Grand Portage National Monument at Grand Portage, Minnesota

The Far North 

The Grand Portage was the Grand Central Station of the Native Far North. Long before French colonial coureurs des bois (runners of the woods) entered the region, the Algonquin hauled their canoes and goods over the 8 mile trail around the falls on the Pigeon River. At this site on the northwest lip of Lake Superior, people in canoes traveled to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans with portages past unnavigable rivers lasting at most a day.

The Ojibwe, an Algonquin speaking tribe, made this land home. Before contact with the French, they trapped, fished, hunted, farmed, and gathered food and resources, moving seasonally to reap nature’s harvest. The Ojibwe used birch bark canoes for fishing, harvesting wild rice, and perhaps most importantly, transporting copper from Isle Royale and furs from their forests for trade with tribes far and wide. 

Birch Bark Canoe in front of the trading post at Grand Portage (Photo by Gary Alan Nelson)

Writing about these canoes, the French missionary Rene de Brehant de Galinese observed in 1669: “The convenience of these canoes is great in these waters, full of cataracts or waterfalls, and rapids through which it is impossible to take any boat. When you reach them, you load canoe and baggage upon your shoulders and go overland until the navigation is good….”[1]

Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall by Frances Anne Hopkins (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

At such a busy center for travel and trade, Grand Portage served as a gateway for migration, contact, and commerce. Native Americans used it in their extensive trading networks, and during colonial times, the French accessed the interiors of North America through this portage.

 The French Enter North America

The French brought a unique European culture into the hemisphere. They founded over a dozen colonies on Caribbean Islands and also settled Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, Green Bay, and farther south St. Louis, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. In 1608, Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America at Quebec, the capital of New France. During the early colonial period, the French explored and laid claim to much of the northern and middle parts of North America.

The coureurs interacted with the native peoples differently. French men often married into native communities, raised families, and served as cultural brokers as Europeans spread into tribal ancestral lands. Additionally, while predominantly Catholic, the French did not evangelize with the same zeal as the Spanish nor the English.

Perhaps the first Europeans to arrive at the Grand Portage were Pierre Esprit and his brother-in-law, Medard Chouart, who traveled the area around 1660. A Jesuit missionary, Father Claude Allouez, canoed Lake Superior in 1667 and on his 1670 map of his explorations marked the mouth of the Pigeon River. Then in 1682, René-Robert Cavelier sailed down the Mississippi River and claimed the middle part of the continent for the French, from the upper Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains. At the edges of these contested empires, disputes flared that sometimes erupted into conflict.

The American Fur Trade

The height of the French fur trade that flowed through Grand Portage occurred between 1740 and 1745. By the late 1760s, English fur traders encroached on the French territories. In 1767, the English traded goods with Native Americans valued at 5,000 pounds sterling and returned the next summer with 100 canoes crammed with pelts. Captain Jonathan Carver witnessed the bounty that summer as packages of pelts came down the trail to the depot and put on larger canoes for transport to Montreal and then to hat makers in Europe. Among the Europeans at the post, Carver also saw Ojibwe, Cree, and Assiniboine tribal members.

The French traded for the pelts of beaver, minx, fox, otter, buffalo, and other animals.  These pelts made hats that were strong, waterproof, and held their shapes. In a damp cool climate of northern Europe with scant heating, beaver hats provided warmth. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, beaver pelts made the highest quality hats. For almost two centuries, the Americas provided the raw material for high fashion in Europe. Over the first 2/3rds of the 18^th century, English factories alone made approximately 21,000,000 high quality beaver and felt hats from American furs.

The Grand Portage around the Upper Falls on the Pigeon River

Map of the portage around the falls of the Pigeon River (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

To get the furs to Europe from middle America, canoes piled to the gunwales sliced through the waters. At unnavigable sections of rivers, coureurs carried their goods and canoes around the obstacles. For the Grand Portage around the falls of the Pigeon River, each porter’s load weighed between 160 and 200 pounds. By stooping over and distributing this heavy load onto the lower and upper back, porters lugged their goods and canoes over the eight miles of the Grand Portage.\

At Grand Portage, an annual rendezvous occurred each July when trappers came from all over to trade their year’s haul, buy supplies for the next year, and party. Some years, 500 men from the fur companies joined the numerous native peoples encamped at Grand Portage to trade and celebrate.

By the end of the 1600s, 16,000 settlers lived in New France bunched along the Saint Lawrence River and in parts of Nova Scotia. At the same time, English colonists equaled around 160,000. The French continued to explore and expand their trade networks into the hinterlands and competition with the English grew.

The English Compete with the French

The English Hudson’s Bay Company earned a charter in 1670 to trap and trade the northlands. The Company governed vast areas of North America, including all the land that drained into Hudson Bay, totaling 1.5 million acres, or about 15% of North America’s land mass. Headquartered at the York Factory on Hudson Bay, it grew rich on the fur trade that came out of the forests.

Trading at Hudson Bay Company (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The men working for the fur companies led hard lives. Living in a harsh climate, isolated from their home country, many married into native communities. Such marriages often strengthened the bonds between the French and the Indians. The resultant mixed heritage children called Métis served many roles in the colonial era. They were cultural brokers between the Europeans and Native Americans, they worked as porters and paddlers for the various companies, and they supplied food for the traders and trappers.

Native Americans often traded on credit so that in the spring, the French returned to pick up the furs as payment for the goods left the previous fall.  A cycle of perpetual debt sometimes burdened Native Americans as their winter hunt did not retire the debt owed for the advanced goods. Fostering unreasonable debt and using alcohol as payment for the furs undermined the traditional cultures of the Native Americans. John Tanner in the 1790’s told of North West Company traders who enticed his mother with alcohol to store her furs at their post at Grand Portage, never to see them again.

From 1689 to 1763, France and England fought four wars of empire, culminating in the Seven Year’s War (aka French and Indian War) where France lost its colony in North America.  In 1673, Britain acquired the vast French territories in the far north.

In 1779, nine mainly Scottish businessmen formed the North West Company to continue the flow of fur to England. Barrels of rum, bags of corn, rifles, knives, kettles, blankets, needles, tobacco, and cloth flooded the Northland to entice Indians to trade their catches from the winter. Joseph Frobisher from the North West Company reported that of its 500 employees, about half transported goods back and forth from Montreal to Grand Portage while the rest traveled outward from their base at Grand Portage to acquire furs. The North West Company successfully competed with the Hudson Bay Company for the fur business in central and western Canada until 1821, when the two companies merged.

The Trading Post on Lake Superior

This description of the Grand Portage trading depot in July 1793 comes from the diary of John MacDonell, a North West Company clerk: "All the buildings within the fort are sixteen in number made with cedar and white spruce fir split with whip saws after being squared, the roofs are covered with shingles of cedar and pine, most of their posts, doors and windows are painted with Spanish brown. Six of these buildings are store houses for the company's merchandise and furs. The rest are dwelling houses, shops, compting [counting] house, and mess house - they have also a warf [wharf] or kay for their vessel to unload and load at. "[2] Today, the National Monument of the “Great Carrying Place” has a partially reconstructed late 18^th century trading post, the Grand Portage trail, and Fort Charlotte on the Pigeon River.

Reconstructed trading post at Grand Portage (Courtesy NPS)

The French were intrepid explorers, skilled entrepreneurs, and innovative cultural brokers. Throughout the north and middle part of the continent, French coureurs de bois were often the first Europeans into this vast country. The sparsely populated French settlements in North America, about 40,000 in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, were predominantly male. Thus the French adopted a more cooperative and embracing attitude about Native Americans. The French voyageurs discovered ways to trade with and live among different tribes. From Detroit to New Orleans, from St. Louis to Des Moines, the French contributed a different culture and fostered different relationships with the land and with the native peoples.

The NPS designated Grand Portage a National Historic Site in 1951 and a National Monument in 1958.

Pigeon River Upper Falls by Kenneth Clinton

Grand Portage National Monument

Heritage Center & Headquarters

P.O. Box 426, 170 Mile Creek Road

Grand Portage, Minnesota 55605

218-475-0123              http://www.nps.gov/grpo/index.htm

The Spring 2016 History Graduate Research Seminar at New Mexico State University work-shopped this chapter. Thanks to Victor Apodaca, Taj Backus, Peter Mattox, Kyle Mery, Casey Panarese, Laura Salas, and Camille Ville for making this a better history.

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[1] Woolworth, ”Historic Study of Grand Portage.”

[2] “The Grand Portage Story” www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/story/chap1.htm

African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City, New York

African Burial Ground National Monument

Engraved on the Ancestral Chamber monument at the African Burial Ground (Photo by Hunner)

Tucked tightly into a corner of downtown Manhattan, dwarfed by massive federal office buildings, the African Burial Ground National Monument pays homage to the millions of slaves that lived not just in New York, but throughout the country. Placed under seven burial mounds on a third of an acre, the remains of 419 Africans and African-Americans give tribute to those slaves and slave descendants who helped build this country in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries. Thousands more lay beneath the busy streets of Manhattan. In fact, between 15,000 and 20,000 people of African descent were interned in a six acre area near today’s City Hall. In the 1700s, New York City held the distinction of having the second highest numbers of slaves in the British colonies, after Charleston, South Carolina.

At the turn of the 16^th century, the Lenape, an Algonquin people, hunted, fished and farmed in the area between the Delaware and Hudson Rivers. With some local variations, they were similar to the Powhatan of Virginia. As with Native Americans elsewhere, they managed their natural resources well. Europeans who encountered the East Coast often marveled at the abundance of game and fish in this “wilderness.” This abundance came from the care that the Lenape and other tribes took to avoid over-exploitation of their regions.

Europeans arrived in New York in the early 16^th century. Giovanni da Verrazano and his crew visited this extraordinary natural port in 1524. In 1609, Henry Hudson laid claim for the Dutch to this area, who established the New Amsterdam colony in 1624. In 1626, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from the Lenape for sixty guilders (around $24) in trade goods and built a fort on its southern tip to support the Dutch West India Company’s fur trade operations on the Hudson River watershed.

The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Slavery in New York

As mentioned in the chapter on colonial Jamestown, slaves imported from Africa made an early entrance into the colonies on the East Coast.  In 1626, a Dutch West India Company’s ship unloaded eleven slaves at New Amsterdam; however, many of the Dutch settlers were uneasy with slavery, so there was little private ownership. Slaves of the Dutch West India Company worked on official projects like repairing the fort, splitting logs for the palisades, clearing land, cooking lime for plaster, building docks and roads, and growing and harvesting grain and other crops. These slaves laid the foundation for a viable colony.

With the Dutch, slaves could gain “half-freedom.” They paid an annual tax and could be called for work by West India Company when needed. They held some rights, including the ability to bear arms in times of emergency, they married in the Dutch Reformed Church in Manhattan, and some of them owned their own homes. This more lenient attitude about slaves changed with the coming of the English.

In the 1660s, the British challenged the Dutch dominance of the Atlantic trade. On September 8, 1664, threatened by English soldiers and frigates, Governor Peter Stuyvesant lowered the West India Company’s flag which ended the Dutch colony in North America. Manhattan and its surrounding lands now changed its name to New York, in honor of the Duke of York, King Charles II’s younger brother,

Under English control, slavery increased. As a center for trade between England, its American colonies (including West Indian plantations), and Africa, New York transshipped slaves, sugar, and sterling in a profitable exchange of goods and peoples. Ships delivered slaves to docks north of the palisades of the fort which gave rise to a vibrant African community. Perhaps 15% of African slaves captured in Sub-Saharan Africa were Muslims according to the "Islam and the United States" podcast on Backstory.

The English curtailed some of the slaves’ freedoms including the practice of their religions and allowed harsher types of physical punishments. Then around 1698, the newly built Episcopalian Trinity Church in southern Manhattan took over the city’s cemetery, and banned African burials there. Slaves, freed blacks, and some whites looked elsewhere for grave sites. As black communities thrived in the areas of Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and City Hall, a cemetery also grew and eventually expanded to over six acres along the eastern edge of the island.

(Courtesy New York Public Library Picture Collection Online)

Ceremonies at the burial ground resurrected traditional rites from Africa. Wrapped in shrouds and placed in wooden coffins, some bodies had coins over their eyes (for payment of passage through the afterlife) while others had shells, glass beads, or buttons placed on them. They were buried with their heads pointing west, similar to the practice in Africa. Rev. John Sharpe in 1713 wrote: “They are buried in Common by those of their country and complexion without the office; on the contrary the Heathenish rites are performed at the grave by their countrymen.”[1] Imagine African burial ceremonies outside of consecrated churchyards and devoid of Christian ministers returning to their animist or Muslim roots.

As New York grew, so did the population of slaves. In 1664, when the English took over, New Amsterdam had around 1,500 white settlers, 300 hundred slaves, and 75 freedmen. The 1703 census counted 4,400 whites and between 600 and 700 slaves, and in 1746, as prosperity spread through the colony, the city had a total population of 11,720 which included 2,440 slaves, about twenty percent of all residents. By then, perhaps half of the city’s households had at least one slave.[2] In all the English colonies in North America, only Charleston, South Carolina had more slaves than New York City. As England incorporated the great port city of New York into its mercantile economy of sugar, rum, and other riches from the Americas, the city’s businesses and farmers turned to slave labor more and more. New York City depended on cheap labor and thus, slavery grew.

Exhibit panel at African Burial Mound NM (Photo by Hunner)

We often understand slavery as it evolved into an institution supporting southern plantations. Actually, the northern colonies first officially recognized it. In 1641, Massachusetts legalized chattel slavery, as did Connecticut in 1643, Rhode Island in 1652, and New York in 1664. The South came late to legalizing slavery when, in 1664, Maryland declared that all blacks in the colony, all those imported into it, and all their children would be enslaved for life. By the end of that decade, Virginia enacted similar legislation. By the end of the 17^th century, African slaves were a legally protected labor force in British North America.

Slaves worked as both skilled and unskilled laborers. In truth, slave labor built the colonies and without them, the colonies would not have thrived. From farm workers harvesting tobacco to blacksmiths pounding out horseshoes, from urban slaves laying pipelines in New York City to construction slaves who helped erect the United States Capitol and the White House, slaves first helped to build the colonies and then the Republic.

Most slaves lived a brutal life. Long hours under a hot sun doing hard field labor, physical as well as sexual abuse, the wrenching separation of wives from husbands, of parents from children, and a lack of food, all contributed to a miserable existence and a legacy of racism that still haunts their descendants and the nation.

As agriculture adapted to the industrial revolution, the cash crop in the South shifted from tobacco to cotton. In 1810, the South produced 200,000 bales of cotton. By the start of the Civil War, spurred on by the textile mills in New England and England, the South produced 4,000,000 bales. Slaves provided the labor for this rapid expansion. In 1700, almost 28,000 slaves populated British North America. By 1740, that total equaled 150,000 and both cotton plantations and northern merchants and communities reaped economic rewards as slaves worked in fields, in the shipbuilding and sail making yards, in iron foundries, in sawmills, at rum distilleries, and a wide variety of other industries and factories. Thus, by the Revolutionary War, the population of American slaves had grown to 452,000 – about one-fifth of the entire colonial population.

From the mid-15th century, the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas transformed the Atlantic world into an economic dynamo based on ships, slaves, plantation crops, and manufactured goods. Without slaves, the industries, municipalities, and large farms would not have prospered as they did. And New York did prosper. By the 19th century, New York City was one of the most prosperous ports and financial centers in the country. In all, 12 million Africans were captured and enslaved in the Americas.  

Creation of the African Burial Ground National Monument

The African Burial Ground National Monument is a recent and complicated addition to the NPS. The General Services Administration planned a $276 million, thirty-four story building to house offices for the United States Attorney, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Internal Revenue Service. In digging the foundation for this building in 1991, the remains of over 400 people were uncovered. After discovery, the skeletons were taken away to Lehman College in the Bronx for conservation and study.

Protests arose from the African-American community over several issues. First, with the bones wrapped in newspaper and taken to Lehman College in cardboard boxes, many felt disrespected. Second, the African-American community was not consulted on what to do with the remains. This sparked discontent as it touched the lack of control that African-Americans have over their heritage. They protested that the fate of these ancestors resided in the hands of federal bureaucrats who ignored African heritage and just wanted to build an office tower quickly and on budget. As a result of the controversy, GSA regional director William Diamond halted construction at the building site.

The House Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds (which appropriates funding for GSA projects) held a meeting in New York to address the African Burial Ground. Committee chair Gus Savage (D- Ill.) abruptly ended the hearing after he heard that the GSA knew about the likelihood of burials even before it purchased the land. He said that he would not approve funding any GSA projects until he heard "a more honest and respectful response" concerning the burial ground.  He added:  "Don't waste your time asking this subcommittee for anything else as long as I'm chairman, unless you can figure out a way to go around me! I am not going to be part of your disrespect."[3] Consequently, the GSA set up an advisory committee which moved the remains to Howard University where Dr. Michael L. Blakey served as the burial ground's scientific director. In a decade of scientific research, Dr. Blakey led some seventy forensic scientists, anthropologists, and African-American scholars who studied the human skeletons.

Burial mounds for 419 Africans and African-Americans (Photo by Hunner)

On October 3, 2003, the remains of the 419 people were re-interred under seven burial mounds at the site. Dr. Blakely addressed that gathering: “With the project, we knew that we were peeling off layers of obscurity. We were also doing something that scholars within the African diaspora have been doing for about 150 years and that is realizing that history has political implications of empowerment and disempowerment. That history is not just to be discovered but to be re-discovered, to be corrected, and that African-American history is distorted. Omissions are made in order to create a convenient view of national and white identity at the expense of our understanding of our world and also at the expense of African-American identity.” Under the streets of New York City, evidence of our pasts lay buried by both dirt and obscurity. The discovery and study of such evidence has created a fuller understanding of the African-American experience and identity in the United States.

Aerial View of the African Burial Ground (Courtesy NPS)

The African Burial Ground National Monument was created by Congress on February 27, 2006, and the monument was dedicated in 2007 to commemorate the role of Africans and African-Americans in the histories of New York City and the United States.

African Burial Ground National Monument

290 Broadway, 1st Floor

New York, NY 10007

(212) 637-2019

http://www.nps.gov/afbg/index.htm

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[1] Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 129.

[2] Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 126-127.

[3] Archeology article in 2003.

Historic Jamestowne at Colonial National Historical Park at Yorktown, Virginia

Historic Jamestowne

First Successful English Colony

On the shores of tidewater Virginia, on May 13, 1607, three wooden sailing ships from England landed. The Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery left London on December 20^th, 1606 and after stops at the Canary and Caribbean Islands, arrived in North America. The three ships searched the James River and after several weeks, selected an isolated upriver island. As the ships tied up to the trees on Jamestown Island, 104 men and boys disembarked to establish the first permanent English settlement in North America.

Replicas in 2/3 scale of the ships at Jamestown Settlement (Photo by Hunner)

The English had failed previous attempts to establish colonies. In the late 1580s, they tried several times at Roanoke. While there, they named the land Virginia, after Queen Elizabeth I. Her successor, James I, granted a charter to the Virginia Company to settle the east coast. As a private business, the Virginia Company had to turn a profit and created two branches—the Virginia Companies of London and of Plymouth. The London branch founded the Jamestown colony while Plymouth held the land north of Virginia.

The English in 1607 faced a daunting challenge. They had to establish a viable community at great distance from England, amidst Algonquins who resisted the settlement, and at an unhealthy place. The nearby swamps bred mosquitoes and disease, and the brackish water sickened the colonists. Within six months of the first landing, fifty percent of the colonists had died, mainly from disease or accidental causes, but also from conflict with the Powhatan.

Swamp at Jamestown Island (Photo by Hunner)

Contested leadership plagued Jamestown from its beginning. Capt. John Smith, an adventurer, mercenary soldier, and an escapee from a Turkish prison, so angered his shipmates on the voyage that they put him in irons. The instructions from the Virginia Company opened at landing however named Smith as one of the leaders. The settlers first built a triangular Fort James on the banks of the river. The log palisaded compound protected the colonists and the English future in North America.

Model of Fort James within the compound (Photo by Hunner)

The Starving Time

In 1608, the “Second Supply” from England arrived on three ships which brought more than 100 men and boys, plus two women, and much needed provisions. The colony struggled through the winter and survived; however the resupply of the summer of 1609 went tragically awry. Nine ships set sail from England but a hurricane hit them, and the ship with the new leaders wintered in Bermuda. At Jamestown, the “Starving Time” gripped the colony. Lack of food and goods, attacks by the Powhatan, and diseases all felled the English. Cannibalism prowled through the community.

In April 2012, archaeologists found and analyzed the remains of a fourteen year old girl (nicknamed Jane) who had died during the Starving Time. They announced in May 2013 that Jane’s remains showed evidence of cannibalism. Cut marks on bones and a hole in the skull proved that after she died, her starving neighbors cannibalized her. At the beginning of the winter of 1609-1610, around 400 people lived at the fort. By the end of the next spring, only sixty had survived the Starving Time.

Jane's skull and reconstruction of her face (From http://www.sciencemag.org/)

In the spring of 1610, the ones alive abandoned Fort James and set sail for England; however, before they got to the Atlantic Ocean, they met the long delayed supply ships. Imagine the emotions of the Starving Time survivors as they were forced to return to the site of so much suffering. Return they did.

Jamestown quickly resettled, but the question of how to make a profit hung heavy over the Virginia Colony. For, while the crown supported the settlement in principal, it gave no money for the expensive colonization. Artifacts excavated from an early well illustrate their attempts at brewing, silk production, brick making, blacksmithing, collecting medicinal plants, and glassblowing. For example, in 1608, German and Polish glassblowers arrived to use the large amounts of wood and sand to make glass for export to London. Their early experiments to turn a profit failed.

Re-enactment of glassblowing at Jamestown (Photo by Hunner)

Tobacco Saves the Colony

Here entered John Rolfe and tobacco. He sailed in on the Third Supply, having spent the winter shipwrecked on the Bermuda Islands where his wife and daughter died. While on Bermuda, he purchased tobacco seeds. The taste for tobacco had swept Europe, and Spain imported the golden leaf from its colonies and so filled its own treasury. The Powhatan grew a harsh tobacco, not acceptable for export to the Europe. In 1611, Rolfe cultivated the sweeter tobacco of the Caribbean and sent four hogshead barrels of it to England. The tobacco shipment quickly sold out, and Virginia found a profitable export crop. This addictive substance turned the tide for Jamestown and secured its permanence.

Tobacco Field at Jamestown Settlement (Photo by Hunner)

Pocahontas

Pocahontas also helped make Jamestown permanent. As daughter of Wahunsenaca, the mamanatowick (paramount chief) of the Powhatan Chiefdom, she met the English soon after they arrived. In the winter of 1607-08, the Powhatans captured Capt. John Smith and brought him to the capital of the Powhatan Chiefdom. Perhaps Pocahontas (who was eleven or twelve at the time and the chief’s favorite daughter) saved Smith’s life by placing her head over his as it was about to be smashed. Whether the Powhatans truly sought to kill Smith or whether this was an elaborate ceremony of acceptance, Smith became an adopted son of Wahunsenaca.

Pocahontas resurfaced several years later with the other John in this story, John Rolfe. Relations between the English and the Americans worsened and hostage taking and combat spread. Capt. Argull kidnapped Pocahontas to force the Powhatan to release several captives and return stolen weapons. While a prisoner, she converted to Christianity, took the name “Rebecca,” and met John Rolfe. They married in April 1614 and the “Pocahontas’ Peace” halted the fighting between the Powhatan and the English for a decade. This peaceful period allowed the colonists to consolidate and spread to new areas of the coastal region.

Statue of Pocahantas at Jamestown (Photo by Hunner)

The power couple had a son, Thomas, and the Virginia Company decided to bring the Rolfe family to England to publicize the struggling colony. They arrived in 1616 with about a dozen Powhatan men and women. The English treated Lady Rebecca Rolfe like the royalty that this Powhatan noble was. In England, they toured the country and attended the theater where they sat near King James I and Queen Anne. Right before they returned to Virginia, Rebecca died. Thomas stayed in England and grew up with Uncle Henry Rolfe, while John and the Powhatan returned to Jamestown. Rolfe married again, but died on his plantation in 1622, possibly during the hostilities that broke out after the Pocahontas Peace collapsed. Warfare erupted off and on for years.

The Powhatan revolted again in 1644 when 350 to 400 of the then 8,000 colonists died. However, the English captured and killed the Chief which ended the Powhatan Chiefdom. These Native Americans then became subjects of the English crown. They continued to live in the East Coast with their descendants who are still there, but after the mid-1600s, their civilization waned under pressure from English weapons, from their draft animals, from their diseases, and from their growing population.

Map of the Powhatan Chiefdom (Photo by Hunner of exhibit at Historic Jamestowne)

The Oldest Representative Assembly in the United States

During the Pocahontas Peace, the Virginians created self-government. At the end of July in 1619, a General Assembly met at the Jamestown church. Representatives from all eleven regions of the colony debated how to create a governing body. Although hampered by a heat wave, Governor Yeardley on July 30^th, 1619 called for the creation of the House of Burgesses. It has met continuously since, is known now as the Virginia General Assembly, and is the oldest representative legislative assembly in the Western Hemisphere.

That year, two other developments added to the peoples of the colony. The first Africans arrived at Jamestown to work in the labor intensive tobacco fields. From this small start, African labor grew in importance, especially after Bacon’s Rebellion. Also in 1619, ninety women arrived to help make the colony more permanent.

Like the Spanish colony in New Mexico, colonists held their Christianity faith closely. Reverend Bucke conducted the first Episcopalian service under a billowing sailcloth in May 1607. The Church of England, not as demanding nor evangelical as Catholicism, set the tone for the colony.

Mortality continued to lurk among the colonists, and church records document high infant mortality. Profits from tobacco with indentured and slave labor doing the field work and a carpe diem attitude from seeing so many family and friends die combined to give Virginia a fast paced, risk embracing society. By mid-17^th century, Jamestown thrived.

Nonetheless, problems simmered. Tobacco experienced declining prices due to competition from Maryland and the Carolinas. Hailstorms, floods, drought, and hurricanes damaged crops. The indentured servant system (where men and women agreed to work for seven years in exchange for trans-Atlantic passage and then room and board) also contributed to the problems. Once they completed their indenture, the freemen often had to settle on the fringes of the colony.

Bacon's Rebellion

The spark that ignited Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675 started with an attack by the Doeg Indians against the Mathews’ plantation in the northern Virginia. Mathews had not paid the Doeg for some trade goods. In retaliation, Nathaniel Bacon, a recent arrival, organized almost 1,000 settlers to subdue the Native Americans. This unleashed an indiscriminate hunt for any Indians, including those loyal to the English. The frontier war then turned into a civil war as Governor Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel and attacked his headquarters. Bacon and his rebels descended on Jamestown and from July through September, 1676, controlled the capital. In early September, the Governor’s forces retook the capital, but not before Bacon and his men set fire to the statehouse, the church, and other buildings. As the colony reeled in turmoil, Bacon died, possibly of cholera, the rebellion fizzled out, and twenty-three rebels were captured and hung.

The Burning of Jamestown by Bacon and his rebels (Courtesy of NPS)

Since the indentured servant system fueled the rebellion, growers looked for new labor sources. Plantation owners now turned to African slaves as an alternative to indentured servants, both in reducing costs as well as in control of the workers. We will explore the issue of slavery in the colonies more in our next chapter on the African Burial Grounds in downtown New York City.

By the end of the 17^th century, the capital of Virginia moved to the Middle Plantation, soon renamed Williamsburg. As the Europeans spread out over the coastal plains and into the Blue Ridge Mountains and as healthier places to live attracted settlers, Jamestown faded away; however, the first successful English colony established that nation's dominance on the East Coast.

The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), founded in 1889, received the Jamestown church ruins and the twenty-two surrounding acres in 1893 from Mr. and Mrs. Barney, the owners of Jamestown Island.  In 1934, the National Park Service acquired the remaining 1,500 acres of the island. Ever since, Historic Jamestowne has been jointly managed by the APVA and the NPS as the Colonial National Historical Park in conjunction with the Yorktown Battlefield. In 2009, the APVA changed its name to Preservation Virginia. As a joint venture by the NPS and Preservation Virginia, Historic Jamestowne evokes the origins of our country, its colonial beginnings with democratic leanings, its dependence on indentured and then slave labor, and its complicated relationship with the indigenous peoples of the continent. We will return to the Colonial National Historical Park in the chapter on Yorktown, the defeat of the English army there, and the end of the British experience in the colonies.

Excavation in 2013 near the re-built Episcopal church (Photo by Hunner)

Entrance to Fort James on the banks of the James River (Photo by Hunner)

Colonial National Historical Park

P.O. Box 210

Yorktown, VA 23690

757.856.1200

http://www.nps.gov/jame/index.htm

El Morro National Monument and El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail in the United States and Mexico

Contact between Americans and the Spanish

Traveling up the spine of Mexico and across the Chihuahuan Desert, Spanish explorers and then settlers pushed north from Mexico City, possibly following Native American trails. Forbidding deserts, waterless days, and harsh sun challenged the travelers. The interior lands can be an unforgiving landscape, especially as Contact between the Americans and the Spanish colonizers launched decades of war as well as exchange.

Spanish Encounter Native Americans

The Spanish made first contact with native peoples on the continent. In 1519, Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro marched on Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire in Mexico and home to over 200,000 people. After two years of siege, the Aztec fell to Cortes, his soldiers, and their Indian allies. The gold and other treasures of the Aztecs fueled Spanish explorers who then found more gold in the Incan empire in Peru.

Tlaxcalan allies with Spaniards attacking Aztecs (Florentine codex 1579)

In the 16^th century, Spaniards attempted colonies in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia; however, these efforts failed. Nonetheless, the Spanish believed that gold and other valuables waited in the far north of New Spain.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján found no wealth during his expedition through the Southwest and into the Great Plains from 1540 to 1542.  These 300 Spanish were the first Europeans to encounter the Puebloan peoples, the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, the first Spaniards to fight Native Americans at the Zuni and Tiguex pueblos, and the first to witness the nomadic Plains Indians chasing the bison herds in Kansas. Despite traveling over 4,000 miles from Mexico to Kansas and back, Coronado found no gold.

 

Coronado's Route 154-1542

Spanish colony of New Mexico

“Pasó por aquí.” “I passed by here.” In 1605, Don Juan de Oñate carved these words into the soft stone at the base of a windswept mesa in western New Mexico. Hundreds of Native American petroglyphs preceded Oñate’s inscription at the place the Spanish called El Morro (the Headland).

Onate's Paso por acqui engraving in 1605 at El Morro (Photo by Hunner)

Several years earlier, Oñate led 700 settlers north and blazed El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (The Royal Road to the Interior Lands). This 1,500 mile trail from Mexico City to northern New Mexico opened up the Southwest to conquest, encounters, migration, and commerce. This trail linked New Mexico to the rest of the world for the next three centuries. Spain’s first successful colony in what would become the U.S. preceded the English’s one at Jamestown by almost a decade.

In July 1598, Oñate’s colonizing group  arrived in northern New Mexico and moved into a ruin near the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh. They arrived too late to plant crops, and in truth, few farmers had traveled with them. Instead most settlers knew mining, convinced that gold lay nearby. Consequently, the colony took food and clothing from the neighboring Puebloans. This made for strained relations.

Relations between the Spanish colonizers and the Puebloans worsened at the end of 1598. An exploratory party led by Juan de Zaldivar, Oñate’s nephew, sought to purchase corn flour from the people at the 1,000 year old Pueblo of Acoma. The Puebloans attacked and killed Zaldivar and many of his twenty soldiers, but several escaped by jumping off the mesa cliffs. In response, Oñate sent his soldiers to punish the Acoma people. A three day battle erupted around New Year’s Day 1599 and ultimately, the Spanish hauled up a canon to the mesa top and subdued the residents. In retaliation for their rebellion, Oñate enslaved the children and women of Acoma and cut off the right foot of all men over the age of twenty-five. With Contact came conflict and conquest.

Ladders to catch the rain clouds at Acoma (Photo by Hunner)

Homes at Acoma (Photo by Hunner)

The “Black Legend” posits that of all the Europeans who came to the Western Hemisphere, the Spanish treated the Americans the worst, killing and plundering native communities. True, some Spanish explorers did do that; however, so did the English in New England during the Pequot War in the 1630s. In fact, brutal warfare swept the continent from Contact until the late 19th century. Europeans from all lands harshly treated Native Americans.

Sometime between 1607 and 1615, as Jamestown struggled to establish itself in Virginia, the colonial capitol of New Mexico moved to La Villa Real de Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis (the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi). Soon, the Spanish built the Palace of the Governors, the final destination of the Royal Road. The Palace served as the capitol for the Spanish, the Mexican, and finally the U.S. governments of New Mexico. Today it houses the marvelous N.M. History Museum on the Santa Fe Plaza. 

The forbidding Chihuahuan Desert (Photo by Hunner)

Traveling on El Camino Real challenged the settlers, officials, priests, and traders. Mountains, deserts, hostile Native Americans, long distances, and fierce weather all contributed to the arduous journey. Covering ten to fifteen miles a day, it took about six months to go the 1,500 miles from Mexico City. Because of the long sea and land journeys to get to northern New Mexico from Europe, of all of the places in the worldwide Spanish empire, New Mexico was “remote beyond compare.” Due to the isolation, decisions from Spain took years to find their way back to New Mexico, so both governors and priests had a relatively free rein.

The Spanish brought profoundly foreign concepts and shockingly unusual items up the Camino Real. Concepts such as private land ownership, a Christian faith, metal tools and weapons, and deadly microbes entered with force. With Contact, both peoples adapted and adopted elements from the other. Each side changed through cultural code switching (discussed in the Columbian Exchange chapter) which in turn transformed the rest of the world.

Spanish officials and soldiers received an encomienda for their service which granted them land and forced labor. Nearby Puebloans had to work for the Spanish, often when their own crops were ready for harvesting. This encomienda system made life difficult for the Americans.

Catholicism also injected strife into the colony. Priests tried to convert Native Americans by establishing missions at pueblos and quashing native religious practices and beliefs. Some Indians did embrace Christianity as a fatih, others converted to acquire things like metal tool technology or to avoid persecution by the priests. Despite these conversions, many Puebloans continued to follow their traditional beliefs, and the destruction of sacred ceremonies and sites only angered the indigenous peoples.  Native discontent erupted in 1680.

The decade before 1680 devastated the Puebloans. A drought wasted their crops, disease struck many communities hard, and the Spanish settlers and priests demanded labor and obedience. Some pueblo elders attributed these hardships to the abandoning of their traditional religion for Christianity. On August 10, 1680, Native Americans exploded in a colony wide rebellion called the Pueblo Revolt which killed more than four hundred of the estimated 2,000 colonists and a significant number of Pueblo warriors. Twenty-one Franciscan priests also died, some on their own altars.

The settlers who survived the original onslaught found refuge in the Palace of the Governors. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting on the plaza and streets of Santa Fe threatened the lives of the Spanish in the Palace. On August 21, Gov. Antonio de Otermín negotiated an escape from Santa Fe and abandoned the colony in New Mexico. Under the watchful eyes of the Puebloan warriors, the settlers stumbled south down El Camino Real for over 300 miles until they reached El Paseo de Norte on the Rio Grande.

Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza with the flag of New Spain
(Photo by Hunner)

The Spanish remained south until 1692, when the new colonial governor, Don Diego de Vargas, led supporters up the Camino Real to resettle New Mexico. Rumors of new revolts swept New Mexico, and warfare did periodically erupt for the rest of the century.

Why did the Spanish reopen El Camino Real and recolonize New Mexico? Partially for geo-political purposes and partially for religious. By the turn of the 17^th century, France had made inroads into North America and had started its own colonies at Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, Green Bay, St. Louis, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. (We'll look at the French in North America in a future chapter). To counter the French threat to the Spanish empire, New Mexico served as a buffer protecting the silver mines at Zacatecas and elsewhere. Additionally, the Catholic church argued that the many converted Puebloans had been abandoned, and that it was the crown’s duty to provide for the souls of those peoples.

The Pueblo Revolt had many consequences. As the most successful Native American rebellion against Europeans in North America, it illustrated the tenuous nature of colonization, even after decades of settlement. At recolonization, the Spanish changed, abolishing the encomienda labor system and allowing native religious practices to live in concert with Catholicism. In fact, an interesting syncretism exists today after mass on feast days, traditional dances take place on the pueblo's plaza. Some Pueblo peoples attribute the preservation of their ancestral cultures and lands to the Revolt. The Puebloans still inhabit their core lands while most other tribes in the U.S. were forcefully moved to far flung reservations.

A last legacy of the Revolt was the spread of horses through the Great Plains and the West. Native Americans captured the animals left behind, and horse trading spread throughout the Great Plains. This put Indians on fast moving mounts that transformed their way of life and gave rise to the mobile bands of Commanches, Apaches, Kiowas, Lakotas, and other tribes. As famed Native American scholar N. Scott Momaday commented: "It must have been the realization of an ancient dream to be elevated, to be severed from the earth, cut free. What a sense of life that must have been, different from anything they'd ever known. With the horse, their ancient nomadism was realized to the fullest extent, and they had conquered their oldest enemy, which was distance."[1]

We have examined the Spanish Colonial experience at two National Park units in this chapter, but many more preserve the Spanish presence at places across the country. The Spanish explored vast portions of the Americas, and their contacts and exchanges were early encounters between the native peoples and Europeans. Traveling through one of the largest deserts in the world on El Camino Real and living in an isolated part of their empire, the Spanish explorers and settlers faced hardship and rebellion. The society they created helped shape our country and continues to impact our nation. 

In 1906, President Teddy Roosevelt designated El Morro a National Monument as one of the first such units allowed by the Antiquities Act. The bi-national route of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro became a National Historic Trail of the National Park Service in October 2000.

The trail ruts of El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro today in southern New Mexico (Photo by Hunner)

El Morro National Monument

HC61, Box 43

Ramah, New Mexico  87321-9603

505.783.4226

www.nps.gov/elmo

El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro National Historic Trail

National Trails Intermountain Region

P.O. Box 728

Santa Fe, New Mexico  87504-0728

505.988.6098

www.nps.gov/elca

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[1] N. Scott Momaday—PBS The West

Contact: Encounters and the Columbian Exchange

Encounters in the Americas

Exchanges fueled by exploration have played an important role from the beginning of human history. Trade is one of our distinguishing characteristics.  Exchanging what you have with what you need or want is one of our oldest professions. Trade transforms peoples and cultures and thus transforms our world. In this section, we will explore what happened when Europeans landed in the Americas and encountered a totally different world view and culture. We will not focus on an individual park, since Contact occurred all over the Americas and impacted everyone sooner or later. 

Europeans started exploring westward when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453. This severed the overland Silk Road which brought the spices, silks, and other goods from Asia to Europe. Seagoing explorers and merchants using nautical innovations from the Portuguese and Spanish governments initiated an unprecedented onslaught of contact and exchanges unknown in the world before or since. This contact revolutionized our lives. New peoples, new lands, new plants and animals, new beliefs, and new sources of wealth and bounty poured out of the Americas into Europe.

This American windfall took Europe by surprise. During the 14^th and 15^th centuries, pestilence, war, famine, and death ruled Europe with the Black Plague, the Hundred Years War, and the Islamic occupation of Spain and parts of Eastern Europe.

Contact by Native Americans with Europeans

In the midst of this turmoil, Portugal saw an opportunity to take the lucrative Asian trade away from Venice. In 1418, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal sponsored systematic explorations of Africa’s Atlantic coast. As Portuguese ships sailed down the west coast of Africa, pilots plotted their course with maps and compasses, navigated by the stars, and used Arab tools like the astrolabe and quadrant to aid in safe sailing. A new ship, the caravel, assisted with the dangerous voyages. Its triangular lateen sails allowed for windward sailing. Using such innovations, Bartolomeu Dias reached the Indian Ocean by sailing around the southern tip of Africa in 1488.

While Portuguese sailors went south, Spanish ones searched west for the illusive route to Asia. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ratified the Treaty of Granada with Boabdil, the sultan of Granada, ending the 700 years of Muslim occupation of Spain. On August 3^rd that same year, Christopher Columbus cast off from southwestern Spain to cross the gray Atlantic Ocean with three ships: one carrack, the Santa María, and two smaller caravels, the Pinta (the Painted), and the Santa Clara, (nicknamed the Niña). On October 12, 1492, Columbus and his crew landed on the Bahamian Islands, believing they had reached India. They encountered the Arawak, who the Europeans mistakenly named “Indians.” At the time of Contact, between two and three million people lived in North America and perhaps ten million inhabited all the Americas—about equal to Europe’s population at the same time.

Columbus and his ships returned to Spain on March 15^th, 1493. Word about the "discovery" of new lands swept through Europe like a wildfire through a bone-dry forest. Between 1493 and 1503, Columbus took three more voyages and touched the continent at Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. His voyages set off a stampede of exploration, conquest, and colonization throughout the Americas. 

Native Americans in the north started encountering Europeans several decades later. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano sailed a French expedition from South Carolina to Newfoundland. That same year, Estevão Gomes, a Portuguese cartographer, explored from Nova Scotia south, stopping at the New York Harbor, and finally reaching Florida.

In the early sixteenth century, fishermen from England, France, Spain, and Portugal discovered the abundant fishing grounds off of Cape Cod, named for the very fish they sought. Some of these ships landed and traded with the coastal Indians. This trade, called the Columbian Exchange, revolutionized the world. The Columbian Exchange invented the world that we know today.

The Columbian Exchange

As we have seen in previous chapters, complicated civilizations inhabited the Western Hemisphere. Europeans crashed in, trading and sometimes brutally plundering, and disrupted Native American lives. Gold, silver, new foods, and other valuables sailed east to Europe while metal tools, horses, diseases, and a crusading religion came west.

The Columbian Exchange rapidly transformed cultures. For example, Europeans knew how to manufacture and used hard metal, especially iron. Iron allowed for more durable tools—from metal pots and pans to nails to weapons. Preparing fields with metal hoes and plows improved farming and hunting with guns enhanced meat harvesting. With metal pots and pans, cooking grew easier. Defending or attacking foes with metal tipped spears, with iron swords, and with guns proved more effective than stone weapons. Contact brought benefits along with disruption.

Europeans brought new animals to America since they had long experience with large animal husbandry. Horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, fowl, and other animals provided for work and food. Plowing a field with oxen, hauling goods and people on horse drawn wagons, feeding multitudes through the cultivation of livestock, such differences in protein and in mobility also transferred to Native Americans. European animals transformed Native Americans lives.

For their part, Native Americans had corn and knew how to grow multiple crops across the continent. From the hot deserts in the Southwest to the cold woodlands of the north, native peoples throughout the Americas produced abundant harvests of nutritious food.  They accomplished astounding innovations in horticulture. Corn from Central America and potatoes from Peru, combined with sugar cane, chocolate, chiles, tomatoes, tobacco, squashes, and manioc revolutionized nutrition first in Europe and then in Africa and Asia. These new foods help explain the worldwide population explosion since Contact.

Europeans also brought new crops to the Americas. Wheat and rice adapted well to the prairies and lowlands of the continent. Fruit trees like apples and peaches flourished along the Eastern Seaboard. In addition to the plants, animals, and metal tools which the Europeans brought here, they also carried germs.

The Columbian Exchange

Contact with European Diseases

Smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, and other diseases swept through Indian communities since they lacked immunity to these diseases. A disease, coming from an explorer or a trader, spread quickly to other tribes even before they had seen a European. Death preceded the Europeans who then marveled at the dying and abandoned villages and fields.

Here’s an eyewitness account from the Roanoke colony. The nearby tribe “began to die quickly. The disease was so strange that they neither knew what it was, nor how to cure it.”[1] The same devastation struck farther north when Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1620. They observed that thousands had “died in a great plague not long since; and pity it was and is to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without man to dress and manure the same.”[2] The colonists took over these abandoned fields for their own farms. Since Contact, diseases have killed more Native Americans than warfare or displacement as 90% of the indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere succumbed to the deadly European germs.

Native Americans had little immunity to diseases like Smallpox 

The Columbian Exchange also impacted religious beliefs. Native Americans believe that spirits animate their natural world. As a result, land ownership did not exist for many of the tribes, since Mother Earth was a deity. How could mere humans own a god?

Europeans held an opposing view about land. Humans could own it and do what they wanted with the land and its bounty. When the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the Lenape Indians for sixty guilders in 1626, the Indians had no concept of land ownership. For them, it was like selling the Brooklyn Bridge today to a gullible dupe.  

Europeans believed in monotheism. In Spain with their recent wars against Muslims, these colonizers wanted to conquer not just land and communities but peoples’ beliefs. Having a god which required evangelism brought a radicalization to the Columbian Exchange.

Cultural Code-Switching

When different peoples meet, a cultural exchange occurs. In linguistics, when someone switches from their dominant language to another one, experts call this “code-switching.” A cultural code switching happens when people adopt and adapt another culture’s fashion, food, lifestyles, music, and beliefs for their own. Humans have borrowed from other cultures since time immemorial, so this is not unique to the Columbian Exchange. With contact between Native Americans and Europeans, both peoples exchanged key elements of their cultures to create a new way of living and a new society of humans. More about this in future chapters.

Columbus began the encounter with Americans which profoundly changed world history. The interactions between Europeans and Native Americans brought together different world views, different religious beliefs, different lifeways, and different technologies. This altered the way people lived, worked, ate, worshipped, and played. The mix of peoples and cultures throughout the Western Hemisphere created a vibrant weaving of innovations and experiences that continues to impact our lives today.

In the previous chapters, we examined some of the peoples of North America before Contact. We now examine the European explorers and colonizers and return to Jamestown, canoe the park at Grand Portage, and travel on the historic Royal Road to the Interior Lands-- El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. We will go to the places where history happened between the Europeans and Americans.

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[1] David B. Quinn, ed. The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to Illustrate the English Voyages to North America (London: Hakluyt Society, 1955), 378.

[2] Edward Winslow, Nathaniel Morton, William Bradford, and Thomas Prince, New England’s Memorial (Cambridge: Allan and Farnham, 1855), 362.