Before Columbus - 2

I

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 sparklingwater 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 rime 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 honiculture, 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 eanhen 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'an, 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 midwestern 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 rwice 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 lesserknown 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 other 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 ig/u snow house (usually about 30 feet in diameter and often connected by domed passageways to clusters of other ig/us 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 Peruan 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 Porno, 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 woodenplanked 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 Indiap 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 Margolin 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

Just what the population of California was at this time is unknown. The most commonly cited estimate is something in excess of 300,000- while other calculations have put it at 700,000 and more.¹⁵ Although the larger figure is regarded by many scholars as excessive, both it and the lower number represent estimates for California's Indian population only in 1769, the time of the founding of the Franciscan mission-that is, more than two centuries after initial Spanish incursions into the region. Even at the time of Cabrillo's voyage in 1542, however, the Indians reported to him the presence of other Spaniards in the area who, he wrote, "were killing many natives." And there is clear evidence that European diseases had a serious impact on California's native peoples throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁶ Since, as we shall see in a later chapter, during those same two centuries the native population of Florida was reduced by more than 95 percent, primarily by Spanish-introduced diseases but also by Spanish violence, it is likely that the indigenous population of California also was vastly larger in the early sixteenth century than it was in 1769. A population of 300,000 for all of California, after all, works out to a population density somewhere between that of the Western Sahara and Mongolia today-hardly suggestive of Cabrillo's "thickly settled" and "densely populated" environs. Indeed, 700,00-rather than being excessive-will in time likely turn out to have been an excessively conservative estimate.

To the east of California lay the vast, dry spaces of the southwest, what is now southern Utah and Colorado, parts of northwestern Mexico, southern Nevada, west Texas, and all of Arizona and New Mexico. The Papago, the Pima, 'the Yuma, the Mojave, the Yavapai, the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Paiute, the Zuni, the Tewa, the Navajo, the Hopi, the Towa, the Cocopa, the Tiwa, the Keres, the Piro, the Suma, the Coahuiltec, and various Apache peoples (the Aravaipa, the Coyotera, the Chiricahua, the Mimbreno, the Jicarella, the Mescalero, the Lipan) are just some of the major extant cultures of the southwest. And all these large cultural designations contain within them numerous smaller, but distinctive, indigenous communities. Thus, for example, the Coahuiltecs of the Texas-Mexico borderlands actually are more than 100 different independent peoples who are grouped together only because they speak the Coahuiltec language.¹⁷

The major ancient cultural traditions of this region were those of the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. Together, these cultures influenced the lives of peoples living, from east to west, across the virtual entirety of modern-day Arizona and New Mexico, and from middle Utah and Colorado in the north to Mexico's Sonora and Chihuahua deserts in the south. This area has supported human populations for millennia, populations that were growing maize and squash more than 3000 years ago.¹⁸ Indeed, agriculture in the pre-Columbian era attained a higher level of development among the people of the southwest than among any other group north of Mesoamerica. Beginning 1700 years ago, the Hohokam, for example, built a huge and elaborate network of canals to irrigate their crops; just one of these canals alone was 8 feet deep, 30 feet wide, 8 miles long, and was able to bring precious life to 8000 acres of arid desert land. Other canals carried water over distances of more than 20 miles.¹⁹ The general lingering fame of these societies, however, rests predominantly on their extraordinary artistry, craftsmanship, and architectural engineeringfrom fine and delicate jewelry and pottery to massive housing complexes.

Among the numerous outstanding examples of southwest architectural achievement are the Chacoan communities of the San Juan Basin in Colorado and New Mexico, within the Anasazi culture area. Chaco Canyon is near the middle of the San Juan Basin, and here, more than a thousand years ago, there existed the metropolitan hub of hundreds of villages and at least nine large towns constructed around enormous multi-storied building complexes. Pueblo Bonito is an example of one of these: a single, fourstory building with large high-ceilinged rooms and balconies, it contained 800 rooms, including private residences for more than 1200 people and dozens of circular common rooms up to 60 feet in diameter. No single structure in what later became the United States housed this many people until the largest apartment buildings of New York City were constructed in the nineteenth century. But in its time Pueblo Bonito was far from unique. Poseuinge, near present-day Ojo Caliente, is another example among many: a complex of several adjoining three-story residential buildings, Poseuinge (or Posi) contained more than 2000 rooms.²⁰

In the dry surrounding countryside the people of this region-not only the ancient Hohokam---constructed intricate canals and ditches, with diversion dams, floodgates, and other runoff control systems, alongside which they planted gardens.²¹ So successful were these water management systems that, as Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton have observed, "virtually all of the water that fell in the immediate vicinity was channeled down spillways and troughs to feed their gardens and replenish their reservoirs."²² And in recent decades aerial photography has revealed the presence of great ancient roadways up to 30 feet wide that linked the hundreds of Chaco Canyon communities with at least fifty so-called outlier population centers up to 100 miles away, each of which contained its own complex of large, masonry pueblos. In all, it appears that these roads connected together communities spread out over more than 26,000 square miles of land, an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combinedalthough recent studies have begun to suggest that the Chaco region was even larger than the largest previous estimates have surmised. Indeed, as an indication of how much remains to be learned about these ancient peoples and societies, in the Grand Canyon alone more than 2000 indigenous habitation sites have thus far been identified, of which only three have been excavated and studied intensively-while almost half of the canyon's 1,200,000 acres of land area has never even been seen at close range by an archaeologist or a historian.²³

Despite the enormous amount of organized labor that was necessary to construct their carefully planned communities, the native people of the southwest have always been known for their political egalitarianism and their respect for personal autonomy. The earliest Spanish visitors to the southwest-including Franciso Vasquez de Coronado in 1540 and Diego Perez de Luxan in 1582-frequently commented on the widespread equality and codes of reciprocity they observed among such Pueblo peoples as the Hopi and the Zuni; the only significant class distinctions that could be discerned were those that granted power and prestige (but not excessive wealth) to the most elderly women and men.²⁴ Observing the descendants of these same peoples 400 years later, twentieth-century anthropologists continue to reach similar conclusions: it is "fundamentally indecent," anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn once wrote of the Navajo, "for a single individual to make decisions for the group."²⁵ That was far from the case, however, for the Indians of the southeast who were encountered by Hernando de Soto in the early sixteenth century during his trek north through Florida in search of gold. Here, much more hierarchical political and personal arrangements prevailed.

At one location during his travels in the southeast de Soto was met by the female leader of the Cofitachequi nation who was carried in a sedan chair, was wrapped in long pearl necklaces, and rode in a cushion-filled and awning-covered boat. She commanded a large area of agriculturally productive land, once settled with dense clusters of towns and filled with impressively constructed ceremonial and burial sites. In plundering those sites de Soto's men found elegantly carved chests and art objects, pearl inlaid and copper-tipped weapons, and other valuables (including as many as 50,000 bows and quivers) that at least one of the conquistadors compared favorably with anything he had seen in fabulously prosperous Mexico or Peru. It was an apt comparison, not only because the jewelry and pottery from this area is distinctly similar in many respects to that of Mesoamerica and the Andes, but because large and dense city-like settlements, built in stockade fashion and surrounded by intensely cultivated agricultural plantations were common here, as were state and quasi-state organizations in the political realm. Major cultural centers here include those of the Caddo peoples, the Hasinai, the Bidai, the Atakapa, the Tunica, the Chickasaw, the Tuskegee, the Natchez, the Houma, the Chocktaw, the Creek, the Tohome, the Pensacola, the Apalachee, the Seminole, the Yamasee, the Cusabo, the Waccamaw, the Catawba, the Woccon-and again, as in other regions, many more. No other part of North America outside of Mesoamerica had such complex and differentiated societies, and no other area outside of the northwest coast and California was so linguistically diverse-much more diverse, in fact, than Western Europe is today.²⁶

Pottery developed in this region at least 4000 years ago and true agriculture followed about 1000 years later. Although the people of the southeast did hunt and fish, they lived primarily in sedentary communities distinguished by clusters of towering temple mounds, large public buildings that each held scores and sometimes hundreds of assigned seats for political and religious gatherings, and assemblages of individual family houses that spread out over as many as fifteen to twenty miles. The people living in these state-like communities largely were nourished by enormous fields of corn, beans, and other produce that they harvested in two or even three crops each year and stored in corn cribs and granaries. They were superb basket-makers, carpenters, potters, weavers, tanners, and fishermen. Some, like the Calusa, fished from large canoes in the open ocean, while they and others also gathered clams and oysters from the coasts and used weirs and basket traps and spears and stupefying herbs to catch fish in rivers and in streams.²⁷

The Calusa, in fact, are especially intriguing in that they defy conventional rules of political anthropology by having been a complex of hunting, fishing, and gathering societies that also were sedentary and highly stratified, with politically powerful and centralized governments. Paramount chiefs, who commanded standing armies of warriors who had no other work obligations, ruled directly over dozens of towns in their districts, while controlling dozens more through systems of tribute. Class rankings included nobles, commoners, and servants (who were military captives), while there were specialized roles for wood carvers, painters, engravers, navigators, healers, and the scores of dancers and singers who performed on ceremonial occasions. And such festivities were both frequent and major affairs: one European account from the sixteenth century describes a paramount chief's house as large enough to accommodate 2000 people "without being very crowded." Moreover, such buildings were not especially large by southeastern coast standards. As J. Leitch Wright, Jr., notes: "similar structures in Apalachee, Timucua, and Guale (coastal Georgia) held considerably more."²⁸

Elaborate social and cultural characteristics of this nature are not supposed to exist among non-agricultural or non-industrial peoples, but like many of the hunting and gathering societies of the northwest, the Calusa lived in an environment so rich in easily accessible natural resources that agriculture was not needed to maintain large, stable, politically complex settlements. One measure of the great size of these communities can be seen in the middens-the refuse collections studied by archaeologists-that the Calusa left behind. Throughout the world, among the largest shellfish middens known to exist are those at Ertebelle in Denmark, where they range up to 30 acres in size and almost 10 feet in height. In comparison, shell middens from Calusa areas throughout southwest Florida have been found covering up to 80 acres of land and reaching to heights of 20 feetthat is, many times the cubic volume of the largest Ertebelle middens. And yet, enormous as these deposits are-testifying to extraordinary concentrations of population-ethnohistorical and archaeological evidence indicates that shellfish were not a major component of the Cal usa diet.²⁹

Far to the north of the Calusa and the hundreds of other cultural centers in what today are Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, resided the Tuscarora, the Pamlico, the Secotan, the Nottaway, the Weapemeoc, the Meherrin, the Powhatan, the Susquehannock, and the Delaware-to just begin a list that could be multiplied many times over. Beyond them, of course, were the great Northern Iroquoian nations-the Seneca, the Oneida, the Mohawk, the Onandaga, the Cayuga, the Wenro, the Erie, the Petun, the Neutral, the Huron, and the St. Lawrence Iroquois. And the New England Indian nations-the Pennacook, the Nipmuk, the Massachusett, the Wampanoag, the Niantic, the Nauset, the Pequot, the Mahican, the Narraganset, the Wappinger, the Mohegan, and more. Traditionally these native peoples were thought to have lived in very thinly populated settlements, but recent re-analyses of their population histories suggest that such separate nations as the Mohawk, the Munsee, the Massachusett, the Mohegan-Pequot, and others filled their territorial areas with as many or more residents per square mile as inhabit most western regions in the presentday United States. Overall, according to one estimate, the Atlantic coastal plain from Florida to Massachusetts supported more than 2,000,000 people before the arrival of the first Europeans.³⁰

Probably the most common association that is made with the congregations of northeastern cultures concerns their sophisticated domestic political systems and their formal networks of international alliances, such as the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois League, founded in the middle of the fifteenth century and composed of the independent Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. Many writers, both historians and anthropologists, have argued that the League was a model for the United States Constitution, although much controversy continues to surround that assertion. The debate focuses largely on the extent of Iroquois influence on Euro-American political thought, however, since no one denies there was some influence.³¹ Indeed, as numerous historians have shown, overall American Indian political and social organization had a powerful impact on European social thought, particularly in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.³² In any case, however the controversy over Iroquois influence on the U.S. Constitution eventually is decided, it will not minimize the Iroquois achievement, since-as one of the originators of the notion of a connection between the League and the Constitution, J.N.B. Hewitt of the Smithsonian Institution, admitted when he first propounded the hypothesis more than fifty years ago:

Some of the ideas incorporated in the League of the Five Nations were far too radical even for the most advanced of the framers of the American Constitution. Nearly a century and a half was to elapse before the white men could reconcile themselves to woman suffrage, which was fundamental in the Indian government. They have not yet arrived at the point of abolishing capital punishment, which the Iroquois had accomplished by a very simple legal device. And child welfare legislation, prominent in the Iroquois scheme of things, had to wait for a century or more before the white men were ready to adopt it.³³

To limit a description of female power among the Iroquois to the achievement of "woman suffrage," however, is to not even begin to convey the reality of women's role in Iroquois society. As the Constitution of the Five Nations firmly declared: "The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the · female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother."³⁴ In her survey and analysis of the origins of sexual inequality among the major cultures of the world, this is how anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday describes the exception of the Iroquois:

In the symbolic, economic, and familial spheres the Iroquois were matriarchal, that is, female dominated. lroquoian women headed the family longhouse, and much of the economic and ceremonial life centered on the agricultural activities of women. Men were responsible for hunting, war, and intertribal affairs. Although women appointed men to League positions and could veto their decisions, men dominated League deliberations. This tension between male and female spheres, in which females dominated village life and left intertribal life to men, suggests that the sexes were separate but equal, at least during the confederacy. Before the confederacy, when the individual nations stood alone and consisted of a set of loosely organized villages subsisting on the horticultural produce of women, females may have overshadowed the importance of males.³⁵

Perhaps this is why, as Sanday later remarks: "Archaeological excavations of pre-Iroquoian village sites show that they were unfortified, suggesting that if there was an emphasis on warfare, it lacked major economic motivation, and conquest was an unknown objective."³⁶ And perhaps this also helps account for the unusually strong egalitarianism even among later Iroquois people-as among other native peoples of the northeast--on which early European visitors invariably remarked. The Jesuit Pierre de Charlevoix, for instance, traveled throughout what today is New York, Michigan, and eastern Canada and marveled at the early age at which Indian children were encouraged, with success, in seemingly contradictory directions-toward both prideful independence and cooperative, communal socialization. Moreover, he noted, the parents accomplished this goal by using the gentlest and subtlest of techniques. While "fathers and mothers neglect nothing, in order to inspire their children with certain principles of honour which they preserve their whole lives," he wrote, "they take care always to communicate their instructions on this head, in an indirect manner." An emphasis on pride and honor-and thus on the avoidance of shame-was the primary means of adult guidance. For example, notes Charlevoix: "A mother on seeing her daughter behave ill bursts into tears; and upon the other's asking her the cause of it, all the answer she makes is, Thou dishonourest me. It seldom happens that this sort of reproof fails of being efficacious." Some of the Indians, he adds, do "begin to chastise their children, but this happens only among those that are Christians, or such as are settled in the colony."³⁷ The most violent act of disapprobation that a parent might use on a misbehaving child, Charlevoix and other visitors observed, was the tossing of a little water in the child's face, a gesture obviously intended more to embarrass than to harm.

Children, not surprisingly, learned to tum the tables on their parents. Thus, Charlevoix found children threatening to do damage to themselves, or even kill themselves, for what he regarded as the slightest parental correction: "You shall not have a daughter long to use so," he cites as a typical tearful reaction from a chastised young girl. If this has a familiar ring to some late twentieth-century readers, so too might the Jesuit's concern about the Indians' permissive methods of child rearing: "It would seem," he says, "that a childhood so ill instructed should be followed by a very dissolute and turbulent state of youth." But that, in fact, is not what happened, he notes, because "on the one hand the Indians are naturally quiet and betimes masters of themselves, and are likewise more under the guidance of reason than other men; and on the other hand, their natural disposition, especially in the northern nations, does not incline them to debauchery."³⁸

The Indians' fairness and dignity and self-control that are commented on by so many early European visitors manifested themselves in adult life in various ways, but none more visibly than in the natives' governing councils. This is evident, for example, in a report on the Huron's councils by Jean de Brebeuf during the summer of 1636. One of the most "remarkable things" about the Indian leaders' behavior at these meetings, he wrote, "is their great prudence and moderation of speech; I would not dare to say they always use this self-restraint, for I know that sometimes they sting each other,-but yet you always remark a singular gentleness and discretion .... [E]very time I have been invited [to their councils] I have come out from them astonished at this feature."³⁹ Added Charlevoix on this same matter:

It must be acknowledged, that proceedings are carried on in these assemblies with a wisdom and a coolness, and a knowledge of affairs, and I may add generally with a probity, which would have done honour to the areopagus of Athens, or to the Senate of Rome, in the most glorious days of those republics: the reason of this is, that nothing is resolved upon with precipitation; and that those violent passions, which have so much disgraced the politics even of Christians, have never prevailed amongst the Indians over the public good.⁴⁰

Similar observations were made of other Indian societies up and down the eastern seaboard.⁴¹ In addition, most natives of this region, stretching from the densely settled southern shores of the Great Lakes (with a preColumbian population that has been estimated at close to 4,000,000) across to northern Maine on down to the Tidewater area of Virginia and over to the Cumberland River in Tennessee, displayed to their neighbors, and to strangers as well, a remarkable ethic of generosity. As the Jesuit Joseph Francois Lafitau, who lived among the Indians for six years, observed: "If a cabin of hungry people meets another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to them without waiting to be asked, although they expose themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those whom they help at their own expense so humanely and with such greatness of soul. In Europe we should find few [people] disposed, in like cases, to a liberality so noble and magnificent."⁴²

As with our earlier enumerations and comments on native peoples across the length and breadth of the continent, these examples of eastern indigenous cultures are only superficial and suggestive-touching here on aspects of the political realm, there on intimate life, and elsewhere on material achievement, in an effort to point a few small spotlights into corners that conventionally are ignored by historians of America's past. Untold hundreds of other culturally and politically independent Indian nations and tribes that we have not even tried to survey filled the valleys and plains and woodlands and deserts and coastlines of what are now Canada and the United States. So many more, in fact, that to name the relative few that we have, this tiny percentage of the whole, risks minimizing rather than illustrating their numbers. Perhaps the best way to convey some sense of these multitudes and varieties of culture is simply to note that a recent listing of the extant Indian peoples of North America produced a compilation of nearly 800 separate nations-about half of which are formally recognized by the United States as semi-sovereign political entities-but then cautioned that the list "is not exhaustive with regard to their subdivisions or alternate names. There are thousands more of both."⁴³

In the same way that in the villages and towns and nations of other continents-of Asia and Africa and Europe-the social structures and political networks and resource production systems of different communities varied greatly from place to place and from time to time, so too was there astounding diversity and multiformity among North America's aboriginal peoples. As on those other continents, both in the past and in the present, some communities were small, isolated, provincial, and poor, barely scraping subsistence from the soil. Others were huge urban and commercial centers where large numbers of people, entirely freed from the necessity of subsistence work, carried out other tasks of artistry, engineering, construction, religion, and trade. And, between these extremes, there was a rich variety of cultural organization, a great diversity of social design. But in all these communities, regardless of size or organizational complexity, human beings lived out the joys and sorrows, the mischief, the humor, the high seriousness and tragedy, the loves, fears, hatreds, jealousies, kindnesses, and possessed all the other passions and concerns, weaknesses and strengths, that human flesh throughout the world is heir to.

Over time (again as in the histories of the other continents), cultures and empires in North America rose and fell, only to be replaced by other peoples whose material and political successes also waxed and waned while the long centuries and millennia inexorably unfolded. Not all the cultures surveyed in the preceding pages were contemporaneous with one another; certain of them ascended or declined centuries apart. Some of the societies that we have mentioned here, and some that went unmentioned, have long since disappeared almost without a trace. Others continue on. Some have had their remains so badly plundered that virtually nothing of them any longer exists-such as the once-massive Spiro Mound, a monument of an eastern Oklahoma people, that was looted of its treasures in the 1930s by the farmer who owned the land on which it stood. Literally tons of shell, pearl, and other precious objects were hauled out in wheelbarrows and sold by the side of the road. And then, for good measure, once the mound was emptied, the farmer had it dynamited into rubble.⁴⁴

In contrast, other large communities have left immense and permanent reminders of their past glories-such as the huge earthen mound at Cahokia, Illinois. At the center of a large community that sprawled down the banks of the Illinois River for a distance as great as that from one end of San Francisco to the other today, with houses spread out over more than 2000 acres of land, stood a gigantic man-made structure extending ten stories into the air and containing 22,000,000 cubic feet of earth. At its base this monument, which was larger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt, covered 16 acres of land. About 120 other temple and burial mounds rose up in and around Cahokia which acted as the urban core for more than fifty surrounding towns and villages in the Mississippi Valley, and which by itself probably had a population of well over 40,000 people. In size and social complexity Cahokia has been compared favorably with some of the more advanced Maya city-states of ancient Mesoamerica.⁴⁵ And it was fully flourishing almost 2000 years ago.

These, then, are just some examples of the great multitudes of permanently settled societies that constituted what commonly and incorrectly are thought of today as the small and wandering bands of nomads who inhabited North America's "virgin land" before it was discovered by Europeans. In fact, quite to the contrary of that popular image, as the eminent geographer Carl 0. Sauer once pointed out:

For the most part, the geographic limits of agriculture have not been greatly advanced by the coming of the white man. In many places we have not passed the limits of Indian farming at all. . . . In general, it may be said that the plant domesticates of the New World far exceeded in range and efficiency the crops that were available to Europeans at the time of the discovery of the New World. . .. The ancient Indian plant breeders had done 'their work well. In the genial climates, there was an excellent, high yielding plant for every need of food, drink, seasoning, or fiber. On the climatic extremes of cold and drought, there still were a remarkable number of plant inventions that stretched the limits of agriculture about as far as plant growth permitted. One needs only to dip into the accounts of the early explorers and colonists, especially Spanish, to know the amazement with which the Europeans learned the quality and variety of crop plants of Indian husbandry.⁴⁶

Still, wildly inaccurate though the popular historical perception of Indian America as an underpopulated virgin land clearly is, on one level-a comparative level-the myth does contain at least a shred of truth. For despite the large, prolific, sophisticated, permanently settled, and culturally varied populations of people who inhabited the Americas north of Mexico prior to the coming of Columbus, their numbers probably did not constitute more than 10 to 15 percent of the entire population of the Western Hemisphere at that time.