ABSTRACT
In North America there were no great indigenous empires, as the great urban center of Cahokia on the Mississippi River had collapsed shortly before the arrival of Europeans. As a result, the circumstances of the encounter between Native Americans and European settlers in North America were quite different than the encounter between Europeans and the societies of Latin America, East Asia, or the Ottoman Empire. Encounters between the Native Americans and the Puritans and Pilgrims have traditionally been portrayed as friendly and constructive. When they sailed across the Atlantic in the early 1600s, the Europeans saw the new world through their own cultural lens. They saw a wilderness that was filled with seemingly infinite abundance, but untamed, having no plowed fields, fences, or farm houses. Native Americans used the land differently than British colonists. According to many Europeans, Native Americans were poor because they had not improved the land.
