Miami (Amerind tribe)

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, by the royal prerogative of Queen Elizabeth I, founds St. John's, Newfoundland, in 1583 as the first North American English colony.

French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrives in 1603 and establishes the first permanent European settlements at Port Royal (in 1605) and ...

...Quebec City (in 1608).

The Beaver Wars break out in the mid-seventeenth century over control of the North American fur trade.

Among the colonists of New France, Canadiens extensively settle the Saint Lawrence River valley and Acadians settle the present-day Maritimes, while fur traders and Catholic missionaries explore the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and the Mississippi watershed to Louisiana.

Smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus all become deadly killers in the New World.

The plagues of the mid-thirteenth century had reduced the overall population of Europe by at least twenty-five per cent; it is not unreasonable to postulate (as do, increasingly many historians) a rapid reduction of the North American Amerind population by a factor of ten.

The Siouan Assiniboine and Dakota, who will later dominate the northeastern Plains, are, like their Winnebago kin, still in what will become Wisconsin and Upper Michigan, whence the Mandan and Hidatsa have begun their migration westward onto the plains.

The linguistic affiliation of the Newfoundland’s Beothuks remains a puzzle, though the majority opinion places Beothuks within the Algonquian family.

The Gros Ventre still live near the shores of Lake Manitoba and the Tsuu T'ina, or Sarcee, hunt the forests of Northern Saskatchewan.

The Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ojibway and Cree still live above Lake Superior, north of the Kickapoo, Menominee, Sauk and Fox nations—Algonquian speakers all.