OPPapers.com

North American Indian Timeline

North American Indian Timeline (1492-1999)
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...