48 Chapter 1 Alien Encounters: Europe in the Americas
preferred to fight in heavily armed masses in order to
obliterate the enemy.
Colonists denounced Indian perfidy for burning
houses and towns; but they saw no inconsistency in
burning Indian “nests,” “wigwams,” and “camps.”
Conversely, the Indians thought it within their rights
to slaughter the cattle that devoured their crops and
spoiled their hunting grounds. But when the Indians
tortured the beasts in fury, the colonists regarded
them as savages.
Cultural Fusions
Increase Mather, a puritan leader, worried that
“Christians in this Land have become too like unto
the Indians.” Little wonder, he observed, that God
had “afflicted us by them” through disease and other
trials. Yet Mather’s comments suggested that interac-
tion between European settlers and the native peoples
was characteristic of life in all the colonies.Interaction
is the key word in this sentence. The so-called
Columbian Exchange between Indian and European
was a two-way street. The colonists learned a great
deal about how to live in the American forest from the
Indians: the names of plants and animals (hickory,
pecan, raccoon, skunk, moose); what to eat in their
new home and how to catch or grow it; what to wear
(leather leggings and especially moccasins); how best
to get from one place to another; how to fight; and in
some respects how to think.
The colonists learned from the Indians how best
to use many plants and animals for food and clothing,
but they would probably have discovered most of
these if the continent had been devoid of human life
when they arrived. Corn, however, the staple of the
diet of agricultural tribes, was something the Indians
had domesticated. Its contribution to the success of
English colonization was enormous.
The colonists also took advantage of that marvel
of Indian technology, the birchbark canoe. An early
explorer, Martin Pring, brought one back to England
in 1603; it was seventeen feet long and four feet wide
and capable, according to Pring, of carrying nine full-
grown men. Yet it weighed “not at the most above
sixtie pounds,” a thing, Pring added, “almost incredi-
ble in regard to the largenesse and capacitie thereof.”
For their part, the Indians adopted European
technology eagerly. All metal objects were indeed of
great usefulness to them, although the products and
tools that metals replaced were neither crude nor
inefficient in most cases. (A bowman could get off six
times as many shots in a given time as a seventeenth-
century soldier armed with a firelock, and would
probably hit the target more frequently.)
The fur trade illustrates the pervasiveness of
Indian–European interaction. It was in some ways a
perfect business arrangement. Both groups profited.
The colonists got “valuable” furs for “cheap” European
products, while the Indians got “priceless” tools,
knives, and other trade goods in exchange for “cheap”
beaver pelts and deerskins. The demand for furs caused
the Indians to become more efficient hunters and trap-
pers and even to absorb some of the settlers’ ideas
about private property and capitalist accumulation.
Hunting parties became larger. Farming tribes shifted
their villages in order to be nearer trade routes and
waterways. In some cases tribal organization was
altered: Small groups combined into confederations in
order to control more territory when their hunting
reduced the supplies of furs nearer home. Early in the
seventeenth century, Huron Indians in the Great Lakes
region, who had probably never seen a Frenchman,Indians were befuddled by the Europeans’ craving for gold, such as these Spanish coins (left). Europeans were similarly baffled by the Indians’
attraction to wampum, seashells that were drilled, placed on a string, and formed into belts, such as this eighteenth-century Oneida belt (right).
No negotiations or trade with many Indian tribes could commence without gifts of wampum. The gold coins are imprinted with the Christian
cross; purple beads, the most valuable, were also suffused with spiritual import among Indians.