The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Within a year, decimated by disease, food shortages, and a brutal winter, and riven by political divisions and poor management that Gorges blamed on “ignorant, timorous and ambitouse persons,” the Sagadahoc colony was abandoned. Yet Gorges’s efforts weren’t completely in vain. In 1614, Ktə̀hαnəto helped Captain John Smith explore the New England coast, assistance that Smith ranked just below the divine: “The maine assistance next [to] God . . . was my acquaintance among the Salvages, especially, with Dohannida, one of their greatest Lords, who had lived long in England.”

  Not every former captive was so forgiving. In 1619, an English crew sponsored by Gorges, on their way to the Chesapeake, landed at Martha’s Vineyard, dropping off a Wampanoag named Tisquantum—better known to history as Squanto, a man whose time in England would soon prove crucial to the Pilgrims. Out of the forest walked Epenow, the Wampanoag who had escaped in a hail of gunfire—and who, in fact, the English had assumed they’d killed as he dove into the water. The ship’s captain, Thomas Dermer, found him a cordial, let-bygones-be-bygones sort who spoke “indifferent good English” and could afford to laugh at the whole affair. Come back again, Epenow said.

  Dermer did. His chores in Virginia finished, he detoured back to Martha’s Vineyard in November—and walked into an ambush. Instead of friendly, English-speaking Indians anxious to trade, he found himself under fierce attack. All of the landing party except Dermer were killed. Badly wounded, he reached the boat steps ahead of his pursuers, who would have “cut [off] his head upon ye cudy [cabin] of his boat, had not ye man reskued him with a sword.”

  Did Epenow set Dermer up for the attack? Or was Dermer attacked by others over whom Epenow had no control? No one knows. But it’s clear that even in its earliest days, the land that had become the First Frontier was a dangerous place, characterized by shifting allegiances and opaque motives, great opportunity and sudden death—a place that would become increasingly treacherous for both Natives and Europeans to navigate as their worlds drew more and more intertwined.

  Chapter 2

  Before Contact

  On cold nights in winter camp, when the earth slept and it was fitting to tell stories of great power and magic, Ktə̀hαnəto and his people listened to the elders talk about how the Wapánahki came into the world.

  There was only forest and sea in those long-ago days. The forest had no animals, the sea no fish, and nowhere were there any people. Then, on a summer day, the great chief Kəlóskαpe, the One Who Made Himself, and Kəlóskαpe’s twin brother, Malsom, who had the head of a wolf and darkness in his heart, came down from the sky in their canoe, down from the rising sun, and at a word from Kəlóskαpe the canoe became oktokomkuk, the vast granite island north of the land of the Mi’kmaq.

  Kəlóskαpe shaped some of the rocks into the mihkomuwehsisok, the little people who hide in the shadows and play haunting music on their bone flutes. One of them was Marten, whom Kəlóskαpe treated like a younger brother.

  Then Kəlóskαpe lifted his great bow and shot arrows into the basket trees, the ashes. Each arrow drove deep, piercing the heartwood, its fletched end quivering in the still air. Again and again Kəlóskαpe shot, until from the bark of the ash trees emerged beautiful human beings, whom he called wαpánahki, “the people of the dawn.” He taught them to plant and grow, to make lodges and canoes. From the mud, Kəlóskαpe formed the animals, from the largest moz and potepe to the smallest minnow, which he taught the people to hunt. The people spread out across wôbanakik and have lived there ever since, closest of all human beings to the rising sun.

  Science, of course, takes a rather different view. Exactly how the First Frontier and the rest of the Western Hemisphere was peopled—when, by whom, and by what routes—was long thought to be a settled question, with scholarship mostly tidying up the details of a well-documented, straightforward narrative. That story began thirteen thousand years ago, at the close of the last ice age, with Asian hunters moving out of Siberia, bearing sophisticated flint spears and chasing big game across a land bridge into North America. Aided by their technical skill and hunting prowess, their descendants fanned out in just a thousand years, spreading as far east as Newfoundland and as far south as Tierra del Fuego, making the once empty land their own.

  But the certainty that once surrounded those assumptions has been shaken in recent years by discoveries in the field and the lab. Excavations of artifacts, explorations of genes, and techniques to tease apart the knotted web of language evolution are all painting a far more intricate picture and igniting a ferocious debate. Was there one migration out of Asia, or many spanning tens of thousands of years? Were the newcomers mighty mammoth hunters following the herds inland through an ice-free corridor, or master mariners who came millennia earlier, paddling south by leaps and bounds as they feasted on the ocean’s bounty? Still more controversially, did at least some of them manage to cross the North Atlantic or even the widest part of the Pacific, bringing cultures and genes from as far away as Europe?

  The story that is emerging, rich and nuanced in its testament to human achievement, may be no less wondrous than the idea of Kəlóskαpe’s arrows calling forth humans from the trunks of ash trees. But however people arrived, by whatever means and journeys, the eventual result was a staggering diversity of human cultures that came to occupy every corner of the New World, including what would become the First Frontier.

  The Seward Peninsula of Alaska comes within a geographic hairbreadth of Asia today, a dividing line in many ways. The continental divide between the Arctic and Pacific Oceans bisects the peninsula, runs over the gray, treeless spine of Cape Mountain, and comes to an end on the wide sand beach below the massif that curves north and west along the Bering Strait. Standing there, buffeted by the endless wind that blows even on the rare cloudless day, you can look west into Russia, to Big Diomede Island, thirty-five miles offshore, its sheer cliffs and white snowfields clearly visible, and to what seems to be another, more distant island to its right—East Cape, actually the tip of the Siberian mainland. The International Date Line runs down the middle of the strait, so you are literally looking into tomorrow.

  This, archaeologists long agreed, was humanity’s portal into the New World—Beringia, the name for the low, boggy land bridge that linked Asia and America during the last ice age, when global sea levels were hundreds of feet lower than today.%3 The term “land bridge,” which conjures an image of a narrow isthmus, is misleading. Beringia was more than a thousand miles wide, a mini-continent of grassy tundra that enveloped Asia and Alaska as far south as Kamchatka and the Aleutian Islands.

  Here, at Cape Prince of Wales, history lies very close to the surface. Every storm that batters the dunes and bluffs unearths evidence of the past—the gray weathered skulls of walruses and bearded seals; whale vertebrae as large as footstools, stained peat brown; ivory harpoon points and bone net rims, artifacts of the Inupiat culture. The descendants of those early Eskimo hunters still live a short distance away, in the village of Wales.

  But the Inupiat and their ancestors are relative newcomers to the Bering Strait, having moved into the Alaskan Arctic less than a thousand years ago, long after Beringia was swallowed by the sea. Before them, about six thousand to eight thousand years ago, came people speaking a language now known as Na-Déné or Eyak-Athabaskan, whose descendants now range from the western Arctic to the desert Southwest. And before any of them, archaeologists believe, came the earliest migrants, members of a hunting culture from the arid, ice-free tundra of northeastern Siberia—a region called the mammoth steppe, treeless and brutally cold, which stretched far west into northern Europe. There is very little evidence of these first pioneers, only a few scattered sites, perhaps because their camps were lost when Beringia sank beneath hundreds of feet of frigid water.

  Although the Siberians could have walked across the land bridge, for almost ten thousand years they could have gone no farther, because continental ice sheets stretching from the Aleutian Range to the Arctic Ocea
n would have blocked their passage much beyond where Fairbanks sits today. Only when the ice began to retreat about eleven thousand years ago, opening corridors along the coast and through the Yukon, would the way have been clear.

  The first incontrovertible sign of these Paleolithic hunters in the heart of North America was unearthed in the mid-1920s near Folsom, New Mexico, where stone spear points were found mingled with the bones of extinct bison. Of even greater age were the so-called Clovis points, a trove of long, delicately flaked spear tips discovered by a teenager in 1929 near Clovis, New Mexico. By the 1930s, Clovis-style points had been found at a number of other Pleistocene sites across North and Central America, usually in association with the bones of mammoths, long-horned bison, unique species of horses, tapirs, and other extinct Ice Age game.

  There was an undeniable glamour to the image of the Clovis people that emerged from these discoveries: peerless hunters, tackling the biggest game imaginable and using weapons that were not only technically advanced but also astonishingly beautiful. Clovis points are up to nine inches long, carefully worked on both sides. They taper like willow leaves and are “fluted,” meaning they have a shallow groove running almost the length of each side, formed when a long flake of flint was struck off from the point’s base; this may have made it easier to haft the thin blade to a spear handle, or it could have been merely decorative. Creating a fluted point was the pinnacle of a flint knapper’s exacting craft, and the Clovis people were masters. Made from glossy flint or chert, the points range in color from cool blue-gray to pink to marbled black and buff. At once lethal and lovely, the Clovis projectiles are works of art.

  As science grew in its ability to date archaeological sites, it became clear that the Clovis culture deserved one further honor: that of founding fathers and mothers. Clovis appeared to represent the dawn of human occupation in the Americas—a horizon line roughly 13,500 years old, before which there was no evidence of people in the Western Hemisphere. For more than half a century, every excavation in North or South America confirmed that preeminent place in American history; no matter where anyone looked, nothing was older than Clovis.

  While thirteen thousand years seems like a long time, the Americas were actually the last region of the world to be colonized by people. Modern humans began moving out of Africa as much as eighty thousand years ago, expanding east along the Indian Ocean and into southern Asia. Forty-five thousand years ago, they managed to sail to Australia and New Guinea, then a single landmass thanks to lower sea levels, but still separated from Asia by a wide, formidable deep-water strait. Not long after that, they moved north into Europe, coexisting with Neanderthals for about fifteen thousand years before that distinct species of hominid became extinct. By eighteen thousand years ago, with the worst of a cold snap known as the last glacial maximum passing, modern humans occupied the Siberian mammoth steppe, with Beringia on the horizon.

  The “Clovis First” hypothesis fits neatly into this larger framework, but there have always been anomalies that Clovis couldn’t explain. For one thing, Clovis points don’t really bear much resemblance to the oldest stone tools found in Alaska, which date from about the same time as Clovis. Most of the Alaskan tools are of a radically different style known as microblade technology, in which tiny shards of worked stone are set into ivory, bone, or wooden shafts—not the single, oversize points that are the hallmark of Clovis. Nor has anything similar to Clovis, and from an earlier period, shown up on the Siberian side of Beringia to serve as a probable ancestor.

  Another anomaly is the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania. Since the early 1970s, scientists have been finding radiocarbon evidence suggesting that humans were stoking fires there at least sixteen thousand years ago, and perhaps as early as nineteen thousand years ago, well before there were supposed to be any people south of Beringia. The experts who first published these results were accused of everything from professional sloppiness to historical wishful thinking, but with more and more sophisticated dating techniques, the evidence has only solidified.

  And if Meadowcroft discomfited archaeologists, a site in Chile known as Monte Verde gave them absolute fits. Starting in 1976, the wet, peaty soil along Chinchihuapi Creek, about fifty miles from the Pacific, has given up a variety of remarkably well-preserved artifacts, ranging from the remains of wooden shelter posts to knotted cord, animal bones, and even ancient foodstuffs, such as mastodon meat and quids of seaweed that were chewed like tobacco. Provocatively, radiocarbon dating suggested that the material was 14,500 years old, a finding that, when published, set off a donnybrook among archaeologists, with the “Clovis First” camp attacking the methodology, techniques, and conclusions of the pre-Clovis proponents.

  It wasn’t until 1997, after a blue-ribbon panel of archaeologists visited the site for themselves and came away convinced of the antiquity of Monte Verde, that the Clovis barrier was officially breached. The years since have seen a flood of new ideas on how the Americas were peopled. Instead of mighty mammoth hunters forging across the prairies, archaeologist Tom Dillehay, who excavated Monte Verde, pictures a maritime culture hopscotching down the Pleistocene coast, using watercraft to move easily across long distances and feasting on the rich array of marine and terrestrial food that was found even at high latitudes during the last ice age.

  The lack of evidence for such early boats notwithstanding, the idea has gained significant ground among archaeologists in recent years, backed by discoveries such as 12,500-year-old stone tools and bones in the Channel Islands of California and the 10,300-year-old skeleton of a man in On Your Knees Cave in southeastern Alaska. Abundant marine animal remains from the same period indicate that Alaska’s coastal environment was inhabitable during the last glacial maximum, and chemical isotopes preserved in the young man’s bones show that he ate a diet heavy in seafood. The stone tools found with him are made of nonlocal rock, suggesting travel or extensive trade networks. Some archaeologists now talk about waterborne colonists from Asia following what they call the “kelp highway,” the almost continuous band of fertile, food-rich submarine kelp forest that stretches around the Pacific Rim from Japan to Chile.%4

  But while the Clovis culture may have been deposed as the oldest human inhabitants in the Americas, there is still broad agreement among scientists that the people who pioneered North America were Asians. American Indians, though usually lacking the epicanthic fold that characterizes the eyes of many modern Asians, share with them other characteristics, including shovel-shaped incisors and the “Mongolian spot,” a purplish pigment sometimes seen on the lower backs of infants.

  Genetic research has strengthened that assumption. For example, a 2007 study examining the DNA of more than four hundred people from twenty-four Native groups stretching from Canada to South America found that all of them carried a unique genetic marker tying them to the Tundra Nentsi, an aboriginal group from eastern Siberia. What’s more, the farther from old Beringia researchers looked, the fewer genetic commonalities with the Siberians they found. The Chipewyan of Canada share more genes with the Nentsi than, say, the Guarani in Brazil, which makes sense if Beringia was the doorway. A DNA analysis of the skeleton from On Your Knees Cave similarly found links with coastal cultures as far south as Ecuador and Chile.

  But just because modern Indians are derived from northeast Asian stock, does that mean that the earliest humans in the Americas were, too? A number of prominent archaeologists are skeptical, because there have been some discoveries that are hard to square with a single migration of northern Asians through Beringia, whatever the antiquity. A comparison of more than fifty ancient skulls from Brazil, dating as far back as eleven thousand years, recently led researchers at the University of São Paulo to conclude that the bones have more in common with Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians than with Asians, “supporting the hypothesis that two distinct biological populations could have colonized the New World.” (Although this paper was immediately interpreted to mean that Austr
alian Aborigines had sailed more than eight thousand miles across the Pacific to South America, the Brazilian researchers actually suggested that the first Americans simply shared a common ancestry with Aborigines and Melanesians and that they had traveled to Brazil on foot, crossing via Beringia and spreading widely in the New World before being swamped by later waves of northern Asians.)

  But none of these theories of early migration into the Americas made as many headlines as the strange story of Kennewick Man, which started on July 28, 1996, when a couple of college students met on the banks of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, to watch hydroplane races and drink beer. Hoping to avoid paying admission to the event, the two men scrambled through thick brush to a secluded spot where they could see the high-speed boats roar past. One of the pair, a twenty-one-year-old named Will Thomas, noticed what he thought was a bunch of deer bones in the water and an oddly smooth stone by his feet. The bones gave him an idea, and, taking a swig from his beer, he decided to play a prank on his friend.