Before Columbus - The World That Was
Essay 1 of 100: The Real History of the Americas
In 1491, the Americas were home to somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.
Let that number gel for a moment. Fifty to one hundred million human beings living in cities, farming land, building roads, governing themselves, trading across thousands of miles, practicing medicine, recording history, building astronomical observatories, and doing every other thing that human beings do when they have been living somewhere long enough to figure out how it works.
Europe, at the same moment in history, had roughly 60 to 80 million people.
I wasn’t taught this in school. Like you, I got the conqueror’s whitewashed version. The story we were taught — the one with the pilgrims and the empty wilderness and the providential hand of God guiding Christian civilization to an unclaimed continent — is a lie constructed after the fact to justify what had already been done. The Americas were not empty. They were not wilderness. They were not a savage land waiting to be claimed. They were home to tens of millions of human beings already. Human beings with their own cultures, traditions, and social hierarchies.
What happened to the Americas is the foundation of everything in this series.
Cahokia
In 1050 CE, at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers — roughly where East St. Louis, Illinois sits today — there was a city. Not a village. Not a settlement. A city. Cahokia was home to an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people at its peak, making it larger than London at the same period in history. It had a central plaza covering five acres. It had over 120 earthen mounds, the largest of which — Monks Mound — contained more earth by volume than the Great Pyramid at Giza. It had organized neighborhoods, a palisade wall four miles in circumference, and evidence of long-distance trade networks stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes.
Nobody knows what the people of Cahokia called themselves. Their descendants are likely among the Osage, Omaha, Ponca, and other nations of the region. What is known is that they built something extraordinary and that the history most Americans receive treats their existence as a footnote, if it appears at all.
Cahokia was not exceptional. It was representative of a human civilization that would soon be decimated.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — known to Europeans as the Iroquois League — was a functioning democratic republic. Five nations: the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Cayuga, and the Seneca. Founded sometime between 1450 and 1600 CE by a figure known as the Peacemaker, the Confederacy operated on a constitution — the Great Law of Peace — that established a bicameral legislature, procedures for debate and consensus, mechanisms for impeachment, protections for freedom of speech, and the principle that decisions must consider their impact on the seventh generation to come.
Benjamin Franklin studied the Haudenosaunee system extensively. He cited them at the Albany Congress of 1754 as a model for colonial union. The influence on the structure of the United States Constitution — the bicameral legislature, the federal structure balancing central and regional authority — is documented and acknowledged by historians who bother to look. It is not taught in most American classrooms. I was not taught about it. Were you?
The people who designed the government of the United States borrowed heavily from a political system they were simultaneously working to destroy.
The Amazon
In the Amazon basin, what Europeans encountered and described as “virgin rainforest” — pristine, untouched, the product of nature alone — was in fact a managed landscape. Indigenous peoples of the Amazon had been actively cultivating the forest for thousands of years. They created terra preta — dark, extraordinarily fertile soil produced through a combination of charcoal, bone, and organic waste — that persists to the present day and is still more productive than surrounding soil. They cultivated hundreds of species of plants, managed fish populations, built earthworks and causeways across vast areas of what is now Brazil and Bolivia.
The “wilderness” that European explorers described was not wilderness. It was a garden whose gardeners had been killed by European diseases before the explorers arrived to report on what they found.
The Mechanism: Disease Before Contact
Diseases arrived when the Europeans did.
Smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus — diseases to which European populations had developed partial immunity through centuries of exposure — spread through Indigenous trade networks at a speed that outpaced European movement through the continent. In many regions, 50 to 90 percent of the population died before sustained European contact. Francisco de Coronado’s expedition through the American Southwest in 1540-1542 found the ruins of civilizations that had been largely wiped out in the preceding decades. Hernando de Soto, moving through the American Southeast in 1539-1542, recorded dense populations and large towns. A century later, when English colonists arrived in the same region, they found what looked like empty land. It was emptied by what the Europeans brought with them on their ships. Whether intentional or not, a genocide occurred.
The historian Charles Mann, in his essential work 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, describes the experience of the English colonists at Plymouth: what they saw as providential preparation — cleared land, abandoned fields ready for planting — was the aftermath of a catastrophic epidemic that had swept through the region between 1616 and 1619, killing an estimated 90 percent of the coastal Wampanoag population. The Pilgrims built their settlement on the site of a Wampanoag town called Patuxent, whose residents had died in such numbers that the bodies had not been buried. The land was cleared because the people who cleared it were gone.
The Europeans called it a gift from God. The Indigenous population that remained did not.
The Maya
The Maya built one of the most sophisticated civilizations in human history. At its peak, between 250 and 900 CE, the Maya maintained a network of city-states across what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. They developed the only fully formed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. They developed a mathematical system that included the concept of zero — independently, centuries before it appeared in European mathematics. Their astronomical calculations were precise enough that their Venus tables are accurate to within two hours over a 500-year period.
Their cities — Tikal, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Copan — were engineering achievements of the first order. Tikal, at its peak in the 8th century CE, housed 100,000 people. Its temple-pyramids rose above the forest canopy. Its causeway system connected outlying communities to the city center. Its water management infrastructure — reservoirs, channels, filtration systems — sustained a population that would not be matched in the region again until the 20th century.
The Maya were not a lost civilization. They were a conquered one. Eight million Maya people live in Mexico and Central America today, many still speaking Mayan languages. The civilization did not collapse — it was disrupted, colonized, and systematically suppressed. The Spanish burned the majority of Maya written records in 1562. Bishop Diego de Landa, in an act of cultural destruction that he later partially documented with evident regret, burned thousands of Maya books — codices — because he considered them works of the devil. What survived are four codices, fragments of a literature that was deliberately erased.
The Inca
The Inca Empire, at its height in the early 16th century, was the largest empire in the Western Hemisphere and one of the largest in the world. It stretched 2,500 miles along the Andes from present-day Colombia to Chile, encompassing a population of somewhere between 10 and 12 million people. It administered this territory through a road system covering 25,000 miles — more extensive than the Roman road system at its peak — connected by relay runners who could move information 150 miles in a day.
The Inca managed an economy without currency, without markets in the Western sense, and without a writing system — instead using quipu, a system of knotted strings capable of recording numerical and potentially narrative information of considerable complexity. They performed successful trepanation — brain surgery — with survival rates that would not be matched by European medicine until the 19th century. They practiced large-scale agricultural terracing that turned the vertical faces of the Andes into productive farmland. They maintained storehouses of food distributed to the population in times of need.
Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire with 168 men, 27 horses, and one cannon. He was able to do so because smallpox had arrived ahead of him, killing the emperor and triggering a civil war that fractured the empire before Spanish forces reached it. The Inca did not fall to European military superiority. They fell to European disease, and then to European military force applied to a civilization already in catastrophic collapse. History is written by the conquerors — always in a way that whitewashes what amounts to multiple genocides.
Fantasies and Fairy Tales
None of this is secret history. It is documented, researched, peer-reviewed, and available to anyone who looks. It is not taught in most American schools because it is incompatible with the story America tells about itself.
The story America tells is this: a vast, mostly empty continent, populated by scattered tribes living in a state of nature, was encountered by European civilization and gradually, inevitably, and providentially brought into the modern world. The Indigenous peoples either joined that process or were left behind by it. What happened to them was tragic, perhaps, but it was the price of progress — the inevitable friction of civilization’s advance.
Every word of that story is wrong.
The Americas were not empty. The peoples who lived here were not primitive. Their political systems were not simple. Their civilizations were not inferior. What happened to them was not inevitable. European invaders made choices — repeatedly, deliberately, and for profit.
The Doctrine of Discovery, the papal bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, established the legal framework: Christian European nations could claim sovereignty over any land not already governed by Christian rulers. The people living on that land did not count. Their presence was legally irrelevant. Their civilizations — however sophisticated, however populated, however functional — could be dismissed, conquered, and replaced. They were less than human.
That papal doctrine was never fully repudiated. The United States Supreme Court cited it as recently as 2005, in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York, as the basis for denying Oneida land claims. The legal architecture of Indigenous dispossession rests on a 15th century papal decree that said the people who built Cahokia, who wrote the Great Law of Peace, who charted Venus, who built 25,000 miles of roads, were not sovereign over their own land because they were not Christian.
Beginnings
The story of the United States did not begin in 1776. Not in 1619. Not in 1492. It begins in the world that existed before all of those dates — a world of 50 to 100 million people, of cities and confederacies and road systems and astronomical observatories and managed forests and political constitutions — and in the systematic destruction of that world and the systematic erasure of its existence from the story told by the civilization that replaced it.
The wealth. The land. The labor. The law. The mythology. The flag and the pledge and the city on the hill and the greatest country on earth and all the rest of it. Seized. Stolen. Storied.
We start here because this is where honesty requires us to start. Not because it is comfortable. Not because it makes anyone feel good. Because the foundation determines the structure, and you cannot understand the structure if you have been lied to about the foundation.
The foundation was a world.
A world that was destroyed.
And then erased from the story of its own destruction.
That is where we begin.
Next: Essay 2 — 1492: The Arrival of Empire
Penfist is a combat veteran, Marine combat correspondent, and the author of Dispatches from a Dying Empire at dyingempire.org. He grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti, was raised by Mennonite and Amish parents, and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
A fascinating and beautifully constructed accurate historical analysis.
This is wonderful. I knew much of it. But when put together and expressed this way, it is powerful and intensely interesting.
The European/American story of our school years was bullshit.
Imagine if Europeans had embraced the Americans as resources of knowledge and wisdom developed over centuries...
Another reason why "Chritianity" is at its core just self absorbed ignorance.