Chapter One
EUROPEAN DISCOVERY
In about the year AD 982 (the exact date is disputed), Norseman EirikThorvaldsson the Red sailed west from Iceland to explore the mysteriouslands that sometimes appeared distantly on the far horizon when the windsblew from the north. Three years later, he and his men returned withglowing tales of a fertile, uninhabited land where fish were plentiful andthe grazing grass lush and green. Eirik named it the Green Land, a nameretained to this day.
Eirik persuaded 25 shiploads of settlers to sail for Greenland in 986. Theyfounded tiny, remote Brattahlid in the southwest, and the so-calledWestern Settlement at Godthaab some 400 miles (644 km) to the north. Forcenturies, these tiny hamlets were bases for Norse wanderings far to thenorth, among icebound fjords and islands on the fringes of the ArcticOcean, and west 186 miles (300 km) across the Davis Strait to Baffin Island,Labrador, and beyond.
The restless and adventurous Greenlanders farmed, kept cattle andsheep, fished, and were skilled hunters who took game on land and sea.Above all, they were seamen, who explored every nook and cranny ofsouthwestern Greenland. Very early on, it seems, bold young men venturedfar north toward the arctic ice, and across the Davis Strait to the Ubygdir,"the unpeopled tracts," new lands beyond the western horizon.
Only the faintest records of these western voyages have come downthrough the centuries. They survive in two fragmentary Icelandic documents,often called the Vinland Sagas, written at least 200 years later. TheSaga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Eirik the Red are tantalizinglyvague and contradictory accounts of extraordinary voyages. Unfortunately,it is almost impossible to separate historical fact from fantasy, geographicalinformation from vague description written and copied several times over(Wahlgren, 1986).
The Saga of the Greenlanders tells how a young merchant named BjarniHerjolfsson comes home to Iceland from Norway with a full cargo. He findsthat his father has moved to Greenland with Eirik the Red, sets out to visithim, but the voyagers become lost in a wilderness of North Atlantic fog.Days or weeks later, they encounter a low, forested coast, which faces east.Bjarni realizes that this cannot be Greenland, so he turns north, sightsmore forested land a few days later, then an island with mountains andglaciers. Herjolfsson turns east, sails across Davis Strait, and reachesGreenland safely.
Perhaps some 15 years later, in the 990s, Leif Eiriksson, son of Eirik theRed, sets out on a journey of exploration to the west. He sails across to theicy island that was Bjarni's last landfall, then voyages southward until he iswell below the latitude of southern Greenland. Eiriksson and his 35 followerswinter in a sheltered location where they are amazed and delighted to findwild grapes and grapevines growing. They survive an unusuallymild winter, explore the countryside, load up with timber and returnhome to Greenland. Leif Eiriksson names the new lands: Helluland,"Slabrock Land," perhaps Baffin Island and northern Labrador, Markland,"Forest Land," probably central Labrador and Newfoundland, andVinland, "Wineland," to the south, whose location is a matter of vigorouscontroversy. In a meticulous analysis of the sagas, Erik Wahlgren (1986)has argued persuasively that Eiriksson wintered over somewhere nearPassamaquoddy Bay, close to the border between Maine and NewBrunswick. The grapes that so enraptured his men were wild grapevinesthat are common in New England. Others believe, on the basis of a16th-century Icelandic chart, that Vinland was Newfoundland, and thatEiriksson simply embellished his account with wild grapes to encourageprospective settlement (McGhee, 1984a).
Leif Eiriksson never returned to Vinland. His brother Thorvald followedin his footsteps, mounting an expedition that lasted two years. He appearsto have explored the Bay of Fundy, was killed in a clash with local people,and buried there. A visiting Icelandic merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefniwas next in Vinland. He took a 60-person expedition back to Leif's wintersettlement and traded with some visiting Indians. There was fightingand men perished on both sides. After two winters, Karlsefni sailed backto Greenland, probably sometime around 1012. More sporadic andunrecorded Norse voyages to Labrador probably ensued in the followingthree centuries, ventures in search of timber, which was in short supply inGreenland (McGhee, 1984a).
Norse Settlement in North America
Archaeologists have searched diligently for traces of Viking settlement inNorth America. There have been the usual archaeological fantasies — stonesinscribed with Norse runic script and mysterious towers in New Englandand the celebrated Kensington Stone discovered in Minnesota in 1898.None stand up to scholarly scrutiny (Wahlgren, 1986).
The logical place for such sites would be Labrador or Newfoundland, andit is at L'Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland that the onlyknown trace of Norse settlement has come to light. Helge Ingstad and AnneStine discovered the remains of eight sod-walled structures on a terraceoverlooking a shallow bay (Ingstad, 1977; 1985). These turf housescontained Norse artifacts such as a spindle whorl and a needle hone. Oneof the houses was too long to have been covered by a single roof.It consisted of several dwellings built together, perhaps forming a kind ofsleeping hall. The settlement had a work shed, a smithy situated well awayfrom the houses, and a possible bath house, also four turf boat sheds,perhaps once roofed with sod-covered rafters or branches. There are signsof both earlier and later native American settlement on the site.
L'Anse aux Meadows is a shallow bay, but a site with one majoradvantage — ample grazing for cattle. It lies at a strategic point, surroundedby water on three sides, an excellent base for exploring the St LawrenceValley, if such a Norse enterprise was ever contemplated. Radiocarbondates from the dwellings date the settlement to about AD 1000, but theprecise identity of the builders is unknown.
No other indisputable traces of Norse settlement have come to light inNorth America. A Norwegian penny dating to between AD 1065 and 1080was found at the Goddard site on the coast of Maine's Penobscot Bay. As faras can be established, this penny reached the site during the 12th or 13thcenturies, probably as a result of indirect trading contacts with Inuit peoplefar to the north (McGhee, 1984a). Some disputed longhouse foundationson Ungava Bay, across Davis Strait from Brattahlid, are almost certainly ofInuit manufacture, and not the work of Norsemen.
As early as the 12th century, Norsemen had sporadic contacts with Inuitgroups living in the Canadian Archipelago and along the western Greenlandcoast, in the Nordrsetur (the central west coast), the area around Disko Bay,and probably much farther north (McGhee, 1984a). A scatter of Norseartifacts has come from Inuit settlements in the High Arctic — especiallyfrom the Ellesmere Island area. These include non-Inuit copper and ironfragments, pieces of woollen cloth, chain mail, and carpenters' tools, alsoboat nails and rivets, even carvings that give impressions of Norsemen.There are Norse stone cairns, some reworked bottom sections of casks, anda single runic inscription from Kingiqtorsoaq high on Greenland's westerncoast, probably dating to 24 April 1333.
The Norsemen called the Inuit Skraelings. "They possess no iron, but usewalrus tusk for missiles and sharpened stones instead of knives," we learnfrom the History of Greenland, a work based on a 13th-century manuscript(McGhee, 1984a). Contacts between Norse and Inuit were probablysporadic, the result of summer bear- and walrus-hunting expeditions far tothe north. Walrus ivory was the medium in which Greenlanders paid theirannual tithe to the church in distant Norway, on some occasions at least400 tusks annually, far more than could be obtained around the Greenlandsettlements.
As far as we can tell, the contacts between Inuit and Norse were sometimesfriendly, occasionally violent, apparently rarely prolonged. In allprobability, the Norse came in touch with both Inuit and American Indians,the latter Beothuk, Algonquian-speakers who were summer visitors to theLabrador coast and Newfoundland (McGhee, 1984a; for archaeology, seeChapter 21). Norse artifacts have come from as far afield as the westernshores of Hudson Bay and latitude 79°N, 500 miles (819 km) north of theKingiqtorsoaq rune stone. That is not to say that the Norse themselvesactually Traveled this widely, for many prized exotica may have passedalong Inuit barter networks.
However, the Norse did not colonize North America. In AD 1000, Europewas not ready to, or capable of, settling the lands to the west. The tough andresourceful Norsemen could survive on Greenland coasts. However, theylacked the sheer numbers and the resources to expand and maintainpioneer settlements, to confront and compete with much larger indigenouspopulations. Nor were there strong motives for colonization — no religiouspersecution at home, no promise of great wealth to attract the greedyadventurer. Eventually, even Greenland proved beyond their capabilities.Norse civilization survived there until around 1500, progressivelydebilitated by increasing arctic cold that brought Inuit hunters farthersouth, by economic deprivation and competition for game resources, andperhaps by declining birth rates and sheer cultural isolation from thehomeland. There were occasional hostile visitors, too, perhaps even somepiracy, for Basque whalers from northern Spain had been sailing inGreenland waters since at least 1372.
Eventually, the Norsemen quietly withdrew, leaving two geographicallegacies behind them for later explorers — the term "Skraeling" and twoplace names: Markland, a land of forests, and Promontorium Winlandiae, aland of vines — actually northern Newfoundland. Their epic journeys survivedin European consciousness as hints of exotic peoples living at thevery edge of the known world. "There are animals of such enormous sizethat the inhabitants of the inner islands use their bones and vertebrae inplace of wood in constructing houses. They also use them for making clubs,darts, lances, knives, seats, ladders, and, in general, all things which elsewhereare made from wood ..." Thus did the great Arab geographer al-Idrisidescribe the North Atlantic and its rich fisheries in his Nuzhet al-Mushtaq,written in about AD 1150 (McGhee, 1984a). Like the medieval geographers,al-Idrisi relied not only on first-hand experience, but travelers' accountsfrom every corner of the world. Perhaps, among these accounts, he heardvague stories of northern whale hunters from the far north. Were these"inhabitants of the inner islands" Inuit hunters, native Americans from theCanadian Arctic, living at the extreme edge of the known medieval world?If al-Idrisi was indeed writing of Inuit peoples from North America, thetales of their whalebone houses had probably reached him through manyhands from Norse sources in Greenland and Iceland.
The first, fleeting contacts between Inuits, native Americans, andWestern voyagers did nothing to alter hunter-gatherer cultures that hadbeen evolving in a vast, isolated continent for more than 13,000 years. Centurieswere to pass before Westerners again voyaged along North Americanshores.
The Search for a Strait
On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea,sailing under the Spanish flag, set foot on San Salvador in the Bahamas.There he found naked people, "very well made, of very handsome bodiesand very good faces." Columbus himself believed he had found the outlyingislands of east Asia, and called the inhabitants of the new lands "Indios,"Indians. The Admiral's explorations brought a torrent of settlers to theCaribbean, settlers who came to "serve God and get rich." They soonencountered an astounding diversity of different peoples — simple hunters,village farmers, and magnificent civilizations like that of the Aztecs of highlandMexico. When Hernan Cortés and his soldiers gazed down on the greatAztec capital at Tenochtitlán in the Valley of Mexico in 1519, they marveledat a gold-laden civilization that rivaled those of Christendom in its magnificence.
Only seven years after Columbus' death in 1506, conquistador VascoNuñez de Balboa trekked across Central America and gazed on the Pacific.The Indies were not part of China at all, but what "we may rightly call aNew World more densely peopled and abounding in animals than Europe,or Asia, or Africa." For years afterward, Europeans had but two ambitionsin the New World — to find another gold-rich civilization, and a navigablestrait to China.
Just as the last Norse colonists vanished in southern Greenland,Genoese-born John Cabot sailed west from Bristol, England, in search of ashort, northern route to the Indies (Morison, 1971). The Mathew sailed in1497, made landfall on Newfoundland, coasted down the west coast, anddiscovered the rich cod fisheries of the Grand Banks. Cabot encountered nohuman beings, but observed snares and nets, presumably belonging toBeothuk groups.
Two years later, Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte Real sailed northwestfrom the Azores and made landfall on "a land that was very cool and withbig trees," almost certainly Newfoundland. He returned the following year.His men kidnapped 57 Beothuk Indians, who "live together by fishingand hunting animals, in which the land abounds, the skins of which theyuse for garments and also make houses and boats thereof." The peoplelived in "rocky caves and thatched huts." After their first experience withEuropeans, the Beothuk retreated to the interior and were very hostile tolater visitors.
The next quarter-century saw the icebound and foggy north with itsforested, rocky shores fade into relative oblivion. Only cod fishermen penetratednorthern waters, people with little interest in exploration or the localinhabitants. Everything else was eclipsed by the brilliant discoveries thatfollowed on Columbus far to the south. Then, in September 1522, JuanSebastian del Caño in the ship Vittoria anchored at Seville in Spain,carrying just 18 of the 239 men who had set out on Ferdinand Magellan'sepic circumnavigation of the globe. He had sailed into the Pacific throughthe stormy Magellan Strait at the southern tip of South America. Spanishand Portuguese explorers had now covered the entire east coast of theAmericas from Florida to Patagonia, but had been unable to find any otherstrait north of Magellan's. On most maps of the time, Newfoundland floatedin the North Atlantic, without any seeming link to the lands farther south.Thirteen degrees of latitude from Maine to Georgia remained unexplored.Here, surely, lay either a strait to the west, or, even better, open sea thatwould carry European mariners to the "happy shores of Cathay."
In January 1524, the French gentleman explorer Giovanni da Verrazzanosailed west from Madeira (Morison, 1971). Instead of dropping down to theWest Indies, he sailed well north of Columbus' track just over 30 yearsbefore. About 1 March, he made landfall at Cape Fear, North Carolina,then sailed up the east coast as far as Newfoundland. He encounteredmany friendly Indian groups along the way, mostly simple farmers andfishermen, wearing leaves or skins. The people of Casco Bay, Maine,apparently more familiar with foreigners, were less welcoming. "They usedall signs of discourtesy and disdain, as was possible for any brute creatureto invent, such as exhibiting their bare behinds and laughing immodestly."Verrazzano named this coast Terra Onde di Mala Gente, the "Land of BadPeople," in revenge.
The prospect of a northern route to China brought Jacques Cartier,French Master Mariner of Saint-Malo in Brittany, to Newfoundland in April1534. He returned to France five months later, having sailed completelyaround the Gulf of St Lawrence, where his men lived off great auk meat,salmon, and other fresh fish, goose eggs and wild strawberries. He wasaccompanied by two Huron Indian teenagers, a chief's sons, who were toact as guides on his second voyage. Cartier returned a year later to penetratedeeper into the Gulf. His Huron guests knew the great river well, all theway upstream to modern Quebec. It was, Cartier realized, a highwayto the interior. "No man has been to the end, so far as they had say," hewrote.
Cartier made contact with Huron people living near modern Quebec, andarrived at Hochelaga, the site of present-day Montreal, on 2 October 1535.There, more than 1000 Indians greeted him, bringing gifts of corn breadand performing welcoming ceremonies. They lived in a fortified villagesurrounded by corn fields, partly situated on the grounds of today's McGillUniversity. The fortifications consisted of palisades with two redoubts"garnished with rocks and stones, for defense and protection." There were50 bark and wood houses inside, each with several rooms and a centralfireplace, grouped around a central plaza. The people were in a constantstate of readiness, for their home was close to the militant Five Nations ofthe Iroquois, notorious for their sudden raids. Cartier was impressed by hisfriendly reception in what were the golden days of race relations along theSt Lawrence. They were not to last. When Cartier returned in an abortiveattempt to found a colony, the Huron were hostile, attacked his settlementand killed at least 35 people. For more than a half-century, the Huron wereleft alone, as exploration and settlement faltered.
Raleigh's Virginia
On 27 April 1584, two ships slipped out of Plymouth, England, on a voyageof reconnaissance along the more southern coasts explored by Verrazzano60 years earlier. Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlow sailed at the behest ofWalter Raleigh, who held letters patent from Queen Elizabeth granting himpermission to colonize an unspecified area of North America. Four monthslater, the two vessels anchored close to Nag's Head in present-dayNorth Carolina. They soon came in contact with the local PowhatanIndians, Algonquian-speakers, "very handsome, and goodly people," whoentertained them royally (Morison, 1971). "The soil," Barlow wroteenthusiastically if mendaciously, "is the most plentifull, sweete, fruitfulland wholesome of all the world." All this was good publicity for prospectivecolonists and for royal ears. Queen Elizabeth I knighted Walter Raleigh andallowed him to name his prospective colony Virginia.
In April of the following year, Sir Richard Grenville led an expedition offive ships and about 500 men, including 108 prospective colonists, toVirginia. This time, Raleigh sent along a scientist, Thomas Hariot, anOxford mathematician, and an artist, John White. The settlement was acomplete failure, but Hariot and White had ample opportunity to visitseveral Indian settlements. White sketched the people and their villageswith astounding, if romantic detail. Hariot's Briefe and True Report of theNew Found Land of Virginia appeared in 1588. Illustrated with White'ssketches, it became a basic source of information on American Indians formore than a century (Rountree, 1989) (illus. p. 24).
Despite later efforts, no permanent colony was established in Virginiauntil that at Jamestown on the James River, about 35 miles (56 km) fromChesapeake Bay in 1607. That effort succeeded both because of sustainedeconomic support from England, and because the colonists exported tobaccohome. A year later, Samuel de Champlain established a colony at Quebecon the St Lawrence, 12 years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plimoth inNew England. The first two decades of the 17th century saw the era ofpermanent European colonization in North America finally begin — withcatastrophic effects on the native peoples that lay in the white settlers' path.
Spanish Explorations in the Southeast
A century earlier, however, the Spanish had tentatively explored NorthAmerica from the south — from New Spain (Mexico) and the Caribbean. Notthat this exploration had followed immediately upon the conquest ofMexico, for it took 10 years and innumerable military campaigns to subduethe Indian population of Central America. The lust for gold intensified asmore and more territory was opened up to European exploitation. Vast landmasses lay to the north of wealthy Mexico. Did these also contain fabulousriches? Applicants willing to lead expeditions into the unknown importunedthe Spanish Crown for permission to find out (Fagan, 1977).
The first man to sail north from the Indies was a soldier named Ponce deLeon, who landed near present-day Palm Beach, Florida, in 1513 (Milanichand Hudson, 1993). He was searching for the mythical "Fountain of Youth"that chroniclers insisted was to be found on an island north of Cuba. Hissearch was fruitless, the country sandy and low-lying, the local inhabitantsfierce and unfriendly. Six years later, Alonso Alvarez de Piñeda entered theMississippi River estuary, where he spent six weeks. The area was quitedensely populated, but devoid of gold.
The sinister and red-bearded Panfilo de Narvaez followed Piñeda north,but landed to the east, in what is now Tampa Bay. There his men obtainedsome gold objects that fired their greedy imaginations. Sending his vesselsto find a better harbor, Narvaez set out to march west along the coast with260 men, promptly losing touch with his ships. The soldiers constructedtemporary boats, but these foundered off the mouth of the Mississippi. Thelast vessel was cast ashore off modern Galveston, Texas. Only a juniorofficer named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, two soldiers, and a black slavesurvived. The five men withstood incredible hardships, and walked all theway from Texas to New Spain. Their report gives little information on thecountry and its inhabitants, except for an impression of people with fewmaterial possessions living in a dry environment. Again, there were nosigns of gold or great treasure.
In 1537, the wealthy conquistador Hernando de Soto came home to Spainafter making a small fortune under Francisco Pizarro in Peru (Garcilaso dela Vega, 1951; Milanich and Hudson, 1993). He was restless for fartheradventure, and lobbied for the governorship of Cuba and Florida, which heobtained. By 1539 this remarkable adventurer had raised a force of 622 menand had landed in Tampa Bay. De Soto hoped to find a kingdom as wealthyas that of the Aztecs or Inca. His only objectives were gold, the acquisitionof wealth, and colonization (for archaeology, see Chapter 22).
Tampa was unpromising. The local people lived in "a town of seven oreight houses, built of timber and covered with palm-leaves. The chief'shouse stood near the beach on a very high mount made by hand fordefence; at the other end of the town was a temple, on top of which percheda wooden fowl with gilded eyes." The surrounding countryside was flat andswampy, and no metals were to be found.
De Soto set off through marshy terrain until he reached higher ground.His soldiers treated the local people brutally, burning villages, then seizingfood stocks and adults as slaves. Eventually, the conquistadors reached thelarge settlement of Cofachiqui, where an important female chieftain greetedthem in a shaded canoe. Apparently terrified of the Spaniards, she orderedthat all yellow and white metals in her domains were to be laid before theforeigners. Large quantities of copper were forthcoming, also sheets ofmica, which local artisans fashioned into fine ornaments. The Spaniardsasked for freshwater pearls, but were told they were imported from faraway. In desperation, the chieftain directed them to the "upper part of thetown," where a temple covered the burial place of long dead chiefs andtheir relatives. The soldiers looted the burials. Some 350 lbs (158 kg) of discoloredfreshwater pearls were divided between them.
During their journey to Cofachiqui, the conquistadors had passed manyabandoned villages, as if the local people had lived there for a long time.Three miles (4.8 km) from Cofachiqui lay Talomeco, a larger settlementwith the usual artificial earthen mounds upon which a temple and thechief's house formerly stood. The temple was still standing, a structure over100 ft (30 m) long and 40 ft (12 m) wide, with a steep roof of reeds andsplit cane adorned with sea shells. The Spaniards forced their way in andwondered at wooden statues mantled with pearls, at enormous bundles ofskins and dyed cloth. There were caches of copper-bladed ceremonialweapons, battle axes and clubs, delicately inlaid bows and arrows, woodenand woven cane shields, all of the finest workmanship — but no gold.
The taciturn and inflexible De Soto was so obsessed with the yellow metalthat he ordered his men westward over the Blue Ridge Mountains into whatis today Tennessee. Hardships multiplied. Choctaw raiders attacked theparty. More than 150 men perished in a counterattack to recover lostbaggage. The conquistadors wintered near the Yazoo River in Mississippi,where they encountered "fine looking" Indians in a fleet of canoes that"appeared like a famous armada of galleys." Next spring, De Soto led hismen through the Ozarks into eastern Oklahoma. There they heard stories of"many cattle," whose skins the local Indians gave them in abundance asbed covers. But they never set eyes on the bison themselves.
Finally, De Soto realized that the gold-laden kingdoms over the horizonwere a fiction. He headed southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico. The journeywas a harsh one, through unfriendly territory occupied by suspiciousIndians. De Soto himself perished of fever, but half of the 622 men who hadset out with him managed to reach Cuba.
De Soto's expedition put paid to any dreams of fabulous, goldenkingdoms in the north. Apart from two abortive French expeditions toFlorida in the 1560s, the Mississippi Valley and the Southeast with theirelaborate chiefdoms were left in peace for over a century. By the time the16th-century Spaniards encountered them, many large Indian settlementshad been abandoned, as if the population had declined sharply. Somearchaeologists believe this may have been the result of epidemics of exoticdiseases like smallpox that spread across the interior long before theIndians had direct contact with Europeans (Crosby, 1986). (This is acontroversial subject, see Chapter 22.) The large earthworks built by someof these people were to puzzle white settlers and scholars for generations.
The Seven Lost Cities of Cibola
When Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City overland fromTexas in 1536, his tales of a harsh and arid land to the north astounded thegold-hungry colonial government of New Spain. So greedy were they thatthey shrugged aside Vaca's tales of suffering. Ever since Cortés and Pizarrohad plundered Mexico and Peru, there had been talk of the fabled SevenCities of a mythical land named Cibola, cities founded as long ago as the8th century by a legendary bishop from Lisbon (Fagan, 1977). Where, then,were these cities, if they were not to be found in Mexico or Peru? WhenVaca returned with vague rumors of large towns to the north, townscrowded with Indians and rich in gold and silver, the authorities weregoaded into action. The Viceroy of Mexico sent Franciscan friar FrayMarcos de Niza in search of the cities, a man said to have "great experiencein the affairs of the Indians." He was accompanied by Esteban, the blackslave who had traveled with Cabeza de Vaca as a guide. They were acurious pair: the sober priest and the jaunty, freed slave who journeyed ingreat style, dressed in ribbons and feathers, for he had acquired somewhatof a reputation as a sorcerer among the Indians.
The expedition was a disaster. Esteban explored far ahead of the maincaravan, sending back optimistic messages along the way. After a 15-daydesert crossing, his party arrived at a Zuñi pueblo in what is now NewMexico, only to be massacred by the inhabitants. Marcos claimed that heheard of the killings from a survivor, then traveled secretly within sight ofthe pueblo, where he gazed undetected at "a faire citie," with many houses"builded in order ... all made of stone with divers stories, and flatte roofs,as farre as I could discerne." The people were light skinned, possessed"emeralds and other jewels," and used "vessels of gold and silver, for theyhave no other metal, whereof there is greater use and more abundance thanin Peru."
As can be imagined, Marcos' report fueled the flames of gold lust when hereturned to Mexico City with "more feare than visuals." The friar was agood storyteller, and embellished his report at every opportunity. In fact,historians are almost certain that he turned and ran, never penetratingmuch farther north than the Gila River in southern Arizona, a long wayfrom Zuñi country. Marcos' stories fell on fertile ground. In February 1540,Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a competent young nobleman and royalcourtier, led a much larger expedition in Marcos' footsteps: 225 horsemen,60 foot soldiers, and a motley crowd of slaves and Indian allies marchednorth, with Fray Marcos as their guide (Fagan, 1977).
Coronado and his men found themselves traveling along Indian trailsthrough harsh, dry country. Horses and men suffered greatly in theshimmering heat, but emerged from the desert within reach of six Zuñipueblos. These were the "Seven Lost Cities," a disappointing sight to theconquistadors. "It is a small, crowded village," wrote Pedro de Castaneda,Coronado's chronicler, of Hawikuh pueblo, "looking as if it had been allcrumpled up together. There are haciendas in New Spain which make abetter appearance at a distance." Marcos' celebrated city was little morethan a glorified village. Coronado routed the defenders in less than an hour.The hungry soldiers made a beeline for the storehouses, where they found"much corn and beans, and fowl." Of gold and precious stones there wereno signs.
In the months that followed, Coronado explored much of the Southwest — withoutfinding any gold. His men entered Hopi country, penetrated as faras the Grand Canyon, and visited Pecos pueblo close to modern Santa Fe, asettlement so large it could field 500 warriors. The town "is square, situatedon a rock, with a large court or yard in the middle, containing the steamrooms," reported Pedro de Castaneda. "The houses are all alike, four storieshigh. One can go over the top of the village without there being a street tohinder." The houses could be entered only by means of ladders from theroofs, with doors that led into the passages.
Conquistador Hernando de Alvarado was sent onto the plains that layeast of Pecos to investigate stories about strange animals like cows withhairy skins. Alvarado and his men were soon surrounded with enormousherds of bison, "the most monstrous thing in the way of animals that hasever been seen or read about." Later, Coronado himself ventured onto theplains and deep into Kansas, where he encountered Plains Indians whorelied on bison for food, hunting them in game drives or at water holes.
Barely a hundred men marched into Mexico City in the fall of 1542 whenthe dispirited expedition returned home. There were only a handful ofIndian blankets and turquoises, and a wealth of new geographical knowledge,to show for more than two years' arduous traveling. It was half acentury before attempts were made to settle the arid, goldless Southwest.Even then, the Spanish hold on these remote lands was tenuous at best,although Catholic missionaries and explorers had traveled widely throughthe region by the late 18th century.
"A Young People, Younger a Thousand Years ..."
Columbus and his successors revealed a vast continent teeming with newforms of animal and plant life, and with a bewildering diversity of humansocieties both simple and complex (Fagan, 1987). Who were these"Indians," exotic, feathered people that Columbus paraded before theSpanish court, people according to Pope Alexander VI "well disposed toembrace the Christian faith?" Where had these strange humans come fromand why were they so diverse? Soon, Europeans back home could see asurprisingly wide variety of native Americans, shipped back by explorers,missionaries, and slavers. The Aztec nobles and acrobats from Mexico whospellbound the Spanish Court in the 1520s, were a far cry from NorthAmericans "clothid in beastys skinnys" who ate raw meat and had themanners of "brut bestis." In contrast, John White's Virginia Indians weredepicted as friendly, noble-minded people, who did not abuse nature. TheInuit of the far north were apparently hardier. Martin Frobisher broughtback a man and woman from Baffin Island in 1576. The hunter obliginglypaddled his skin kayak on the River Avon near Bristol and shot ducks withhis bow and arrow.
The 16th century saw a torrent of speculation about the origins of theAmerican Indians, speculations about ancient Carthaginian migrations,about the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel exiled by Assyrian King Shalmaneser in721 BC (Wauchope, 1972). There were more serious observers, too, like thecelebrated Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas, a champion of theIndians, who wrote that "there is not a great argument that the people ofthese islands and continent are very ancient." But he, and other historicallyminded religious scholars, turned to the only historical sources available tothem — the Scriptures. They believed that all American Indians were relatedto familiar ancient societies in the Scriptures, like the Tartars, Scythians,and biblical Hebrews.
The Elizabethan philosopher Francis Bacon, on the other hand, marveled"at the thin population of America, for you must accept your inhabitants ofAmerica as a young people: younger a thousand years, at least, than the restof the world."
Whatever their antiquity, everyone agreed that the Indians had comefrom the Garden of Eden. How, then, had they reached the Americas? Hadthey sailed across a vast ocean, or had they walked? Siberia was still ageographical blank in the 16th century, the Bering Strait between Asia andAlaska unknown. In 1589, Jesuit missionary José de Acosta published aremarkable work, his famous Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias(Fagan, 1987; Willey and Sabloff, 1993). It was entirely possible, he wrote,that "men came to the Indies driven unwittingly by the wind." However, hebelieved that most of the Indians had reached the New World in the samemanner as the unfamiliar beasts that abounded in the Americas — by land.He theorized that small groups of "savage hunters driven from their homelandsby starvation or some other hardship" had taken an overland routethrough Asia to their present home. There were, he argued, "only shortstretches of navigation" involved. At first, Acosta wrote, only a few Indianssettled in the Americas. But they were successful. Their descendants developednot only agriculture, but elaborate states like those of the Aztecs andInca. Acosta calculated that first settlement had taken place as much as2000 years before the Conquest of Mexico.
It was to be a century and a half before Russian explorer Vitus Beringsailed through the Bering Strait in 1728, and seven decades after that beforeNorth American archaeology was born. By that time, Western explorershad penetrated all the oceans, and encountered a myriad unfamiliar humansocieties on remote shores. The Age of Enlightenment had made sciencefashionable in the intellectual circles of 18th-century Europe. CaptainJames Cook had mapped much of the Pacific, and the Russian scientistPfefferkorn was able to state in 1794 that "it is almost certain that the firstinhabitants of America really came by way of the strait." Not that suchsober observations quenched the wild fire of speculations about the ancientAmericans. They were the background to the first archaeologicalresearches in North America.
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