Wilderness At Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent

"My next selection is Wilderness at Dawn by Ted Morgan. This book shaped my understanding of human geography. It reminds readers that America was settled by several different cultures and countries. It’s a triumph of storytelling about the different frontiers of America. We were often taught American history as going from East to West and the British settlement as being the preeminent story. Ted Morgan’s book emphasises the fact there were multiple settlements and multiple beginnings of American history. He spends the early chapters talking about American Indians and their presence on the landscape before European settlement. That influenced me quite a bit and shaped how I selected my sites for my book. The first two places I talk about are the Cahokia Mounds along the Mississippi river near St Louis in Illinois and the other is Mesa Verde in Colorado. Ted Morgan writes about both those places. But the Spanish presence, the French presence, and the Dutch—as well as the English later on—all play a major role in the settlement of North America. That is still debated by archaeologists today. Some of the most recent theories are that the first Americans may have arrived in the Americas by boat rather than by coming over the Bering Strait. If you attend any archaeological conferences, you will witness some very heated debates among archaeologists, who will stand by their different theories of how the first Americans arrived and where they first settled. I choose not to get into that debate, but it has been demonstrated that the original settlements were probably 15-16,000 years ago instead of 7000-8000 as had originally been thought. Ted Morgan has a gift for telling stories within stories. When he’s talking about the Spanish settlement in New Mexico, he will take a diversion, talking about the revolt of the Pueblo Indians in 1680 — the only successful Native American revolt against colonial rule in history. He provides important details around that revolt that clearly influenced the chapter I wrote about The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I think that’s an important point to make. History is not inevitable. It is based on decisions and choices that people make. Morgan is very skilful at identifying those key decisions and key choices that people made that really affected the outcome. Sometimes we read back into history and say, ‘it had to turn out this way,’ but it’s not as clear to the people who are actually living in that moment, how history is going to unfold."