How the Land was Peopled

UNTIL the end of the last ice age, it seems that the Americas were unpeopled. But toward the end of the ice age, it became possible to walk across a land bridge from Siberia, a land bridge now called Beringia. Although the area was far north and fairly cold, it was free of ice because comparatively little snow fell in this region at the time. And so, the ancestors of the first native Americans were able to walk across, and then to walk south through other ice-free corridors in the western part of what is now Canada.

Thus were the Americas peopled for the first time. All native Americans, even those as far south as Patagonia or in the Amazon jungles, are related to people who still live in Siberia.

The first Europeans to find their way to the Americas, significantly so in view of the later European majorities in North and South America, were the Vikings: who did not, however, leave a lasting colonial impact. The Vikings island-hopped by way of Iceland and Greenland in the north, and the only parts of North American that they arrived in were fairly inhospitable.

Colonisation by Europeans began in earnest with the arrival of Christopher Columbus’s fleet in 1492. Columbus himself became a colonial governor and was then removed from office for mistreating the indigenous inhabitants: a bad omen for the future.

Introduced diseases severely depopulated the continent, with an estimated native American population of more than twenty million in Mexico falling by ninety per cent in half a century, and seven hundred thousand in Florida dwindling to about two thousand by 1700.

An Aztec-like civilization called the ‘Mississippian’ culture covered much of the future United States but declined and fell due to disease with no European record of its existence, as European settlers hadn’t got there yet, unlike the civilisations of Mexico which were recorded by the invading Spanish.

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Here is a map from J. H. Beadle’s book Western Wilds (1877), describing the major ethno-linguistic groups of surviving native North Americans at that time. By that date, native North Americans were far fewer in number and often more nomadic: roaming around on horses, which had been introduced by the Spanish, and inclined to forget that they had once had civilisations (though some tribes did remember).

Many  whites supposed that the remains of the Mississippian culture had been built by an extinct group of people they called the mound builders: though scholars did conclude by 1900 that the Missippians were the direct ancestors of the native Americans of their time, the inhabitants of a sort of dark age compared to what had gone before.

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It is something of a mystery as to why the original inhabitants of the Americas were so vulnerable to European diseases, to the point that their civilisations fell. The exact reasons continue to be debated.

But the net result was that large numbers of European colonists were able to move in under the impression that North America was an untamed virgin wilderness of forests inhabited by only a small number of native Americans.

In reality, the forests had regrown on former farms and villages in many cases. There is even a theory that the regrowth of the forests sucked so much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere that it contributed to the global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, at its worst in the 1600s when the Thames river used to freeze over in London and when cold weather led to hunger and privation in the Old World, so that Europe itself was torn by wars to an even greater extent than usual.

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The next thing to happen was the introduction of slavery, conventionally dated to 1619, though it began slowly and indeed, was not covered by any laws that declared anyone to be a slave at first. Among the American colonists the practice of slavery was not an age-old evil but one that they invented, or re-invented. Millions of slaves were eventually imported from Africa, and then bred locally, before being finally freed as a result of the 1861–65 American Civil War.

In the 1840s, the USA waged war on Mexico and gained many western territories. This war heightened tension over slavery, since there was argument between north and south as to whether the new territories should be slave or free. Here is a colourful painting from that era by Richard Caton Woodville, Sr. It seems to perpetuate a common stereotype of the time, to the effect that southern whites were over-excitable. The slaves seem quite dignified by comparison.

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Although there is a myth that the black slaves were passively liberated by well-meaning whites in the eventual Civil War, in fact about a quarter of the troops in the Northern, Union army were black or, as they were called at that time, U.S. Colored Troops, who fought for their own freedom.

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Immigration continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in ways that left distinct impressions on different parts of the USA insofar as birds of a feather tended to flock together. People from the same region of Europe, even the same village, would uproot themselves from the old country and come together once more at a chosen spot in America once more. Germans, in particular, were so numerous that it was thought at one time that the United States might become officially bilingual in English and German. Large parts of the country were certainly informally bilingual in English and German, known locally as Dutch, a corruption of Deutsch.

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And so, we move forward to the present day, in which there is a lively debate as to whether USA should have two official written languages or not, except that German has largely died out and the current debate is about whether Spanish should be the other language.

Today, there are great divides in America’s society, some of them to do with ethnic groups and skin colour, but also to do with regional cultures and subcultures, of which some people, such as Colin Woodard in his book American Nations, have counted as many as eleven. Much earlier, in his Childhood and Society, first published in 1950, the German psychologist Erik Erikson also described the USA as a land of polarities. Polarities such as:

Open roads of immigration and jealous islands of tradition; outgoing internationalism and defiant isolationism; boisterous competition and self-effacing cooperation. (1965 edn, p. 258)

The polarities today have included liberals versus the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, scientists versus creationists, coastal areas versus the interior, and a tremendous residue of ignorance and prejudice and brutality in what is otherwise supposed to be a modern country. Thus, the USA remains notorious for its shootings, mass shootings and gun culture, problems that have actually got worse in the last few decades in some ways.

Lastly, when I was in Scandinavia on another occasion, I was impressed by how much the folkways of the Sámi, the last indigenous tribal people in Europe, resembled those of some of the native American tribes whom the European settlers of North American encountered.

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There is some common ancestry of the Sámi and native Americans in the sense that some of the ancestors of both lived in western Siberia and migrated around the Arctic. Though, that was thousands of years ago, and later similarities of lifestyle and dress were probably driven by similar environments and ways of coping with them.

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Having said that, what these interesting parallels show that there was nothing unique about the ways of the native Americans, that some early Europeans and even their descendants today have had similar ways.

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