Miners at work in the Argonaut Mine in Jackson, California
In each place and at different times, these settlers adapted to hostile environments in numerous ways. In the inhospitable arctic, both the Norse in the eleventh century and the English mining expedition in the sixteenth century had to weigh the costs versus the gains of exploiting the frozen land. Early in the next century, the English found the warm, humid wetlands of tidewater Virginia barely more welcoming when they planted a colony on Jamestown Island. Still further south, La Salle sailed into the Gulf of Mexico near the century’s end seeking a passage through North America to the Orient and a favorable place for a French settlement. But the mudflats of the Texas Gulf coast proved hostile to these settlers unfamiliar with its foods and unprepared for its storms, insects and reptiles, and the diseases they carried. Almost two centuries later, for new immigrants mining the Sierra Nevadas to the north and west, the tools of industrialization offered little comfort in the isolation of winter.
The dynamic history of people and the land in North America has many complicated layers. In Jamestown, the National Park Service-sponsored team learned to follow the money and the goods, where they came from and how they were used, to unravel the economics of city-building in the early English colony. In the West, the scale of mining and the extent of the environmental consequences have led archaeologists to stories of poisoning and cleanups and, again, of money, this time on an industrial scale. But like the archaeologists excavating La Salle’s ship, La Belle, they also seek to tell stories of people. With their help, we can literally see the Irish miners and French colonists and learn how places like target-shooting galleries and objects like ancient Roman coins offered some small comfort against the uncertainties of sea voyages and immigration to an alien land.
For generations, many of us learned that the story of the Americas began with Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” in 1492. But that is only one place to begin the story. There are other, often less familiar but equally important, stories to tell about encounters between people and the unique and diverse environments of North America.