New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

The Cherokees were the most powerful Indigenous nation in the present-day American Southeast. Like the Iroquois in the North, the Cherokees acted for the most part as English allies. To a greater degree perhaps than any other Indigenous community, the Cherokees adopted European habits. By the end of the colonial period, a number of Cherokees owned African slaves.

Like the Cherokees, the Creeks were a powerful Indigenous confederacy in the present-day American Southeast. To an even greater extent than the Cherokee, the Creeks “for a long time held the balance of power in the Southeast” between England and Spain (123). Creeks also suffered more internal divisions as a result of European invasion. Some Creeks, for instance, broke away from the larger confederacy, moved to northern Florida, built new communities, and became known as Seminoles.

The French and Indian War (1754-63) was the North American component of the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), also known as the Great War for Empire. Rival European powers fought one another all over the world, prompting some historians to describe the Seven Years’ War as the first “world” war. In North America, France and Great Britain fought for control of the continent. Each side enlisted colonial and Indigenous allies. In New Worlds for All, the French and Indian War serves as an example of mixed warfare in which combatants adopted both Indigenous- and European-style tactics: frontier raids, wilderness ambushes, fortress sieges, and pitched battles. Twenty years later, American rebels used this same mixture of tactics during the Revolutionary War.

The largest and most powerful Indigenous confederacy in the North, the Iroquois consisted of five nations: Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas. After their defeat in the 1711 war that bears their name, the Tuscaroras fled northward, linked up with the Iroquois, and became the confederacy’s sixth nation. In New Worlds for All, the Iroquois appear as English allies, as enemies of the Huron and other Northeastern tribes allied to New France, as skillful practitioners of frontier diplomacy, and above all as a free people. According to one trader, the Iroquois “laugh when you talk to them of Kings; for they cannot reconcile the idea of submission with the dignity of man” (193).

King Philip’s War (1675-76) pitted Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and a handful of smaller tribes against the English and their Indigenous allies in New England, including Mohegans and Pequots. Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief known to the English as “King Philip,” led the anti-English alliance. Metacomet’s warriors launched a series of surprise attacks that resulted in heavy casualties and the destruction of several English towns, but the tide turned in the winter of 1675-76 when the Mohawks entered the war on the English side. Thousands perished in what became the bloodiest war, per capita, in American history. 

In August 1680, Pueblos and other Indigenous Americans in present-day New Mexico rebelled against New Spain and drove Spanish colonizers out of the region for more than a decade. Approximately one thousand people were killed—at least 400 Spaniards and as many as 600 rebels. Spain’s Catholic missionaries had spent decades trying to convert Pueblos and others by force. Pueblos resented the priests, but many Pueblos also adopted Christian symbols and perhaps elements of the faith.

The most destructive of all imported diseases, smallpox decimated North America’s Indigenous population. Over centuries, Europeans had developed immunity to airborne diseases. Indigenous Americans, however, succumbed by the thousands. Although it is impossible to know exactly how many perished, evidence suggests that smallpox and other diseases took a catastrophic toll. The populous Indigenous towns that greeted de Soto’s expedition in present-day Arkansas, for instance, had vanished by the next century. The same was true of villages along the St. Lawrence River. In short, smallpox was “probably the number-one killer of Indian people” (38).