The people of the American woodlands, too, had meanwhile learned to make use of alternate resources, though their lives were considerably easier and far more comfortable that those endured by their Western cousins.

Among the oldest of the Woodland sites discovered is the so-called Modoc Rock Shelter, a cave on the Mississippi River bluffs in Illinois.  Though people inhabited this cave more than 9,000 year ago, the Modoc site has produced no fossils of any large Ice Age mammals.  The tools found in this site show that meat was still the inhabitants’ major food source, but instead of the heavy hunting spears used by the big-game hunters of that time, the Woodlands people had already developed the atlatl, a relatively light-weight spear with a throwing stick to propel it.  With this much lighter weapon, they were able to go after deer or perhaps elk, certainly such smaller creatures as raccoons and opossums, and the birds that inhabited the river and the shore, while at the same time the river below provided additional food in the form of fish and turtles and mussels.  Thus, while hunters and gatherers have traditionally been forced to migrate constantly if they expected to find enough to eat, Eastern Woodlands people had no such problems.  Their wildlife, and whatever plantfoods they used, was generally available within easy distance of their shelter, and they were able to remain year round in the same area.

It was this more or less settled way of life in a limited area that allowed the people to acquire an intimate knowledge of the local plant and animal life.  Thousands of years later, the European newcomers were often amazed by the Native Americans’ knowledge of animal behavior and by their expertise in the use of plants for so many varied purposes.  The Cherokee, for instance, who were among the descendants of this Woodlands culture, were familiar with well over five hundred plants and their uses as food, as medicine, as dyes, for smoking and chewing, and so on.  On the other hand, it was this same increasingly sedentary life that isolated many of the people from other groups, and they gradually began to form into distinct families and clans and even tribes, each with their own peculiar customs and habits, and inevitably with their own distinct dialects or languages as well.

By about 6000 BC, many of these Woodlands people began to make tools to process meat and hides, for woodworking, for carving, for sharpening stone edges.  They began making mortars and pestles for grinding seeds and nuts.  Baskets and woven mats appeared, and so did bone awls and needles, presumably used in making leather goods.  Stone adzes and axes have been found from that period, suggesting that perhaps they were already familiar with the dugout canoe.  Sometime around 3500 BC, for the first time anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, people began to make use of the rich copper deposits around the Great Lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan and Ontario.  They hammered it into tools, spear tips, knives, scrapers, hooks; these copper tools were later found in sites as far west as the Dakotas, eastward into New England, and all through the Southeast.  Obviously, then, a wide-ranging trade had already begun with neighboring area.

Judging by the numbers and sizes of settlements, there seems to have been a substantial increase in population after about 3000 BC.  One archeological site, the so-called Koster site in southern Illinois, revealed skeletons of people who may have reached the ripe old age of sixty years or more.  A primitive sort of agriculture had begun during that time as well, perhaps with squash and sunflowers as the major crops.  The gourd may have been the first domesticated plant in these Woodlands, but it was in fact not grown as a food at all; gourds are easy to grow, and after they are cleaned and dried, can be used for a variety of purposes.  Less breakable than clay pots, and certainly much lighter, they were used as water jugs, dippers, ladles, cups and bowls, rattles.  In some areas they were worked into masks, and Florida’s inhabitants used them as floats for their fishing nets.

But, as was true everywhere in North America, there were no domesticated animals at all, a situation that was to have, in much later years, tragic consequences for Native America.  In pre-Columbian times, however, this lack of tame animals was a true blessing for the people of the Western Hemisphere, for unlike their European counterparts, they remained remarkably free of infectious diseases.

During the frigid eons of the Pleistocene, infectious diseases could not survive among humans anywhere in the world, since populations were not large enough, or at least not concentrated in sufficient numbers to sustain such diseases.  If a contagious – and usually lethal – disease did appear among some of the widely scattered family groups, it quickly killed off the relatively few potential victims; without any living hosts around to keep it going, the disease soon died out as well.  Only among the large herds of wild animals did such infectious diseases manage to sustain themselves, though inevitably the animals developed immunities and survived.  It was only much later, when the people in the settlements of Europe and Asia and Africa began to keep herds of domesticated animals, and thereby came into close and regular contact with them, that humans, too, become infected with diseases carried previously only by animals.  By this time, the populations were large enough to sustain the diseases, and they became a human problem as well.  Gradually, however, much like the animals before them, the people acquired immunities, and with every outbreak thereafter, these diseases became less and less deadly.

In pre-Columbian America, on the other hand, there were no herds of domesticated animals, and rarely, if ever, were infectious diseases transferred from animals to humans.  Native America, at any rate, remained blessedly free of infectious diseases, and tragically free of immunities to them.  In the end, when 16th-century Europeans arrived in America, bringing with them their long history of contagious diseases, the consequences were to prove disastrous to the native populations.

As was true everywhere in the world, the beginnings of agriculture became a powerful factor in the growth of populations in the Woodlands.  It was around 1000 BC that a distinctive culture first appeared in the Ohio Valley, now known as the Adena.  The Adena were not a clearly identifiable civilization as such; various ancient North American Indians show similarities from Indiana into Kentucky, West Virginia, even into Pennsylvania.  Named after the estate of an early Ohio governor, near Chillicothe, Ohio, where Adena-type mounds were first found, this culture apparently developed out of northern Woodlands people who had long ago begun to bury their dead in elaborate ceremonials, along with tools and weapons and personal possessions, in earthen mounds.  It was these same burial mounds that now gave the entire culture its distinctive appearance.  Gradually, as new burials were made, Adena mounds rose one on top of another, until they reached amazing proportions.

Among the most famous of the Adena sites is the Serpent Mound at Ohio’s Brush Creek, an elaborate earthworks in the shape of a wriggling snake.  The distance from the snake’s head to its tail end is about 800 feet – if it were stretched out in a straight line, it would measure over 1,300 feet.  The mouth of the snake is wide open and holds a round object that is believed to represent the sun; there are several Native American legends in which the sun was swallowed by a snake.  And since such large-scale construction must have required the cooperation of a considerable number of people who were willing to work for extended periods under some sort of supervision, it would appear that a class system of sorts must have been established by that time.

But the Adena were merely a prelude to a much more elaborate culture, which began to form in the valleys of the Scioto and Miami rivers of southern Ohio sometime around 200 BC.  Archaeologists refer to it as the Hopewell, for no better reason than that a man named M. C. Hopewell owned a farm on which about thirty burial mounds were discovered late in the 19th century.  When artifacts from these mounds were displayed at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893 under the label ‘Hopewell,’ the term became attached to all similar finds, which eventually reached into Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Iowa, and as far east as Pennsylvania and even New York.

Hopewell people were not satisfied with the much simpler Adena accomplishments.  Hopewell burial mounds grew ever taller, larger and more intricate, and their funeral offerings increasingly richer and more elaborate.  The earthworks surrounding their burial mounds sometimes extended for miles in square or circular patterns, until one such enclosure in Ohio surrounded an area of nearly four square miles.

But the Hopewells’ most remarkable achievement was their immense network of trade, by which they brought to their settlements a previously unknown wealth of raw materials from all parts of North America.  Their burial mounds still reveal the extent of this trade: there are thousands upon thousands of freshwater pearls from the Mississippi Valley; there is copper and lead from the Great Lakes area; silver from Ontario; ceramic figurines from Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin; mica from southern Appalachia; quartz crystal from Arkansas; grizzly bear claws and teeth from the Rocky Mountains; shells, shark’s teeth, alligator teeth, turtle shells from the areas around the Gulf of Mexico.  These raw materials were hammered, shaped, twisted, and strung together by Hopewell artists into some of the most beautifully crafted objects ever produced in primitive America: ornaments and jewelry, necklaces, decorated clothing, pottery – some of the best ever made by any people of the Northeast – sculptures, pipe bowls, and even simple musical instruments such as drums, rattles and panpipes.  They probably also traded for perishable items that have left no archeological traces – animal skins and food stuffs and such.  In turn, Hopewellian-made articles have been found in many sites far distant from their centers.

Hopewell flourished peacefully for perhaps five hundred years.  Despite their numbers and their influence, it does not appear that these people ever were anything but peaceful traders and artisans, and they never seem to have organized for conquest or war.  But sometime after AD 300, Hopewell centers  began to decline everywhere, along with their mound building and their long-distance trade network.  Again, there are no records nor any legends to show what might have happened, but there were almost certainly outside influences that gradually destroyed this peaceful existence.  Around that time, there appears to have been a long period of warfare and raiding throughout the Northeast; the bow and arrow had made its appearance in that area just a little earlier, and the use of this new weapon would surely have intensified any warfare among hostile tribes in the region, creating serious disruptions in the Hopewellian way of life.

At any rate, fewer of the huge mounds were built after that time, and many of those that were constructed were located on inaccessible hilltops, where they could be better defended.  In one of these later sites, too, more than half of the bodies seem to have met a violent death, and in a number of others there is evidence of fires and massacres.  A few mounds were still constructed as late as AD 750, but they were stocked with only meager offerings, and they were the very last of their kind.  By that time, the once thriving Hopewell culture had all but ceased to exist.

Still another mound-building culture existed, this one along the shores of the Mississippi River and several smaller streams of the South.  The Temple Mound culture – usually called the Mississippian – erected huge earthen mounds, not as burial grounds, but as bases for their tribal rulers’ residences, or for the wooden temples where their religious ceremonies were held.  These so-called platform mounds seldom, if ever, contained any burials.  They were built in stages, and it appears that whenever a ruler died, his palace on the mound was destroyed, and a new layer of earth was added.  The new ruler’s palace was then constructed atop the higher mound.  Apparently the Mississippians already thought bigger was better, for it has been suggested that the height of a palace mound was a good measure of a chief’s influence over the area, that any stranger could immediately judge the ruling lineage’s power by size of such structures.

In that case, there ruled at least one truly impressive lineage during that period.  One of the Mississippian sites near East St. Louis, known as Cahokia, contained some 85 mounds in a native settlement that once upon a time must have stretched for nearly six miles along the Mississippi River.  One of the mounds in that site is approximately a thousand feet long, seven hundred feet wide, and nearly a hundred feet high.  So impressive are these works that in later years the American settlers and pioneers  simply could not believe that Cahokia could have been built by the irksome savages of their day.  The president of Yale University, for one, was convinced that the Phoenicians must have had a hand in such elaborate construction projects.  Benjamin Franklin, more realistic perhaps, argued that it had to have been the early Spaniards in America, though he could give no reason why they should have done so.  Other dignitaries voted for the Romans, for a long-gone race of giants, even the Lost Tribes of Israel, always a favorite ancestral candidate for America’s native population as a whole.  Though the site was in fact named after the Cahokia Indians, who lived nearby when it was first discovered in the 18th century, the Cahokian ancestors did probably not even live in this area when the mounds were built; it is far more likely that the Mississippian mound builders were the ancestors of such historic Indian tribes as the Kansas, the Omaha, and the Osage.

For hundreds of years, Cahokia was the most powerful center north of Mexico, surpassed only, perhaps, by the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, which the Aztecs were about to inherit.  It was long though that the construction had to involved the concentrated labor of thousands upon thousands of Mississippians, who had neither wheeled vehicles nor beasts of burden, but had to carry every last ounce of earth to the site in baskets.  The labor involved in such construction must have been considerable, indeed; on the other hand, these mounds were probably not constructed in one single organized project.  Most likely, such works grew very gradually, probably over several centuries, and in that case a hundred or so people could have done the job in near-leisurely fashion: they filled their baskets with fifty or sixty pounds of earth, walked up a hill of their own making, dumped their loads on designated spots and returned.  Fifteen million such round trips were probably required for the largest of the mounds – an incredible number, to be sure, but spread across a span of perhaps three centuries, it no longer seems so prodigious.  Assuming the project was in operation only half the time, 300 loads a day would have been more than enough.

Still, nearly four hundred such villages of various sizes are known to have existed along the lower Mississippi, and several hundred more along the Ohio, the Red River and other southern streams.  The Mississippian culture flourished for many centuries; Cahokia, for example, may have been occupied for nearly a thousand years, and some centers still flourished when the white men arrived in the area.  But Cahokia was all but deserted by that time; left behind were amazing works in a place that no longer had a name nor any inhabitants.  Only the Natchez of the lower Mississippi Valley, with their cult of the Great Sun and Ancient War Chief, remained to continue many of the religious and social rites of that long-ago time.

Everywhere throughout the North American continent, the people were beginning to emerge into a bewildering variety of ‘Indians,’ though most can now be traced back to five original language families, each differing from the others in sounds and grammar as much as English differs from Chinese – which may well indicate at least five distinct migrations of people, each with a different background, perhaps with entirely different origins as well.  Many of these people still continued the old ways of hunting and gathering, though wherever possible or practical, agriculture was rapidly gaining in importance.  Populations expanded and the numbers and sizes of settlements increased.  Over the next few generations there began to emerge the distinctive traits and customs, the languages and dialects of the innumerable Indian tribes the white men were to encounter. Across the northern forests there now appeared the ancestors of the Siouan, Algonquian and Athabascan tribes.  There were many migrations into and out of some areas.  The ancestors of the Winnebago, for example, came from the upper Mississippi Valley to northern Wisconsin around the year 1000, while some of the northern Athabascan people had already begun to push southward in a centuries-long migration, until white men would meet them in the American Southwest as the tribes of Apache and Navajo.

When the Europeans arrived on the American continent at the beginning of the 16th century, they found a total population of perhaps five to six million people spread far and wide over the immense areas of North America.  Their cultures and languages had by that time become as varied as the lands they inhabited.  But if thousands of years of development had created this so-called American Indian, the natives themselves neither recognized nor exhibited any such racial unity – no more, to be sure, than the Europeans of that time would have acknowledged at home.  There was in fact not the slightest resemblance, either in language or customs or appearance, between a New York Iroquois and a Southwestern Zuni, between a Montana Crow and a Mexican Maya.  Their languages and their customs appeared for the most part as alien to each other as were those of the white men who had appeared so unexpectedly over the horizon.  Long forgotten was any common ancestry, if such had ever existed at all; forgotten, too, were many of the ways of the Ancient Ones.  They were now ‘the people’ in innumerable languages and dialects, thoroughly adapted to survive in environments which had been chosen for them by forefathers they themselves could no longer recall.  None of these many varied people would ever understand that the white man saw “only an Indian.”