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COMBINED, NORTH AMERICA and South America cover an area of 16,000,000 square miles, more than a quarter of the land surface of the globe. To its first human inhabitants, tens of thousands of years ago, this enormous domain they had discovered was literally a world unto itself: a world of miles-high mountains and vast fertile prairies, of desert shrublands and dense tropical rain forests, of frigid arctic tundra and hot murky swamps, of deep and fecund river valleys, of sparkling-water lakes, of canopied woodlands, of savannahs and steppes—and thousands upon thousands of miles of magnificent ocean coast. There were places where it almost never rained, and places where it virtually never stopped; there were places where the temperature reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and places where it dropped to 80 degrees below zero. But in all these places, under all these conditions, eventually some native people made their homes.
By the time ancient Greece was falling under the control of Rome, in North America the Adena Culture already had been flourishing for a thousand years. As many as 500 Adena living sites have been uncovered by modern archaeologists. Centered in present-day Ohio, they radiate out as far as Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. We will never know how many hundreds more such sites are buried beneath the modern cities and suburbs of the northeastern United States, but we do know that these early sedentary peoples lived in towns with houses that were circular in design and that ranged from single-family dwellings as small as twenty feet in diameter to multi-family units up to eighty feet across. These residences commonly were built in close proximity to large public enclosures of 300 feet and more in diameter that modern archaeologists have come to refer to as “sacred circles” because of their presumed use for religious ceremonial purposes. The buildings they constructed for the living, however, were minuscule compared with the receptacles they built for their dead: massive tombs, such as that at Grave Creek in West Virginia, that spread out hundreds of feet across and reached seven stories in height—and that were commonplace structures throughout Adena territory as early as 500 B.C.1
In addition to the subsistence support of hunting and fishing, and gathering the natural fruit and vegetable bounty growing all around them, the ancient Adena people imported gourds and squash from Mexico and cultivated them along with early strains of maize, tubers, sunflowers, and other plant domesticates. Another import from the south—from South America—was tobacco, which they smoked through pipes in rituals of celebration and remembrance. From neighboring residents of the area that we now know as the Carolinas they imported sheets of mica, while from Lake Superior and beyond to the north they acquired copper, which they hammered and cut and worked into bracelets and rings and other bodily adornments.
Overlapping chronologically with the Adena was the Hopewell Culture that grew in time to cover an area stretching in one direction from the northern Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, in the other direction from Kansas to New York. The Hopewell people, who as a group were physiologically as well culturally distinguishable from the Adena, lived in permanent communities based on intensive horticulture, communities marked by enormous earthen monuments, similar to those of the Adena, that the citizenry built as religious shrines and to house the remains of their dead.2 Literally tens of thousands of these towering earthen mounds once covered the American landscape from the Great Plains to the eastern woodlands, many of them precise, geometrically shaped, massive structures of a thousand feet in diameter and several stories high; others—such as the famous quarter-mile long coiled snake at Serpent Mound, Ohio—were imaginatively designed symbolic temples.
No society that had not achieved a large population and an exceptionally high level of political and social refinement, as well as a sophisticated control of resources, could possibly have had the time or inclination or talent to design and construct such edifices. In addition, the Hopewell people had trade networks extending to Florida in one direction and Wyoming and North Dakota in the other, through which they acquired from different nations of indigenous peoples the copper, gold, silver, crystal, quartz, shell, bone, obsidian, pearl, and other raw materials that their artisans worked into elaborately embossed and decorative metal foil, carved jewelry, earrings, pendants, charms, breastplates, and other objets d’art, as well as axes, adzes, awls, and more. Indeed, so extensive were the Hopewell trading relationships with other societies throughout the continent that archaeologists have recovered from the centers of Hopewell culture in Ohio more materials originating from outside than from within the region.3
To the west of the Hopewell there emerged in time the innumerable villages of the seemingly endless plains—large, usually permanent communities of substantial, multi-family homes and common buildings, the villages themselves often fortified with stockades and dry, surrounding moats. These were the progenitors of the people—the Mandan, the Cree, the Blood, the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Piegan, the Hidatsa, the Arikara, the Cheyenne, the Omaha, the Pawnee, the Arapaho, the Kansa, the Iowa, the Osage, the Kiowa, the Wichita, the Commanche, the Plains Cree, various separate nations of Sioux, and others, including the Ute and Shoshoni to the west—who became the classic nomads on horseback that often serve as the popular American model for all Indian societies. But even they did not resort to that pattern of life until they were driven to it by invading armies of displaced Europeans.
Indeed, although the modern horse originated in the Americas, by 10,000 B.C. or so it had become extinct there as well. The only survivors from then until their reintroduction by the Spanish were the Old World breeds that long ago had moved across Berengia in the opposite direction from that of the human migrants, that is, from east to west and into Asia. Thus, there could not have been a nomadic life on horseback for the Indians of the plains prior to European contact, because there were no horses in North America to accommodate them. On the contrary, most of the people who lived in this region were successful hunters and farmers, well established in settled communities that were centered—as are most of today’s mid-western towns—in conjunction with the rivers and adjoining fertile valleys of the Great Plains. Others did relocate their towns and villages on cyclical schedules dictated by the drastically changing seasons of this area, disassembling and reassembling their portable homes known as tipis. These dwellings were far different from the image most modern Americans have of them, however; when one of the earliest European explorers of the southwestern plains first came upon an Indian village containing scores of carefully arranged tipis “made of tanned hides, very bright red and white in color and bell-shaped . . . so large that in the most ordinary house, four different mattresses and beds are easily accommodated,” he marveled at their comfort and extraordinary resistance to the elements, adding that “they are built as skillfully as any house in Italy.”4
Since the land area supporting the people of the plains included about a million square miles of earth—that is, more than twice the area of formerly Soviet Central Asia—all generalizations about the societies and cultures that occupied the land are invariably rife with exceptions. Roughly speaking, however, the Indian peoples of the western plains thrived well into the post-Columbian era on the enormous herds of bison—along with elk, deer, bears, and other game—that these descendants of ancient wooly mammoth hunters had used as their primary means of sustenance for thousands of years. The same generally was true on the southern plains. But these varied peoples also were very active traders, principally with the other, more densely settled cultures of the plains to the north and to the east who raised advanced strains of maize and beans and other lesser-known plant crops, such as the unprepossessing but widely grown prairie turnip—which has three times the protein content of the potato and nearly the same level of vitamin C as most citrus fruits.5
Far to the north of the plains settlements, from Baffin and Ellesmere islands, off the coast of Greenland in the east, to the Yukon and beyond in the west, lay the enormous Arctic and Subarctic areas, inhabited by the Iglulik, the Nelsilik, and ot
her Eskimo peoples, as well as the Aleut, the Koyukon, the Ingalik, the Tanana, the Kulchin, the Han, the Nabesna, the Tagish, the Hare, the Tahltan, the Kaska, the Tsetsaut, the Sekani, the Dogrib, the Salteaux, the Naskapi, the Beothuk, and others. If it were a country unto itself, this dominion today would be the seventh largest nation on earth in land area, just behind the entire continent of Australia, but larger than all of India including Kashmir.
The first people to migrate here had moved into what one archaeologist has called “the coldest, darkest, and most barren regions ever inhabited by man.” But they were a hardy and tenacious lot whose varied and ingenious dwellings ranged from the well known iglu snow house (usually about 30 feet in diameter and often connected by domed passageways to clusters of other iglus as well as to large common rooms for feasting and dancing) to the huge semi-subterranean barabara structures of the Aleutian Islands, each of them up to 200 feet long and 50 feet wide, and housing more than 100 people. The residents of these northernmost regions survived the rigorous tests of the natural environment, and they flourished; as that same archaeologist who had described this area in terms of its cold, dark, and barren harshness later acknowledged, the early inhabitants of the Arctic and Subarctic possessed all the tools “that gave them an abundant and secure economy [and] they developed a way of life that was probably as rich as any other in the nonagricultural and nonindustrial world.”6 For subsistence, along with the fish that they caught, and the birds that sometimes flocked so thickly overhead that they threatened to cover the sky, the people of this land hunted polar bears, arctic fox, musk oxen, caribou, and narwhals, seals, and walruses.
Forbidding though this place may seem to residents of the rest of the world, to its native people there was nothing, apart from one another, that they treasured so much. Observes anthropologist Richard K. Nelson, writing of the Koyukon, a people still living there today:
To most outsiders, the vast expanse of forest, tundra, and mountains in the Koyukon homeland constitute a wilderness in the absolute sense of the word. . . . But in fact the Koyukon homeland is not a wilderness, nor has it been for millennia. This apparently untrodden forest and tundra country is thoroughly known by a people whose entire lives and cultural ancestry are inextricably associated with it. The lakes, hills, river bends, sloughs, and creeks are named and imbued with personal or cultural meanings. Indeed, to the Koyukon these lands are no more a wilderness than are farmlands to a farmer or streets to a city dweller.7
Nelson’s point is affectingly well illustrated in a story told by environmental author Barry Lopez about “a native woman [of this region], alone and melancholy in a hospital room, [who] told another interviewer she would sometimes raise her hands before her eyes to stare at them: ‘Right in my hand, I could see the shorelines, beaches, lakes, mountains, and hills I had been to. I could see the seals, birds, and game. . .’”8
From the panhandle of Alaska south through the upper northwest and on down to the California border lived so many different cultural communities, densely settled and thickly populated, that we have no hope of ever recovering anything close to a complete record of their vibrant pasts. The Makah, the Strait, the Quileute, the Nitinat, the Nooksack, the Chemakum, the Halkomelem, the Squamish, the Quinault, the Pentlatch, the Sechelt, the Twana, and the Luchootseet are a baker’s dozen of linguistically and culturally separate peoples whose communities were confined to the relatively small area that today is bounded by Vancouver to the north and Seattle to the south, a distance of less than 150 miles. Overall, however, the native peoples of the northwest coast made their homes along more than 2000 miles of coastline. Compared with other regions, archaeological research has been minimal in the northwest. As a result, while traditional estimates of the population prior to European contact rarely exceed a third of a million people, many more than that probably lived along this strip of land that is more extensive than the coastline of Peru—an area that supported about 6,500,000 people in a much harsher environment during pre-Columbian times. Indeed, one recent study has put the population of British Columbia alone at over 1,000,000 prior to Western contact.9 In addition to the coastal settlements, moreover, even as late as the nineteenth century, after many years of wholesale devastation, more than 100 tribes representing fifteen different language groups lived on in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—including the Chelan, the Yakima, the Palouse, the Walla Walla, the Nez Perce, the Umatilla, the Cayuse, the Flathead, the Coeur D’Alene, the Kalispel, the Colville, the Kootenay, the Sanpoil, the Wenatchee, the Methow, the Okanagan, the Ntlakyapamuk, the Nicola, the Lillooct, the Shuswap, and more.
Similarly, from the northern California border down to today’s Golden Gate Bridge in the west and Yosemite National Park in the east, an area barely 250 miles by 200 miles, there lived the Tolowa, the Yurok, the Chilula, the Karok, the Shasta, the Wiyot, the Whilkut, the Hupa, the Mattole, the Chimariko, the Yana, the Nongatl, the Wintu, the Nomlaki, the Lassik, the Wailaki, the Sinkyone, the Yuki, the Cahto, the Modoc, the Achumawi, the Atsugewi, the Maidu, the Nisenan, the Washo, the Konkow, the Patwin, the Wappo, the Lake Miwok, the Coast Miwok, the Pomo, and a branch of the Northern Paiute—to name but some of the Indian nations of this region, again, all culturally and linguistically distinct peoples, a diversity in an area of that size that probably has never been equaled anywhere else in the world. And we have not even mentioned the scores of other independent native communities and cultures that once filled the land along the entire western seaboard of Oregon and central and southern California, thick populations of people living off a cornucopia of earth and marine resources.
As in so much of ancient America, the social and political systems of the west coast cultures varied dramatically from one locale to the next. Much of the northwest, for example, was inhabited by permanent settlements of fishing and intensive foraging peoples who lived in large wooden-planked houses that often were elaborately decorated with abstract designs and stylized animal faces; many of these houses and public buildings had an image of an animal’s or bird’s mouth framing their entryways, sometimes with huge molded wooden “beaks” attached that when open served as entrance and exit ramps. Northwest coast peoples are perhaps best known, however, for their rich and demonstrative ceremonial lives and their steeply hierarchical political systems. Thus, the most common symbolic associations we make with these cultures involve their intricately carved totem poles and ritual masks, as well as their great status-proclaiming feasts known as potlatches. Indeed, from the time of first European contact on down to contemporary ethnohistorical investigation, to outsiders the single most compelling aspect of these peoples’ lives has always been their flamboyant display of wealth and their material extravagance. Given the natural riches of their surrounding environment—including lush and game-filled evergreen forests, salmon-thick rivers, and ocean waters warmed by the Japanese current—such festivals of conspicuous consumption are easily understood.
The peoples of resource rich California also were known for their complicated coastal-inland trade networks and for their large multi-cultural fiestas which apparently functioned in part to maintain and expand trade relationships.10 But in addition—and in contrast to their neighbors to the north—the California peoples were noteworthy for their remarkably egalitarian and democratically ordered societies. As anthropologists long ago demonstrated, native California peoples such as the Wintu found it difficult even to express personal domination and coercion in their language, so foreign were those concepts to their ways of life.11 And for most of California’s Indian peoples those ways of life were directly tied to the great bounty nature had given them. Although many of them were, in a technical sense, hunter-gatherer societies, so rich in foodstuffs were the areas in which they settled that they had to move about very little in order to live well. Writing of the Ohlone peoples—a general name for forty or so independent tribes and many thousands of people who inhabited the coastal area between present-day San Francisco and Monterey—Malcolm M
argolin has put it well:
With such a wealth of resources, the Ohlones did not depend upon a single staple. If the salmon failed to run, the people moved into the marshes to hunt ducks and geese. If the waterfowl population was diminished by a drought, the people could head for the coast where a beached whale or a run of smelts might help them through their troubles. And if all else failed, there were always shellfish: mussels, clams, and oysters, high in nutrients and theirs for the collecting. . . . All around the Ohlones were virtually inexhaustible resources; and for century after century the people went about their daily life secure in the knowledge that they lived in a generous land, a land that would always support them.12
“In short,” as Margolin writes, “the Ohlones did not practice agriculture or develop a rich material culture, not because they failed, but because they succeeded so well in the most ancient of all ways of life.”13
Other California peoples did practice agriculture, however, and the very earliest European explorers found it and the numbers of people living in the region awe-inspiring. Describing his voyage along the southern California coast in 1542 and 1543, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo repeatedly noted in his journal comments on the large houses he observed; the “very fine valleys [with] much maize and abundant food”; the “many savannahs and groves” and “magnificent valleys” that were “densely populated”—as was, he added, “the whole coastline.” Again and again, wherever he went, he marveled at the “many pueblos,” the “dense population,” and the “thickly settled” coasts and plains. Even the small and subsequently uninhabited Santa Barbara islands, lying 25 to 70 miles off the coast—San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, Santa Catalina, San Clemente, Santa Barbara, San Nicholas—were populated by “a great number of Indians” who greeted the Spanish ships in friendship and traded with them in ceremonies of peace. In all, from the islands to the coasts to the valleys and the plains that he observed, Cabrillo wrote, this “densely populated . . . country appears to be very fine.”14
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