North American Economy
When people first came to North America, about 12,000
BC, they were all hunters
and gatherers, and that's what
they spent most of their time doing. In California, and along the East Coast,
people like the Iroquois gathered
acorns and crushed them to make bread. Cree
people gathered wild rice from shallow lakes and rivers near the Great Lakes
where they lived. Ute people, near the
Rocky Mountains (in modern Colorado and Utah), ate mainly wild roots and
grass seeds, along with a lot of trout, berries, and meat from wild birds
and deer. In the Pacific Northwest, people fished for salmon.
The first people in North America to start planting and
harvesting their own food were probably the Pueblo
people living in the Southwest (modern Arizona and New Mexico). They
learned how to farm corn and beans
and squash from the Aztec
people who lived in Mexico, south of them, probably about 2000 BC. But they
didn't really settle down and start farming for most of their food until
about 100 AD.
Little by little, people began to plant corn
and beans in other parts of North America. By about 800 AD, the Mississippians
along the Mississippi valley were planting crops. They planted corn and
beans and squash, which they called the Three
Sisters, all together in the same field. The Cherokee,
in the southwest, probably began to plant crops a little later. About 1000
AD, Iroquois
people living in the North-east (modern New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts)
began to plant corn - three thousand years after the Pueblo people! But
they had already been growing sunflowers
for some time, which they had figured out on their own. Iroquois people
found (just as you would if you planted corn there today) that it was hard
to grow corn in the short summers of the north. Often the frost came and
killed the plants before the ears of corn were ready to pick. People had
to get the corn to evolve into a type of corn that would get ripe in just
three months, before the weather turned cold.
There was a lot of trading in canoes
up and down the big rivers - the the Columbia and Willamette rivers in the
Pacific Northwest, the Colorado river in the Southwest, the Mississippi
and Missouri rivers, the Platte and the Snake, in the middle of the continent,
and the Hudson river in the Northeast. Traders carried seashells for carving,
and furs for blankets, and stone for grindstones, and flint and obsidian
for making arrowheads and knives. Even the stone that they used to make
hoes for farming was traded from Mississippi
all over the midwest, as far north as Illinois. In return, the people of
Mississippi got copper from near the Great Lakes for jewelry. The Inuit,
along the Arctic circle in the most northern part of North America, sometimes
traded with the Algonquins and Blackfoot
to their south, and with the Viking
settlers of Greenland to their east.
Here's a video of Iroquois people making tools:
By 1500 AD, when invaders from Spain first landed in
Florida, many people in North America were farming most of their food. But
other groups, like the Ute people and the
Cree and the Chinook,
were still gathering most of theirs.
Click on these books to buy them at Amazon.com and learn more:
North American food
North American economy after
1500 AD
Back to main North America page
Main economy page
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