29.8 America: a.d. 1401 to 1500

America

Back to America: A.D. 1301 to 1400

North america

Canada and the far north

The last recorded voyage from Iceland to Greenland was in 1410. The worsening climate had reduced productivity of Greenland livestock and there was increasing navigational hazards from drift ice. Nevertheless, in 1432 a treaty had been reached between the Norwegian and English kings in an effort to stop English pirates from roving the Davis Strait and a papal letter of 1448 condemned these English pirates. All Greenland settlements were apparently abandoned by about 1500.

In the arctic there were Thule Eskimos and Aleuts and in the subarctic regions there were many Indian tribes, including Kutchin, Kaska, Chipewyan and Cree. There seems no doubt that the Thule people, previously described as inhabiting northern Canada and Greenland from at least A.D. 1000 onward, were the direct ancestors of todays Polar Eskimos, who live on Greenland's northwest coast. The Thule, like the Dorset before them, were artists of ivory carving, both for implements and decorative pendants. Although they apparently originally had pottery when they lived primarily in Alaska, their northeastern Canadian areas had a scarcity of clay and firewood, so they carved vessels out of soapstone for seal-blubber lamps, over which they boiled their meat or fish. At the end of this century large scale fishing enterprises began on the Newfoundland banks, where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream meet the colder arctic currents and the cod survive in amazing numbers. Basques, French, Dutch and English all scuffled for dominance, with the Spanish Basques finally being driven out. (Ref. 260 ) In 1497 Giovanni Cabato, a Genoese sailing under the British Union Jack and the anglicized name of John Cabot re-discovered Newfoundland and Nova Scotia for England. Three years later Corte-Real of Portugal explored the coast of Labrador. (Ref. 222 ) On the Canadian Pacific coast there were the Tlingit tribes and on the Great Plains were Blackfoot, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Huron and Micmac. The United States Apache are related to the Canadian Athapascan tribes, some of whom migrated to reach the southwest (Arizona) in this 15th century. By the 1490s there were about 200,000 Indians spread over much of Canada. (Ref. 8 , 189 , 93 )

The united states

To supplement the remarks made in the paragraph above, in North America as a whole there were, in this century, about 1,000,000 Indians, with about 500 different languages. In northeastern United States there were Pottowatomie, Susquehannock, Iroquois, Erie, Miami, Illinois and Shawnee. In the southeast were Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Chocktaw, Natchez and others. In the far west were the Nes Perce, the California tribes of Pima, Yokuts, Chumash, Cochimi and then inland the Shoshone, Utes, Apache and in the central plains the Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Wichita, Comanche and many others. (Ref. 206 , 8 )

Regarding the Indians of the Great Plains, the Huff archeological site, some 20 miles south of Bismarck, N.D., shows a remarkable village built by the ancestors of the Mandan tribe and occupied from 1400 to 1600. House lodges still number more than 100 and the Missouri River has been cutting away an untold number by eroding the bluff on which the houses rest. These structures averaged 38 feet by 30 feet, supported by central posts. The walls were of wattle and daubb and the roofs perhaps of sod. There is evidence of both horticulture and bison hunting. (Ref. 88 )