History of North America after 1500

Just about 1500 AD, many, many people in North America began to die from mysterious diseases like smallpox and measles that nobody in North America had ever seen before. Soon people saw that they were catching these diseases from European sailing men who had come to the Atlantic coast to trade knives and beads for furs. But even though people were careful not to touch the Europeans any more, or even let them on shore, they still kept catching the diseases. The diseases spread even to the Navajo and the Chinook and other people who had never seen a European, all the way on the other side of North America, and they died too. Soon Spanish invaders in Mexico began to spread these diseases directly along the Pacific coast and into what is now Texas.

By 1650 AD, so many people had died that North America was like a land full of ghosts. Empty houses stood in empty villages. French, English and Spanish traders saw that the Algonquin, the Iroquois and the Cherokee and the Mississippians and the Pueblo people were not able to fight back anymore, because so many had died. All across the southern part of North America, Spanish settlers built villages and cities like Santa Fe and Taos in New Mexico and Los Angeles and San Francisco in California. The Navajo began to raise sheep. English traders began to bring over groups of English settlers to live in the old Iroquois villages and farm their fields. French settlers came to live on the Algonquins' and Iroquois' land (in modern Quebec province, Canada). The few surviving Iroquois tried to fight off the invaders, but they couldn't.

In the South, English and Spanish people (both men and women) wanted to grow rice and sugar cane and tobacco and indigo (a blue dye), which were good crops for that climate, but they couldn't find enough people to work on these farms. So they forced West African people to come to North America and work on these farms as slaves.

In the 1700's AD, most of North America was still under the control of native people. Because Pueblo people and the Navajo had taken Spanish invaders' horses and traded them north, they and the Sioux, Ute, Blackfoot, and other Plains Indians did very well. Hunting bison was much easier on horseback than it had been on foot, and people also sold a lot of horses to other native people and to Europeans who were settling the Mississippi Valley and the Midwest.

But the English farmers in the South forced more and more West African people to come to North America to work on their plantations (big farms). At the same time, more and more English settlers came to build towns along the Atlantic coast. Many of the people who came had been convicted of crimes in England like stealing, and the English government sent them to North America to get rid of them, and to provide more people to work on the farms along the Atlantic coast. By the 1760's, a lot of English settlers and soldiers came to Canada too, where they pushed out the French settlers and the Algonquin and took control. By the end of the 1700's, there were enough English people along the Atlantic coast that they wanted to be their own independent country, and they fought the Revolutionary War to get their independence and start the United States of America. They needed help to win the war, and they got that help from the French king, and from the Algonquins . The Iroquois and the Cherokee fought on the side of the English, and after they lost the war, the new United States government took away most of their land. Many English people who still wanted to be part of England, and many Iroquois, moved to Canada.