American history: 15 000 B.C.  –  1000 A.D.

The first people to inhabit what is now the United States arrived about 15,000 years ago. They reached Alaska from Asia across a land bridge over the present Bering Strait, and gradually moved southwards. They eventually reached South America, leaving en route the ancestors of the present Eskimos as well as of those who became known as the American Indians. 

The Indian population is unlikely ever to have exceeded 10 million and their impact on contemporary American life is more in its folklore and culture of a 'Wild West' celebrated on paper and cinema screen than as an integral element in mainstream society. Their fate was more like that of the Australian Aborigines and Maoris of New Zealand than of the Indians in Central and South America. Spanish and Portuguese blood mixed more freely with the indigenous population of the colonized lands than did that of settlers from northern Europe; the physical 'melting-pot' of North America was more exclusive of people of dark skin - those from Africa as well as the Indians. And despite evidence of permanent settlements of some sophistication at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly and elsewhere in the south-west, the Aztec and Mayan civilizations to the south had developed more of an urban way of life. The Spanish in particular incorporated the indigenous population into the colonial structure, albeit as cheap and subservient labour; the more nomadic North American Indians were less amenable to such treatment, more left to fend for themselves once most of their land had been appropriated.

Dennis Welland (ed.): The United States. A Companion to American Studies; Methuen, London, 1974/1987, page 3 f.