The very first white outsiders to arrive—by general agreement, the expeditions led by the Spanish conquistador Ponce de León, whose ships made landfall in 1513 on both the western and eastern shores of what he christened “Florida”—were however suspicious of those they first encountered, and in their behavior toward them were disdainful, intolerant, and short-tempered. The expedition deputies claimed to have found the local Indians—a people called the Calusa—markedly hostile, and there was much unseemly behavior—capture, killing, enslavement—in consequence.

  The Spaniards may have formally claimed for Spain such of the territory as they saw, but they abandoned their first explorations of North America without creating a colony—this Ponce de León did with a second expedition eight years later, in 1521—and sailed off southwest in the hope of reaching Mexico, and there find compatriots. But they were shipwrecked off Galveston Island, in present-day Texas, where they met groups of local nomadic Indians, most probably members of the Karankawa band, who were rather more amiable than the Calusa, took pity on the starving sailors’ plight, fed them fish and nuts, and offered entertainment and shelter. But in time the Spaniards turned on these people too and fighting and eradication once again dominated the relationship.

  Neither the Karankawa nor the Calusa people exist today, evaporated and exterminated by imported illness and skirmishing. The Karankawa had been seasonal drifters; the Calusa, if they ever fully embraced the concept of landownership—which was somewhat unlikely, since they were a shoreline people, their homes perched on stilts among the mangroves, their habits more connected to fishing than to the growing of crops from the earth—it is a memory now long extinguished. What was once the exclusive domain of Floridian fisherfolk now gleams with the elaborate mansions and apartment buildings of the wealthy American retirees who have come south to cities like Tampa and Naples, to escape the northern cold.

  The early Spaniards who first colonized these parts were in their behavior toward the locals something of a dishonorable exception among early European adventurers: it can be fairly be said that their conquistadores did not get matters colonial off to a good start. By contrast the early explorers and settlers from the more northerly European states—though they were quite as imperially motivated as the Spaniards, and so by today’s standards equally deserving of contempt—generally liked what they found and were well liked in return.

  “A gentle and loving people” remarked one of Henry Hudson’s fellow Dutchmen in 1609, as his little ship the Half Moon wound its way upriver through the thickly settled estates of the Mohican people. And the Mohicans returned the favor: “Our forefathers immediately joined hands with the people in the vessel,” a tribal elder told a conference a century and a half later, “and became friends.”

  Across on the far coast, too, there was an initial atmosphere of near collegial amity. In June 1579 Francis Drake, privateer and explorer and Queen Elizabeth’s then current hero, was beating his little carrack the Golden Hind northward through the eastern Pacific. He was hugging the coast, for reasons of both of navigational prudence and imperial possibility. He was well aware of the Spaniards’ dominant Pacific presence south of the equator, as well as their being settled in their possessions—like the Philippines—on the far, western side of this immense body of water. But they had thus far made few significant inroads in the northeast—aside from Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo’s sighting of the spectacularly useful bay at what is now San Diego—along the ocean’s northern and eastern coasts. Drake wanted to lay claim to these untaken parts, and so sailed on northward (his crew one day noting with dismay a fall of snow, suggesting to modern historians that the ship went very much farther up the coast) and eventually brought his craft to a halt in what is now believed to have been northern California. The precise landing spot remains a matter of argument, but most probably it was somewhere between San Francisco and Mendocino, where a bay near Point Reyes, and now named for him, is edged with cliffs that bear a striking resemblance to the white chalk cliffs of Dover. Drake spent forty days here and dealt on terms of some intimacy with the local Indians—Coast Miwok, most likely—and professed himself entirely charmed by them. They were even more enthusiastically captivated in return, crowning Drake a king and making as to worship him and all his crew.

  But there was a sting to Drake’s apparent affection. He certainly described his hosts with sympathy, the men and women he met as being “of a tractable, free and loving nature, without guile or treachery.” It turns out that he, being more rogue than saint, would behave with both treachery and with guile himself. He took formal possession of their lands in the name of Queen Elizabeth, managing to do so by claiming that the acres were a gift, and from a people who, so lacking in guile, did now “freely resign their right and title in the whole land unto her Majesties keeping.”

  “New Albion” was what Drake called his possession, and he had his ship’s smith hammer out a brass plate formally stating his claim, with an English sixpence welded into it to give a semblance of Elizabeth’s royal imprimatur. He wrote later that he had fixed the plate to a stout post somewhere near his campsite. But it has never been found—though a forgery of credible quality was uncovered in the 1930s, fooling many people until later science disproved its authenticity.

  Drake’s claim—a monstrous cheek, one might say today, since it is surely unthinkable that any Miwok would seriously have agreed to handing over land on which their people had lived contentedly for generations—was to have profound implications for the future of Britain’s relationship with North America for centuries to come. It was, to some historians and legal scholars, an indication that the whole country, east coast to west, had been taken by England and so the entire nation—most of its interior at this moment quite unexplored—was a colony.

  Drake’s taking of the Miwok land was of course not thought of as cheek at all back at court. In 1580 the grateful Virgin Queen, beneficiary in chief of Drake’s American discovery, awarded her captain a knighthood. and touched her sword upon his shoulders in a ceremony on the Golden Hind’s afterdeck, in the very port of Deptford, in east London, from which the now Sir Francis had set sail four years before.

  England’s initial local intentions may well have been good. Those in the imperial vanguard may indeed have entertained publicly positive thoughts about such natives as they met, may have come initially to think of those on both American coasts, Mohican to Miwok, as gentle and innocent, as souls to be treated with respect and kindness. But this was the publicly expressed view. Deep within the newcomers’ minds was a shrewd, cynical, and calculating component. For the Indians were their rivals, competitors for the possession of the great tracts of the square mileage on which they had for so long existed, but which the incoming settlers now so dearly wished for themselves. And as early as the sixteenth century the newcomers began the lengthy and initially stealthy process of wresting away that land.

  It was a complicated and accelerating process that ranged from prudent exchange by way of cunning purchase to fits of outright theft. It came mostly veiled in a pervasive attitude of curt dismissiveness, which, in essence, would define almost all imperial adventuring among those the newcomers thought of as inferior. It led to a series of processes—followed both by the colonists and then in ever more dramatic fashion by the new-made Americans themselves as they ambitiously pursued their Manifest Destiny—that would eventually deprive an ancient native people of almost all of the territory which had given them such sustenance for many thousands of years.

  Those who led the first two fully organized and lasting English settlements on American soil—the Virginia Company, with its original headquarters at Jamestown, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, first based in the seaport of Salem—enjoyed a growing certainty about their right and duty to gather, claim, and own—in the name of the English monarch, that is—the land that they would now administer. The Dutch humanist scholar-poet named Hugo Grotius had advanced a legal opinion that offered broad justification for the settlers to plunder as they wished: “land which lies common, and hath never beene replenished or subdued,” he wrote in a text considered in Europe of the time to be the essence of wisdom, “is free to any that possesse and improve it.”

  Not a few of the Puritans were, however, somewhat discomfited by the employment of this blanket argument of consent. so they sought additional biblical authority. They had considerable early admiration for the local Wampanoag people and had an understanding that these friendly and cultivated natives—who were decidedly helpful to the nervous strangers now in their midst—had a particular reverence for the land that they had clearly been using for a very long time, and with evident sophistication for agriculture. Massasoit, the great sachem of the tribe, described their feeling toward the earth beneath their feet. The land, he declared, was “our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?”

  John Winthrop, the Bay Colony’s second and most influential governor, was the first to dilute Grotius’s opinion by stirring a tincture of godly authority for landownership* into the mix by arguing—as the English philosopher John Locke would argue more forcefully fifty years later—that it was man’s Christian duty not just to own the land, but to improve it. The Book of Genesis, after all, spoke of the injunction for humankind to “increase and multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.” Winthrop could thus argue that the settlers now had both a natural, God-given right to own, but a civil right too, one that came about only when the land was fenced in, manured and improved, to paraphrase his own words in a pamphlet that he published in 1629 designed for the westbound voyagers to read on their Atlantic crossing.

  Captain John Smith—the man who coined the phrase New England for the territories to the north and west of the Plymouth Colony—was even more forceful than Winthrop about the pioneers’ need to acquire land, and he had little truck with the idea that the Deity should play any kind of role in justifying its seizure. His experience in Virginia—where he had understandably conflicted feelings about the local natives, the Powhatan, since they had been planning to execute him, and would have done but for the legendary supposed intervention of the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas—led him to believe that the English should be allowed to live more or less where they liked and to own what they would. America had an abundance of room for all, he told his followers, and so far as he was aware this room was quite unoccupied. If this single fact wasn’t sufficient to ease their consciences, they should remember, he cautioned, what little monetary value the Powhatan, the Wampanoag, or any other Indians so far encountered had placed on it: “for a copper knife and a few toys, as beads or hatchets, they will sell you a whole country—and for a small matter their houses and the ground they dwell upon.”

  And there was one other justification for land seizure, and that could be added to those permissions offered by international law, by the Bible, and by simple need. There was, for the English most of all, the matter of the king, and the “divine grace” by which he reigned and ruled. The formal royal charters that set up the colonists’ adventuring in the first place gave the settlers the right—and indeed the duty—to take such land as they wanted in the king’s name. They would create real estate—royal estate, some might say—in the unquestioned name of God.

  Superimposed on the specific ideas that then justified native land acquisition, and which were advanced by colonial managers like Winthrop and Smith, was a very much more ancient legal provision of breathtaking audacity, known generally today as the Doctrine of Discovery. This notion was first adduced by the fifteenth-century Portuguese, who sought and won a papal bull—known as Romanus Pontifex*—which permitted them, very basically, to seize as much of west Africa as they cared to take. The idea put forward then—and which has generally held legal sway throughout all subsequent American history, even though it started by being limited to the colonizing ambitions of just Portugal and Spain—held that if a European nation was lucky enough to discover foreign lands peopled by non-Christian natives, it had an inalienable right to own those lands and to colonize such people as were unlucky enough to live in the Europeans’ path. England and France soon followed suit, employing their own version of the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their own behaviors around the world as their empires burgeoned through the centuries; and the United States, once it got itself under way in the 1780s, used the same or a similar version of the doctrine to claim ownership of the lands hitherto settled by Indians. Merely by planting a flag, the doctrine said, you owned the land on which you planted it.

  The British went further: believing the doctrine extended authority over humanity every bit as much as it did over landscape, they also took large numbers of Native Americans into slavery. Ironically the Spaniards, reputedly leaders of thought in these matters, had made slavery of Native Americans illegal in the mid-sixteenth century, leading the British to employ subterfuge and semantic sleight of hand to force indigenous people to work their plantations in the Caribbean—fulfilling the initial land-grabbing and slave-making suppositions of the doctrine to the letter, in other words. The Americans later took thousands of locals as slaves too, though this “other slavery,” as it has been recently called, was also perpetrated in cunning ways, coercive labor based on financial indebtedness being the classic means of forcing natives to work on the southern plantations, alongside the African importees.

  So now the principle had been conceived and agreed to—that by divinely sanctioned right and with formal papal endorsement, European flag-planting settlers might now take away the land previously settled by the America’s vast and varied population of native peoples. And with that, so the rush to gather up the spoils—the land and its landscapes, soon to be deconsecrated and commodified—got ponderously under way.

  Land was by now a fully recognized capital asset, with its value positively straining to be released by the labor of men who worked on it. This was one of the central messages of the then widely published and popular writings of William Petty, the seventeenth-century philosopher-anatomist who was at the time cutting a swathe through economic thinking in England. Petty—mathematician, linguist, astronomer, surveyor, navigator, doctor, thinker of formidable breadth, and a prodigious talent*—had convinced most in the English establishment of the day that land was not a merely static resource, rock and grass and little else, but was an asset with an inherent capital value that could be released by the simple process of working it. Moreover, land’s intrinsic value would also increase by the simplest principle of supply and demand, in that land was limited in supply but the population that wanted it would always be guaranteed to increase, such that the land would become ever more in demand, and so command higher and higher prices at sale. Since land would in both theory and practice bring profit to all involved, land must be acquired by colonists coming to America if they were to profit and prosper and lead the colonies into the sunlit uplands of economic success.

  The colonial managers agreed entirely. For a while, any settler who paid his own way across the ocean to Virginia was given a so-called headright of one hundred acres of land, free and clear. So popular did this enticement become, and the ships in consequence so crammed to the bulwarks with migrants, that Virginia had in short order to cut back on its promise and instead charge a modest five shillings for fifty acres—and even then most of those flocking to the New World were said by the historian Robert Beverley to be “not minding anything but to be masters of great tracts of land.”

  A lust for land was from now on part of the quintessential allure of America, a lust that transcended the more principled reason for migration, which had been the religious and political freedoms promised by breaking free of the stiffening constraints of the older world. Land was what could be had, and in abundance. Except, of course, for the inconvenient reality that this land was already owned by others, by communities who had a prescribed right to have and to hold on to it.

  So, what would eventually happen in Oklahoma, and which was centered most profoundly around the distribution of land, was now firmly on the horizon. What would be particularly egregious examples of land grabbing now simply required the passage of time—a century and a half of further colonial rule, then the creation of the United States out of the divided remains of the gigantic American fiefdom of the British empire, and a century more of Washington’s independent governance, briefly fractured though it was during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. During all of these periods of North American history, native lands were being thinned and culled and native people were being slain and pinioned into remote reservations, tracts that were often waterless or infertile or both, impenetrable laagers that no white man would ever wish for. Or else they were forced away to become homeless, or were subjected to savage legislative sanction—leaving the country in the state it is today, with (in the view of many critical environmentalists) the original inhabitants left mainly landless, and those who have since occupied these former native territories disrespecting and despoiling them in a manner no Indian ever would have done.

  For the Native Americans had looked after their land. They tilled and fertilized it, they grew ample harvests of corn and squash, beans and cotton. They dug irrigation canals. They used fire—most bands had flint carriers who could set fires to trap and encircle animals, to clear forests for planting, to illuminate the night. They built roadways and trading networks, and even the forests were culled to space out the trees so that bands of men in large numbers could move through them at speed. Their villages had accommodations both permanent for the settled tribes and portable for those still practicing nomadism. They had tribal governments. They held ceremonies and councils and meted out justice and maintained discipline. They worshipped gods, built temples, carved totems.

  They were, in short, a sophisticated and civilized people—and though many Americans today believe there to be precious few natives remaining in the country, there are in fact some five hundred tribes remaining and officially recognized today, with as many languages spoken, and of as rich and complex a set of etymologies as might be imagined. Native Americans are all, it should be remembered, genetically related to those who twenty thousand years ago crossed by way of Beringia, the land bridge across the north Pacific between eastern Russia and western Alaska. Native Americans are, genetically, a Pacific people. They are, in essence, an Asian people. Americans are Asians—or they were, until the Europeans swept in and stole so much from them, and came to regard the Indians essentially as savages, as barely human primitives in the country that they had first settled, the country that they had first made.