At 250 Years: The American Story Part One: Encounter and Conquest

The World Columbus Entered

The earliest Native Americans likely arrived on the continent by crossing Beringia, the land bridge that once connected Northeast Asia to North America. While scholars continue to debate the timing and details of these migrations, we do know this: by the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the late 1400s, the Americas were already home to hundreds of Indigenous societies, each with distinct languages, religions, economies, and forms of government.

Many Native societies organized daily life around agriculture, especially the crops often called “the Three Sisters,” corn, beans, and squash. These crops provided a stable food supply and allowed many communities to settle in one place, grow in population, develop complex cultures, and create lasting works of art, architecture, and technology.

The agricultural practices associated with the Three Sisters spread northward into the American Southwest around the first century. By about A.D. 1000, major farming settlements had developed in what is now New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. In these regions, Southwestern peoples built impressive cliff dwellings and apartment-like structures known as pueblos. One of the most remarkable examples is Chaco Canyon in present-day New Mexico, which became a major center of culture, trade, and architecture.

Around the middle of the eleventh century, another major Native settlement emerged near the Mississippi River, close to present-day St. Louis, Missouri. Known today as Cahokia, this city may have held around 20,000 people at its height, rivaling the size of major European cities such as London during the same period. Cahokia reminds us that North America was not an empty wilderness waiting to be discovered. It was already home to large, organized, and sophisticated societies.

Other Native societies encountered by European explorers included the Eastern Woodland peoples, such as the Mohegans in New England and the Powhatans in Virginia. These groups were part of the broader Algonquian-speaking world. Like many other Native communities, they relied on corn, beans, and squash as essential parts of their diet. They also managed the forest through controlled burning, which improved fields for planting and created better habitats for deer and other game.

Another major group in the Eastern Woodlands were the Iroquoian-speaking peoples. Like their Algonquian neighbors, they combined hunting, gathering, and farming. They too cultivated the Three Sisters and developed strong village communities, political alliances, and regional networks of trade and influence.

Before Europeans ever called this land “America,” it was already filled with peoples, places, languages, cities, farms, governments, and stories. Any faithful account of American history must begin there.

The Age of Exploration and Exploitation

While Native societies developed across the Americas, largely disconnected from the Crusades and other major events in Europe, European powers began looking outward. By the late Middle Ages, kingdoms such as Portugal and Spain were investing heavily in exploration, trade, and conquest.

What drove Europeans to explore the west coast of Africa and eventually the eastern coasts of the Americas? The simple answer is land, wealth, trade, and power.

The travels of Marco Polo to China in the late 1200s stirred the European imagination. His accounts of Asia’s wealth created a hunger for access to the riches of the East. But overland travel from Europe to Asia was long, costly, and dangerous. Trade with Asia had introduced Europeans to gunpowder, cannons, and navigational tools such as the compass, but sea travel remained difficult and unreliable.

That began to change when Portuguese shipbuilders developed a new kind of vessel called the caravel. These ships were faster, more maneuverable, and better suited for long voyages than earlier medieval ships. The caravel opened new possibilities for exploration, colonization, and global trade. To use a modern analogy, it was almost like the invention of lightspeed in Star Trek. Suddenly, a much larger world seemed reachable.

Portuguese explorers first pushed down the coast of West Africa in search of gold and trade routes. But they soon discovered another source of profit: human beings. In 1482, the Portuguese founded the port of Elmina on the Gold Coast. Elmina became one of the most important European trading posts in West Africa and, over time, a major point of departure for enslaved Africans forced into the Atlantic slave system.

Because Europeans often struggled to travel far into the African interior, they relied heavily on African slave traders and political powers who captured men, women, and children through war, raids, and regional conflict. These captives were then sold into existing slave networks that reached North Africa and the Middle East. Eventually, Europeans became major buyers, expanding this trade across the Atlantic.

At the same time, European tastes were changing. The growing demand for sugar helped create the brutal system of plantation slavery. Sugar colonies required enormous labor forces, and enslaved Africans were treated as movable property—bought, sold, transported, and forced to work for profit. In time, enslaved labor also fueled the production of other cash crops, including rice, tobacco, and eventually cotton.

These crops became central to colonial wealth in the Americas. But that wealth came at a devastating human cost. The plantation system helped produce the largest forced migration of people in human history and bound the story of European colonization to the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade.

The coming of the Europeans, then, was not merely a story of ships and discovery. It was a story of ambition, technology, commerce, conquest, and exploitation. The same voyages that expanded Europe’s world also shattered the worlds of countless others.

Christopher Columbus

If one figure represents Europe’s new age of western exploration, it is the Italian sailor Christopher Columbus. While explorers such as Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1488 and Vasco da Gama sailed to India in 1497–1498, others began to wonder whether Asia could be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus believed it could.

A committed Roman Catholic, Columbus shared the religious and imperial vision of the Spanish monarchy. Spain had recently completed the reconquest of Muslim-controlled territory on the Iberian Peninsula, and Columbus saw his voyages as part of a larger Christian mission. He believed Spain could carry the faith into new lands, confront Islam, oppose idolatry, and expand Christian rule. Yet, as his story shows, religious language was often entangled with the hunger for wealth, land, and power.

Columbus was also mistaken about where he had arrived. When he reached the Caribbean islands in 1492, he believed he had found islands near Japan or China. Because he thought he had reached the East Indies, he and other Europeans called the Native peoples “Indios,” or “Indians.” The name was based on a geographical error, but it would remain.

Another Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, later helped demonstrate that these lands were not part of Asia but a previously unknown continent to Europeans. In 1507, a German mapmaker used Vespucci’s name and labeled the land “America.”

Across four voyages, Columbus visited the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His men established a small settlement on Hispaniola called La Navidad because they had landed there on Christmas Day.

The Native people of Hispaniola, the Taíno, suffered devastating consequences after European arrival. Epidemic disease, forced labor, enslavement, violence, and Spanish domination shattered their society. Before Columbus arrived, Hispaniola was home to a large Indigenous population. Within a few generations, that population had collapsed. Many died from diseases to which they had no immunity. Others were exploited through slavery and forced labor. Some were offered limited freedom only if they accepted Christianity and submitted to Spanish rule.

After Columbus’s voyages, Spain, Portugal, and Rome began negotiating control over the Atlantic world. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas divided newly claimed lands between Spain and Portugal. Spain received much of the Western Hemisphere, while Portugal gained control over routes and territories connected to Africa and, eventually, Brazil. European powers were now turning discovery into empire.

Other nations soon joined the race. In 1497, England commissioned the Italian sailor John Cabot, who explored parts of the North Atlantic coast, including present-day Canada. His voyage marked the beginning of England’s claim to territory in the New World.

Columbus’s voyages also helped give rise to a new kind of figure: the conquistador. These soldiers of fortune were armed adventurers who sought treasure, land, and glory in the Caribbean, Central America, and parts of what is now the southern and southwestern United States. They were often ruthless men, operating with royal permission, religious justification, and personal ambition.

Yet not everyone in Spain celebrated what was happening. The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas had once participated in the conquest and subjugation of Native peoples in Hispaniola and Cuba. But he later repented and became one of the most famous defenders of Indigenous peoples. He described the Native inhabitants as gentle sheep torn apart by Spanish wolves, accusing the Spaniards of doing little more than destroying, tormenting, and enslaving them.

Las Casas’s writings spread throughout Europe, especially through his work A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. His reports helped convince Pope Paul III to issue a 1537 declaration condemning the abuse and enslavement of Native peoples and insisting that they were not to be treated as beasts but as human beings capable of receiving the Christian faith.

The story of Columbus illustrates the complicated nature of European exploration. European powers often justified their efforts by claiming they were serving the church and bringing Christianity to “heathen” lands. But again and again, the desire for land, wealth, and power overwhelmed any genuine concern for communicating the message of Jesus Christ.

Columbus remains one of the most consequential figures in world history. He was bold, brilliant, ambitious, and deeply mistaken. His voyages connected worlds that had long been separated. But they also opened the door to conquest, disease, enslavement, and the destruction of Indigenous peoples.

His legacy reminds us that exploration is never morally neutral when it is joined to greed. The cross cannot be faithfully carried in one hand while the other hand reaches for conquest.

The Spanish Conquest of the Americas

Spain’s ambitions in the Americas did not stop in the Caribbean. As reports of wealth spread, Spanish conquistadores turned their attention to the mainland of Central and South America.

In 1519, Hernán Cortés led Spanish forces into Mexico and eventually attacked the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, ruled by Moctezuma II. At the time, Tenochtitlán was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of around 200,000 people. The Spanish had military advantages through horses, cannons, steel weapons, and armor. But the most devastating force was not Spanish technology. It was disease. Smallpox ravaged Indigenous communities that had no immunity to European illnesses. Within a decade of the Spanish invasion, millions of Native people in central Mexico had died.

After the conquest of the Mexica, commonly known as the Aztecs, and later the Incas of Peru, Spain controlled a vast imperial network stretching from the Caribbean through Central and South America and into parts of the North American Southwest. What began as exploration quickly became conquest, and conquest quickly became empire.

Spanish expeditions also moved into what would become the future United States. Hernando de Soto traveled through Florida and across parts of the Southeast. Spanish leaders sought to establish the encomienda system, which forced Native peoples into labor under Spanish rule. In 1565, Spain founded St. Augustine, Florida, which became the first continuously settled European town in what is now the United States. Yet even there, Spain faced growing competition from French and English ambitions along the Atlantic coast.

Conquistadores such as Cortés and de Soto often brought priests with them. The stated goal was not merely conquest but also Christianization. Yet, as Bartolomé de las Casas warned, there was a deep contradiction between subjugating Native peoples and evangelizing them. How could the Spanish claim to bring the gospel of Christ while also enslaving, exploiting, and destroying the very people they hoped to convert?

This contradiction marked much of European colonization. Catholic and Protestant Europeans often struggled to communicate the Christian faith in ways that Native peoples could understand and receive as their own. Instead, Christianity was frequently presented as the religion of the colonizer—bound up with foreign power, forced labor, cultural destruction, and political submission.

Spanish expansion into the American Southwest was also driven by rumors of golden cities and unimaginable wealth. In the early 1540s, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an expedition into present-day New Mexico in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. Their journey carried them as far as present-day Kansas, but they found no golden cities and no great treasure. The search for wealth had led them deep into the continent, but the legends proved empty.

Other Spaniards moved north across the Rio Grande, eventually leading to the founding of El Paso, “the pass of the north.” In the Southwest, the Spanish encountered Indigenous peoples they called “Pueblo,” meaning “village,” because they lived in distinctive multilevel residences. Franciscan missionaries established mission communities near these Pueblo settlements so Native people would have regular access to Catholic Mass and other religious instruction.

But many Pueblo peoples resented Spanish rule. They opposed forced labor, cultural suppression, and the efforts of missionaries to destroy traditional religious practices. In 1680, a Pueblo leader named Popé helped organize a major uprising in present-day New Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt became the most successful Indigenous uprising against European power in the American colonial era. Pueblo forces drove the Spanish out of Santa Fe and forced them to abandon many missions. Their anger was directed especially toward missionaries and symbols of Spanish Christian authority. Twenty-one of New Mexico’s thirty-three Franciscan missionaries were killed in the revolt.

The Pueblo Revolt also had lasting consequences for the Great Plains. As Spanish settlements were raided and abandoned, Native peoples acquired large numbers of horses. Horses transformed Indigenous life in the West, reshaping travel, hunting, trade, and warfare. This new horse culture helped set the stage for the rise of powerful Plains peoples, including the Comanches.

The Spanish conquest also belonged to the larger story of the Columbian Exchange—the movement of people, animals, crops, diseases, and goods between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Horses came to the Americas from Europe and transformed Native societies. Crops native to the Americas, such as potatoes, corn, and tomatoes, reshaped diets across Europe and beyond. Africans likely brought rice-growing knowledge that later became central to plantation agriculture in the Lower South.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was therefore not one story but many. It was a story of empire, disease, treasure, forced labor, missions, resistance, and cultural transformation. Spain claimed to bring Christianity to the New World, but too often the message of Christ was buried beneath the pursuit of gold, glory, and dominion.

French Colonization

The French entered the colonial race after the Portuguese and Spanish. In 1534, France sent Jacques Cartier across the Atlantic in search of a water route to the East Indies. Instead, he landed in northeastern Canada. Though he did not find the passage he was looking for, Cartier explored and mapped the Gulf of St. Lawrence and traveled up the St. Lawrence River as far west as the future site of Montreal.

Nearly a century later, Samuel de Champlain established the French settlement of Quebec in 1608. Unlike the Spanish, whose empire was often driven by conquest, mining, and forced labor, the French focused primarily on trade, especially the fur trade. Beaver pelts were highly valued in Europe, where fashionable elites desired fur hats, coats, and accessories.

French colonization also included a strong missionary presence. Jesuit missionaries traveled with French explorers and traders, seeking to evangelize Native peoples. In many cases, the Jesuits were more attentive to Native cultures than other European missionaries. They often learned Native languages and sought to communicate the Christian faith through local dialects. Still, French missions were never separated from French imperial interests. The gospel often traveled alongside trade, diplomacy, and European ambition.

As with other areas of European contact, disease brought devastation. Smallpox and other European illnesses spread through Indigenous communities with deadly force. The fur trade also intensified Native rivalries and reshaped patterns of hunting, warfare, and alliance. French traders depended heavily on Native hunters, while also trading guns, tools, and other manufactured goods for beaver pelts.

Competition over hunting lands and trade routes brought the French and their Native allies into conflict with the Iroquois League. In 1648 and 1649, Iroquois forces destroyed several Huron towns and Jesuit missions, killing many and scattering survivors. Like the Pueblo Revolt in the Spanish Southwest, these conflicts showed that Native peoples were not passive observers of colonization. They resisted, adapted, negotiated, and fought for power in a rapidly changing world.

The French continued exploring deep into the interior of North America. In 1673, Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet traveled along the Mississippi River, helping expand French knowledge of the continent’s vast river systems. In 1701, the French founded Fort Detroit near the Great Lakes. In 1718, they established New Orleans near the mouth of the Mississippi River, creating a strategic port that connected the interior of North America to the Gulf of Mexico.

French colonization was part of a larger European economic system known as mercantilism. Under mercantilism, powerful nations sought colonies as sources of raw materials and as markets for manufactured goods. Colonies could provide furs, precious metals, agricultural products, and enslaved labor. In return, European nations sold firearms, clothing, tools, and other manufactured items back into colonial markets.

For France, North America offered wealth, trade, influence, and strategic power. But like the Spanish and English, the French entered a world already inhabited by Native peoples with their own societies, economies, alliances, and conflicts. French colonization did not simply bring Europe to America. It created a new Atlantic world of trade, mission, disease, rivalry, and empire.

The Geopolitics of the Protestant Reformation

We do not usually connect Martin Luther’s Reformation to the colonization of America. But we should.

The Reformation did not merely divide churches. It divided kingdoms, redrew alliances, and turned European expansion into a religious and political contest. England had once been Catholic and closely connected to Catholic Europe. But after Henry VIII broke with Rome, and especially after his Protestant daughter Elizabeth I succeeded her Catholic sister Mary I in 1558, England became firmly identified with the Protestant cause. That decision brought England into direct conflict with Catholic Spain.

By the late sixteenth century, Spain was the dominant Catholic power in Europe and the Americas. King Philip II saw Protestant England as both a religious threat and a geopolitical rival. The conflict reached its dramatic high point in 1588, when the Spanish Armada sailed against England. But the great Spanish fleet was defeated by smaller, faster English ships and by fierce storms. To many English Protestants, the victory seemed providential. God, they believed, had preserved Protestant England from Catholic domination.

But this struggle was not limited to Europe. It crossed the Atlantic. The contest between England and Spain became a contest over the future of the New World. Who would claim these lands? Who would control trade? Who would shape the spiritual lives of Native peoples? Would the Americas be dominated by Catholic Spain, or would Protestant England establish its own colonies and missions?

One of the clearest voices arguing for English colonization was Richard Hakluyt, a geographer, minister, and tireless promoter of overseas expansion. In his 1584 work, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting, Hakluyt urged Queen Elizabeth to support English colonies in North America. For Hakluyt, colonization was not merely an economic opportunity. It was a religious duty, a national strategy, and a direct challenge to Spain.

Hakluyt argued that western planting would lead to “the enlargement of the gospel of Christ.” He believed Protestant rulers, especially Elizabeth, had a responsibility to carry the Christian faith into new lands. In his view, England could “plant sincere religion” in the Americas and rescue Native peoples from Spanish cruelty and Catholic deception.

Hakluyt also made an economic and strategic case. He argued that colonies would open new trade, provide raw materials, and strengthen England against Spain. A western colony, he wrote, could supply England with “all the commodities of Europe, Africa, and Asia.” In other words, America could become the key to England’s global future.

This is what made Hakluyt so important. Before England successfully planted Jamestown, Hakluyt had already planted the idea of English America. He gave England a vision in which Protestant mission, national security, commercial wealth, and imperial ambition all reinforced one another. That vision soon moved from paper to practice.

In 1585, Elizabeth commissioned Sir Walter Raleigh to establish an English settlement on Roanoke Island, part of the Outer Banks along the coast of present-day North Carolina. The effort failed. Conflict with Native peoples, poor planning, supply problems, and isolation doomed the settlement. The later Roanoke colony disappeared altogether, becoming known as the “Lost Colony.”

But failure did not end England’s colonial ambitions. Roanoke became a warning, not a conclusion. The English would try again. And when they did, they carried with them many of the same arguments Hakluyt had made: colonies would bring wealth, weaken Spain, expand English power, and spread Protestant Christianity.

The geopolitics of the Reformation, then, helped shape the colonization of America. The Atlantic world became a battlefield of empires, economies, and confessions. Catholics and Protestants were not merely arguing over doctrine in Europe. They were competing to shape the future of the Americas.

And here we see again the moral complexity of colonization. English Protestants often criticized Spanish cruelty, and sometimes rightly so. But they too would struggle to separate the mission of Christ from the pursuit of land, wealth, and power. The gospel was preached, but too often it was carried in the shadow of empire.