ABSTRACT
Combining written sources, archaeological findings, linguistic studies, and oral histories, historians and anthropologists have pieced together a surprisingly rich portrait of Native life in pre-colonial North America. The documents one a Native oral tradition and the others written by early Spanish conquistadors provide glimpses of early Indian society in three distinct regions: the Northeast, the Southwest, and the Southeast. An oral tradition of the Huron Indians, offers an alternative explanation of the origins of North America's Native people. This account was related by a Huron woman named Catherine Johnson in 1912. Pedro de Castaeda de Njera accompanied Coronado's 1540-1542 expedition into the American Southwest to Mexico and wrote one of the earliest European descriptions of the Pueblo Indians some years after his return. The description of the Mississippian people of the American Southeast derives from an account of the 1539-1543 Hernando de Soto expedition in Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo y Valds's Historia General y Natural de las Indias.
