For several centuries, chroniclers of the North American experience before 1800 have faced a basic dilemma—so basic, in fact, that it is rarely recognized or stated. Put bluntly, the familiar but vexing paradox is this: Should “early American history” concern the growth and expansion of European colonies, particularly those English-speaking ones along the east coast that eventually combined to form the United States and to push westward across the continent? Or should it concern all parts of the North American continent, and all the people living there before 1800?
Certainly the east coast orientation is the older and more familiar of these two approaches. After all, the rapid growth of the population along the eastern seaboard and the creation of the American Republic in the late eighteenth century paved the way for a massive demographic, political, and cultural push westward in the nineteenth century that transformed the North American continent.1 That push was epitomized by cowboys on European horses herding European cattle, and by immigrant farmers from Europe planting wheat and raising hogs that had been brought from the Old World. Rapidly, it changed the heartland into what Alfred Crosby has called a “neo-Europe.”2 In addition, it fixed the way that future generations would look at American history, for the century of Euro-American expansion was also the formative era for writing about the American past. Ever since, the United States has cast its entire narrative in terms of “Westward the Course of Empire.”
Granted, the well-known eastern seaboard narrative has been modified in recent decades. Most, though not all, survey courses now begin in North America well before Columbus’s voyage; the rise of Native American history and ethnohistory has thankfully moved us beyond old “empty continent” and “virgin land” formulations. Most important, the evolving literature on colonial-era North America has been enriched, over the past generation, by the welcome growth of a self-conscious Atlantic history. Among other things, that worthwhile venture is erasing the invisible boundary used by several generations of scholars to separate their familiar North Atlantic from what seemed an all-too-foreign South Atlantic. A new cohort of early Americanists feel increasingly drawn to the well-known ports, peoples, and landscapes of Africa and Latin America. One can debate whether this more expansive approach has been adopted belatedly and reluctantly or swiftly and eagerly. But it is hard to deny the recent payoffs. Scholars who can conceptualize an early modern “Atlantic world” find themselves grappling with timely notions of globalization, intercultural contact, the growth of transnational capitalism, and the spread of European imperialism—ecological and religious, as well as economic and political.
But even as the gains of Atlantic history are being consolidated, historians are already peering over new horizons. Though an Atlantic-centered viewpoint remains dominant, scholars are beginning to question it in interesting ways.3 What possibilities lie ahead? One inevitable next step, facilitated by the growth of an increasingly well-traveled and international generation of scholars, will be an increase in comparative history. Atlantic history should, as Jack Greene makes clear in an accompanying essay, give new life to a complementary hemispheric perspective of the kind that Herbert Bolton began to advocate and practice nearly a century ago. Not surprisingly, early Americanists are forging fresh links to the complex histories of Europe and Africa as well, and it is only a matter of time before the watery trails of the Atlantic lead them to see new connections and comparisons in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
But there is another prospect equally close at hand. It is linked to the broad paradox with which I began, and it can best be described as a “continental” approach to early America history. This different stance (looking broadly at the vast lands north of the Rio Grande without becoming drawn into tedious turf wars and definitional boundary debates) has gained adherents in recent years.4 Only time will tell how productive or successful such a viewpoint will be over the long term. But it is already possible to suggest what a continental approach is not, and also what it could become. It is not, first of all, a wholesale substitute for existing models of colonial American history, including the expansive and useful Atlantic formulation. Nor is it in direct conflict or competition with hemispheric or comparative approaches; indeed, it is more readily seen as a precursor to such efforts, for future comparisons will differ and grow as we explore more fully all the rooms of our own house. Finally, it is definitely not presentist, nationalist, or anachronistic. On the contrary, it builds upward from a deep chronological foundation, rather than digging down to find the roots of the American republic; it challenges and traverses later geopolitical boundaries, rather than being defined by them; and it tends to underscore, rather than diminish, the huge contrasts between distant pasts and the surrounding present.
If the continental approach to early North America is not some sudden and dangerous replacement, it may still prove an increasingly logical and promising tool as the twenty-first century unfolds. What it becomes will depend on future scholars, but continental history already shows potential in several obvious ways. Far from precluding consideration of French and Spanish (and Dutch and Russian) colonial history, this approach invites it, while also demanding a far fuller understanding of the deep and diverse Native American presence. Also, while encompassing imperial and cultural boundaries, continental history gives importance, and sometimes precedence, to geographic and ecological variables. (It is no longer just ecologists and environmentalists who are demanding that we comprehend the interconnectedness of our continent’s vast ecosystems and their significant long-term changes in response to invasive and escalating human presence.) Moreover, if the Atlantic and comparative approaches move horizontally into a wider early modern world, this complementary continental approach creates vertical, or chronological, links. It is by no means isolationist, but it stretches deep into the precolonial past and forward toward the North American present. It is a challenging asset, not a liability or pitfall, that this approach connects suggestively to the later chapters of American history, whether it is being studied in Hackensack or Honolulu, Fairbanks or Fort Myers.
It is now increasingly possible to start exploring, and teaching, early North American history from a broad continental perspective. To think about doing this, we need to plant ourselves in the West occasionally, and look east. But which West? When the historian Frederick Jackson Turner wished to “stand” in the late-eighteenth-century “West” and face east, he imagined himself at Cumberland Gap in southwest Virginia. In the current century, when ethnohistorian Daniel Richter conceived his recent book, Facing East, he was high up in a St. Louis hotel overlooking the Mississippi River, not far from the spot where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out for the Pacific in 1804.5
Despite suggestive recent work, the eighteenth-century West still lies just beyond the Alleghenies for most Americans. But a broader and more continental vision seems to be on the way. Eventually, in discussing America before 1800, we shall use the term “the West” to refer to the geographical, continental West rather to than the provincial, pre-Louisiana Purchase West of trans-Appalachia, located along the eastern side of the Mississippi river Basin.6 That larger West begins at the Mississippi and ends in the Pacific (or vice versa). It is part of a continental vision for America’s early modern era that embraces two oceans and puts Atlantic history into a very different perspective, as the following brief experiment may suggest.
Suppose that instead of standing at Cumberland Gap with Turner and Daniel Boone, or at St. Louis with Richter and the expectant Lewis and Clark, we situate ourselves far out over the North Pacific, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.7 If we hover there—roughly half way between the Aleutian Islands and Hawaii—in the year 1700, with our stationary spacecraft/time-capsule facing eastward (and if we assume clear weather, superhuman vision, and an altitude that overcomes the Earth’s curvature), we can see, from that vantage point, a great deal that European mapmakers do not yet know.8
We can confirm, for instance, that Lower (Baja) California is clearly a peninsula rather than an island.9 Likewise, looking far to the north, we can observe that easternmost Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula is not, in fact, linked to the western hemisphere, even though some in the court of young Peter the Great in Moscow still hope that a land connection may exist.10 Glancing backward over our left shoulder and scanning the North Pacific below the Aleutians, eastward from Japan, we see no sign of the fabled isles of Rica de Oro (Rich in Gold) and Rica de Plata (Rich in Silver). Nearly a century earlier, in 1611, Sebastián Vizcaíno had been sent out from Mexico in a futile effort to locate these rumored islands. He expended valuable resources that the king of Spain had originally designated for the purpose of establishing the first colonial post along the coast of California. Vizcaíno spent several years in Tokugawa Japan, and when he returned eastward across the Pacific in 1613, he brought 180 Japanese with him to Mexico. These residents of Japan constituted a high-level trading and cultural delegation that moved on to Spain and Italy. But persecution of Christian foreigners in Japan increased soon afterward, and no lasting link ever developed.11
If it is late summer, we might be able to make out almost below us Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a large “Manila galleon” that left the Philippines in June 1700. The ship is riding the prevailing winds and currents eastward toward California. From there, it will sail south toward Acapulco, arriving in Mexico in December. The huge Spanish vessel, well over 300 tons and with a polyglot crew of more than 100 men, had sailed westward across the Pacific the previous year, via a more southerly route, carrying silver and chocolate from Mexico. Now this galleon, one of several engaged in the trade, is returning from Manila, laden with cinnamon, pepper, gold, ivory, silk, and porcelain. By 1700, Spain’s lucrative trans-Pacific commerce has been conducted on an annual basis for well over 100 years, and it will persist regularly for more than a century to come.12
Off to our right, in the south, we can see the Hawaiian Islands, settled some fourteen centuries earlier by experienced Polynesian ocean explorers sailing northward more than 2,000 miles from the distant Marquesas below the equator. And looking eastward, we scan the North American continent, inhabited for more than 15,000 years by the descendants of early migrants from Eurasia. In 1700, the ancient mesa-top pueblos along the upper Rio Grande have been reconquered again by the Spanish (and have revolted again) since the massive Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In the twenty years since that first successful uprising, a series of native rebellions has swept the northern frontier of New Spain.13 There has also been a sudden acceleration in the distribution of Spanish horses among the Indian nations bordering the Great Plains.14
Farther east and more than twenty degrees to the north, in the great bay explored by Henry Hudson nearly a century before, the English trading posts at York Factory and Moose Factory have been in operation for several decades. In competition with France for furs from the interior, the English, like their more experienced French rivals, are trading guns to Indians bordering the northern plains west of Lake Superior. And French explorers are reacting to the disappointing and unexpected failure of La Salle’s ambitious effort to launch a colony near the mouth of the Mississippi River in 1685.15 Shaken by the news of La Salle’s murder in 1687, potential successors, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, jostle for his mantle. Even before the eventual founding of the Louisiana colony by Iberville in 1699, others have moved quickly to pursue the new vistas laid open by La Salle’s generation. Almost immediately, they begin probing west beyond the Mississippi; further research may show that several of them soon moved much further than we yet understand.
Even a brief glance eastward at North America above the Rio Grande in 1700 raises a basic question: What was the continent’s overall population? Scholars are only beginning to piece together plausible information on this fundamental matter. We do know that the Native American population was declining and that the European colonial population was growing at an accelerating rate. North America’s small African population of roughly 30,000 persons was about to expand exponentially in the decades ahead.16 In 1698, England’s Parliament had passed the Africa Trade Act, formally breaking the monopoly of the Royal African Company and opening the English slave trade to independent shippers, known as separate traders. “In the fifteen years prior to the 1698 act,” William Pettigrew reminds us, “slavers transported close to fifty-five hundred slaves to the American mainland. In the fifteen years after, that figure increased by nearly 300 percent to more than fifteen thousand.”17
Geographically, we know that the new European population was clustered almost entirely along the eastern seaboard, below the fall line of the major rivers. Most newcomers lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean; their communities still constituted a marginal foothold on a continent 3,000 miles wide. Granted, colonial outposts were being established at places such as Pensacola, Biloxi, Detroit, and Cahokia. But these new forts, along with older missions and settlements such as Santa Fe, prove statistically insignificant when their occupants are compared to the entire human population living north of the Rio Grande.
Moreover, the population of the English colonies in 1700 is generally estimated at 250,000 or slightly higher, and the North American colonies of France and Spain contained far fewer than 30,000 inhabitants between them.18 Hence, the continent’s overall European population in 1700 had not yet reached 300,000, and the entire colonial population (combining Europeans and Africans) was below 330,000 people. Meanwhile, the total population of indigenous Americans had been falling rapidly for generations.19 In 1700, the declining Native American population, according to rough calculations, was still somewhere between 1.4 and 1.6 million people, using the most conservative estimates. This means that eight years after the Salem witch trials and six years before the birth of Benjamin Franklin, roughly five out of every six persons living in North America was a Native American.
It also means, significantly, that the North American population was still spread rather evenly across the entire continent in 1700. This would change dramatically by the end of the eighteenth century, with the rapid buildup of east coast population and the further decimation of native populations by nearly half a million, due to recurrent warfare and the ongoing spread of epidemic diseases. But in 1700, at the start of the eighteenth century, eastern populations remained relatively small, and in some areas east of the Mississippi (such as Florida, Georgia, southern Appalachia, and Mississippi, for example) the total population was actually declining.20 Over the previous generation across the South, Indian deaths had more than offset all new colonial arrivals, by birth and immigration combined.21
If we use the admittedly speculative, but also rather conservative, estimates of Douglas Ubelaker regarding the changing size of Indian populations in each major North American region, we find that in 1700 there were more men, women, and children living in the Great Basin region of the mountain West (34,000) than were living in Maryland (31,000). At the same time, the number of indigenous people spread across the continent’s northernmost regions was nearly three times larger than the colonial population rooted in Virginia’s tidewater settlements. According to Ubelacker, there were nearly 160,000 people living in either the frigid Arctic (59,000) or the inhospitable Subarctic (100,000), whereas there were scarcely 60,000 persons inhabiting William Byrd’s temperate Virginia.22
Such arbitrary but suggestive comparisons can be expanded. In 1700, for instance, more than twice as many people inhabited the Great Plains (189,000) as there were colonists in New England (92,000). Four times as many people resided in California (221,000) as there were settlers living in the Middle Colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania combined (53,000). There were nearly 50,000 people (the majority of them Indians) living in the Carolinas and Florida in 1700. At the same time there were an estimated 275,000 indigenous people—women and men, young and old—living in the Southwest, and another 175,000 residing on the salmon-rich Northwest Coast.23
These numbers—informed estimates rather than confirmed head counts—are eye-opening, to say the least. There were roughly equal numbers of Indians and non-Indians (a quarter of a million each) residing throughout the “East” (that is, the greater Northeast plus the greater Southeast) in 1700. But the rest of the continent (the vast region least familiar to most early American historians) was inhabited by an additional 1.15 million persons—almost all Native Americans. In other words, of an estimated 1.65 million people in North America in 1700, only about 15 percent of them were non-Indians.
This startling and unfamiliar demographic picture would change dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century. By the time of Jefferson’s election as president, the native population, according to Ubelaker, had declined precipitously by 25 percent, from 1.4 million in 1700 to slightly over one million people in 1800. This decline affected all regions of the continent, as accelerated trade spread epidemic diseases more extensively, more rapidly, and more frequently across North America. Certain areas of increasing movement and expanding contact were particularly hard hit, such as the Southeast, the Great Plains, and the Northwest Coast.24
Conversely, the European and African populations in the East had grown dramatically; the federal census of 1800 counted roughly 5.3 million people. In 100 years, North America’s population had roughly quadrupled in size, with almost the entire gain occurring in the East, thanks to high birth rates, steady immigration, and an almost unremitting traffic in enslaved Africans. In short, the demographic tables had been completely reversed. Of an estimated 6.6 million people in North America in 1800, only about 15 percent of them were Native Americans. Precisely how and why this great reversal came about is a story that has only begun to be explored on a continental scale.25
The logic of these surprising numbers would seem to point to a new research agenda. A provocative 1994 essay in the William and Mary Quarterly by James A. Hijiya, entitled “Why the West Is Lost,”26 prompted the frontier scholar John Mack Faragher to observe cogently: “What we really need is a fundamental change in the way we think about the colonial history of North America, a change that re-envisions the field in continental perspective. The place to begin is with the agendas of colonial historians themselves.”27 In geographical terms, such a change would move early Americanists toward the center of the continent.28 In disciplinary terms, it would move many of them in the direction of ethnohistory.
New research agendas always stem from complex shifts in the interests of scholars and the questions and priorities of their audiences. Still, such agendas must begin with practical reconsiderations. So it seems appropriate to list briefly half a dozen basic steps that will help to point the way. We need, first, to explore in greater detail what anthropologists and archaeologists have to tell us about a vast array of North American cultures. As we know, these indigenous groups differed greatly from one another, and they were in various stages of contact with the Europeans who were competing to control navigation on both the Atlantic and the Pacific. But we need to learn far more about these groups; they still seem as homogeneous and remote to most early American scholars as West Africa’s diverse societies appeared to American teachers and students in the 1950s.
Second, we need to re-immerse ourselves in the multitude of Spanish sources that have been located and utilized by several generations of “Borderlands” historians, from Herbert Bolton to David Weber.29 Many of these sources now exist in English translations; but many more await scholars with a reading knowledge of Spanish—something that should become a requirement for the next generation of early Americanists. Third, we also need to revisit the rich troves of French documentary material, such as the incomparable Jesuit Relations, translated and published a century ago in more than seventy volumes.30 Fourth, we would profit from combing existent colonial documents on Russia’s eastward expansion, many of which are now available in English translation.31 To gain a better sense of what has already been done, as a fifth step we might do well to revisit certain surveys of cultural contact in the American West from recent generations.32 Finally, while building upon past scholarship in all these areas, we need to intensify our work in published primary sources and in unpublished archival manuscript collections, both here and abroad.
Having listed possible approaches to this broader, transcontinental version of early American history, let me suggest half a dozen topics of ongoing research which are now only marginally familiar to most eighteenth-century Americanists, but which are rapidly becoming more widely known and deeply understood. These specific non-Atlantic subjects suggest some of the diverse dimensions of a general reexamination. I mention them here only by way of example. In each instance significant work has been done, much of it dated and most of it still scarcely integrated into standard treatments of early American history. Clearly, more remains to be done regarding these few illustrative topics (and a much longer set of research possibilities that is now emerging).
The first topic is the European exploration of the Pacific, beginning with Ferdinand Magellan.33 This slow probing of the world’s largest ocean stretched across two and a half centuries.34 Though much work exists on the Pacific voyage of Sir Francis Drake,35 scholarly attention to a wider early English presence in that ocean remains limited.36 In contrast, the scholarly effort expended upon Cook and his voyages has been enormous, and an Australian-built replica of his ship, the Endeavor, continues to make its way around the world to publicize his exploits, some of which transformed the history of Hawaii and completed the mapping of the Northwest Coast.37 Exploration remains a crucial aspect of the West Coast frontier, and a fuller understanding of the naval rivalries, geographic breakthroughs, and native contacts associated with eighteenth-century Pacific voyages remains overdue.
The second topic concerns Russian Alaska. No eighteenth-century Pacific voyages were more dramatic than those of Vitus Bering, the Danish born explorer who gave his name to the strait separating Siberia from North America. On his deathbed in 1724, the Russian emperor, Peter the Great, sought to resolve the vexing scientific and political question of whether Russia “might be joined to America.” It was a matter, he observed, “which has been on my mind for many years.” Bering, an experienced officer in the Russian navy, was sent east in 1725, but when his extensive survey of the Siberian coast in 1728 failed to provide a definitive answer, he was sent back in the following decade to build more ships and explore again. In 1741 the navigator finally managed to outfit two small vessels on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and set out for American shores. At first, he expended precious time sailing southeast rather than northeast, meandering through the North Pacific in hopes of finding the imaginary lands that had lured Vizcaíno 130 years before. After finally touching Alaska very briefly, he rushed his return voyage through uncharted waters as winter approached. During an ill-advised stopover on a frozen island that now bears his name, Bering suffered a harrowing death in December 1741 from what his physician described as “hunger, thirst, cold, vermin and grief.”38
Along with Bering, thirty of his crewmen died of scurvy and exposure before their return, but forty-six survivors limped back to Kamchatka the following year with an enormous cargo of furs that would spark further exploration.39 In 1991, to mark the 250th anniversary of the voyage, members of Russia’s Merchant Marine Academy sailed replicas of Bering’s tiny vessels, the Saint Peter and Saint Paul, from Vladivostok to Kodiak, Alaska. This feat received little attention beyond the Northwest Coast, even among early Americanists, but that is hardly surprising, for it is difficult to commemorate events that are unfamiliar. Fortunately, contact-period archaeology, document retrieval, and sophisticated ethnohistory are well under way in opening up this neglected chapter of North American colonization.40
As the Russians were moving southward along North America’s Pacific coast, reaching California in the early nineteenth century, Spaniards were moving northward with very different kinds of Christian missionaries, European soldiers and imperial bureaucrats. The Spanish push into California constitutes a third topic of current and future study for early American historians. In contrast to the Russians, the Spanish had been present in America for centuries, and had long been the dominant naval and commercial force in the Pacific. The Spanish-speaking settlers who founded San Diego in 1769 and San Francisco in 1776 were operating in a more hospitable climate, and they had far easier access to the resources of Mexico and Madrid than Russian colonizers of Kodiak and Sitka had to Kamchatka and St. Petersburg.
It has been nearly 100 years since Irving Richman published California Under Spain and Mexico, lamenting that as yet “few critical monographs” had been devoted to the subject.41 Eight decades have passed since Herbert Bolton published his volumes on the 1774 expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza and Father Garcés from Tubac in northern Sonora to San Gabriel (what is now Los Angeles).42 Research and scholarship have proceeded steadily since Bolton’s time.43 An excellent work now exists on the general topic of Indian–Spanish relations along the vast boundaries of Spain’s empire in the Americas in the late eighteenth century, and new books on the Spanish missions of Alta California are appearing frequently.44 But the satisfactory linking of colonial California history to the wider framework of early North American history remains tenuous at best.
The same might be said for other aspects of the eighteenth-century Pacific frontier. The fatal impact of Captain Cook on Hawaii, and vice versa, has been dealt with frequently in various popular forms, and has been the focus of an extended and often bitter theoretical debate among anthropologists.45 But it stands out as a fourth topic for further exploration and integration. So far early Americanists, preoccupied with the Revolutionary War when they get to the 1770s, have had little to say about the European “discovery” of the so-called Sandwich Islands in either comparative or ethnohistorical terms.
Similarly (and this remains a fifth appealing topic), there is an extensive, but somewhat specialized, literature about the arrival of American ships along the Northwest Coast after the Revolution. It relates to several topics already noted—Pacific exploration and eighteenth-century Hawaii—and it is often associated with the obscure diplomatic controversy of 1790 known as the Nootka Sound Crisis. But it is actually, among much else, a final chapter in the search for the Northwest Passage. Most early Americanists drop this subject after discussing Jacques Cartier and Henry Hudson. We are less familiar with the later endeavors of the Italian navigator Alejandro Malaspina, the Spanish captain Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, the French naval officer Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, Cook’s English successor George Vancouver, and Scottish fur trader Alexander Mackenzie.46 This is not simply an unfamiliar chapter in “great man history”; it involves devastating interactions between natives and newcomers, as well as imperial conflict and commercial enterprise.47
Finally, a corollary to this Northwest Coast story involved the opening up of a lucrative commerce in Pacific whaling and in the exchange of sea otter pelts for China tea by east coast merchants and New England sailors.48 Toward the end of the eighteenth century, many among North America’s eastern elite, like their wealthier counterparts in England and France, developed growing economic and cultural interests in the Orient. Leading the way, the financier Robert Morris dispatched the American vessel Empress of China on its pioneering and lucrative voyage to Asia in 1784. Moreover, some of the same ships that once plied the Atlantic in the slave trade later sailed the Pacific in the China trade. For example, as John Brown of Providence was reducing his involvement in the African slave trade in 1787, he dispatched his 300-ton vessel, General Washington, to China.49 Professor Sucheta Mazumdar and others are finding significant links between the curtailing of the Atlantic slave trade and the expansion of commerce with China.
Few of these topics are unknown, but all can be explored more deeply and integrated more fully than they have been. And this list, confined to the Pacific and its immediate North American coastline, is presented merely as an appetizer. As we begin to push our inquiries inland from Sitka, Nootka, and Monterey, moving east toward the distant Cumberland Gap, we approach the busy Atlantic world from an unfamiliar direction.
Interestingly, this fresh vantage point, different as it may seem, has an eighteenth-century precedent in the vision of John Ledyard, who had sailed with Captain Cook on his final voyage to the Pacific. After seeing the West Coast of North America, the Connecticut-born adventurer conceived an ambitious plan with Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1786. As Jefferson explained admiringly, this intrepid traveler hoped to make his way, via Asia and the Pacific, “to the Western side of America, and penetrate through the Continent to our side of it.”50 Ledyard failed to realize this ambitious dream, and he is now all but forgotten. Yet several centuries later we are finally in a position to rediscover the world he hoped to explore.
If we dare to press eastward into the continent as it existed well before 1800, we shall encounter all of North America’s peoples, and we stand to learn a great deal. One payoff could involve a greater attention to the land itself and to the slow evolution of geographical and cartographic understanding among foreigners. Another payoff would be a fuller understanding of the extensive networks which carried ever more numerous trade goods and ever more devastating diseases. Still another reward would involve a better awareness of the diverse Native residents—along with the few isolated traders, explorers, missionaries, and colonizers—who inhabited most of North America during the eighteenth century. It is too early to imagine all the other possibilities in such a reorientation. Already, however, it seems safe to say that as early American history becomes more continental in scope, the subject will become more diverse and more interdisciplinary, while taking on a fresh relevance as well.
1. As late as 1875, a quarter of a century after the California gold rush, only 7 million Americans, out of a total of 44 million, lived west of the Mississippi. All but 2 million of those lived in states bordering that river. Fewer than 1 million people lived on the Pacific side of the Continental Divide. (Among 4 million Canadians, scarcely 150,000 lived west of Sault Saint Marie.) Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Pacific (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 76.
2. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 171–194, and “Metamorphosis of the Americas,” in Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, eds., Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 70–89.
3. Trevor Burnard, “Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History,” Historically Speaking (July/August 2006): 19–21. Also see the useful collection, “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 63 (October 2006): 675–742.
4. I use continental broadly and loosely here. We sensibly continue to employ national boundaries in teaching American history at all levels, but the presence of Alaska and Hawaii as the most recent states prompts greater awareness of U.S. relationships with Canada, Mexico, and the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific.
5. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 1.
6. For a useful presentation of this broader, continental approach, see William H. Goetzmann and Glyndwr Williams, The Atlas of North American Exploration: From the Norse Voyages to the Race to the Pole (New York: Prentice Hall, 1992). See also John Logan Allen, ed., North American Exploration, 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), especially James R. Gibson, “The Exploration of the Pacific Coast,” in vol. 2: A Continent Defined, pp. 329–396. An excellent issue of the online publication Common-Place [5, no. 2 (January 2005)] focused on bringing the Pacific into early American history.
7. See Ernest Stanley Dodge, Islands and Empires: Western Impact on the Pacific and East Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Walter A. McDougall, Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and the review article of Stefan Halikowski Smith, “The Pacific World, 1500–1900,” Itinerario, 30, no. 1 (2006): 83–86.
8. For an introduction to the unfolding of this complex cartography, see Carl I. Wheat, The Mapping of the Transmississippi West, 5 vols. (San Francisco: Institute of Historical Cartography, 1957–1963)., vol. 1.
9. Dora Beale Polk, The Island of California: A History of the Myth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
10. Benson Bobrick, East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia (New York: Poseidon Press, 1992), pp. 97–98.
11. W. Michael Mathes, Vizcaíno and Spanish Expansion in the Pacific Ocean (San Francisco: California Historical Society, 1968), p. 146; William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), pp. 230–234; Naojiro Murakami, “Japan’s Early Attempts to Establish Commercial Relations with Mexico,” in H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E. Bolton, eds., The Pacific Ocean in History (New York: Macmillan, 1917), pp. 467–480.
12. Schurz, The Manila Galleon, pp. 50, 194, 209; H. Morse Stephens, “The Conflict of European Nations in the Pacific Ocean,” in Stephens and Bolton, eds., The Pacific Ocean in History, p. 26. For Bruce Cruikshank’s expanding Directory of Manila Galleon Voyages, 1565 through 1815, see http://home.windstream.net/cr33856/.
13. Roberto Mario Salmon, Indian Revolts in Northern New Spain: A Synthesis of Resistance (1680–1786) (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991): pp. 38, 41.
14. Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), pp. 20–21.
15. Peter H. Wood, “La Salle: Discovery of a Lost Explorer,” American Historical Review 89 (April 1984): 294–323. For a sound introduction to the literature on La Salle, see the various works of Robert S. Weddle and William C. Foster.
16. On Africans, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 370. Berlin’s table suggests that the slave population of mainland North America was just below 30,000 in 1700 and at least 900,000 by 1800. Not all Africans in North America were enslaved, and not all of those enslaved were of African ancestry, but these numbers suggest the proper range.
17. William A. Pettigrew, “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688–1714,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 64 (January 2007): 33.
18. See, for example, Morris Altman, “Economic Growth in Canada, 1695–1739: Estimates and Analysis,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 45 (October 1988): 707 (table VII).
19. Suzanne Austin Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in a Global Perspective (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003); Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005).
20. See Marvin T. Smith, “Indians of Mississippi, 1540–1700,” in Native, European, and African Cultures in Mississippi, 1500–1800 (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1991), p. 35.
21. Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Race and Region, 1685–1790,” in Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and Tom Hatley, eds., Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, 2nd ed., enl. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 59–60.
22. Douglas H. Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size: Changing Perspectives,” in John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker, eds., Disease and Demography in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), p. 173. I have rounded some of the figures slightly to underscore the fact that all of these numbers are estimates.
23. For the Carolinas and Florida, I have used Wood, “Changing Population,” p. 59; for Maryland and Virginia, Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 147, 161; for New England and the Middle Colonies, Wesley Frank Craven, The Colonies in Transition, 1660–1713 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 288; for Native American regions, Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size,” p. 173.
24. Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size,” p. 173, estimates the following declines for these three regions over the eighteenth century: Southeast, from 105,125 to 60,370; the Great Plains, from 189,100 to 120,330; and the Northwest Coast, from 175,000 to 98,333. His overall North American Indian totals decline from 1,404,745 in 1700 to 1,051,688 in 1800. For a recent detailed study of mortality in the Pacific Northwest, see Robert Boyd, The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline Among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774–1874 (Vancouver and Seattle: University of British Columbia Press and University of Washington Press, 1999).
25. See Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
26. James A. Hijiya, “Why the West Is Lost,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 51 (April 1994): 276–292.
27. “Forum: ‘Why the West Is Lost’: Comments and Response,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 51 (October 1994): 727. On the relation of western history to global history, see Stephen Aron, “Returning the West to the World,” Magazine of History 20, no. 2 (March 2006): 53–60.
28. Peter H. Wood, “North America in the Era of Captain Cook: Three Glimpses of Indian-European Contact in the Age of the American Revolution,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 489–490.
29. See, for example, Herbert E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921); John Francis Bannon, ed., Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964); John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513–1821 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974); David J. Weber, ed., New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1979); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
30. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1903). Also see Louise Phelps Kellogg, ed., Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634–1699 (New York: Scribner’s, 1917) (vol. 16 in the Original Narratives of Early American History series); and Theodore Calvin Pease and Raymond C. Werner, eds., The French Foundations, 1680–1693, vol. 23 in the Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1934). Among excellent new English-language resources, see Joseph L. Peysar (trans.) and José António Brandão, eds., Edge of Empire: Documents of Michilimackinac, 1671–1716 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008).
31. See the 3-vol. document series, Basil Dmytryshyn et al., eds. and trans., To Siberia and Russian America: Three Centuries of Eastward Expansion (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1985–1989).
32. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962); Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1975); Warren L. Cook, Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1543–1819 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988); Wheat, Mapping the Transmississippi West; Donald A. Barclay, James H. Maguire, and Peter Wild, eds., Into the Wilderness Dream: Exploration Narratives of the American West, 1500–1805 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994); and Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). Also, see forthcoming works by Michael Witgen (University of Michigan) and Paul W. Mapp (College of William & Mary).
33. Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (New York: William Morrow, 2003).
34. See John H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Derek Howse, Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Stephen Haycox, James Barnett, and Caedmon Liburd, eds., Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741–1805 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). See also Mathes, Vizcaíno; Cook, Flood Tide; Ernest Stanley Dodge, Beyond the Capes: Pacific Exploration from Captain Cook to the Challenger, 1776–1877 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Oliver E. Allen, The Pacific Navigators (New York: Time-Life Books, 1980); John Dunmore, Storms and Dreams: The Life of Louis de Bougainville (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2007).
35. On Drake, see John Hampden, ed., Francis Drake, Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents (University: University of Alabama Press, 1972); Derek Wilson, The World Encompassed: Francis Drake and His Great Voyage (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Norman J. W. Thrower, ed., Sir Francis Drake and the Famous Voyage, 1577–1580 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); David Beers Quinn, Sir Francis Drake as Seen by His Contemporaries (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1996); Stephen Coote, Drake: The Life and Legend of an Elizabethan Hero (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); and R. Samuel Bawlf, The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577–1580 (New York: Walker, 2003).
36. On the English in the Pacific before Cook, see Glyndwr Williams, The Great South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Peter Gerhard, Pirates of the Pacific, 1575–1742 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); and Glyndwr Williams, “The Pacific: Exploration and Exploitation,” in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 552–575.
37. J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); Daniel Conner and Lorraine Miller, Master Mariner: Capt. James Cook and the Peoples of the Pacific (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Adrienne L. Kaeppler, ed., Cook Voyage Artifacts in Leningrad, Berne, and Florence Museums (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1978); Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston, eds., Captain James Cook and His Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); Ròdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Richard Hough, Captain James Cook: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995); Andrew David, chief ed., The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols. (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1988–1997); Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
38. The quotations appear in Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfi nders: A Global History of Exploration (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 269–275 (where Bering’s death is mistakenly dated as 1742 rather than 1741).
39. Raymond H. Fisher, Bering’s Voyages: Whither and Why (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), p. 150. Cf. Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Bering’s Voyages: The Reports from Russia, Rasmuson Library, Historical Translation Series, vol. 3, trans. Carol Urness (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1986); Georg Wilhelm Steller, Journal of a Voyage with Bering, 1741–1742, edited by O. W. Frost (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Corey Ford, Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966; Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Books, 1992); Orcutt Frost, Bering: The Russian Discovery of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
40. Fitzhugh and Crowell, Crossroads of Continents; Steve J. Langdon, The Native People of Alaska, rev. 2nd ed. (Anchorage: Greatland Graphics, 1989); S. Frederick Starr, ed., Russia’s American Colony (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond J. Barnett, eds., Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1990); James R. Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier America: The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America, 1784–1867 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian–American Relations, 1775–1815, trans. Elena Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975); William R. Hunt, Arctic Passage: The Turbulent History of the Land and People of the Bering Sea, 1697–1975 (New York: Scribner’s, 1975). See also Erik Hirschmann, “Empires in the Land of the Trickster: Russians, Tlingit, Pomo and Americans on the Pacific Rim, Eighteenth Century to 1910s” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1999); and the forthcoming book, Kodiak Kreol, by Gwenn A. Miller. Numerous important translations of Russian sources have been edited by Richard A. Pierce of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and published by the Limestone Press, Kingston, Ontario.
41. “The Atlantic Coast of North America has been dealt with in works elaborate and minute. The Pacific Coast, on the contrary, is as yet nearly a virgin field, few critical monographs having been devoted to it. The consequence is that in this field it is necessary for the historical writer to use the sources directly; and these sources are almost wholly manuscript.” Irving Berdine Richman, California Under Spain and Mexico, 1535–1847 (reprinted New York: Cooper Square, 1965 [1911]), p. v.
42. Herbert E. Bolton, Anza’s California Expeditions, 5 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1930). Cf. Father Francisco Garcés, A Record of Travels in Arizona and California, 1775–1776, trans. John Galvin (San Francisco: John Howell, 1965).
43. See, for example, Donald C. Cutter, California in 1792: A Spanish Naval Visit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); Joseph P. Sánchez, Spanish Bluecoats: The Catalonian Volunteers in Northwestern New Spain, 1767–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990); and Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). See also Donald Cutter and Iris Engstrand, Quest for Empire: Spanish Settlement in the Southwest (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1996); Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, eds., The Mapping of the Entradas into the Greater Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
44. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); James A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian–Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Kent G. Lightfoot, Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Alison Lake, Colonial Rosary: The Spanish and Indian Missions of California (Athens: Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2006).
45. Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), and his Islands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
46. John Kendrick, Alejandro Malaspina: Portrait of a Visionary (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999); Herbert K. Beals, ed. and trans., “The 1775 Journal of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra,” in Beals et al, eds., Four Travel Journals (London: Hakluyt Society, 2007), pp. 1–139; John Dunmore, ed., The Journal of Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, 1785–1788, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1994–1995); W. Kaye Lamb, ed., The Voyage of George Vancouver, 1791–1795, 4 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1984), and The Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970). See also Donald C. Cutter, Malaspina and Galiano: Spanish Voyages to the Northwest Coast, 1791–1792 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991); Robin A. Fisher and Hugh Johnston, eds., From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993); John Dunmore, Where Fate Beckons: The Life of Jean-François de la Pérouse (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2007); and Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, B.C.: Cavendish Books, 1999).
47. Richard Batman, The Outer Coast (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); John Kendrick, Men with Wooden Feet: The Spanish Exploration of the Pacific Northwest (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); Erna Gunther, Indian Life on the Northwest Coast of North America, as Seen by the Early Explorers and Fur Traders During the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Derek Pethick, First Approaches to the Northwest Coast (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979); Alexander Walker, An Account of a Voyage to the North West Coast of America in 1785 & 1786, ed. Robin Fisher and J. M. Bumsted (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); José Mariano Moziña, Noticias de Nutka: An Account of Nootka Sound in 1792 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970; 2nd ed., 1991); John Kendrick, trans., The Voyage of Sutil and Mexicana, 1792: The Last Spanish Exploration of the Northwest Coast of America (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark, 1995).
48. Alfred Tamarin and Shirley Glubok, Voyaging to Cathay: Americans in the China Trade (New York: Viking Press, 1976); Margaret C. S. Christman, Adventurous Pursuits: Americans and the China Trade, 1784–1844 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921); Ernest Stanley Dodge, New England and the South Seas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Arrell Morgan Gibson, with John S. Whitehead, Yankees in Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); James R. Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992).
49. Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 247. See also Captain John DeWolf, A Voyage to the North Pacific (Fairfield, Wash.: Ye Galleon Press, 1998).
50. Jefferson to Ezra Stiles, 1 September, 1786, quoted in James Zug, American Traveler: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man Who Dreamed of Walking the World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 172. See also William C. Gifford, Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer (New York: Harcourt, 2007); Stephen D. Watrous, ed., John Ledyard’s Journey through Russia and Siberia, 1787–1788: The Journal and Selected Letters (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).