Native American Timeline of Events

NATIVE AMERICAN LEGENDS

Native American Timeline of Events

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1492	From their nakedness, Columbus inferred the native people to be an inferior race. Columbus wrote of the Indians he encountered, "They all go around as naked as their mothers bore them; and also the women." However, he noted that "they could easily be commanded and made to work, to sow and to do whatever might be needed, to build towns and be taught to wear clothes and adopt our ways." Although Columbus also wrote that "they are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest," his record of the first encounter between Europeans and New World Indians was filled with accounts of enslavement, murder, and rape
1513	In May, Ponce de Leon encountered Calusa Indians while exploring the Gulf Coast of Florida near Charlotte harbor. In a fight with the Calusa, de Leon captured four warriors.
1524	On July 8, the first kidnapping in America took place. Florentine explorers kidnapped an Indian child to bring to France.
1528	On April 16, the first significant exploration of Florida occurred when Spanish soldier, explorer, and Indian fighter Panfilo de Narvaez saw Indian houses near what is now Tampa Bay. Narvaez claimed Spanish royal title to the land.
1540	Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led Mexico's invasion of the north with an expeditionary force of 300 conquistadors and more than one thousand Indian "allies." When they reached Cibola, they found not the promised metropolis but "a little, crowded village, looking as if it had been crumpled all up together." This was the Zuni Pueblo of Hawikuh, whose warriors answered with arrows when Coronado demanded that they swear loyalty to his King. Within an hour, the Spaniards overran the pueblo, and over the next few weeks, they conquered the other Zunis in the region. Coronado moved his camp to the upper Rio Grande, where his soldiers confiscated one pueblo for winter quarters and looted the surrounding pueblos for supplies. During this operation, a Spaniard raped an Indian woman, and when Coronado refused to punish him, the Indians retaliated by stealing horses. Lopez de Cardenas attacked the thieves' pueblo, captured 200 men and methodically burned them all at the stake.
1541	Faced with an incipient uprising, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ordered an attack on Moho pueblo, a center of Indian resistance. His men were repulsed when they tried to scale the walls, so they settled in for a siege that lasted from January through March. At last, when the Moho tried to slip away, the Spaniards killed more than 200 men, women and children in a massacre that pacified the region.
1542	Under pressure from religious leaders, especially the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, Spanish Emperor Carlos V attempted to impose "New Laws" on the Spanish colonies, ending the encomienda system that gave settlers the right to Indian slave labor.
1546	The "New Laws" barring Indian enslavement were repealed at the insistence of New World colonists, who developed a society and economy dependent on slave labor
1552	Bartolome de Las Casa, the first priest ordained in the Western hemisphere and chief architect of the now-defunct "New Laws" against Indian enslavement, published Brief Relations of the Destruction of the Indies, which provided many gruesome examples of the colonists' treatment of Indians.
1598	On November 15, Don Juan Oñate declared possession of Hopi land (in what is now northern Arizona) in the name of the Spanish crown. Four hundred years later, the Hopi have still never signed any treaty with any non-Indian nation.
1600's	Europeans of the time held steadfastly to the belief that their introduced diseases were acts of God being done in their behalf. One settler proclaimed while speaking about the deaths of Native Americans, "Their enterprise failed, for it pleased God to effect these Indians with such a deadly sickness, that out of every 1000, over 950 of them had died, and many of them lay rotting above the ground for lack of burial."
1607	Jamestown is founded in Virginia by the colonists of the London Company. By the end of the year, starvation and disease reduce the original 105 settlers to just 32 survivors. Captain John Smith is captured by Native American Chief Powhatan and saved from death by the chief's daughter, Pocahontas. On July 3, Indians brought maize, beans, squash, and fresh and smoked meat to the Jamestown colony. As at Plymouth years later, the colonists and their diseases would eventually exterminate them.
1609	On July 29, Samuel de Champlain, accompanied by 2 other Frenchmen and 60 Algonquins and Hurons, defeated a band of Iroquois Indians near the future Ticonderoga, beginning a long period of French/Iroquois enmity.
1611	Former Dutch lawyer Adrian Block explored Manhattan Island in the ship Tiger. He returned to Europe with a cargo of furs and two kidnapped Indians, whom he named Orson and Valentine.
1614	On May 13, the Viceroy of Mexico found Spanish Explorer Juan de Oñate guilty of atrocities against the Indians of New Mexico . As part of his punishment, he was banned from entering New Mexico again.
1616	A smallpox epidemic decimates the Native American population in New England. In May, Virginia’s Deputy Governor George Yeardley and a group of men killed 20 - 40 Chickahominy Indians. It was under Yeardley’s leadership that friendly relations between the Chickahominy and the colony ended.
1621	One of the first treaties between colonists and Native Americans is signed as the Plymouth Pilgrims enact a peace pact with the Wampanoag Tribe, with the aid of Squanto, an English speaking Native American.
1626	Peter Minuit, a Dutch colonist, buys Manhattan island from Native Americans for 60 guilders (about $24) and names the island New Amsterdam.
1637	In the colony of Massachusetts the Pequod Indians were the first slaves, but as they "would not endure the yoke," they were sent to the Bermudas and exchanged for Negroes in the hope that the latter would bear slavery more patiently. The first exchange of Indians for Negroes was made in 1637, the first year of the Pequod war and was doubtless kept up for many years. On May 26, Captains John Mason and John Underhill attacked and burned Pequot forts at Mystic, Connecticut, massacring 600 Indians and starting the Pequot War. On June 5, English settlers in New England massacred a Pequot Indian village.
1639	Captain William Pierce of Salem, Massachusetts sailed to the West Indies and exchanged Indian slaves for black slaves.
1675-1676	King Philip's War erupts in New England between colonists and Native Americans as a result of tensions over colonist's expansionist activities. The bloody war rages up and down the Connecticut River valley in Massachusetts and in the Plymouth and Rhode Island colonies, eventually resulting in 600 English colonials being killed and 3,000 Native Americans, including women and children on both sides. King Philip (the colonist's nickname for Metacomet, chief of the Wampanoags) is hunted down and killed on August 12, 1676, in a swamp in Rhode Island, ending the war in southern New England and ending the independent power of Native Americans there. In New Hampshire and Maine, the Saco Indians continue to raid settlements for another year and a half.
July 30, 1676	Bacon's Rebellion - Tobacco planters led by Nathan Bacon ask for and are denied permission to attack the Susquehannock Indians, who have been conducting raids on colonists' settlement. Enraged at Governor Berkeley's refusal, the colonists burn Jamestown and kill many Indians before order is restored in October.
1690	The beginning of King William's War as hostilities in Europe between the French and English spill over to the colonies. In February, Schenectady, New York is burned by the French with the aid of their Native American allies.
1702	French explorer Pierre Liette had a four-year sojourn in the Chicago area during which he noticed that "the sin of sodomy" prevailed among the Miami Indians, and that some men were bred from childhood for this purpose.
1704	On June 23, former Governor of South Carolina, James Moore, led a force of 50 British, and 1,000 Creek Indians against Spanish settlements. They attacked a Mission in Northwestern Florida. They took many Indians as slaves and killed Father Manuel de Mendoza.
1709	A slave market was erected at the foot of Wall Street and here Negroes and Indians, men, women and children were daily declared the property of the highest cash bidder.
1711	Hostilities break out between Native Americans and settlers in North Carolina after the massacre of settlers there. The conflict, known as the Tuscarora Indian War will last two years.
1715	Yamasee tribes attack and kill several hundred Carolina settlers.
1716	South Carolina settlers and their Cherokee allies attack and defeat the Yamassee.
1721	Jesuit explorer Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix recorded effeminacy and widespread homosexuality and lesbianism among the “Indian” tribes in what is now Louisiana. The most prominent tribes in the area at the time were the Iroquois and Illinois.
1725	Ten sleeping Indians were scalped by whites in New Hampshire for a bounty.
1745	Upon hearing of an impending French and Indian attack upon the Ulster county frontiers, Europeans massacred several Indian families in their wigwams at Walden in the Hudson River Valley.
1745	On November 28, French military forces out of Canada, accompanied by 220 Caughnawaga Mohawk and Abenaki Indians, attacked and burned the English settlement at Saratoga. The 101 inhabitants were either killed or taken prisoner.
1752	In the 1752 census, 147 "Indian" slaves — 87 females and 60 males — were listed as living in French households in what would later be called Illinois. These people were from different cultural groups than the local Native American population and were often captives of war.
1754	On April 9, an Indian slave trader sent a letter to South Carolina Governor J. Glenn asking for permission to use one group of Indians to fight another: "We want no pay, only what we can take and plunder, and what slaves we take to be our own."
1756	On April 8, Governor Robert Morris declared war on the Delaware and Shawnee Indians. Included in his war declaration was “The Scalp Act,” which put a bounty on the scalps of Indian men, women and boys.
1758	On August 1, the first Indian reservation in North America was established by the New Jersey Colonial Assembly.
1759	Responding to a Comanche attack that destroyed two missions on the San Saba River in central Tejas, a Spanish force of 600 marched north to the Red River where they engaged several thousand Comanche and other Plains Indians fighting behind breastworks and armed with French rifles. The Spaniards were routed, losing a cannon in their retreat, and Comanche raids became a constant threat to settlers throughout Tejas.
1762	Governor Thomas Velez Cachupin had a number of Indians living at Albiquiú [La Cañada, New Mexico ] tried for witchcraft sometime after 1762. They were conveniently condemned into servitude.
1763	In May, the Ottawa Native Americans under Chief Pontiac begin all-out warfare against the British west of Niagara, destroying several British forts and conducting a siege against the British at Detroit. In August, Pontiac's forces are defeated by the British near Pittsburgh. The siege of Detroit ends in November, but hostilities between the British and Chief Pontiac continue for several years. The Proclamation of 1763, signed by King George III of England, prohibits any English settlement west of the Appalachian mountains and requires those already settled in those regions to return east in an attempt to ease tensions with Native Americans. An indication of the basic racism inherent in the use of violence by colonial whites can be found in the notorious Paxton Boys. In 1763 this group of frontier thugs did not hesitate to kill dozens of friendly Christian Indians, for they were easier to get at than the hostiles who would put up a fight. The Paxton Boys mostly beat their victims to death, though they did not scruple at using axes. Yet when they marched on Philadelphia to press their claims for more funding and arms for a war against the Indians, they were met by an armed militia, and their forces melted away. Only some 250 Paxton Boys remained, and they were intellectually outnumbered by Benjamin Franklin, who offered these “white savages” a face-saving out. The western insurgents presented a pro-murder petition to the legislature, an amazing exercise in projection that argued that Indians should be killed because they were prone to massacre innocents. The point is, again, that these white rebels contented themselves with a petition and then went home. The legislature ignored their drivel. In brief, then, personal violence in colonial America appears to have been reserved for despised races. On December 8, an organization compensating settlers for losses resulting from Indian raids was created by Indian Commissioner Sir William Johnson. On December 27, a troop of 50 armed men entered the Workhouse at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and hacked to death the only 14 surviving Conestoga Indians (the rest of the tribe having been similarly dispensed with 13 days earlier).
1775	Forced to labor in the mission fields and to worship according to the missionaries' teachings, the Indians at San Diego rebelled against the Spanish, burning every building and killing most of the inhabitants, including the mission's head priest. Thanks to a Spanish sharpshooter, the Indians were finally driven off and the Spanish retained control of their outpost.
1776	On May 25, the Continental Congress resolved that it was "highly expedient to engage Indians in service of the United Colonies," and authorized recruiting 2,000 paid auxiliaries. The program was a dismal failure, as virtually every tribe refused to fight for the colonists.
1776	On July 21, Cherokee Indians attacked a settlement in western North Carolina. Militia forces retaliated by destroying a nearby Cherokee village.
1772-1780	4/5 of the Arikara died of smallpox, measles, etc.
1781	Smallpox wiped out more than half the Piegan Blackfeet.
1782	On March 8, Captain David Williamson and about 90 volunteer militiamen slaughtered 62 adults and 34 children of the neutral, pacifist, and Christian Delaware people at Gnadenhutten, Ohio in retaliation for raids by other Indian tribes. On April 21, the Presidio, overlooking San Francisco, was erected by the Spanish to subdue Indians interfering with mail transmissions along El Camino Real.
1786	On July 13, the Northwest Ordinance was enacted, stating "the utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians . . . in their property, rights, and liberty they shall never be disturbed."
1787	First federal treaty enacted with the Delaware Indians.
1789	Indian Commerce Clause of the Constitution is added stating "The Congress shall have Power...to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes." This clause is generally seen as the principal basis for the federal government's broad power over Indians. Indian affairs assignation. Indian agents, who were appointed as the federal government's liaison with tribes, fell under jurisdiction of the War Department. The Indian agents were empowered to negotiate treaties with the tribes.
1790	The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act is passed, placing nearly all interaction between Indians and non-Indians under federal, rather than state control, established the boundaries of Indian country, protected Indian lands against non-Indian aggression, subjected trading with Indians to federal regulation, and stipulated that injuries against Indians by non-Indians was a federal crime. The conduct of Indians among themselves, while in Indian country, was left entirely to the tribes. These Acts were renewed periodically until 1834. Military battle between US Army and Shawnee. The army, some 1,500 strong, invaded Shawnee territory, in what is now western Ohio. The Americans were defeated in 1791 after suffering 900 casualties, 600 of whom died. On March 1, the first U.S. Census count included slave and free Negroes. Indians were not included.

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