Unit 6 · The First Peoples of North America

Long before any city, people walked and paddled into North America. Most scientists think they came from Asia. During the last ice age, so much water was frozen in ice that the sea was lower. Land connected Asia and Alaska. People may have crossed that land, or paddled along the coast. This happened at least fifteen thousand years ago. Some sites may be older.

How do we know? Nobody wrote it down. Instead, people left things behind. Near Clovis, New Mexico, hunters made long stone spear points. They dropped them next to the bones of mammoths. Scientists call these artifacts, objects that people made. They can tell how old an artifact is by testing the bone or charcoal found with it.

Illinois has these clues too. Farmers plowing fields have turned up stone spear points thousands of years old. Along the rivers, people fished and gathered nuts. Slowly they learned to grow plants. By about a thousand years ago, corn had become the main food in many places. That change made villages and cities possible.

When Europeans arrived in the 1490s, millions of people already lived in North America. They did not belong to one group. They belonged to hundreds of nations. A nation is a people with its own land, its own leaders and its own language. The Lakota, the Hopi and the Haudenosaunee were very different from each other. They were as different as Spain is from China.

The land shaped how each nation lived. In the forests of the east, people built homes from bark and grew corn. On the grassy plains, people hunted bison. In the dry Southwest, people built with mud brick and watered their crops by hand. On the rainy northwest coast, people fished for salmon and carved giant cedar trees. In the frozen north, people hunted seals on the ice.

Scientists call each of these areas a culture region. Nations in the same region often shared foods, homes and tools. They faced the same weather and the same plants and animals. But they still had their own languages and stories. In this chapter you will visit five regions and one great city. Keep asking one question: how did the land shape the way people lived?

Picture a forest of oak and maple that goes on for weeks of walking. This was the Eastern Woodlands, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. Wood was everywhere, so people built with it. The Haudenosaunee of what is now New York built longhouses. A longhouse had a frame of bent poles covered with sheets of elm bark. It could be as long as a school hallway.

Several related families lived in one longhouse. Each family had its own space along the wall, with a shared fire in the middle. The oldest woman in the family was in charge of the house. Other Woodlands peoples, like the Algonquian nations, built smaller round homes called wigwams. Both kinds of home used bark, because bark was free and easy to find.

Woodlands farmers planted three crops in the same mound of soil. They called them the three sisters: corn, beans and squash. The corn grew tall. The beans climbed the corn stalks. The squash spread its wide leaves on the ground and kept the soil damp. Beans also put back into the soil what corn used up. Together, the three sisters fed whole villages. Corn from these fields still shapes what Illinois grows today.

West of the Mississippi the trees thin out. Then they stop. The Great Plains are a sea of grass that stretches from Texas to Canada. Millions of bison, the big shaggy animals many people call buffalo, grazed on that grass. Before Europeans came, there were tens of millions of them. For the peoples of the Plains, the bison was life.

Plains peoples used every part of the animal. Meat was eaten fresh or dried for winter. Hides became blankets, robes and the walls of homes. Bones became tools and needles. Horns became spoons. Even the stomach could be a cooking pot. Wasting a bison was unthinkable, because the whole village depended on it.

Bison herds moved with the seasons, so many Plains peoples moved too. Their home was the tipi. It was a cone of long poles covered with bison hides. A tipi could be taken down in minutes and packed onto a dog sled. Before Europeans brought horses, dogs did the hauling. Nations like the Lakota and Cheyenne followed the herds across the grass, and their homes came with them.

Now picture red cliffs, dry ground and a hot sun. This is the Southwest, in what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Rain is rare. Yet people have farmed here for more than two thousand years. The Ancestral Puebloans, the Hopi, the Zuni and others built towns of stone and mud brick. The Spanish later called these towns pueblos, their word for villages.

A pueblo looked like an apartment building made of earth. Rooms were stacked several stories high. People climbed ladders to reach the upper floors. Thick walls kept rooms cool in the day and warm at night. Some pueblos were built into the sides of cliffs, high above the valley floor. Others, like Acoma in New Mexico, sit on top of a mesa and have been lived in for hundreds of years.

Farming with so little rain took skill. People dug ditches to carry river water to their fields. This is called irrigation. They planted corn deep in the ground where the soil stayed damp. They saved seeds from the plants that survived dry years. Corn, beans and squash grew here too, along with cotton for clothes. The Hopi still plant corn in the desert today, using ways their families have kept for centuries.

On the Pacific coast, from Oregon up to Alaska, it rains most of the year. Giant cedar trees grow taller than a ten-story building. Every spring and fall, rivers fill with salmon swimming upstream to lay their eggs. Peoples like the Haida, Tlingit and Chinook had plenty of food. They did not need to farm. They caught salmon by the thousands. They dried and smoked the fish for winter.

Cedar was the wood for everything. People split the soft, straight-grained trunks into planks and built large houses. They hollowed whole logs into canoes that could go out on the ocean. They wove cedar bark into clothes, mats and baskets. And they carved tall cedar posts with animals and family symbols. These are the totem poles that stood in front of homes.

A totem pole is not a god or an idol. It is a family record. The carved raven, bear or whale shows the family’s history and its rights. Rich families held a feast called a potlatch. The host gave away blankets, food and other gifts to hundreds of guests. Giving more away showed more honor. In this land of plenty, being generous was the way to become great.

At the top of the continent, the ground stays frozen all year. No trees grow. In winter the sun barely rises. This is the Arctic, home of the Inuit and their relatives across Alaska, Canada and Greenland. You cannot farm here. But the sea is full of life. Seals, walrus, whales and fish became food, fuel and clothing.

Inuit inventions fit this world exactly. The kayak was a light one-person boat with a skin cover stretched over a frame. A hunter sat inside, sealed against the icy water. Sleds pulled by dogs crossed the snow. Boots and parkas were sewn from seal and caribou skins with sinew thread. Seal oil burned in stone lamps for light and heat.

In winter some Inuit families built domed houses from blocks of packed snow. The snow held in body heat. In summer they lived in tents of skin. They knew the ice the way a farmer knows a field. They knew which ice would hold and which would break. They knew where seals came up to breathe. Today Inuit still hunt in the Arctic, often by snowmobile, and their languages are still spoken.

Cahokia stood on the east side of the Mississippi River, across from what is now St. Louis. It was in Illinois. Around the year 1100 it may have held ten thousand to twenty thousand people. No city in the United States would be that big again until Philadelphia in the 1700s. Its people belonged to a way of life scientists call Mississippian.

The city was famous for its mounds. People carried soil in baskets, one load at a time, and piled it up. The biggest, now called Monks Mound, is about one hundred feet tall. Its base covers about fourteen acres, more than ten football fields. About one hundred twenty mounds once stood in the city. Leaders lived on top of some. Others held the dead.

Corn made Cahokia possible. Farmers in the rich river bottom grew enough to feed thousands of people who did not farm: builders, priests, potters, traders. By about 1350, the city was empty. Nobody knows exactly why. Floods, crop failures, war and worn-out soil are all possible. The mounds still stand at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, and you can climb Monks Mound today.

Long before the United States, five nations in what is now New York State were at war with each other. According to their own history, a man called the Peacemaker traveled among them. He urged them to stop fighting and join together. The Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca agreed. They called themselves the Haudenosaunee, the people of the longhouse. Later the Tuscarora joined as a sixth nation.

Their agreement is called the Great Law of Peace. It set up a confederacy, a group of nations that stay separate but act together on big matters. Each nation sent chiefs to a Grand Council. The council met at Onondaga, in the middle. Chiefs talked until they agreed. No one nation could force the others. A war against one was a war against all.

Women held real power. Each family belonged to a clan, and the oldest women, the clan mothers, chose the chiefs. If a chief did wrong, a clan mother could remove him. Some early Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, knew about the council and admired how the nations worked together. The Haudenosaunee Grand Council still meets today.

Most Native nations did not use writing. Instead, they kept their history by oral tradition, passing stories from one generation to the next by speech. Elders told how the world began, how the clan got its name and where the boundaries were. Children heard the stories many times until they knew them. A good storyteller was as important as a good hunter.

Art carried memory too. The Haudenosaunee wove beads of white and purple shell into belts called wampum. A wampum belt recorded a treaty or an important event. Its pattern was read aloud at council. Plains peoples painted the year’s big event on a bison hide, adding one picture each winter. Pueblo potters painted designs that told who made the pot and where.

Trade tied the continent together. Archaeologists at Cahokia have found copper from Lake Superior, seashells from the Gulf of Mexico and a shiny stone from the Rocky Mountains. Each of these traveled hundreds of miles by canoe and on foot. Goods, ideas and games moved along the same paths. When Europeans arrived, they walked onto trails that were already old.

Native peoples are not only part of the past. Today the United States recognizes more than five hundred seventy Native nations. Each is a sovereign nation, which means it has its own government, laws and leaders. Many have their own lands, called reservations. Others do not. Their citizens are also citizens of the United States.

Illinois is named for the Illinois people. They called themselves the Illiniwek. Most of their descendants were pushed west in the 1800s. Today they belong to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. The Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Miami, Sauk, Meskwaki and Ho-Chunk also lived here. In recent years the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation regained some land in northern Illinois.

Chicago has one of the largest urban Native populations in the country. People from many nations moved there for work in the 1900s. The American Indian Center of Chicago opened in 1953. It holds a powwow every year. Native students go to Chicago schools. Native artists, doctors and lawyers work across the state. The first peoples are still here. They are still speaking and still building.

In the 1400s a pinch of pepper in Europe was worth more than its weight in silver. Pepper, cinnamon and cloves came from Asia. So did silk. The goods traveled thousands of miles by land, and every merchant along the way raised the price. European kings and merchants wanted a cheaper way. They wanted to sail to Asia and buy the spices directly.

Portugal tried first. Its sailors crept down the coast of Africa, year after year. In 1488 a Portuguese captain rounded the southern tip of Africa. In 1498 another reached India by sea. Spain, Portugal’s rival, wanted its own route. A sailor from Italy named Christopher Columbus had an idea. He would sail west, across the ocean, and reach Asia from the other side.

Trade was not the only reason. Europeans also wanted gold, because gold was money. They wanted land, because land made a family rich. And many wanted to spread their religion, Christianity. Priests sailed with the soldiers. One historian summed up the reasons as gold, God and glory. All three were on the ships that sailed west.

On October 12, 1492, after about five weeks at sea, three Spanish ships reached a small island in the Bahamas. Columbus went ashore and claimed it for the king and queen of Spain. The people who lived there, the Taíno, came out to meet the strangers. Columbus thought he had reached islands near India. So he called the people Indians. The name stuck, though it was a mistake.

Columbus wrote in his journal that the Taíno were gentle and generous. They brought parrots, cotton thread and food. In the same pages, he wrote that they would make good servants and could be easily ruled. He took some Taíno back to Spain by force. On later trips, the Spanish made Taíno people dig for gold. Within a few decades, war, hunger and disease had killed most of the Taíno on the islands.

Columbus never reached Asia and never understood that he had found continents unknown to Europe. But his voyage changed history. Ships began to cross the Atlantic every year. Plants, animals, people, ideas and diseases moved in both directions. Historians call this the Columbian Exchange. The next lessons show what it carried.

Look at a pizza. The wheat crust and the cheese came from Europe. The tomato sauce came from the Americas. Before 1492, no one in Italy had ever seen a tomato. No one in Ireland had seen a potato. No one in Africa had grown corn. No one in Mexico had eaten a cow or tasted wheat bread. The Columbian Exchange put them all on one plate.

Native farmers had bred corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, peanuts, cacao for chocolate and many more plants over thousands of years. Once these crossed the ocean, they fed millions. Potatoes grow well in cold, poor soil, so they became the main food of Ireland and northern Europe. Corn spread across Africa and China. The population of the world grew partly because of American crops.

Going the other way came wheat, rice, sugar cane, coffee, bananas and fruit trees. Also animals: cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and horses. The Americas had no large farm animals before this except the llama. Pigs and cattle ran wild and multiplied. They also trampled Native cornfields. Sugar cane grew so well in the Caribbean that Europeans built huge farms, and soon they were bringing enslaved Africans by force to work them.

There were no horses in the Americas when Columbus landed. The Spanish brought them to Mexico in 1519. Native people had never seen anything like them. Some Spanish soldiers on horseback seemed at first to be one giant animal. But soon Native peoples learned to ride, and they learned fast. Horses escaped or were traded, and they spread north across the land.

For Plains peoples, the horse was a revolution. Before, a family could carry only what their dogs could pull. Hunting bison on foot was slow and dangerous. On horseback, a hunter could ride into a herd and pick the animal he wanted. Tipis grew bigger, because horses could haul longer poles. Families could move farther and faster. Nations like the Comanche and Lakota became some of the best riders in the world.

The horse also brought conflict. Nations moved onto the Plains that had never lived there before. They competed for hunting grounds and for horses. Raids to take horses became common. By the 1700s, before most Plains people had ever met a white settler, their lives had already been changed by a European animal. That is how the Columbian Exchange worked: its effects ran ahead of the Europeans themselves.

The deadliest thing on the European ships was invisible. It was germs. Smallpox, measles and the flu had lived in Europe, Asia and Africa for thousands of years. People there often caught them as children. Many died. Many others survived. A survivor could not catch the disease again. That is called immunity. No one in the Americas had ever met these germs. No one had immunity.

When smallpox reached a Native village, nearly everyone got sick at the same time. There was no one healthy to bring water or food. In 1520, smallpox reached the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in Mexico. It killed the emperor and a large share of the people. The Spanish captured the weakened city the next year. Disease did more to defeat the Aztecs than Spanish steel.

Sickness spread along trade routes faster than Europeans traveled. Some villages lost most of their people before they ever saw a European. Historians do not agree on exact numbers. But they agree that a very large share of Native people died in the two centuries after 1492. It was one of the greatest losses of life in human history. The survivors rebuilt. But their world was smaller, and their nations were weaker when the settlers came.

The Spanish came first and came to rule. In 1519 a soldier named Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with a few hundred men. He had horses, steel, guns and smallpox on his side. He also had thousands of Native allies who hated the Aztecs. He captured Tenochtitlan in 1521. Spain took the Aztec gold and silver and ruled Mexico for three hundred years. Spanish soldiers who conquered are called conquistadors.

In the lands they took, the Spanish gave Native villages to Spanish settlers. The villagers had to work for the settler and pay him. Priests built missions, churches with farms around them. Native people were required to live there, work and become Christians. Some priests protected the people from the worst abuse. Many did not. Native religions were banned, and ceremonies were punished.

The Pueblo peoples of New Mexico put up with this for about eighty years. Then in 1680, a religious leader named Popé sent runners to every pueblo with knotted cords. The knots counted the days until the uprising. On the chosen day the pueblos rose together. They killed hundreds of Spanish and drove the rest out of New Mexico. The Spanish did not return for twelve years. No other Native uprising against Europeans in what is now the United States was so successful.

The French did things differently. Few French people wanted to move across the ocean. Those who came wanted beaver fur, which sold for high prices in Europe for hats. To get fur, they needed Native hunters. So the French built trading posts, not big farms. They learned Native languages. Many French traders married Native women. Their children grew up in both worlds.

In 1673 a priest named Jacques Marquette and a trader named Louis Jolliet came down the Mississippi. They were paddling canoes. They were the first French to see Illinois. The Illinois people welcomed them with the calumet, a long peace pipe. On the way home they went up the Illinois River. They passed a village of thousands near where Utica is today. Marquette wrote that the land was rich and the people kind.

Soon French forts and missions dotted the rivers. La Salle built a fort near Peoria in 1680. The town of Kaskaskia in southern Illinois started as a French mission in 1703. Illinois hunters brought furs, and French traders brought kettles, cloth, guns and brandy. The French also brought disease. They drew the Illinois into wars against the Iroquois and others. But French and Native people in Illinois lived side by side for nearly a century. Many families were both.

The English came last and came to stay. Jamestown in Virginia began in 1607. Plymouth in Massachusetts began in 1620. Unlike the French, English settlers came by the thousands, as whole families. They wanted farms of their own. They cleared forests, built fences and let cattle and pigs roam. Every new farm was land that a Native nation had used for hunting, fishing or planting.

At first, Native nations helped. The Powhatan people traded corn to starving Jamestown. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit made a treaty with Plymouth and shared a harvest feast with them in 1621. But the English kept coming. The two sides also thought about land differently. To Native peoples, land was shared by a nation for use. To the English, land was property that one person owned and could fence and sell.

Within fifty years the friendship broke. In 1675 Massasoit’s son Metacom, called King Philip by the English, led many nations against the settlers. The war burned dozens of towns on both sides. Thousands died. The English won, and Metacom was killed. After that, the pattern in English lands was set: settlers moved in, the frontier moved west, and Native nations were pushed off the land.

Add it up. Disease killed a very large share of Native people. Wars killed more. Then came treaties, written agreements between a Native nation and a government. On paper, a treaty was a deal between equals. In practice, nations weakened by sickness and war often had no better choice. So they signed. Many treaties were broken as soon as settlers wanted more land.

Illinois shows the whole story. When Marquette came in 1673, the Illinois people numbered many thousands in big villages. Disease and wars with other nations shrank them. In 1803 the Kaskaskia, one of the Illinois nations, signed a treaty giving up most of their land to the United States. The Sauk leader Black Hawk tried to return to his village on the Rock River in 1832. Soldiers and militia drove his people out in a short, brutal war.

In 1833 a treaty was signed in Chicago. In it the Potawatomi gave up their remaining land in northern Illinois. Within a few years they were marched west. By the 1840s almost no Native nation held land in Illinois. The state was named for a people who were no longer allowed to live in it. That was the cost of the encounter. The people who were here first paid it.

Native nations were never just victims. They chose, planned and fought. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 drove out an empire. Metacom nearly did the same in New England. In 1763 an Ottawa leader named Pontiac united nations around the Great Lakes and captured most of the British forts west of the mountains. Illinois nations joined him. The British had to promise that settlers would stay east of the mountains, though the promise was soon broken.

Nations also adapted, which means changing to fit new conditions. They took the horse and became the finest riders on Earth. They took iron, guns and cloth and made them their own. Some nations played the French, Spanish and English against each other to protect their land. Native leaders learned to read treaties and argue in court. Adapting was not giving up. It was survival.

The hardest thing to protect was culture: language, ceremony, story. Governments and missions worked for centuries to stamp these out. Yet the Haudenosaunee still hold council. The Hopi still plant corn the old way. Native languages are being taught again to children in Illinois and across the country. The Illinois language itself, called Miami-Illinois, is being relearned from old French dictionaries. Resistance did not end. It changed shape.

Here is one event. In 1621 Wampanoag men and English settlers at Plymouth ate together after the harvest. For many Americans, this is the first Thanksgiving, a happy story of sharing. For many Wampanoag today, the same day is the start of a story that ends with their land taken and their nation nearly destroyed. Both are talking about the same meal. Both are telling the truth about part of it.

That is why a point of view matters. A point of view is the position a person sees from. A Spanish soldier, a Spanish priest, an Aztec warrior and an Aztec farmer would each describe the fall of Tenochtitlan differently. Most written records from this time were made by Europeans. Native accounts were spoken, painted or remembered. To hear them, historians have to look harder.

Good readers ask three questions about any source. Who made it? When? Why? Columbus wrote his journal to impress the king and queen who paid for his trip. Black Hawk told his story to explain himself after losing a war. Neither one is lying, but each has a reason to tell it his way. Today some places mark the second Monday of October as Columbus Day, and others call it Indigenous Peoples’ Day. That argument is about which story we choose to remember.