When Columbus first arrived in the Americas in 1492, its estimated that North America north of the Rio Grande had a population of some seven million people who belonged to some 600 tribes with a wide diversity of languages and cultures. By 1700, that population had fallen to around 1.2 million or less, with many tribes scattered and swept far from their original homelands, or outright destroyed by disease, famine and warfare, many having never set their eyes on the Europeans, but their lives still completely altered by their arrival all the same.
Along the northern Atlantic Seaboard, the once dominant Algonquian peoples were nearly gone, the few remnants of the once proud nations found by the earliest European explorers nearly entirely integrated into colonial society as second-class citizens. Those who had not died in epidemics or the various wars with the colonists had fled westward over the Appalachian Mountains, taking refuge in the Ohio Country, which had largely been emptied itself over the preceding century by disease and the Beaver Wars. The only areas where the Algonquian remained largely in control were in what is today Maine and New Brunswick, where alliances with the French allowed for a much stiffer resistance to English expansion.
Aside from the fleeing coastal tribes, the Ohio Country was mostly completely empty. Controlled by the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, most other tribes didn’t dare re-enter their former homelands though the Iroquois had become much more focused on warring with the French rather than the former violence of them trying to control the fur trade. In comparison, though greatly hurt by disease and war with the Iroquois, the Algonquian peoples of the Midwest were re-establishing themselves in their former homelands in Illinois and Indiana, though some of the weaker nations had been pushed out onto the Great Plains, never to return. Farther north in Canada, the beaver trade was slowly but surely pushing many Algonquian groups further west as they attempted to retain their role as middlemen between the French and other tribes putting them into contact with many Algonquian groups who had moved westward centuries before.
Similar to the Algonquian of the Midwest, a similar story could be told for the Siouan peoples, who had been pushed westward by the Algonquian fleeing from the Iroquois. Greatly reduced in number, they were increasingly shifting towards a way of life involving both agriculture and hunting and gathering. This migration westward often put them into conflict with the Caddoan peoples, who still controlled significant parts of the Central and Southern Plains and lived in a similar fashion.
Comparatively, the Muskogean tribes in the southeast had managed to a certain degree to stabilize following the devastating pandemics which struck them in the sixteenth century. Though plagued by the Spanish and English native slave trade along the coastal areas, which spurred conflict amongst various rival groups looking to secure European goods, within the interior many groups began to thrive again to a certain degree, isolated from many of the travesties which befell their more northern neighbors.
In the southwest, though the Spanish controlled large parts of New Mexico, especially in relation to the Pueblo people who were in many ways nothing more than slaves in their own towns, the deserts outside said towns were controlled by the Navajo and Apache, who had spread out and taken control over a fairly wide area, especially the Apache, who had even moved eastward into the Southern Plains, putting them increasingly in conflict with the Caddoan.
Along the Pacific Coast, things remained largely the same as they had for millennia, with the powerful coastal tribes trading with and enslaving the weaker tribes in the interior, such as the Salishan peoples of the Columbia Plateau and the Numic people of the Great Basin, though both were facing increasing pressure from the north as Algonquian Plains tribes, pushed further north and west by migrating Siouan peoples, began to increasingly move down into what is today Montana from Canada. Things were only to become more chaotic in the coming century.
