an important part of religious practice. To induce dreams, an individual might fast for several days, use drugs, or go through a physical ordeal. In addition to rituals to bring rain or ensure a good harvest or hunt, ceremonies marking life-cycle events—birth, puberty, marriage, and death—were common.

There is a tendency to view North American society at the end of the fifteenth century as a pre-Columbian Garden of Eden corrupted by the arrival of the Europeans. This notion of an idyllic place where everyone was one with the environment and each other denies native peoples their own history. The Mississippians, for example, practiced torture and human sacrifice as part of their death cult. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest had a very rigid class structure based on private property and made slaves out of war captives and debtors. Among the Natchez in the Southeast, the hereditary nobles under the chief, or “Great Sun,” oppressed the majority of the tribe.

European Contact

For the native peoples of North America, contact with Europeans was less dramatic than that experienced by the Aztec and Inca empires upon the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Nonetheless, Spanish explorers attempting to penetrate into what would become the United States left three major legacies for the tribes: disease, horses and other domesticated animals, and metal tools and firearms.

Disease. The most serious threat the native peoples faced was not the superior arms of the Europeans but the diseases they brought with them to the New World. With the possible exception of syphilis, the Western Hemisphere was effectively free of infectious disease prior to European contact. The indigenous population, with no reservoir of natural immunity or built-up resistance, succumbed quickly to diphtheria, mumps, measles, and smallpox. Smallpox, the main killer, spread rapidly beyond the initial European carriers. Tribes that met and traded over long distances infected one another and carried the disease back to their villages. There is evidence that smallpox had already surfaced in Peru sometime before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro in 1532.

Estimates of the depopulation of the native peoples of North America as a result of disease run as high as ninety percent in many regions, and, in some instances, even the knowledge of the existence of certain tribes was obliterated. Infection carried by Spanish explorers traveling along the Gulf Coast annihilated the tribes of the lower Mississippi River so that their cultural presence, visible in the form of their burial mounds, was largely unrecognized until the twentieth century. The devastating impact of disease was not limited to just the years of initial contact. In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, leaders of the Corps of Discovery, were given hospitality by the Mandans during their winter stay at Fort Mandan on the Missouri River. The tribe, which numbered about 2000, dwindled to 150 after an epidemic of smallpox brought by fur traders in 1837.

Horses and other domesticated animals. Although disease proved a curse to the native peoples, the introduction of European livestock improved the quality of life for many tribes. The best known and most dramatic change came with the horse, but other domesticated animals were important as well. Cattle, sheep, goats, and hogs were raised for food, and their hides were used for clothing, blankets, and shelter coverings.

The arrival of the horse in North America, which probably occurred with the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado into the Southwest, transformed Plains Indian culture. By the end of the sixteenth century, horses were being traded, stolen, or left to stray, and their numbers multiplied. The Sioux, Cheyenne, and Kiowa soon found the horse indispensable, and its use spread to other tribes. A simple tied arrangement of poles made from young trees enabled horses to pull large loads. The poles doubled as a tipi framework and enabled the dwellings of these nomadic peoples to be larger and more comfortable. Mounted on horseback, the Indians became dramatically more efficient hunters of bison. Within a generation, the Plains Indians made the horse an integral part of their culture. Frontiersmen crossing the Mississippi and encountering Indians on horseback in the eighteenth century had no idea that the horse culture was less than two hundred years old.

The introduction of a variety of domesticated animals came with a price tag apparent to neither the native peoples nor the Europeans for some time. European settlers fed livestock with European grains. These grains, including wheat, oats, rye, and a wide range of other grasses, took to North American soil in much the same way that crab-grass and weeds attack a carefully tended lawn. Slowly, the landscape of North America changed as native grasses gave way to foreign varieties. Not until late in the twentieth century would the environmental changes be fully noticed or even start to be assessed.

Metal tools and firearms. Technologically, native peoples were in the Stone Age. As finely wrought and useful as their basketry, pottery, and obsidian blades may have been, Native Americans lacked the knowledge to make metal tools. The knives, needles, fishhooks, hatchets, and pots offered by the Europeans were immediately recognized as more efficient than their stone, bone, or clay implements.

Early firearms—muskets and pistols—did not present a clear advantage for the Europeans over the Indians. The guns were not especially accurate over more than a short distance, took time to reload, and were difficult to repair; Native Americans initially found their own bows and arrows still quite effective against them. Even the Puritans recognized the limitations of their firearms when they passed a law in 1645 calling for militia training in pikes and bows and arrows as well as muskets.

The balance of firepower changed though by the late eighteenth century as muskets evolved into rifles with much greater accuracy. By the end of the Civil War, repeating rifles and six-shot revolvers put the bow and arrow at a severe disadvantage. Native Americans did not reject the rifle, and many learned to pour lead into molds for bullets. Improvements in weapons technology, however, left them dependent on whites for firearms and ammunition as well as most metal goods. The Native Americans could not replicate the complex mechanisms of a Winchester or Colt, and cartridges requiring a molded bullet, shell casing, and gunpowder were beyond their ability to duplicate. By the end of the nineteenth century, Euroamerican technology had overwhelmed the Native Americans.

The great biological exchange. European contact did not affect only the native peoples; there was a genuine, if perhaps unequal, exchange. Many new crop and food plants, such as maize, beans, potatoes, peanuts, pumpkins, and avocados, were first introduced to Europe from the Western Hemisphere. Maize, or Indian corn, was perhaps the most important of them. Capable of growing in almost any climate or soil, it soon became a staple around the world.

The old view that Columbus “discovered” America has been replaced by the idea that he “encountered” America. The rephrasing recognizes that there were already millions of people in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 with their distinct and developed cultures who merit being acknowledged as the first Americans. There is no doubt that contact with Europeans was devastating to the native population both then and later. While the conquest was certainly inevitable, oversimplification should be avoided. It did not take place all at once in all places. Confrontation was sudden and subjugation immediate in some locales, while in others the native peoples remained unaware of the Europeans' presence for centuries. California Indians knew almost nothing of the Europeans until 1769, and the Shawnee still looked to a British alliance to keep American settlers south of the Ohio River as late as 1812.

Expanding Outward

At the end of the fifteenth century, the confluence of a number of long-developing factors and several major events launched the European exploration and colonization of the Western Hemisphere. In 1096, European Christians had embarked on a succession of military expeditions to free Palestine from Muslim rule. Although ultimately unsuccessful, these Crusades fostered economic ties between Europe and the Middle and Far East. Trade in spices (which were needed to preserve food) and silks attracted the new merchant class that was emerging in the growing medieval cities. The Italian Marco Polo's account of his travels to and extended stay in China at the end of the thirteenth century further stimulated interest in Asia, and the city-states of Genoa and Venice became the centers of international trade.

As Europe slowly recovered from the devastating effects of the Black Death (1347–51), the epidemic of bubonic plague that killed a third of its population, political developments disrupted economic ties with Asia. In 1453, the Muslim Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople, strategically located on the eastern Mediterranean. As Ottoman power spread throughout the Middle East, Europeans found their traditional overland trade routes effectively blocked. The prohibitively high tribute charged by the Turks led to dramatic price increases for luxury products from the Far East. Searching for a solution to this dilemma, European merchants reasoned that if land routes were problematical, perhaps trade could continue by sea.

Portuguese Explorations and West Africa

Motivated by the desire for new markets and an ongoing opposition to the Muslims, Portuguese sailors had begun to explore the West African coast in the first half of the fifteenth century. The expeditions were sponsored by Prince Henry of Portugal, who founded a center for seamanship around 1420 and earned himself the title of the Navigator. At the center, information about tides and currents was collected, more accurate charts and maps were drawn, techniques for determining longitude were improved, and new ship designs (such as the caravel) were developed. With these innovations, the Portuguese reached the westernmost point of the continent at Cape Verde in 1448, setting up a lucrative network of trading posts along the way. The most significant voyages, however, came forty years later. Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa in 1488. A decade later, Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa and reached the Malabar Coast of India, establishing an all-water route to Asia. Over the next twenty years, Portugal made Goa its major trading center in India, established outposts in Malaysia, and set up direct contact with China. The Muslim monopoly on the spice trade in Asia was broken.

The West African kingdoms. One consequence of the Portuguese expeditions was contact with West Africa. The sub-Saharan kingdoms—Ghana, Mali, Benin, Songhai, and Kongo—were well-organized societies with a long history, but they were almost unknown to Europeans. Until the Muslim invasions of the eleventh century, the Ghana empire had extensive commercial ties with North Africa, Egypt, and the Middle East. Mali, an Islamic state whose capital Timbuktu was a major economic and cultural center, controlled the gold trade. The arrival of the Portuguese brought about a dramatic shift in the flow of African gold. Rather than going overland by caravan to North Africa and then into the coffers of the commercially powerful Italian city-states, the precious metal was shipped by sea directly to Lisbon and western Europe.

The Portuguese were interested in slaves as well as gold. Arab merchants had bought slaves in West Africa as early as the eighth century, and they continued to act as middlemen when the Europeans arrived. Portugal used African slaves as early as 1497 in the sugarcane fields on the islands it took over off the African coast. Millions of blacks were shipped from West African ports to work plantations in North and South America over the next three hundred years. Slavery in the New World, justified on economic and racial grounds, was quite different from that in Africa. Although slavery was an accepted social institution throughout the continent, the slaves were typically prisoners of war, debtors, or criminals, and their condition was neither permanent nor hereditary.

Columbus and the Spanish Explorations

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor, believed that sailing west across the Atlantic Ocean was the shortest sea route to Asia. Ignorant of the fact that the Western Hemisphere lay between Europe and Asia and assuming the earth's circumference to be a third less than it actually is, he was convinced that Japan would appear on the horizon just three thousand miles to the west. Like other seafarers of his day, Columbus was untroubled by political allegiances; he was ready to sail for whatever country would pay for his voyage. Either because of his arrogance (he wanted ships and crews to be provided at no expense to himself) or ambition (he insisted on governing the lands he discovered), he found it difficult to find a patron. The Portuguese rejected his plan twice, and the rulers of England and France were not interested. With influential supporters at court, Columbus convinced King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to partially underwrite his expedition. In 1492, Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula, had fallen to the forces of the Spanish monarchs. With the Reconquista complete and Spain a unified country, Ferdinand and Isabella could turn their attention to overseas exploration.

The voyages of Columbus. Columbus set sail with three small ships and a crew of eighty-seven men on August 2, 1492, and made landfall on October 12 on an island in the Bahamas that he called San Salvador. Over the next several months, he explored the island that is now Cuba and another island he named Hispaniola (Santo Domingo), where he came across the first significant amount of gold. Ferdinand and Isabella financed a much larger expedition with seventeen ships and more than twelve hundred men soon after his return to Spain. During his second voyage, Columbus explored the islands that are now called Puerto Rico and Jamaica and established the first permanent Spanish settlement on Hispaniola. He made two additional voyages: between 1498 and 1500 to the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America, and between 1502 and 1504 to the coast of Central America.

Columbus's success created the potential for conflict between Spain and Portugal. Ferdinand and Isabella were anxious to protect their claims to the new lands. In May 1493, very soon after Columbus returned from his first voyage, they persuaded Pope Alexander VI to issue an edict giving Spain all lands west of an imaginary line through the Atlantic. Portugal was not satisfied. Through the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the two countries agreed to move the line further west and give Portugal exclusive right to the territory to the east. Although the result of the shift was unknown at the time, the change put the eastern quarter of South America (Brazil) in the Portuguese sphere; Pedro Cabral reached the Brazilian coast in 1500.