Us Melting Pot

The United States has always been know as the melting pot. It is a country based on so many different cultures and people from many different countries, as well as people that were indigenous to the country before the exploration of it began. People came to this country for many different reasons when colonization began during the "discovery" of America. They came for freedom of religion, freedom from an oppressive government, in search of wealth and riches and many other things. It took many different cultural groups to make up the early years of America, they had different origins and all made contributions to what our country has become. Although some of them had large parts in the building of America and its society while others were more or less excluded from it all together.

Two of the cultures that had immediate impacts on American society were the English, more specifically the colonists from Europe, and the indigenous Native Americans. Native Americans were the indigenous people of North America. They were there when the Europeans first began to explore the "New World" as they called it. As far as the origins of the Native Americans, The common theory holds that fewer than thirteen thousand years ago aboriginal Americans entered the continent from Asia across a land bridge where the Bering Strait is today and then migrated through an ice-free corridor into the interior of North America (Native Americans: An Overview (2010). The Native American population had a large role in the beginning with their contributions and development of this country in the early years of colonization. Many believe without their help most if not all of the colonization attempts would have failed. Unknown to them this would be the beginning of their eventual exclusion from American society almost completely. The colonists coming from Europe came to the new world for many reasons. The systematic effort to establish English colonies in the New World was dependent from the start to capital raised by joint-stock companies and they were granted land in North American claimed by the Crown (Colonists and Settlers, British in North America, 2005) Then they started to come because of stories of riches such as gold and silver as well as they plentiful lands with abundant animals and endless supplies of food. Attractive advertisements convinced some to build new lives across the Atlantic, while judges offered felons and those convicted of lesser crimes an opportunity to avoid imprisonment or corporal punishment in exchange for transportation to Virginia(Colonists and Settlers, British in North America, 2005). So in the, a lot of the settlers and colonists coming to America were not the best of what Europe had to offer. With the arrival of the Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, native people of North America came into contact with a completely different culture form their own, which effectively resulted in both the physical and cultural demise of their civilization (Native Americans: An Overview, 2010). One key factor in the demise of the Native population was the spread of disease brought by the Europeans. Native People had never been exposed to such illnesses as influenza, measles, and smallpox. in some areas native populations were virtually wiped out within a few decades of their first contact with whites (Brinkley p13).

While the colonists decimated the Native population with diseases they also had a positive and mutually beneficial relationship between the two cultures. The Europeans introduced the natives to new and important crops, domestic livestock (cattle, pigs, and sheep) and, perhaps most significant, the horse, which gradually became central to the lives of many natives and transformed their societies (Brinkley p15). the interaction between the two cultures was really a mutually beneficial relationship in this aspect, the Europeans learned a lot from the natives about the area they were living, which was completely different and foreign to them. The natives taught them new agricultural techniques appropriate to the demands of the new land (Brinkley p15). They also were shown new crops that were taken back to Europe and were starting to be grown in Europe. So although in the end the Colonists were thought to have been a large reason for the significant drop in the native population there was also a mutually beneficial side to the exchange between the two cultures.

As America became more colonized the native population began to become more aware that they were slowly being pushed off and sometimes even forced off of the land that they had called home. The colonists had begun with settlements such as Jamestown, and a few other small ones, but slowly developed into many more and larger settlements began to pop up and down the rivers. Once the tobacco crop took off and became a large cash crop that was under high demand in Europe, the land became a much larger and rapidly began to be taken over by tobacco growers. The tobacco growers needed large areas of farmland, and because tobacco exhausted the soil very quickly, the demand for land increased rapidly (Brinkley p31). As settlements grew throughout the New World and more and more of them were developed along the eastern seaboard, Indians soon became more of a second thought. As areas were settled the local natives were slowly pushed further and further away. What once was a generally friendly relationship slowly began to turn, one of the primary reasons for this was the white colonists' insatiable appetite for land (Brinkley p40). The natives soon began to slowly be driven off their homeland. Those that stayed and tried to live peacefully with the whites were often urged or forced to lay down their weapons and adopt European ways of life and convert to Christian religion. (Native Americans, 2003). Over time the delicate partnerships along the frontiers of the white settlements gave way to the sheer number of Europeans who were moving westward (Brinkley p 53). This continued to drive the Natives further and further west, it would not be long before they began to try and push back. Unfortunately, the Indians themselves did suffer, at the hands of the settlers who were easily panicked into acts of violence and prejudice, and eager to support harsh government policies against Indians (Native Americans, 2003).

The uneasy peace between the two side soon began to crumble and the fighting