do, but leaves them to make the most of their free will and to secure as
many as they can of the good things that flow from him. That therefore it
was to no purpose either to fear or worship him, but on the contrary if
they did not pacify the evil spirit and make him propitious, he would take
away or spoil all those good things that God had given and ruin their
health, their peace, and their plenty by sending war, plague, and famine
among them. For, said he, this evil spirit is always busying himself with
our affairs and frequently visiting us, being present in the air, in the thun-
der, and in the storms.I know of no other early account in which a white colonist tried so
carefully to understand Indian belief or, indeed, other aspects of Indian life.
Much of what we know of Indian life comes from later centuries. But by
then, Indian societies and culture had been violently transformed. The
older people, who were the carriers and disseminators of tradition, died
before they could perpetuate their lore; societies imploded and mingled
with survivors of alien groups so that the sense of being “a people” with-
ered. And the whites, having filled the lands with their own kind, moved
ever westward. It is what white people later saw or heard about in the West
that, largely unconsciously, we see as “Indian” in our mind’s eye. What our
more recent ancestors learned about the nineteenth-century nomads of the
Great Plains has been further programmed in our minds by the cinema.
Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Crazy Horse are the quintessential Indian war-
riors, flashing across the screen on their Spanish ponies, hot after buffalo or
white settlers. Even after stripping away the stereotype, we can see that the
actual way of life of the hunters of the Great Plains was very different from
that of the farmers met by the colonists on the Atlantic coast in the six-
teenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. So I begin with a basic fea-
ture of their lives, agriculture.
Native Americans began the transition from hunting and gathering to
agriculture at roughly the same time as Old World farmers but faced a more
difficult task. Some of the plant species with which they experimented,
notably the potato (Solanum tuberosum), of the nightshade family, con-
tained poisons that had to be extracted before the plants could be eaten. It
must have taken generations of experimentation and selective cultivation to
The Native Americans 9