"Wherever Christians have passed, conquering and discovering, it seems as though a fire has gone, consuming everything."
-- Pedro de Cieza de Lion, ca. 1550. 1550

Europeans "discovered" America by sheer stroke of luck. Then, they created empires out of the conquest of the native peoples. This conquest was accompanied by centuries of cultural interaction not only with Native Americans, but also with the unfortunate Africans—interaction that meant disaster for both the Africans and the Native Americans but victory for the Europeans, to be sure, but this was the conquest that transformed all three nations in the process .

In times before Columbus sailed to America, Europeans were the most doubtful of all candidates for global discoveries and explorations. Chinese had the financial resources as well as the navigational skills that would have enabled them to explore, but the world outside of China was of no importance to them. The Arabs and other Islamic states also possessed wealth and the required knowledge, but they were only interested in the regions that were close to them—and not in those that were totally unfamiliar. Europeans, on the other hand, were busy gathering the needed capital and expertise.

The European explorers were all searching for a sea route to Asia. Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the Spanish royals, started his journey in 1492. He used the known routine paths to the Canary Islands, towards the northwest coast of Africa, and then navigated on. In nearly two months he reached the Caribbean on an island in the Bahamas, believing that he had arrived at the East Indies. The Spanish explored further. Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci also travelled on a ship to the northern coast of South America in 1499 and marked the land as a new continent. European mapmakers later labeled it America to pay tribute to this explorer.

When discovered by the Europeans, North America had a complex variety of native individuals. Most thickly populated was the Atlantic Seaboard from the borders of the modern-day Southern Maine to North Carolina, where Algonquian-speaking population lived in established agricultural communities. They made efficient use of the much sophisticated and refined means of cultivation, along with hunting and fishing for a livelihood. In the Great Lakes region and the Saint Lawrence River area, the Native Americans cultivated wild rice, hunted and fished. They also made use of advanced agricultural methods, and moved from place to place by canoes, getting connected with other nations through a structure of friendly trading groups and much hostility too.

The Mississippian and Hopewell societies to the south were also thickly populated, with reciprocally hostile inhabitants and hierarchical social systems. To the west, on the less densely populated Great Plains lived the Amerindian hunters. On the West shore, from present-day southern Alaska to the Columbia River, mobile trading states journeyed along the coast and along the rivers, even navigating at times, as far south as the Acoma pueblo towns of modern California on instances. They made use of seafaring canoes to do the business of iron, pelts, copper, dried fish, fish oil, dentalium shells, and human slaves with other coastal regions. The Pacific coast was one of the most sophisticated areas of North America before the European invasion; it could also boast of the greatest variety of languages on the continent as well as too many diverse and complex cultures. Other nations that could be called Natives in North America included the Inuit, the Aleut, and the Athapaskan speaking groups.
Native Americans endure lots of hardships primarily because of their isolation from the rest of the world. Europe, Africa, and Asia had been exchanging information and material goods for centuries. Societies on all three known continents had learned to use iron and also had flocks of animals used for domestic purposes. Europeans had bought gunpowder, paper, and paraphernalia needed for navigation from the Chinese. Native Americans, on the other hand, did not have any of these advantages. They were often vulnerable against European conquerors with horses, firearms, and—especially— armor and weapons and other means of defense.
The most devastating outcome of the continuing isolation of the Native Americans was biological, i.e. it affected their very lives. Asians, Africans, and Europeans who had been open to one another’s diseases for a long time had developed a strong immune system that to some extent protected them from most infections. On a whole, Native Americans were healthier than the Europeans who first conquered them. But they were powerless and weak against diseases brought by the Europeans and the Africans. Smallpox became the major cause of death, but infections such as those of measles and influenza also killed thousands of people.

In North America, the French, Spanish and Dutch established basic European societies and—more significantly— detailed, lasting trading ties with the Native inhabitants, made efforts to convert them to Christianity and sometimes to turn them into a labor force for occupations as mining and agriculture. Among the European conquerors of North America, only the English formed settlements of agricultural immigrants as their interest in Native Americans was less about trade than about the attainment and acquisition of land. Thus the Native Americans faced a far greater threat from the English than from any other invading state. The Spanish, French, and Dutch wanted to find valuable metals in America and to trade with the original inhabitants. Their agricultural settlements in the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America were worked on by African slaves, labourers and by other unwilling native people, and comparatively fewer Europeans settled permanently in those areas. In comparison, England, a late arrival to this New World resettlement, sent more people to America than other European nations—about 400,000 in the 17th century—and established more permanent horticultural settings.

Shortly after the occupation of America, Catholic missionaries—Jesuits until 1571, Franciscans and Dominicans after that, endeavored to convert Native Americans to Christianity. They founded missions not only at the heart of the new domain, but also in New Mexico and Florida. Spanish missionaries even temporarily built mission settlements in Virginia.

In the Southwest, Native Americans rebelled when Spanish missionaries tried to obliterate their religion, their belief and faith, and they succeeded in forcing the priests back to Mexico. When Eastern Native Americans rebelled against colonial expansion, they were not as fortunate and successful as those of the Southwest. After being crushed twice, the Native Americans living on the Atlantic coastline submitted to the English rule. In interior North America, the influential and dominant Iroquois held onto their power only as long as the enmity between Britain and France existed. As the settlement’s European and African populace increased rapidly, revivalism and the Great Awakening swept through the colonies. These two religious movements encouraged individual responsibility and stimulated Americans to defy unjust authority, especially in such matters as enslavement and control of their native place.
To live like Europeans was not intrinsically the nature of the Native Americans, yet a small number of people (identifying their immense drawback in numbers and skill to carry on sustained conflict and rivalry) attempted to get at least some degree of safety from European invasion by seeking diplomatic relations and approving of European methods of farming, manners of clothing and other cultural bits. In the end, these efforts failed to safeguard tribal freedom. Individuals intermarried with Europeans and were accepted by the majority people. The tribal way of life gradually gave way until the few existing groups were downgraded to the level of wards of the State and were required to live on lands the Europeans believed were useless for themselves. The communication among groups created an intricate mosaic of relationships and associations. Many different forms of opposition and adjustment among Indian, African and European peoples occurred throughout the region. But it was the Europeans' cultural conceit, together with their money-oriented outlook towards the territory and its animal and plant beings that the Indians found disgusting. Europeans, in summation, were regarded as emotionless - soulless beings that used diabolically ingenious tools and armory to achieve mad ends. And in the end, it was the Native Americans who lost their culture, traditions and values at the hands of the colonist Europeans.