Cheating spouses in historic aztec tribes

SEVENTH EDITION

Seventh Edition

Red, White, and Black The Peoples of Early North America

Gary B. Nash

University of California, Los Angeles

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nash, Gary B. Red, white, and black : the peoples of early North America / Gary B. Nash, University of California, Los Angeles. —Seventh edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-205-88759-0 — ISBN 0-205-88759-7 1. United States—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. 2. America—Discovery and exploration. 3. United States—Race relations. I. Title. E188.N37 2014 973.2—dc23 2014009616

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 10: 0-205-88759-7 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-88759-0

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Preface vii

Introduction ix

1 Before Columbus 1 Cultural Evolution 2

Regional Cultures 4

The Iroquois 9

Pre-Columbian Population 13

The Native American Worldview 13

2 Europeans Reach North America 17 Spanish and Portuguese Expansion into the Americas 18

England Enters the Colonial Race 24

Early Spanish Incursions in North America 27

The French Penetration of North America 31

Imagining Native Americans 37

3 Cultures Meet on the Chesapeake 43 The Failed Colony at Roanoke 43

Reestablishing Virginia 45

Reorganization and Tobacco 48

English-Indian Relations 51

The War of 1622 and its Aftermath 57

4 Cultures Meet in the Northeast 63 The Dutch in the Northeast 63

Puritanism 69

The Elusive Utopia 71

Puritans and Indians 73

The Question of Land 77

The Pequot War 79

Contents

iii

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5 The Coastal Societies: Resistance, Accommodation, and Defeat 85

Metacom’s War 86

Bacon’s Rebellion 90

Colonizing South Carolina 94

Carolina-Indian Relations 95

The Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars 99

Penn’s “Holy Experiment” and Quaker-Indian Relations 103

6 Europe, Africa, and the Americas 113 The Atlantic Slave System 114

Capture and Transport of Slaves 118

Slavery in the North American Colonies 123

Slavery in North and South America 127

7 The African Ordeal Under Slavery 137 Coping with Enslavement 137

Regional Variations of North American Slavery 139

Resistance and Rebellion 145

Black Culture in Colonial America 150

8 The Transformation of Euro-American Society 162 Eighteenth-Century European Immigrants 162

Land, Growth, and Changing Values 166

The Cities 169

Changing Social Structure 172

The Great Awakening 175

9 Wars for Empire and Indian Strategies for Survival 181 Iroquois Diplomacy 182

Creek Diplomacy 186

Cherokee Diplomacy 189

iv Contents

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Transformations in Indian Society 190

Cultural Persistence 199

10 The Seven Years’ War and Its Aftermath 202 Population Increase 203

The Seven Years’ War 203

Indian Strategies in the Seven Years’ War 206

Indian-White Relations after 1763 212

The Colonizers’ Society after 1763 217

11 The Tricolored American Revolution 221 The Abolitionist Impulse 222

Struggling for Liberty 224

Exodus of Pro-British Slaves 228

The War Comes to an End 229

Free Black Leaders 230

The Indians’ Revolution 233

12 The Mixing of Peoples 243 Indian-European Engagement 245

Across the Color Line 251

Between African and Indian 254

Blending and Bleeding: The Mixing of Red, White, and Black 258

Index 266

Contents v

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The pages that follow began to take form in my mind several decades ago when I par- ticipated in redesigning the introductory course in American history at the University of California, Los Angeles. This effort was directed at making American history more understandable to an ethnically, a socially, and an intellectually diverse undergraduate audience by studying it as the process of change that occurred when people of widely varying cultural backgrounds interacted over a period of four centuries. Although this does not sound like a startling innovation, I discovered that it required me to read broadly in areas that had largely escaped my notice during fifteen years of studying and teaching colonial American history—anthropology, ethnohistory, African history, and Latin American history. To say that they “escaped my notice” is to put the point obliquely, for one of the thrusts of this book is that we read, think, and write selec- tively and in ways that reflect our cultural biases. Nothing more than changing my “angle of vision” was required to make it apparent that early American history and the early history of the American peoples were two different subjects and that the lat- ter was comprehensible only by vastly widening the scope of my reading and thinking about the subject.

In revising Red, White, and Black for this seventh edition, I am indebted to review- ers of the sixth edition, whose comments and suggestions have helped me make important changes, I gratefully acknowledge. The explosion of scholarly work in early American history, especially on the roles and experiences of Native Americans and African Americans, has required me to rethink and rewrite many passages in the chapters that follow. One could not have imagined a few decades ago how much it has been possible to learn about the interaction of the diverse peoples who encountered each other in North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. History is a never-ending search for a durable rendition of the past, and this edition owes a debt especially to the young historians who are contributing so much to the vibrancy of the colonial and revolutionary eras of the American past. This continu- ing quest for a more inclusive and nuanced history is reflected in the revisions to the chapters and in the Further Reading at the end of each chapter.

What’s New in This edition? In this edition of Red, White, and Black, I have made many changes to keep abreast of the latest scholarship on African American and Native American history. The extraor- dinary interest in these two subfields of early American history continues to flourish, adding richness and subtlety to what was known only sketchily not so many years ago.

O New archaeological studies, combined with DNA analysis, continue to refine what we know about the timing and sources of the first migration of people from Asia to the Americas thousands of years ago, helping me bring Chapter 1 up to date on this fascinating case of humans in search of new lands.

O In Chapters 1 and 2 I have also fleshed out how climate change, from about 900 a.d. through the late 1400s when Europeans first reached the Americas, helps us

vii

PrefaCe

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viii Preface

understand the rise and collapse of some early indigenous societies in North Amer- ica while facilitating the advent of the agricultural revolution that swept over most parts of the Americas.

O Likewise, in these first two chapters, readers will learn more than in previous edi- tions about how European pandemic diseases staggered Native societies while paving the way for European colonization. How the vectors of disease affected Native peoples in their engagement with European colonizers also figures in revi- sions in later chapters.

O Recent studies of almost every Indian society in North America has added im- mensely to our understanding of the complex interactions—economic, political, and cultural—between Native peoples and colonizing Europeans from the late six- teenth to early nineteenth centuries. This has allowed me to add new information and refine the analyses in Chapters 3, 4, 5, 9, and 10. Many of these new studies are included in Further Reading at the end of each chapter.

O Of great importance in revising Chapters 6 and 7 is the publication of the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010). In essays that capture a wealth of new scholarship and in a magnificent array of maps and charts that graphically display the analysis of some 27,000 slave voyages, we now have at hand important new information on every aspect of the slave trade, from the changing participation of various European maritime nations to the ages and gender of people captured in different parts of West and Central Africa, to their destinations in the Americas, to mutinies on slave ships, and much more. Especially of note is how this astounding bank of data puts the relatively small flow of captive Africans to the British Ameri- can colonies in an Atlantic-wide context. New scholarship in African history has also allowed me to give greater texture to the experience of enslaved Africans in the Americas and also their cultural contributions to the lifeways of the European colonizers.

O Women’s history is another sector of abundant new scholarship, and here too I have stitched new insights and research results into the narrative, as well as adding important new works of scholarship to the Further Reading section.

O In Chapter 11 readers will find a considerable expansion of how African Ameri- cans and Native Americans figured in the epochal upheaval, as it related both to the war for independence with England and to the internal struggle to revital- ize and reform the old colonial order. I hope students will find much to ponder in the enlarged discussion of how revolutionary agendas for change necessarily broached the abolition of slavery in a new nation dedicated to “unalienable rights” and grappled with the fraught question of how Native people would be included in, or excluded from, the democratically conceived new republic.

O In Chapter 12 I have drawn upon a ballooning number of DNA analyses that show a degree of racial boundary crossing never imagined by historians and other social science scholars. It is becoming clear through this probing of the human genome that many decades of denying racial intermingling and even erasing ex- amples of it from the historical record have stood in the way of appreciating how the strenuous efforts of white legislators and cultural leaders were never able to patrol the racial boundaries as effectively as they wished.

O A final new feature of this edition is the addition to each chapter of Learning Ob- jectives, Summary, and Critical Thinking Questions.

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“God is English.” Thus John Aylmer, a pious English clergyman, exhorted his parishio- ners in 1558, attempting to fill them with piety and patriotism.1 That thought, though never stated so directly, has echoed ever since through our history books. As school children, as college students, and as presumably informed citizens, most of us have been brought up on what has passed for the greatest success story of human history, the epic tale of how a proud, brave offshoot of the English-speaking people tried to reverse the laws of history by demonstrating what the human spirit, liberated from the shackles of tradition, myth, and oppressive authority, could do in a newly discov- ered corner of the earth. For most Americans, colonial history begins with Sir Walter Ralegh and John Smith, and proceeds through William Bradford and John Winthrop to Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. It ends with the Revolution, during which wilderness-conquering settlers pitted themselves against a mother country that had grown tyrannical and won their independence against the odds.

This is ethnocentric history, as has been charged frequently and vociferously in recent decades, both by revisionist white historians and by those whose citizenship is American but whose ancestral roots are in Africa, Asia, Mexico, or the native cultures of North America. Just as Eurocentrism made it difficult for the early colonizers and explorers to believe that a continental land mass as large as North America could exist in the oceans between Europe and Asia, historians in this country have found it dif- ficult to understand that the colonial period of our history is the story of a minority of English colonizers interacting with a majority of Iroquois, Delawares, Narragan- setts, Pequots, Mahicans, Catawbas, Tuscaroras, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Ibos, Mandingos, Fulas, Yorubas, Ashantis, Germans, French, Spaniards, Swedes, Welsh, and Scots-Irish, to mention only some of the cultural strains present on the continent.

In recent years, American historians have provided correctives to white-oriented, male-dominated, hero-worshipping history. At first, they devoted their efforts to restocking the pantheon of national heroes with new figures whose skin is not so pale. Pedestals, for example, were erected for Crispus Attucks, the half-Wampanoag, half- black fisherman of Boston who fell first at the Boston massacre; for Ely Parker, the Seneca general who helped the North win the Civil War and later served his friend, Ulysses Grant, when the latter attained the presidency; and for Cesar Chávez, the leader of the United Farm Workers, who brought major wage benefits and working conditions to the agricultural workers in this country.

Historical revisionism often begins in this tentative way, turning a monochromatic cast of characters into a polychromatic one with the story line unchanged. More than forty years ago, Vine Deloria, Jr., an outspoken Indian leader, charged that much of the “new” history “takes a basic ‘manifest destiny’ white interpretation of history and lov- ingly plugs a few feathers, woolly heads, and sombreros into the famous events of Ameri- can history.”2 But historians have moved beyond this crude form of multicultural history.

ix

1Quoted in Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590–1642 (New York, 1968), p. 13. 2Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York, 1970), p. 39.

IntroduCtIon

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When first drafting this book in 1972, I took Deloria’s criticism to heart, believ- ing that a fuller and deeper understanding of the colonial underpinnings of American history must examine the interaction of many peoples, at all levels of society, from a wide range of cultural backgrounds over a period of several centuries. For the colonial and Revolutionary period, this means exploring not only how the English and other Europeans “discovered” North America and transplanted their cultures there, but also how societies that had been in North America and Africa for thousands of years were actively and intimately involved in the process of forging a new, multistranded culture in what would become the United States. Africans were not merely enslaved. Native Americans were not merely driven from the land. As Ralph Ellison, the African Ameri- can writer, has reasoned: “Can a people . . . live and develop for over three hundred years by simply reacting? Are American Negroes simply the creation of white men, or have they at least helped to create themselves out of what they found around them?”3 To include Africans and Indians in our history in this way, simply as victims of the more powerful Europeans, is hardly better than excluding them altogether. Rather, it renders voiceless, nameless, and faceless people who powerfully affected the course of our historical development as a society and as a nation.

Breaking through the notion of Indians and Africans being kneaded like dough according to the whims of the invading Europeans was one of the main goals of this book from the start. During the last four decades, as I have revised this book for new editions, a host of resourceful and talented archaeologists, anthropologists, climatolo- gists, evolutionary biologists, linguists, and historians have provided rich studies that add depth and complexity to this initial formulation. A body of historical literature now shows irrefutably how Africans and Native Americans were critically important participants in the making of American history. Wherever has fallen the focus of these scholarly inquiries—the French penetration of the Great Lakes region, the Spanish occupation of Florida and New Mexico, the English interaction with the Iroquois or Catawba, the English enslavement of Africans in South Carolina, Virginia, Barbados, and Jamaica—a consistent picture has emerged of the complex, intercultural birthing of the “New World.” It was a new world for conquerors and conquered alike. It is the story of transformation for all involved, regardless of enormous inequalities in status and power, where European and Native worlds blurred at the edges of contact and merged at the heart of colonial existence, where Africans and Europeans made a new world together.

Every historian and anthropologist engaged in breaking old molds in the service of a more faithful recounting of how North American societies emerged has had to aban- don the old master narrative of “primitive” and “civilized” peoples careening toward each other after 1492 on a collision course, surely one of the greatest cultural engage- ments of human history. Much utility still remains in pointing out differences in tech- nological levels—for example, the Europeans’ ability to navigate across the Atlantic and to process iron and thereby to manufacture guns and sharp-edged tools. But plac- ing too much emphasis on technological advancement creates a mental trap in which Europeans are imagined as the principal agents of history, the African and Native peo- ples as the passive victims, and the outcomes as seemingly inevitable. Inevitability is a

3Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 301.

x Introduction

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victor’s story, one that robs history of its contingency and unexpected outcomes. This book presents historical outcomes as part of a tangled and an unpredictable human process where little is inexorable or foreordained.

Africans, Indians, and Europeans all developed various societies that functioned, for better or worse, in their respective environments. None thought of themselves as inferior people. “Savages we call them,” wrote Benjamin Franklin more than two cen- turies ago, “because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.”4 To imagine Indians simply as victims of European aggression is to bury from sight the rich and instructive story of how people who came to be known as Narragansetts, Iroquois, Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and many others, which had been forming and changing for centuries before Europeans touched foot on the continent, responded creatively and powerfully to the newcom- ers from across the ocean. In this way, the Native people reshaped themselves while reshaping the course of European settlement.

This book adopts a cultural approach to our early history. It looks at the landmass we know as “North America” as a place where a number of different societies converged during a particular period of history—between about 1550 and 1790, to use the Euro- pean system of measuring time. In the most general terms, we can define these cultural groups as Indian, African, and European, though, as we will see, this oversimplification is itself a Eurocentric device for classifying cultures. In other words, this book is not about early American history as usually defined—as the English colonization of thirteen colonies along the continent’s eastern seaboard—but about the history of the peoples of North America during the two centuries leading toward the American Revolution.

Each of these three cultural groups was exceedingly diverse. In their cultural char- acteristics, Iroquois were as different from Natchez as English from Egyptians; Hausas and Yorubas were as distinct as Pequots and Creeks. Nor did the subgroups in each of these cultural blocs act in concert. The French, English, Dutch, and Spanish fought wars with each other, contending for power and advantage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as Hurons and Iroquois or Creeks and Cherokees sought the upper hand in their respective regions. Our task is to discover what happened when peoples from different continents, diverse among themselves, came into contact with each other at particular points in history. Social and cultural process and change are of primary concern: how societies were affected and how their destinies changed by the experience of engagement with other societies. Anthropologists call this process “transculturation”; historians call it “social change.” Whatever the terms, this book explores a dynamic process of interaction that shaped the history of American Indians, Europeans, and Africans in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is important to consider that when scholars speak of “cultural groups” or “soci- eties,” they are referring to abstractions. A society is a group of people organized together so that their needs—the sustaining of life at the most basic level—can be met. Culture is a broad term that embraces all the specific characteristics of a society as they are functionally related to each other—technology; modes of dress and diet; economic, social, and political organization; religion; language; art; values; methods of child- rearing; and so forth. Simply stated, “culture” means a way of life, the framework

4“Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1784), in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Ben- jamin Franklin (New York, 1907), X: 97.

Introduction xi

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within which any group of people—a society—comprehends the world around it. But “culture” and “society” are also terms that imply standards or norms of behavior. This is what is meant by “cultural traits” or “group behavior.”

Employing such terms runs the danger of losing sight of the individual human beings, none of them exactly alike, who make up a society. Culture is a mental con- struct that scholars employ for the sake of convenience, so that highly varied and complex individual behavior can be broadly classified and compared. Because we are Americans, belonging to the same nation, speaking (or learning to speak) the same language, living under the same laws, participating in the same economic and politi- cal system, does not mean that we are all alike. Otherwise there would be no gen- eration gap, no differences in aesthetic taste, no gendered values, no racial tension, and no political conflict. Nonetheless, taken collectively, Americans typically organize their lives differently than do people in other parts of the world. Although we must be aware of the problems of a cultural approach to history, it at least provides a way of understanding the interaction of the great mass of individuals of widely varying backgrounds who found themselves cohabiting one part of the “New World” several centuries ago.

One other cautionary note is necessary. Though I often speak of racial groups and racial interaction, these terms do not refer to genetically different groups of people. For more than a century, anthropologists poured their intellect and energy into attempts to classify all the peoples of the world, from the pygmies of Borneo to the Aleuts in Alaska, according to genetic differences. Noses were measured, cranial cavities exam- ined, body hair noted, lips described, and hair and eye color classified in an attempt to define scientifically the various physiological types of humankind. Much was at stake in this effort. If physiological characteristics, with skin color prominent among them, could be “scientifically” determined, it would be possible to rank degrees of “cultural development” or achievement on a scale reaching from “savagery” to “civilization.” It comes as no surprise that this massive effort of Western white anthropologists resulted in the conclusion that the superiority of the Caucasian peoples of the world could be “scientifically” proven.

Today, genetic sciences, and particularly the DNA breakthroughs from molecu- lar biologists, have wiped away this long effort to establish a hierarchy of human types. Modern science finds that race is not biologically determined. Rather, it is socially and historically constructed. No objective foundation exists for the idea that a person belongs to one biological “race” or another or that a particular number of distinct races exist. It is now apparent that Europeans in the Americas fashioned different codes of race relations based on their own needs and attitudes concern- ing how people should be classified, treated, and separated. “Negro” in Brazil and in the United States, for example, came to have different meanings that reflected conditions and values, as well as degrees of social mingling, not genetic differences. As Sidney Mintz wisely reminds us, “The ‘reality’ of race is thus as much a social as a biological reality, the inheritance of physical traits serving as the raw material for social sorting devices, by which both stigmata and privileges may be systemati- cally allocated.”5 This social sorting is highly arbitrary—down to the present day

5Sidney Mintz, “Toward an Afro-American History,” Journal of World History (published in Switzerland), 13 (1971): 318.

xii Introduction

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when, for example, the U.S. Census Bureau for many decades obliged every resident to choose one racial category as if no people whatsoever existed with mixed genetic and cultural inheritances.

Thus, we gain little insight into the historical process by distinguishing cultural groups at the biological or physiological level. In this book, we are not considering genetically different groups but human populations from different parts of the world, groups of people with cultural differences. Most of all, we will be inquiring into the way these peoples, brought into contact with each other, changed over the course of several centuries—and changed in a manner that would shape the course of American history for generations to come.

A Word about Words Readers of this book should understand that our choice of words—all language—is tied up with cultural attitudes and ideological stances. That Columbus “discovered America” in 1492 is a bold example of compromised language and yet what young students learned for many generations. Of course, Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, but he didn’t discover what millions of humans already knew about because they had lived for many millennia on the western side of the Atlantic. That is an easy phrase of eurocentric phrasing to fix. But the problem runs deeper. As James Merrell, a historian of Native American history has recently argued, a tainted terminology, a “pervasive, pernicious language problem,” chains us “to a lexicon crafted by the vic- tors in the contest for America.”6 In the way an author chooses words, he chides us, he or she, even if unconsciously, privileges the history of Europeans to the detriment of Native Americans (and Africans). Merrell wants all textbooks cleansed of such words as “frontier,” “backcountry,” “hinterland,” the “New World,” the “Old World,” “pre- contact,” “postcontact,” and even “settlers” and “settlements” because all such words, he argues, refer to the perspectives of European newcomers to the Americas and the way they occupied the land on which Native people had lived for countless genera- tions. The “hinterland,” for example, was the region west of colonial settlement in eastern North America, but it was not a “hinterland” for Native people but rather their homeland and then a zone of contact where they traded, negotiated, warred, allied, and—occasionally—intermarried with European colonists.

In this seventh edition, I have tried to avoid such linguistic traps. However, having cautioned the reader, I continue to use such words as “settler” or “settlement,” while understanding that Native people were settlers and had settlements as well. Similarly a “frontier” for Europeans was on the edge of their settlements, usually westwardly. For Native people the frontier was usually eastward. And sometimes the “frontier” was a zone of contact where Native people and colonizing Europeans were co-occupying the land.

Also, though it privileges the colonizers, it is nearly impossible to purge all place names that Europeans put on the maps and used in their discourse. It is true that “the Great Lakes” was not the name used by the Huron and other Native peoples who lived on its shores, but it is the name that is familiar to students and still serviceable

6James Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 69 (2012): 451–512. The phrase is from pp. 458–459.

Introduction xiii

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in a book of this kind. Likewise, when I write of “Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley” the reader can keep in mind that the Lenape called this ancient homeland differently. It makes sense to say that, in the wake of the American Revolution, the Iroquois ceded parts of Iroquoia to the victorious Americans rather than ceding parts of New York and Pennsylvania. But using every term and geographical designator so that the reader understands it as it was termed by both Europeans and Natives (or differently by the French, English, and Spanish) would make for cumbersome reading. Some historians prefer La Florida to Florida in writing about the pre-Revolutionary period because it was claimed and partially occupied by the Spanish, not the English. Similarly, Nuevo México, rather than New Mexico is the preferred term for some historians. But in the pages that follow, I have used the place names familiar today, asking the reader to understand the complexity of word choice and how the terms have changed as the pro- cess of occupying the land of North America has evolved over four centuries.

Similarly, I have used the tribal names that were used in the discourse and docu- ments of European colonizers. The Iroquois people called their league the Haudeno- saunee, but for ease of reading I have employed the term known in history books for many generations. Likewise, the Creeks, Cherokees, and Choctaws, had different names for themselves, and readers will find these terms in specialized studies by ethno- historians and anthropologists. Having alerted readers to these linguistic tangles, it is best to proceed in a way that makes this book accessible.

A Word about Maps Readers will find a number of maps in the pages that follow. In many cases they por- tray land on the eastern seaboard of North America colonized by Europeans, such as Southern New England (p. 76) or Pennsylvania (p. 107). In each case, they show the claims and boundaries of different English colonies but not land actually populated and controlled by English and other European colonizers. Those living on the ground, particularly more than about fifty to one hundred miles from the Atlantic coast, were Native people whose presence is difficult to map. Similarly, European claims of posses- sion and dominion of the vast territories extending from the Atlantic Ocean far into the interior are mapped in most textbooks. This mapping of space was an essential part of the struggle among emergent European empires in the Americas because the planting of the king’s arms established a claim to be used as European monarchies struggled for ascendancy in the Americas. This was “cartographic fiction,” as one his- torian has put it, since territories claimed by England, France, or Spain were for the most part not occupied or controlled by them. But they could act as if they did when wars of empire ended with peace treaty negotiation. In faraway European capitals, diplomats made decisions about territorial claims that were then transferred from the vanquished European power to the victor nation. On p. 205, readers will see a map representing “European Rivalry in the Americas in 1750.” No Native peoples appear on this map, and if they were to be portrayed the map would be unduly complicated and would not serve its purpose. But readers are reminded that maps do not represent the reality of human occupation and control of land; rather they are representations of the partial occupation and the imagined possession and dominion of land.

xiv Introduction

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Seventh Edition

Red, White, and Black The Peoples of Early North America

Gary B. Nash

University of California, Los Angeles

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The history of the American peoples begins not in 1492 but hundreds of centuries before the birth of Christ. It was then, according to archaeologists and geologists, that hu- mans first discovered what much later would be called North America. Thus, American history can begin with some basic ques- tions: Who were the first inhabitants of the “New World”? Where did they come from? What were they like? How had their soci- eties changed over the millennia that pre- ceded the arrival of Europeans? Can their history be reconstructed from the mists of prehistoric time?

Almost all the material evidence suggest- ing answers to these questions comes from ancient sites of early life in the Americas. By unearthing pots, tools, seeds, ornaments, and other objects, and by establishing the age of skeletal remains of the “first Americans”

through radiocarbon dating, archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, and physical anthro- pologists have posited the arrival of humans in America to about 15,000 years ago. Our knowledge of this is still very tentative and hotly debated as researchers uncover new early human living sites. What is certain is that the date for the first human pres- ence in the Americas has been pushed back farther and farther through sophisticated research.

Most Native American peoples have their own creation stories about their origins in North America itself. However, paleoan- thropologists and molecular biologists study- ing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA inherited through the female line of descent) generally agree that these first inhabitants of the conti- nent were men and women from Asia (though recent discoveries suggest seaborne migrations

1

Before Columbus

CHAPTER 1

Learning Objectives ◼ Describe the origins, population, and

diversity of Native societies in Ancient America, including language, social structure, and lifeways, and explain how the agricultural revolution played a role in this diversity.

◼ Compare the various regional societies in terms of population, agricultural production, housing, and culture and arts.

◼ Explain the matrilineal structure of the Iroquois people and the various roles assumed by women in this society.

◼ Compare and contrast the worldviews of the early Native Americans and the European colonists.

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2 ChAptEr 1 ▸ Before Columbus

across the Pacific from Polynesia, Japan, and other parts of eastern Asia).1 Game-hunting no- madic peoples from the inhospitable environ- ment of Siberia, they migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska in search of more reliable sources of food. Geologists have determined that Siberia and Alaska were connected by a land bridge only during the two long periods when massive glaciers covered the northern latitudes, locking up most of the world’s moisture and leaving the floor of the Bering Sea exposed. These two long periods were from roughly 36,000 to 32,000 years ago and again from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago. At other times, the melting glaciers raised the level of water in the Bering Strait, inundating the land bridge and blocking foot traffic to North America. So when Europeans found a way to reach North America in ships 500 years ago, they encountered people whose ancestors had come on foot many thousands of years before.

Although most anthropologists agree that the migration was of Asian peoples, particularly those of Mongoloid stock from northeast Asia, the skele- tal remains of these migrants also reveal non-Asian characteristics. It is probable that they represent a potpourri of different populations in Asia, Africa, and Europe, which had been mixing for thousands of years. But whatever the prior infusion of genes from peoples of other areas, these first Americans were Asiatic in geographical origin. From the vast steppes of Siberia they began trekking eastward toward a continent where no human had ever set foot. They lived in what geologists and archaeolo- gists call the Pleistocene or Ice Age.

Cultural Evolution Once on the North American continent, these early wanderers began trekking southward and then eastward, following vegetation and game.

1For general agreement among geneticists that present-day’s five mtDNA haplogroups and Y-chromosome groups trace back to humans who crossed the Bering Land Bridge, see Brian Fagan, The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011), pp.16–17.

0

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500 1000 Miles

1000 Kilometers500

36,000 – 32,000 years ago

Land bridge open

23,000 – 10,000 years ago

BERING LAND BRIDGE AND SPREAD OF NATIVE AMERICANS

SIBERIA

ALASKA

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

A T L A N T I C

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A R C T I C O C E A N

B E R I N G

S E A

Bering Strait

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Cultural Evolution 3

Scores of generations passed before these nomads reached the Pacific Northwest. The migratory movement ultimately brought them to the tip of South America within about 1,000 years and to the east coast of North America much later. American history traditionally emphasizes the “westward movement,” but for hundreds of gen- erations in North America, the frontier moved southward and eastward. The distances were immense—15,000 miles from the Asian home- land to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost limit of South America, and 6,000 miles from Siberia to the eastern edge of North America. By roughly 9000 b.c, the first Americans were widely dis- persed across the Western Hemisphere.

During the centuries spanned by these long migrations, one band in search of new food sources would split off from another. This pro- cess, repeated many times in many areas, marked the emergence of separate societies, numbering in the hundreds on the continent by the time the Europeans arrived. Cultural differences over thousands of years became more distinct as peo- ple in widely different ecological regions orga- nized their lives and related to the land in ways dictated by their natural habitats. Much later, Europeans would indiscriminately lump together a wide variety of native cultures under a single rubric “Indian.” But in reality, myriad ways of life had developed by the time Europeans found their way to the very old “New World.” If Euro- peans had been able to drop down on native vil- lages from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts and from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico in 1492, they would have found “Indians” living in Kwakiutl rectangular plank houses on the northwest coast, in Gothic domed thatched houses in Wichita grasslands, in earth lodges in Pawnee prairie country, and in barrel-roofed rectangular houses in Algonquian villages in the northeast wood- lands. Different societies had developed a great variety of techniques for providing basic shelter because they lived in areas where building mate- rials and weather conditions varied widely. The same diversity marked the ornaments and clothes they fashioned, the tools they employed, and the natural foods they gathered.

This diversity of Native culture in Ancient America is also evident in the languages they spoke. Linguistic scholars divide Native lan- guages, at the point when Europeans first ar- rived in North America, into twelve linguistic stocks, each as distinct from the others as Semitic languages are from Indo-European languages. Within each of these twelve linguistic stocks, a great many separate languages and dialects were spoken, each as different as English from Rus- sian. In all, about 2,000 languages were spoken by the Native Americans—a greater linguistic di- versity than in any other part of the world.

How can we account for this striking diversity of Indian cultures? The explanation lies in an un- derstanding of environmental conditions and the way in which bands of people lived in relatively self-contained communities for centuries, adapt- ing to their natural surroundings and molding their culture in ways that allowed for survival in their region. As elsewhere in the prehistoric world, human beings were basically seed gatherers and game hunters. They were dependent for life on a food supply over which they had little control. They struggled to master their environment but were frequently at its mercy. Thus, to give a single example, as great geologic changes occurred in North America about 8000 b.c., vast areas from Utah to the highlands of Middle America were turned from grasslands into desert. Big game and plants requiring plentiful water could not survive these changes, and Native societies in these areas either had to move on to find new sources of food or to modify their cultures to the new conditions.

Another way of understanding the process of cultural change and the proliferation of culture groups is to focus on agriculture—the domesti- cation of plant life. Like all other living organ- isms, human beings depend ultimately on plants to survive. For both humans and animals, plants are the source of life-sustaining fuel. The ultimate source of this energy is the sun. But in tapping this solar energy, humans and animals had to rely on plants because they are the only organ- isms capable of producing significant amounts of organic material through the photosynthetic pro- cess. Plant food was—and still is—the strategic

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4 ChAptEr 1 ▸ Before Columbus

element in the chain of life. It nurtured humans, and it sustained the animals that provided them with their second source of food.

When humans learned to control the life of plants—agriculture is the term we give to the process—they took a revolutionary step toward controlling their environment. The domestication of plants began to emancipate human beings from oppression by the physical world. To learn how to harvest, plant, and nurture a seed was to as- sume some of nature’s functions and to gain par- tial control over what had been uncontrollable. In the wake of this acquisition of partial control over nature’s forces, came vast cultural changes.

Dating the advent of agriculture in the Amer- icas is difficult, but archaeologists date it at least as far back as 5000 b.c. Agriculture had already developed in southwestern Asia and Africa, and it spread to Europe at about the time peoples in the Tehuacán Valley of central Mexico were first planting maize, beans, and squash. Where agri- culture occurred first, a much debated subject, is not as important as the fact that the “agricul- tural revolution” began independently in several widely separated parts of the world, all of which were later subordinated by European colonizers.

When the production of domesticated plant food replaced the gathering of wild plant food, dramatic changes occurred in the life of societ- ies. First, plant domestication gradually allowed settled village life to replace nomadic existence. Second, the spread of maize, beans, and squash, which together provide a well-balanced diet, spurred population growth, for even putting as little as 1 percent of the land under cultivation produced enormous increases in the food supply. This outcome in turn caused large groups to split off to form separate societies. Third, the cultiva- tion of plants reduced the amount of time and energy needed to obtain a food supply and thus created more favorable conditions for social, po- litical, and religious development; aesthetic ex- pression; and technological innovation. Last, it led in most areas to a sexual division of labor, with men clearing the land and engaging in the hunt for game while women planted, cultivated, and harvested crops.

Thus, the agricultural revolution began to re- shape the cultural outlines of native societies. Pop- ulation growth and the beginnings of sedentary village life were accompanied by more complex so- cial and political organization. Bands evolved into tribes, and tribes evolved into larger political enti- ties. Tasks became more specialized, and a more complex social structure took form. In some soci- eties, the religious specialist became the dominant figure, just as in other parts of the world where the agricultural revolution had occurred. The religious figure organized the common followers, directed their work, and exacted tribute as well as worship from them; in return, this figure was counted on to protect the community from hostile forces.

regional Cultures When Europeans first reached what they came to term “the New World,” Native Americans were in widely different phases of this agricultural revolution, and therefore, their cultures were marked by striking differences. A glimpse at sev- eral of the societies with which Europeans first came into contact in the early sixteenth century will illustrate the point.

In the southwest of North America, Hohokam and Anasazi societies had been engaged in agri- cultural production with ditch irrigation and a sedentary village life for at least two millennia be- fore the Spanish arrived in the 1540s. By about 700 to 900 a.d., descendants of these people began to abandon the ancient pit houses dug in cliffs and to construct rectangular rooms ar- ranged in apartment-like structures. By 1050 a.d., “Pueblo” people, as the Spanish called them, had developed planned villages composed of large ter- raced buildings, each with many rooms. These apartment-house villages were often constructed on defensive sites—on ledges of massive rock, on flat summits, or on steep-sided mesas—locations that would afford the Anasazi protection from their northern enemies. The largest of these villages, at Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco Canyon (in today’s Four Corners region of New Mexico), contained about 700 rooms in five stories and may have housed as many as 1,000 persons.

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Regional Cultures 5

No larger apartment-house-type construc- tion would be seen on the continent until the late nineteenth century in New York City. The roof- ing and flooring of the Chaco Canyon villages re- quired cutting several hundred thousand juniper and pinyon trees with stone axes and dragging them many miles from their source north of the village complex. Within a 60-mile radius, hun- dreds of villages dotted the landscape, all linked together by about 250 miles of roads.

Then, around 1150 a.d., Chaco Anasazi so- ciety began to unravel. After six centuries of pop- ulation growth and agricultural development, the Anasazi had apparently reached the carrying limits of a fragile and unpredictable environ- ment. Deforesting the region led to soil erosion, and crop production was crippled by a 50-year drought. On the edge of collapse, the Natives starved or abandoned the region in search of a more hospitable environment.

Long before the Spanish arrival, descen- dants of the Anasazi were using irrigation canals, check-dams, and hillside terracing as techniques for bringing water to what had for centuries been an arid, agriculturally marginal area. At the same

time, the ceramic industry became more elaborate, cotton replaced yucca fiber as the main clothing material, and basket weaving became more artistic. In its technological solution to the water manage- ment, its artistic efforts, its agricultural practices, and its village life, the highly stratified Pueblo soci- ety, on the eve of the Spanish arrival, was not radi- cally different from peasant communities ruled by the nobility in most of the Euro-Asian world. Don Juan de Oñate reported home in 1599 after reach- ing the Pueblo villages on the Rio Grande River that the Native people “live very much the same as we do, in houses with two and three terraces.”2

Far to the north, on the Pacific coast of the Northwest, native people organized their soci- eties around cedar and salmon. Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl, and Salish people lived in villages of several hundred, drawing their sustenance from salmon and other spawning fish. Their plank houses of red cedar displayed elaborately carved pillars and were guarded by gigantic totem poles that depicted animals with supernatural power such as the bear, sea otter, bald eagle, raven, killer whale, frog, and wolf. Early European explorers, who reached this region much later than most

Pueblo Bonito.

(Courtesy Josemaria Toscano/Shutterstock)

2Quoted in Thomas D. Matijasic, “Reflected Values: Sixteenth-Century Europeans View the Indians of North America,” Ameri- can Indian Culture and Research Journal, 11 (1987): 45.

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6 ChAptEr 1 ▸ Before Columbus

other parts of the hemisphere, were amazed at the architectural and artistic skills of the North- west Indians. “What must astonish most,” wrote one French explorer in the late eighteenth cen- tury, “is to see painting everywhere, everywhere sculpture, among a nation of hunters.”3

Carving and painting softwood from deep cedar forests surrounding their villages, native people of the Northwest defined their place in the cosmos with ceremonial face masks. Of- ten the masks represented animals, birds, and fish—reminders of magical ancestral spirits that inhabited the four interconnected zones of their cosmos: the Sky World, the Undersea World, the Mortal World, and the Spirit World.

Ceremonial masks had a pivotal place in the potlatch, a great winter gathering where through song, dance, and ritual, Northwest Indian peoples sought to give meaning to their existence and to reaffirm their goal of achieving balance and har- mony in their world. In the potlatch ceremonial dances, native leaders expressed their family lin- eage and their chiefly authority in the tribe. By giv- ing away many of their possessions, chiefs satisfied tribe members and thus maintained their legiti- macy. Such largesse mystified and often disturbed Europeans. Attempts by American and Canadian authorities to suppress potlatch ceremonies in the late nineteenth century never succeeded.

Far to the east, other Indian cultures evolved over thousands of years. From the great plains of the midcontinent to the Atlantic tidewater re- gion, a variety of tribes belonging to four main language groups—Algonquian, Iroquoian, Muskogean, and Siouan—grew in strength. Their existence in eastern North America, which has been traced as far back as about 9000 b.c., was based on a mixture of agriculture, food gather- ing, game hunting, and fishing. Like other tribal groups that had been touched by the agricultural revolution, they gradually adopted semifixed set- tlements and developed a trading network link- ing together a vast region.

Among the most impressive of these societ- ies were the so-called Hopewell mound-building

people of the Ohio River valley, who constructed gigantic sculptured earthworks in geometric de- signs, sometimes in the shapes of huge humans, birds, or writhing serpents. When colonial set- tlers first crossed the Appalachians, after almost a century and a half in North America, they were astounded at these monumental constructions, some reaching as high as seventy feet. Their ste- reotype of eastern Indians as forest primitives did not allow them to believe that these were built by primitive native peoples, so they postulated that survivors of the sunken islands of Atlantis or de- scendants of the Egyptians and Phoenicians had wandered far from their homelands, built these mysterious monuments, and then disappeared.

Archaeologists and anthropologists now con- clude that the Mound Builders were the ancestors of the Creeks, Choctaws, and Natchez. Their so- cieties evolved slowly over the centuries, hastened by population increase associated with a warming period from about 900 to 1300 that lengthened growing seasons and allowed for the spread of the maize-bean-squash dietary trilogy north of the Rio Grande. By the advent of Christianity, Mound Builders had developed considerable complexity. In southern Ohio alone, archaeologists have pin- pointed about 10,000 mounds used as burial sites and have excavated another 1,000 earth-walled enclosures, including one enormous fortification with a circumference of about three and one-half miles, enclosing about one hundred acres, or the equivalent of fifty modern city blocks. We now know from a great variety of items found in the mound tombs—large ceremonial blades chipped from obsidian rock formations in what is now Yellowstone National Park; embossed breast- plates, ornaments, and weapons fashioned from copper nuggets from the Great Lakes region; decorative objects cut from sheets of mica from the southern Appalachians; conch shells from the Atlantic seaboard; and ornaments made from shark and alligator teeth and shells from the Gulf of Mexico—that the Mound Builders participated in a vast trading network that linked together hundreds of Indian villages across the continent.

3Quoted in Paul S. Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Lexington, MA, 1993), p. 6.

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Regional Cultures 7

By about 500 a.d., the Mound Builder culture was declining, perhaps because of attacks from other tribes or because severe climatic changes un- dermined agriculture. To the west, another culture, based on intensive agriculture, was beginning to flourish. Its center, now called Cahokia, was be- neath present-day East St. Louis at the confluence of the Illinois, Missouri, and Mississippi rivers. It radiated out to encompass most of the Mississippi watershed from Wisconsin to Louisiana and from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Hundreds of villages were included in its orbit. By about 700 a.d., this Mis- sissippian culture, as it is known to archaeologists, began to send its influence eastward to transform the life of most of the less technologically advanced woodland tribes. Like the Mound Builders of the Ohio region, these people built gigantic mounds as

burial and ceremonial places. The largest of them, called Monk’s Mound, rises in four terraces to a height of one hundred feet with a rectangular base covering nearly fifteen acres and containing 22 million cubic feet of earth, carried basket by bas- ket to the site—an immense marshaling of human labor. It is larger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Built around 1050 a.d., this huge earth- work faced the site of a palisaded Indian city that contained more than one hundred small artificial mounds marking burial sites. Spread among them was a dense settlement, called “America’s first me- tropolis” by one archaeologist. This Mississippi valley city of Cahokia is estimated to have had a population of about 16,000 to 20,000, the most concentrated population north of the Rio Grande until the late eighteenth century.4 Radiating out

Artist’s conceptualization of Cahokia Monk Mound and satellite mounds.

(Courtesy Cahokia Mounds Historic Site, painting by William R. Iseminger)

4Biloine W. Young and Melvin L. Fowler, Cahokia: The Great Native American Metropolis (Urbana, IL, 2000), pp. 310-311.

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8 ChAptEr 1 ▸ Before Columbus

from Cahokia for many miles were tilled fields that supplied the maize for the urban dwellers.

The finely crafted ornaments and tools re- covered by archaeologists at Cahokia include elaborate ceramics, finely sculptured stonework, carefully embossed and engraved copper and mica sheets, and one funeral blanket for an im- portant chief fashioned from 20,000 shell beads. These artifacts indicate that Cahokia was truly an urban center, with clustered housing, markets, and specialists in toolmaking, hide dressing, pot- ting, jewelry making, shell engraving, weaving, and salt making.

By about 1300, 200 years before Europeans arrived on the Atlantic seaboard, the mound- building Mississippian societies had passed their prime and were dying out. Though the reasons are not yet clear, a severe earthquake that dam- aged Monk’s Mound may have challenged the supernatural power claimed by Cahokia’s chiefs. The Cahokians may also have outstripped their water supply, perhaps partly caused by the re- lentless cutting of nearby forests. Perhaps more important was a long period of global cooling, called “the Little Ice Age” by today’s scientists. According to paleoclimatologists, from about 1300 and continuing into the mid-nineteenth century, a cooling period afflicted much of the northern hemisphere, bringing colder and more extended winters and shorter summer growing periods. This affected farmers and food pro- duction on both sides of the Atlantic, even to the extent of causing recurrent famines and, in Europe, the reduction of cattle herds deprived of adequate forage.

Whatever the reasons for Cahokia’s de- cline, its influence had already passed eastward to transform the woodlands societies along the Atlantic coastal plain. Although the widely scattered and relatively fragmented tribes that were settled from Nova Scotia to Florida never matched the earlier societies of the midcontinent in architectural design, earthwork sculpturing, or artistic expression, they were far from the forest primitives that Europeans pictured. Changed by contact with the Hopewell and Mississippi cul- tures of the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys,

they added agriculture to the skills they had al- ready acquired in exploiting a wide variety of natural plants for food, medicine, dyes, flavor- ing, and smoking. In the mixed natural econo- mies that resulted, they utilized all the resources around them—open land, forests, streams, shore, and ocean.