History of North America after 1500
Abandoned Iroquois longhouse
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.
Continue to page two of
Later North American History
North American Economy
North American Government
North American People
Later North America page
History of Early North America
Main North America page
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