Native American History: A History from Beginning to End

by Hourly History

The truth was that by the time that Columbus arrived in America, people had been living there for more than 12,000 years in culturally rich and varied societies.

When western settlers finally did begin to arrive in America, the effect was cataclysmic for the people already living there. The new arrivals brought with them new diseases and modern technologies.

cultures and societies which had existing in harmony with the land for many thousands of years were obliterated and replaced by rapacious incomers who disturbed the balance of nature and wiped out large numbers of the native people with very little concern or regret.

“We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.” —Dakota proverb

Cooking food made it easier to digest and easier to chew. That may not sound terribly important, but it was the single most important discovery to date. The wearing down and destruction of teeth caused by eating uncooked food led to early death; there was no form of dental care, and an inability to chew usually meant an inability to eat. Uncooked food is also harder to digest, and we are able to extract more of the calorific value of our food if it is properly cooked. Uncooked food is also a rich source of intestinal parasites and diseases.

The discovery of the use of fire led directly to humans living longer.

The landscape was changed dramatically as vast sheets of ice scoured out new valleys and flattened mountains. In that time, what is now Alaska and Siberia weren’t separated by the Bering Strait; they were connected by an area of land which has now disappeared, called Beringia. Beringia (this is the name given to this area by modern historians—we have no idea what the people who lived there called it) covered an area of more than 600,000 square miles (1,600,000 square kilometers) and stretched from the Lena River in what is now Siberia to the Mackenzie River in what is now Canada.

somewhere about 16,000 BCE, the climate of the Earth gradually began to change and to warm. The glaciers began to retreat, opening the way to North America. The melting of the ice also caused sea levels to rise.

As Beringia grew smaller, the people living there were forced either to go west, into Siberia, or east and south, into Canada and America. By around 11,000 BCE, the process was complete. The land bridge had been completely severed and the people who had gone east and south into Canada and America were isolated from Asia, Europe, and Africa. These were the people who became the first Native Americans.

By the time of the birth of Christ, civilizations in the Near-East, North Africa, Europe, and Asia had changed—now people generally lived in or near cities and used agriculture rather than hunting and gathering to provide food. These changes were supported by important developments in the understanding of irrigation technologies and building techniques, the development of writing, the development of wheeled vehicles, and scientific advances in the fields of medicine, metallurgy, and astronomy.

the indigenous people of America continued with the same semi-nomadic lifestyle, primarily subsisting as hunter-gatherers. They did, however, develop their own distinct cultures, belief systems, and ways of life, largely depending on their geographical location.

Up to ten million people may have lived in the Americas before the arrival of the first white settlers.

The Arctic. In present-day Alaska and Canada, small numbers of people lived as both semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer groups and in small villages. Two peoples inhabited these inhospitable lands, the Inuit and the Aleut.

The Subarctic. Much of inland Canada and Alaska was only slightly less inhospitable than the Arctic. This area consisted of vast expanses of taiga or snow forest interspersed with swamps and waterlogged tundra. The population of these lands was sparse and semi-nomadic, with people living in tents or caves and surviving by hunting caribou and other large animals and by following this game as it migrated.

The Northeast. This region stretched from the Atlantic coast west through present-day North Carolina and as far as the Mississippi River Valley. The more temperate climate in this area led to a very different way of life for those who lived here, which included the Algonquian-speaking Fox and Shawnee and the Iroquoian-speaking Erie and Tuscarora.

The Southeast. The Southeast, between the Northeast and the Gulf of Mexico, was home to the “Five Civilized Tribes,” which were Muskogean-speaking people comprising the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee Creek, and later the Seminole.

The Plains. This vast area of open prairie and mountain stretched from the Mississippi River Valley in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the modern U.S.-Canadian border in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. The people here were hunters who exploited the vast herds of buffalo for food and skins.

The Southwest. This area encompassed present-day Arizona and New Mexico. Native people living in this area adopted two very different ways of life. Tribes like the Hopi and the Yaqui became farmers, growing maize, beans, and squash.

Other tribes in this area, including the Navajo and the Apache, lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, building only small, temporary homes out of wood and mud.

The Great Basin. This was a huge area of barren and inhospitable lands set between the Rocky Mountains to the east and the Sierra Nevada to the west and the Colorado Plateau to the south and the Columbia Plateau to the north. The tr...

California. The land which is the present-day state of California was the most densely populated part of North America before the arrival of white settlers. However, this is only relative to the otherwise sparsely populated continent—it has been estimated that, immediately before the arrival of outsiders, this land was the home to around 300,000 people who formed a bewildering number of different tribes. Up to 100 different tribes, each with its own social structures and often with a unique language, existed as nomadic hunter-gatherers, living in small, temporary, and portable homes of wood and skin.

The Northwest Coast. This area, which ran up the Pacific coast from California in the south to the present-day Canadian border in the north had a generally mild climate and an abundance of natural resources.

The Plateau. This area was located in the basins of the Fraser and Columbia Rivers, between the Plains, the Great Basin, the Northwest Coast, and California.

The original people who came to North America across the Bering Land Bridge also settled across South America and the Caribbean. However, these people developed entirely separate ways of life, languages, cultures, and social structures,

Given this multitude of different peoples living in different areas and adopting very different ways of life and different languages, it will be seen that there is no such thing as a typical Native American.