Thread by @VanDiemen_

In order to understand the history of North America, it's good to review the three very different approaches each of the major colonial powers took with regard to the Indians:

1. French - Trade
2. Spanish - Assimilation
3. English - Land Ownership

Let's go over each:

1. French

The French were the greatest traders with the natives. Obviously they envisioned the fleur-de-lis flying over all of North America, but this was to support their primary interest which was mercantile. French trappers and traders wandered the furthest as a result.

French weapons dealing caused ceaseless consternation to the English and Spanish, who more tightly regulated trade and had to deal with the result of heavily armed tribes. Many conflicts between the French and their neighbors in the New World could be traced back to this.

But this also meant that the French typically enjoyed the best relations with the Indians. French trappers were the most welcome in Indian villages continent-wide and our best ethnographic accounts of first contacts usually come from French sources.

It wasn't a coincidence that Lewis and Clark found Charbonneau at the Mandan villages on the Missouri.

Osborne Russell wintered with a Frenchman at a Shoshone camp at present day Ogden, Utah in 1840.

French names all over North America attest to their roaming.

2. The Spanish were famously interested in the New World because of the three Gs - God, Gold, Glory. What this meant in practice was a cultural policy of assimilating with the native Indians. The new mestizo race of Latin Americans was born of this widespread mixing.

The most religiously devout of the three, the Spanish sent many missionaries who genuinely wished to convert the natives and improve their lives. These Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans worked to spread Catholicism and European culture and practices throughout New Spain.

The pre-Columbian populations of Mesoamerica were orders of magnitude larger than the populations north of the Rio Grande. Even after multiple waves of epidemics killed off 90% of the population, there were still many millions of Indians who remained.

What this meant was that there was always going to be a massive population of natives who couldn't possibly be ethnically cleansed or exterminated without great cost to the new Spanish rulers.

Intermarrying happend almost immediately between the Spanish and Aztec elite.

When the Spanish moved into New Mexico in the early 1600s, they brought Aztec and Tlaxcalan families from central Mexico, and the leader of the expedition was married to a great-granddaughter of Montezuma himself.

The Spanish crown regularly chastised and punished Spaniards who were too cruel to natives. A Dominican friar named Bartolome de las Casas was a social activist in the 1500s who agitated for humane treatment of the conquered peoples, and was influential at court.

3. The Anglo interactions with the indians were primarily centered on land use issues. Coming from a strong tradition of English common law which emphasized the property rights of landowners, this English worldview of exclusionary land use was antithetical to the native one.

English settlers were primarily motivated by land ownership, as opposed to trading, proselytizing, or commodity extraction. Obviously this meant that they had the most intractable conflict with the Indians. The conflict ended only with complete subjugation of the indians.

The Anglo did intermarry with Indians to some degree, but the intensity of violence and the small numbers of natives relative to New Spain meant that it never manifested very strongly racially.

However, the Japanese, who fought both the English and Americans in the Pacific theater of World War 2 often remarked at the differences in fighting styles of the two races. They attributed a certain ferocity and stubbornness to the presence of Indian blood in the Americans.

This is only the most cursory summary of North American colonial history, and certainly exceptions are widespread, but I think it's helpful to understand the broad strokes as we examine how these peoples clashed and moved about North America during the Age of Exploration.