Native Peoples: The First Forgotten Founders

—Alexis de Tocqueville

America's truly first settlers were, of course, native inhabitants, not just in the West but also in the East. Much of what various Indian groups did has disappeared from history as they were displaced, killed off, or confined by the encroaching Europeans. Even so, native peoples developed some settlements that have persisted to the present day. And evidence indicates that their influence on the patterns and success of European settlement, even on some of its institutions, though often belittled or ignored, was substantial. The first colonists who landed in Massachusetts and Virginia in the sixteenth century, for example, survived harsh winters because their Indian hosts shared the grains and foodstuffs they had stored. The history of the Mayflower Pilgrims suggests that the natives in the vicinity of Plymouth Rock not only provided fresh food but also taught the newcomers to raise corn and to fertilize their gardens with alewives harvested in nearby tidal creeks. A similar pageant of salvation took place nearly a century earlier, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's starving 1,000-man expedition entered the American Southwest and was fed lifesaving corn that thrifty Pueblo Indian farmers had stored in large granaries.

Although native peoples have conventionally been relegated to the margins of settlement accounts, they are woven deep into the fabric of American history. European settlement of both the East and the West would have been different indeed if Indians had not been there to begin with. Early interactions between Indians and invading Europeans in the Southwest and then, quite independently, in the East set many of the patterns that would be carried over to later encounters in the American West. The first extensive contacts between Europeans and Indians occurred between 1539 and 1542 when two separate Spanish exploring parties, one led by Hernando de Soto and the other by Coronado, conducted far-ranging inland investigations that stretched from Florida north to the Carolinas, along the Mississippi River, into Arkansas, and through eastern California. The treks gave these Europeans an initial look at the geography of the southern sector of what is now the United States and made it possible for them to bring back knowledge about the primitive—and not-so-primitive—societies the aboriginal peoples who populated this region had developed.

Some of the natives encountered by the exploring parties were nomadic, but others lived a pastoral life in villages, hunting game and harvesting a wide variety of crops. Some, the explorers noticed, such as the Pueblo Indians in the Southwest, lived in cohesive communities centered on religious rituals and beliefs. In these communities, native craftsmen erected durable houses and farmers grew grains, fruits, and other crops, practices that yielded living conditions comparable to those of many people in western Europe.

The story of East Coast colonization, at least as presented by the incoming Europeans, can be divided into two distinct phases of interaction with native peoples. The first phase is a positive account of Indians who were peaceful and helpful—the names of Squanto and Pocahontas come up routinely. The second phase is dominated by stories of warriors who refused to submit to the colonists' demands and were driven from their homelands. In Virginia, for example, the peaceful initial period was short-lived because Captain John Smith organized armed food raids. A swashbuckler who viewed the natives as savages who had no rights, Smith pursued an Indian policy that produced unrelenting conflict and that, within forty years of Jamestown's founding, left the remnants of the once-powerful Powhatan Indians scrambling to eke out a living on the fringes of the region the tribe once had dominated.

In New England, the initial phase of European settlement followed a somewhat different path largely because the colonists there were refugees who had experienced religious persecution, and they put a premium on personal freedom and peace. The outlook that governed the first decades of Puritan settlement—and helped produce a "treaty" of peace with the Wampanoag Indians that lasted forty years—was articulated in these directives issued by the officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company:

Above all, we pray you to be careful that there be none in our precincts permitted to do any injury, in the least kind, to the heathen people [and] if any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, we pray you endeavor to purchase their title.

No New England leader did more to fulfill the letter and the spirit of these injunctions than Roger Williams. A fiery advocate of religious freedom, Williams was a friend of poet John Milton and had known Oliver Cromwell. On being banished from Massachusetts in 1635, he founded Providence, the first settlement of Rhode Island, as a haven for Quakers and other dissenters. He subsequently won the trust of Narragansett Indians by treating them as equals and by insisting that they be paid for title to their land.

But such endeavors came to naught as the flow of immigrants into southern New England swelled and the desire for Indian lands became more compelling than the commitment to maintain good relations. The Puritan perspective soon changed to accommodate the new situation, and native homelands were seized on the pretext that "civilized" men had a God-given right to displace a culture deemed inferior. Welcome of the peace that had prevailed for three decades was replaced among Puritans by a conviction that there was an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. This hubris in turn extinguished earlier hopes that a policy of tolerance would allow Puritans and natives to live harmoniously in the same valleys.

The hopelessness and despair these events generated in the minds of New England's natives led to a bloody uprising in 1675. The year-long, region-wide conflict (misnamed King Philip's War by the Puritans) had tragic consequences for both sides. The casualties were severe. When the killing ended, all hopes for peace were extinguished and the scattered natives of southern New England were left landless.

Historians who argue that such an outcome was...