Created Equal
25,000 to 11,000 years ago
Low ocean levels expose land bridge linking Siberia to Alaska
14,000 years ago
Early Paleo-Indians inhabit sites in North and South America, including Monte Verde, Chile
13,900 to 12,900 years ago
Clovis hunters spread across North America
10,000 to 3,000 years ago
Archaic Indians flourish in diverse settings
4,200 to 2,700 years ago
Poverty Point culture exists in Louisiana
A.D. 300 to 900
Mayan culture flourishes in Mesoamerica
400 Polynesian explorers reach the Hawaiian Islands
500 to 600
Teotihuacan in central Mexico becomes one of the world’s largest cities
900 to 1100
Anasazi culture centers in Chaco Canyon in Southwest
1000 Norse explorers establish a Vinland colony in Newfoundland
1100 Cahokia in Illinois becomes one focus of Mississippian culture
1250 to 1400
Mississippian culture reflected at Moundville in Alabama
1400 Aztec build capital at Tenochtitlán (site of modern Mexico City)
1405 to 1433
Chinese fleet of Admiral Zheng He reaches Indian Ocean and Africa’s east coast
1418 to 1460
Prince Henry of Portugal sends ships to explore Africa’s west coast
1492 First voyage of Columbus
1494 Treaty of Tordesillas arranges an equal division of the globe between competing overseas claims of Spain and Portugal
1497 to 1499
Vasco da Gama completes trading voyage from Portugal to India
1517 Martin Luther launches Protestant Reformation
1519 Cortés invades Mexico
1519 to 1522
Magellan’s ship circumnavigates the globe and returns to Spain
1533 Pizarro overthrows Inca Empire in Peru
1534 to 1543
Expeditions of Cartier (Canada), de Soto (Southeast), and Coronado (Southwest) probe North America
1565 Spanish establish St. Augustine
1577 to 1580
Voyage of Drake challenges Spanish dominance in the Pacific
1585 to 1590
English attempt to establish Roanoke colony fails
1588 Spanish Armada fails in effort to invade England
1599 Spanish colonize New Mexico
1607 England’s Virginia Company launches colony at Jamestown
1620 Mayflower passengers establish Plymouth Colony
1630 English Puritans found Massachusetts Bay Colony
1637 Pequot War in New England
1660 Restoration of monarchy in England under Charles II
1664 Charles II grants charter to his brother James, Duke of York, sanctioning the takeover of the Dutch New Netherland colony and the creation of New York
1675 to 1676 Metacom’s War in New England
1676 Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia
1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico
1681 Quaker William Penn receives charter for Pennsylvania
1682 La Salle explores the Mississippi River and claims Louisiana for France
1689 Dutch leader William of Orange and his wife Mary become joint English sovereigns in the Glorious Revolution, replacing King James II
1691 Witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts
1699 Iberville begins colony in French Louisiana
1711 to 1715 Tuscarora Indians in North Carolina, and then the Yamasee in South Carolina, resist English colonial expansion
Part one
North American Founders
We sometimes call the framers of the U.S. Constitution America’s Founding Fathers, using capital letters for emphasis. The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 were indeed founders in a political sense, having drafted our enduring frame of government. But the 1780s seem recent in relation to most of North America’s long human history. We must explore far back in time, long before the eighteenth century, to find the varied men and women who were the continent’s first founders.
Two kinds of foundation builders emerge: the distant ancestors of today’s Native Americans and newcomers from abroad who colonized North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Our earliest human ancestors evolved in Africa and then spread across the landmass of Eurasia. In the Southern Hemisphere, they managed to cross to Australia some 40,000 years ago, but evidence suggests that they reached the Americas from Asia much later, probably less than 20,000 years ago. These first human arrivals took advantage of the land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska when Ice Age glaciers prompted a dramatic decline in sea levels. Roughly 14,000 years ago, these hunters apparently bypassed melting glaciers to reach the North American interior. They came on foot, but additional newcomers may have skirted the Pacific coast in small boats or even drifted across the South Pacific.
We still understand very little about these earliest Americans. What we do know is that they spread rapidly across North America over the next thousand years, and they continued to hunt mammoths and other large animals until these ancient species became extinct. Later, their descendants adapted to a wide range of different environments, learning to fish, hunt for smaller game, and gather berries. It has been 10,000 years since the extinction of the mammoths and 3,000 years since the early signs of agriculture in the Americas. By a.d. 500 complex societies were beginning to appear in equatorial America, and a succession of diverse and rich societies had arisen in the Americas by the time a second set of founders appeared around a.d. 1500.
Although Vikings from Scandinavia had preceded Christopher Columbus by five centuries, their small outpost on the coast of Newfoundland lasted only a few years. In contrast, when Columbus reached the West Indies and returned to Spain in 1492, his voyage launched a human and biological exchange between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres that has never ceased. Spanish and Portuguese ships initiated this exchange, but they were soon followed by vessels from England, France, and Holland. Half a century after Columbus’s first voyage, Spanish overland expeditions had already pushed from Florida to Arkansas and from Mexico to Kansas. French explorers, hoping to find a Northwest Passage to Asia, had penetrated far up the St. Lawrence River in Canada.
Europeans brought new materials such as iron and new animals such as horses, cattle, and pigs. They also brought deadly diseases previously unknown in the Americas, such as measles and smallpox, which had a catastrophic impact on Native American societies. By 1565 Europeans had established their first lasting outpost in the North American continent, the town of St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. Two decades later the English tried, unsuccessfully, to plant a similar colony at Roanoke Island along the coast of what is now North Carolina.
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, permanent European settlements took hold at Quebec on the St. Lawrence River and at Santa Fe near the Rio Grande. A transatlantic outpost of English society appeared at Jamestown on Chesapeake Bay in 1607. Farther north, behind the sheltering hook of Cape Cod, other settlers formed additional coastal outposts and renamed the region New England.
Numbers were small at first, but these communities and others endured and expanded, often with crucial help from Native Americans who knew the keys to survival in their own domains. The gradual success of these European footholds prompted imitation and competition; colonizers clashed with each other and with longtime Indian inhabitants over control of the land and its resources. Disappointed in their early searches for easy mineral wealth, the new arrivals made do in various ways: cutting timber, catching fish, raising tobacco, or trading for furs. The French in particular, with aid once again from Native Americans, explored the interior of the continent. By 1700 they had laid claim to the entire Mississippi River valley and established a colony on the Gulf of Mexico.
Each new colonizing enterprise in the seventeenth century took on a distinctive life of its own—or, rather, numerous lives. First of all, there was the internal life of the community: who would be allowed to take part, how would participants govern themselves, and how would they subsist? In each instance, relations with the region’s native inhabitants constituted a second unfolding story. Complicated ties to Europe—economic, religious, social, and political—made a third crucial narrative. Furthermore, relations between colonies and between the distant European powers that backed them had a determining influence, as when England took over the Dutch colony at New Netherland in the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Finally, there was the compelling drama of the newcomers’ relationship to the environment itself. These founding generations labored to understand—or to subdue and exploit without fully understanding—the continent they had started to colonize.
chapter 1
First Founders Chapter Outline
Ancient America
A Thousand Years of Change: 500 to 1500
Linking the Continents
Spain Enters the Americas
The Protestant Reformation Plays Out in America
Conclusion
Sites to Visit
For Further Reading
One day in 1908, a cowboy named George McJunkin was checking fences on a cattle ranch near Folsom, New Mexico, when something strange caught his eye. McJunkin noticed several large bones protruding from the earth. Dismounting from his horse, he also spotted an old arrowhead, something common in these parts. But it was the bones beside it that seemed unusual. They were larger than cattle bones and buried under layers of dirt, so McJunkin decided to show them to others.
Nearly twenty years later, ancient-bones expert Jesse Figgins came to Folsom after seeing McJunkin’s evidence. Soon Figgins unearthed an extensive bone bed containing the remains of twenty-three large Ice Age bison of a species that had been extinct for 10,000 years. He also uncovered a spear point, clearly fashioned by human hands, embedded between two bison ribs. Figgins’s finds confirmed McJunkin’s earlier discovery. The objects stirred first disbelief and then excitement, for they proved that human hunters had existed in North America 7,000 years earlier than scientists had supposed. The discovery of the thin projectile tips, named Folsom points after the site, sparked a revolution in North American archaeology.
In 1908, the year of McJunkin’s discovery, the nation still had a great deal to learn about the oldest chapters in American history. The United States had just commemorated the 300th anniversary of England’s Jamestown settlement in Virginia, and across the country, U.S. citizens memorialized Anglo-American beginnings. Textbooks of the era paid scant attention to the earlier Spanish and French arrivals in North America and none at all to the Native American inhabitants who had preceded them by thousands of years.
In the century since George McJunkin picked up a prehistoric bison bone, all of that has changed. Scholars who explore and debate the long history of early North America have steadily learned more about the continent’s first inhabitants. An expanding American history now stretches back in time far before the Jamestown settlement and reaches broadly from coast to coast. Its earliest roots lie with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent over many millennia. In addition, the foreigners who suddenly intruded into portions of the Native American world in the sixteenth century—speaking Spanish, French, and occasionally English—also represent a significant beginning. All these people now number, in different ways, among America’s first founders.
The discoveries at Folsom more than doubled archaeologists’ estimates of the time span that humans had lived in North America. Clearly, they had resided on the continent for at least 10,000 years.
After the Folsom find, collectors soon located additional evidence at nearby Clovis, New Mexico, 170 miles south of Folsom and close to the Texas border. In 1929 a teenager reported spotting large, well-chipped spearheads near Clovis. Three years later, amateur collectors located more in the same vicinity, this time beside the tooth of an extinct mammoth. These so-called Clovis points lay beneath a soil layer containing Folsom points, so they were clearly older than McJunkin’s and Figgins’s finds.
Since then, scientists have unearthed Clovis-like points throughout much of North America. According to the latest calculations, humans started creating these weapons roughly 13,900 years ago and ceased about 12,900 years ago. This means that people were hunting widely on the continent nearly 14,000 years ago. Archaeologists continue to push back and refine the estimated date for the appearance of the first people in the Americas. Recently, they have unearthed evidence suggesting the possible presence of pre-Clovis inhabitants.
The Question of Origins
Like all other peoples, the Native American societies whose ancestors have lived in America for at least 14,000 years retain rich and varied accounts of their own origins. No amount of scientific data can diminish or replace the powerful creation stories, in the Americas or elsewhere throughout the world, that have been passed down from distant ancestors and continue to serve an important cultural purpose. Nevertheless, modern researchers continue to compile evidence about the origin and migrations of the diverse peoples whom explorer Christopher Columbus mistakenly lumped together as “Indians” more than 500 years ago.
Scientists have determined that it was scarcely 70,000 years ago when the most recent ancestors of modern humans moved from Africa to spread across the Eurasian landmass, the area comprising Europe and Asia. By 40,000 years ago some of these Stone Age hunter-gatherers had already reached Australia. Others lived on the steppes of central Asia and the frozen tundra of Siberia. They had perfected the tools they needed to survive in a cold climate: flint spear points for killing mammoths, reindeer, and the woolly rhinoceros; and bone needles to sew warm, waterproof clothes out of animal skin.
Over thousands of years, bands of these northern hunters migrated east across Siberia in search of game. Eventually they arrived at the region where the Bering Strait now separates Russia from Alaska. Between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, cold conditions expanded arctic ice caps, trapping vast quantities of the earth’s water in the form of huge glaciers. As a result, ocean levels sank by 300 feet—enough to expose a bridge of land 600 miles wide between Asia and America.
The Bering Land Bridge formed part of a frigid, windswept region known as Beringia. Small groups of people could have subsisted in this cold landscape by hunting mammoths and musk oxen until Ice Age glaciers receded about 14,000 years ago. As the climate warmed and the ocean rose again, some might have headed farther east onto higher ground in Alaska. If so, these newcomers would have been cut off permanently from Siberia as water once more submerged the land bridge. But the same warming process also eventually opened a pathway through the glaciers blanketing northern America.
This ice-free corridor along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains could account for the sudden appearance of Clovis hunters across much of North America nearly 14,000 years ago. Small bands of people, armed with razor-sharp Clovis points, spread rapidly across the continent, destroying successive herds of large animals that had never faced human predators before. According to this theory, generations of hunters (known as Paleo Indians) could have migrated as far as the tip of South America within several thousand years.
In recent decades, three new developments have complicated the picture. At Cactus Hill, Virginia, and other sites, archaeologists have uncovered artifacts suggesting the presence of immediate predecessors to the Clovis people. In addition, a provocative discovery in South America—a campsite at Monte Verde, Chile, dating back more than 14,000 years—suggests to some that small groups may have used a coastal route around the North Pacific rim to reach the Americas by water. Meanwhile, genetic comparisons of different peoples, present and past, are yielding increasingly specific, if controversial, details about ancient migrations and interactions. Advances in understanding DNA—the genetic material that determines our physical make-up and transmits it to our offspring—may someday sharpen or change our awareness regarding the origins of the earliest Paleo-Indians.
The Archaic World
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Some 10,000 years ago, the Paleo-Indian period in North America gradually gave way to the Archaic period, which lasted for roughly 7,000 years. Major changes in wildlife played a large part in the transition. As the continent warmed further and the great glaciers receded north, more than 100 of America’s largest species disappeared. These included mammoths, mastodons, horses, camels, and the great long-horned bison. Researchers debate whether these large animals were hunted to extinction, wiped out by disease, or destroyed by climate change.
Human groups had to adapt to the shifting conditions. They developed new methods of survival. Inhabitants turned to the smaller bison, similar to modern-day ones, that had managed to survive and flourish on the northern plains. Archaic-era hunters learned to drive herds over cliffs and use the remains for food, clothing, and tools. A weighted spear-throwing device, called an atlatl, let hunters bring down medium-sized game. Archaic peoples also devised nets, hooks, and snares for catching birds, fish, and small animals. By 4,000 years ago, they were even using duck decoys in the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada.
Though genetically similar, these far-flung bands of Archaic Indians developed diverse cultures as they adapted to very different landscapes and environments. Nothing illustrates this diversity more clearly than speech. A few early languages branched into numerous language families, then divided further into hundreds of separate tongues. Similar cultural variations emerged in everything from diet and shelter to folklore and spiritual beliefs.
The Rise of Maize Agriculture
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