Complete Idiots Guide to American History

Pueblos—still live in these areas.

Atlantic Presence

Far to the northeast of the Pueblos, agriculture was well established in the Mississippi valley by the 1st century A.D. We have already glanced at the burial and ceremonial mounds some of these people left. These cultures eventually reached from the Gulf of Mexico to Wisconsin, and from New York to Kansas. It is believed that the thatched houses built by “Temple Mound” people resembled dwellings found in Mexico, and that their pyramidal mounds harked back to the pyramids of Mesoamerica. For these and other reasons (including similarities in religious ritual and in pottery design), many historians believe that the first Indians of the Mississippi valley and Atlantic coastal regions may have descended from Mayan and other Central and South American immigrants to the northern hinterlands.

However they came to populate North America, the Indians of this vast region developed in diverse ways, creating more than 2,000 distinct cultures. Some of these cultures barely subsisted as hunter-gatherers; others became stable and relatively prosperous agricultural societies.

Unlike the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, these North American groups had no written language and left no historical records, so it is impossible to present a “history” of the North American Indians before their contact with Europeans. In fact, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that most North American Indians lived apart from linear time, harmonizing their lives with the cycles of the seasons and the biological processes of propagation, birth, and death. Europeans, forever doing and getting, were obsessed with recording events and measuring time. The Native Americans were focused instead on being. Time itself was therefore different for them.

Leif the Lucky

Momentously—and tragically—the time of the Old World would collide with the time of the New. For 400 years, from a clash between “Indians” and Christopher Columbus’s men in 1493 to the massacre of Native Americans by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, the history of America would be in large part the history of racial warfare between white and red.

The first European contact, some 500 years before Columbus sailed, ignited no great tragedy, however. It seems likely that Vikings reached the Faeroe Islands by A.D. 800, and that they landed in Greenland in 870. The very first Old World dweller to set eyes on the continent of North America was most likely a Norseman named Bjarni Herjulfsson in A.D. 986. But that sighting came as a result of a mistake in navigation. Herjulfsson had been blown off course, and he had no interest in actually exploring the land he sighted.

It was not until the next decade, about the year 1000, that the Norse captain Leif Eriksson led an expedition that touched a place called Helluland (probably Baffin Island) and Markland (most likely Labrador). Most historians believe that Leif—celebrated as Leif the Lucky in the great Icelandic sagas of the 13th century—and his men spent a winter in rude Viking huts hastily erected in a spot abundant with berries and grapes and, for that reason, called Vinland.

Nobody knows for certain just where Vinland was. Some have suggested a location as far south as the Virginia Capes, although most historians believe that it was in Newfoundland, perhaps at a place called L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of the Canadian province.

After Leif the Lucky left Vinland, his brother Thorvald paid a visit to the tenuous settlement about 1004. Next, in 1010, Thorfinn Karlsefni, another Icelandic explorer, attempted to establish a more permanent settlement at Vinland. According to two Icelandic sagas, Thorfinn, a trader as bold as he was wealthy, brought women as well as men with him. They carried on a lively trade, but they also fought fiercely with the Native Americans, whom the sagas call Skraelings—an Old Norse word signifying “dwarfs” or “wretches” or, perhaps, “savages.” The Skraelings attacked tenaciously and repeatedly.

After three lethal winters, Thorfinn and his would-be settlers abandoned Vinland forever. The Viking expeditions to North America led, then, to nothing—at least not right away. Christopher Columbus, half a millennium removed from the Vikings, heard of the Vinland tradition and was excited by stories about a New World across the “Ocean Sea.”

The Least You Heed to Know

Native Americans almost certainly immigrated to the Americas from Asia across an Ice Age “land bridge” where the Bering Strait now is.

Pre-Columbian Native American cultures varied widely, with the most elaborately developed living in South and Central America.

The European discoverer of America was (most likely) Leif Eriksson about 1000.

Stats

Eleven million is the current consensus. However, estimates of the prehistoric population of the area encompassed by the United States range wildly—from 8.4 million to 112 million. For comparison, in 1990, 1,959,234 Indians, including Eskimos and Aleuts, lived in the United States.

Word for the Day

Native American is the term used by most historians and anthropologists to describe the aboriginal peoples of the Western Hemisphere. In this book I also use the more familiar term “Indian.” That designation was coined by Christopher Columbus, who, on October 12, 1492, thought that he had landed in Asia—”the Indies”—and therefore called the people he encountered Indians. The name stuck.

Stats

Tikal, in northeastern Guatemala, was the largest Maya city of the Classic era. Its