Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast number two. I am your host, Jack Heneman,

and this episode is The Americans Before Columbus, Part 2.

Last time we talked about the essential nature of the Indians, that they dramatically

shaped their world, just as eastern hemisphere peoples had done.

And we're neither tree-hugging naturalists nor uncivilized barbarians.

We ended the story just before we got to the Algonquin tribes of the northeast.

The first Indians that Northern European explorers got to know well when they arrived in the years following Columbus.

Let's talk now about the Algonquin tribes that were pinned against the northeastern Atlantic coast and its immediate interior by the Iroquois to their west.

Charles Mann, author of 1491, New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus,

described the pre-Columbian Algonquins by telling the story of the post-Columbian figure

to Squantum, known to Americans of a certain age as the friendly Indian Squanto. Squanto wasn't his

actual name, and probably neither wasn't to Squantum, and for that matter, he might not have been so

friendly. Notwithstanding my love of

traditionalism, in this episode, I'll follow a man's lead and go with Tisquantum too, if you will

forgive me the occasional lapse. The reason why we might talk a bit about Tisquantam now,

we'll have much more to say when we get to the Pilgrims and the Mayflower and all,

is that we know of pre-Columbian conditions because of the very earliest observations by Europeans who wrote stuff down,

and Indians who had learned European languages and spoke to Europeans who again wrote stuff down.

Everything else is inferred or hypothesized via archaeology, botany, and other disciplines,

rather than witnessed.

Disquantam was a man of Patuxet, later Plymouth, one of the coastal settlements that comprised the Wampanag Confederation

in what is now eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Wampanags, if you will, were in turn in

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