Thousands of years ago, as the people who would become known as the Native Americans pushed their way south from Beringia, past the receding glaciers, the first part of the New World that they came to was the West Coast. Though many continued deeper into the North American and South American continents, small contingents of each stayed behind, creating a highly concentrated and diverse mixture of cultures and languages. The rich fertility of the lands they inhabited allowed for significantly large populations, which along with the limiting climatic conditions of the neighboring Great Basin and Rocky Mountains, protected them and allowed them to build complex societies which largely remained unchanged for thousands of years along the coast, the Columbia Plateau and the Central Valley of California. These peoples fished, hunted, and gathered as needed. Often times they purposefully set forests ablaze to create clearings for deer, camas, and other edible plants to thrive. By and large they did not farm. They built large towns and raided each other for slaves. They built societies based on the gathering of wealth which was shown off by the giving as much away as possible as gifts. They decorated themselves with tattoos, piercings, and body modifications like the flattening of one’s skull. They established vast trade networks which stretched far to the east, north, and south, developing a unique trade language to better communicate amongst each other. Some of the larger groups of peoples included the Na-Dene, Wakshan, Salishan, Penutian, Hokan, and Yukian, many scattered throughout the region, all divided into numerous smaller groups with their own unique cultures. It’s estimated that the region was home to up to a third of all the native peoples living in what is today the United States.
Other than a few Spanish expeditions in late 1500s, these peoples long had little contact with Europeans aside from wrecked or blown off course Spanish ships sailing between Mexico and the Philippines. Aside from stories and a few European trade goods passed westward, they remained largely ignorant of the monumental changes taking place elsewhere on the continent. However, things began to change by the start of the 1700s. The early adoption of horses of the Shoshone allowed them to terrorize the peoples of the Columbia Plateau, and then grow rich trading horses to those same peoples. By the middle of the century, many of the tribes of the Columbia Plateau were using horses, some even travelling each year to the Great Plains to hunt buffalo. A few decades later, the Spanish began appearing again, pushing their way north along the coast of California, establishing missions to convert the natives to Catholicism and a European way of life, which largely seemed to involve basically enslaving them. Though the natives were great in number, they were disorganized into too many small tribal groups, and lacked horses and firearms. Those which did resist soon found their numbers decimated.
Further north, things did not go as badly, at least at first. British, Spanish, Russian, and American ships arrived to trade for sea otter pelts and other furs, which the natives were delighted to give in exchange for wool blankets, metal pots and tools, and glass beads. Luxury goods to the West Coast peoples just as they had been when first introduced to their East Coast nearly two centuries before. However, smallpox arrived soon after, spread by the Spanish missions, European trading ships, and Shoshone horse traders. Having had little to no contact with Old World diseases, it killed thousands, leaving entire towns and villages emptied and the social fabric torn to tatters. In some areas the death toll is estimated to have been nearly 70 percent, though this was far from a universal figure. Many of those who died never once saw a European person.
As the dust settled from the devastation of this first contact, the native societies of the West Coast struggled to survive. In California, old tribal bonds were broken and the various native groups became scattered, coalescing in the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains to avoid the Spanish along the coast, keeping to smaller familial units. Further north, in northern California and the Pacific Northwest, the peoples, though reduced in number, retained much of the same cultures and way of life as before the pandemic. Their reliance on fishing, hunting, and gathering rather than farming allowed them to avoid complete societal collapse and quickly adapt to the new smaller population. However, amongst the coastal nations, the taking of slaves became more common. The apocalypse had come, but they were still there, unchanged, at least for now.
