em dependent on the white man after the War of 1812.
Traditional Cultures and Initial Responses to the Europeans
According to Gibson, "by around 1500 A.D., Eastern peoples had reached that stage of cultural maturity which prehistorians called Woodland" (32). In the North and in Appalachia, their cultures further evolved in parallel with cultural adaptations to the arrival of the Europeans. In the South, the 16th century Spanish incursions produced a devastatingly negative effect, mainly through the spread of deadly diseases such as smallpox, measles, and typhus against which the Indians had no natural immunity and which decimated indigenous populations and hastened the end of the Mississippi culture. According to Green, among the various tribes which came to make up the Creek Confederacy, the population declined from about 200,000 in 1500 to about 10,000 in 1700 (17). Similar epidemic-induced population declines were experienced later along the Atlantic coast, in the St. Lawrence Valley and, to a lesser extent, among the tribes further inland. Eradication of New England and Coastal Indian Cultures. The Indians who occupied the coastal areas along the eastern seaboard from Maine in the north to South Carolina in the south bore the brunt of the initial waves of European settlement. In New England, the primary tribes were Algonquian, such as the Penobscots, Abenakis, Massachusetts, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Pequots. Their combined population when the English settlements began in 1620 was small, about 25,000 (Gibson 186). Even so, they were strong enough to have thrown the earliest settlers back into the sea, but instead co-existed with them, except for sporadic incidents. Most of these tribes were relatively pacific, content to pursue sedentary farming, fishing and hunting and to participate in the fur and other trading activities opened up by the English. Those that were not, such as the Pequots, were in the 1630s hunted do...