Antiques.(colonization of the indians)

 
The "West" is the great word of our history. The "Westerner" has been 
the type and master of our American life. 
Woodrow Wilson, "The Course of American History," Address to the New 
Jersey Historical Society, Newark, May 16, 1895 

The "great word" has always been part fact and part myth, here and elsewhere. Long before they first sailed west, Europeans dreamed of unknown lands inhabited by exotic races of men and women unlike any in the known world. And their dreams came true in the accounts of voyages to the New World by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503 and Peter Martyr d'Anghiera's narrative in 1511 of Christopher Columbus's exploits. They found a world of innocence before the fall, a true Garden of Eden. Of the inhabitants of Hispaniola, Martyr wrote: "They go naked, they know neither weights nor measures, nor that source of all misfortunes, money; living in a golden age, without laws, without lying judges, without books, satisfied with their life, and in no wise solicitous for the future."

For the Europeans of the early sixteenth century who read these accounts, the New World represented the ideal made real, blurring the traditional distinction between the imaginary and the actual, the fictional and the historical. Centuries of dreaming inspired their conquest and colonization of the West.

However, what was a new world for the European settlers was an old world for the many peoples who ...