The Contributions Case

There are many different ethnicities and cultures of people that came to the United States over the past few centuries making it what it is today, the nation that is known as the Melting Pot. Two of the cultures that I believe made some of the biggest impacts and contributions on what the nation is today are the Native Americans and the English. The Native Americans were the first to come to the North American continent and make civilizations and their own societies. Later, another people came to the country seeking a new world as well. These people were the English coming from Great Britain to colonize the new continent. While both Native Americans and the English came to the new continent to seek a new place to seek new and better opportunities, the English were able to conquer the entire continent through superior technology, while the Native Americans were banished from the lands they once inhabited and were left to live in certain areas of the continent due to their lack of technology and for some, misplaced trust in the English treaties.

When most people think of when America was discovered and by who, they say Christopher Columbus discovered the continent in 1492 A.D., but in fact, the first people to come to the American continent where the Asians during the time period of 16,000 to 14,000 B.C. "By the end of the fifteenth century A.D., when the first important contact with Europeans occurred, the Americas were home of millions of men and women." (p.2) The first Asians to come to the American continent came from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge, which does not exist anymore. It is now the Bering Strait. It is a body of water in between Russia and Alaska. The Asians came down across the continent and some settled in certain areas and some went even further into the continent settling deeper in the lands. They migrated all the way through the continent until there were settlements everywhere. It is believed that there were migrations into the American continent from Asia to follow big animals for hunting purposes. Over thousands of years, these Asians would become Native Americans and later known as Indians for their mistaken identity by the Europeans for thinking they had landed in India. The Native Americans established many different tribes all over the continent over thousands of years. Some of the tribes from the Eastern Woodland area were the Cherokee and Iroquois. Some tribes from the Great Plains area were the Sioux, Apachean, and Pawnee. Some tribes in the California region up to the Northwest Coast were the Hopi, Tillamook, Chinook, and Puyallup. Then all the way up north in the Arctic region were the Inuit.

There were many more Native American Tribes in North America. Many of them had many interactions with the Europeans that came to the New World. Some were good interactions and some were not so good interactions. There is the famous story of the Indians that helped the Pilgrims. They taught them how to grow crops such as corn in the area. This enabled the Pilgrims to survive the winter, who would have otherwise had very little chance of survival. This is where the holiday Thanksgiving came from. Unfortunately, not all interactions were of good nature like this. There was a lot of wagered war between Native Americans and the Europeans. The Europeans came to the land seeking to make a new life for themselves. Because of this, the Europeans pushed the Native Americans off of their lands causing many disputes and a lot of times ending bloody for both sides. There are many famous battles and various altercations over a long period between when Europeans first arrived and even once the country was established as the United States. One of the first instances of conflict was when the town of Jamestown was founded. They chose a poor area to build the town because it was in a swampy area surrounded by trees and powerful Native American Tribes. "The result could hardly have been more disastrous. For seventeen years, one wave of settlers after another attempted to make Jamestown a habitable and profitable colony. Every effort failed." (p.29) They had to deal with the Native Americans wanting to drive them out on a constant basis. Another major battle that lives in infamy even still today, was the Battle of Little Bighorn. The Battle of Little Bighorn was a battler between the U.S. Army and the Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. The soldier that led the American troops was Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer. He was the commander of the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry. This was one of the last major battles of Native Americans to try to save their way of life. Lt. Col. Custer underestimated the Native Americans and the battle ended in a slaughter of the American soldiers. 263 soldiers, including Lt. Col. Custer were killed in the battle. They were greatly outnumbered, fighting several thousand Native American Warriors. This was just another example of the hardships that existed between the Native Americans and Americans trying to both secure their own way of life.

Eventually all of the Indian Tribes had been defeated and they were being shipped to certain areas of the country known as reservations. Most Americans supported this so that they white Americans could continue to expand their country and build cities and towns wherever they liked. "In the eighteenth century, many whites had shared Thomas Jefferson's view of the Indians as "noble savages," with an inherent dignity that made civilization possible among them." (p.222) But within time, this opinion changed drastically and most whites began to believe that they were just savages and wanted them removed from all the areas east of the Mississippi and the people in the west also wanted them removed. Eventually these wishes were met and all the Indians were defeated and removed from their lands and sent to reservations. One of the most horrific tales of the removal of Indians from their lands was known as the Trail of Tears. There were about 1,000 Cherokee that escaped to North Carolina and still have a reservation there today. The rest were forced to march to what was Indian territory then and is Oklahoma today. They were forced to leave their homes and thousands of them died on the way to Oklahoma. The five major tribes were all forced to go to this territory during the period between 1830 and 1838. When Native Americans were first moved to this new territory, many whites attempted to work and live together as one unit, but this changed. The white