Digital History

The First Americans Timeline , Digital History ID 2928

80,000 b.c.e. – 1492 c.e.

80,000-15,000 b.c.e. Ancestors of the Indians enter the Americas .

15,000 b.c.e. Glaciers begin to recede and many large animal species become extinct.

10,000 b.c.e. Sophisticated forms of toolmaking known as Clovis technology appear.

9,000 b.c.e. Plant cultivation begins in central Mexico .

8,000 b.c.e. Immigrants reach the southernmost tip of South America .

7,000-4,000 b.c.e. Athabascans settle in the Pacific Northwest .

5,000 b.c.e. Inuits and Aleuts cross the Bering Straits by boat.

3,000 b.c.e. Cultivation of corn begins in the Southwest.

1,000 b.c.e. Beginning of Hohokam and Mogollon cultures.

700 b.c.e. Adena culture begins.

300 b.c.e.-500 c.e. Hopewell culture flourishes.

100 Anasazi culture emerges in the Southwest

700 Mississippian culture develops.

1000 Athabascans begin to arrive in the Southwest.

1300 The Anasazi abandon their cliff dwellings.

1451 Iroquois confederacy founded.

1492 Columbus first arrives in the Caribbean.

1492 – 1800

1521 Hernan Cortes completes his conquest of the Aztec empire.

1542 Spain's "New Laws" seek to protect New Spain's native inhabitants.

1546 Spain repeals the "New Laws" prohibiting Indian slavery.

1598 Don Juan Onate establishes the Spanish colony of New Mexico

1622 Opechancanough leads assault against English settlers in Virginia, beginning 12 years of warfare.

1634 English settlers defeat Openancanough.

1637 Pequot War.

1675 King Philip's War begins; colonists defeat southern New England Indians in 1676 and the northern New England Indians in 1678.

1680 Indians of New Mexico rise up against the Spanish in the Pueblo Revolt; Spain reconquers the territory in 1692

1700s Plains Indians adopt the horse.

1711-13 Tuscarora War in North Carolina.

1715-18 Yamasee War in South Carolina.

1758 New Jersey establishes an Indian reservation for the Delawares.

1763 Britain defeats France in the French and Indian War; Proclamation of 1763 forbids white settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains; Pontiac 's Rebellion.

1769 Franciscan Father Junipero Serra establishes the first of a string of missions near present-day San Diego.

1775 The Indians in San Diego stage an unsuccessful rebellion against Spanish missionaries.

1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers, which compels an Indian coalition to sign the Treaty of Greenville, ceding land in Ohio to the United States.

1800 - 1900

1808 The U.S. government moves Cherokees in Tennessee to Arkansas.

1811 At the Battle of Tippecanoe, William Henry Harrison defeats an Indian alliance led by the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa.

1813 Tecumseh dies in the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812.

1814 Andrew Jackson's forces defeat the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

1816 Land cessions by Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks.

1816-18 First Seminole War in Florida forces Spain to cede the territory.

1819 Land cessions by the Cherokees.

1820s Further land cessions by the Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles.

1824 The Bureau of Indian Affairs is established.

1828 Cherokee Phoenix newspaper begins publication.

1830 Congress passes the Indian Removal Act.

1831 The Nez Perce send a delegation to St. Louis to ask for teachers, sparking an influx of missionaries into the Pacific Northwest.

Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia.

1832 Sauk and Fox Indians unsuccessfully seek to recover territory in Illinois during the Black Hawk War.

In Worcester v. State of Georgia , the Supreme Court rules that the federal government, not the states, has jurisdiction over Indian territories.

1833 The Choctaw complete their removal to lands west of the Mississippi River.

1835 Second Seminole War begins, lasting seven years.

1838 Cherokee removed along the Trail of Tears.

1846-64 Navajo warfare.

1851 Plains Indians agree to confine hunting to specified regions.

1853 California begins to confine its Indian population on reservations.

1854-1890 Sioux wars.

1861-1900 Apache warfare.

1864 Sand Creek , Colorado , massacre.

1867-68 U.S. demands that Plains Indians move to reservation.

1868 Colonel George Armstrong Custer's cavalry attacks a Cheyenne village on the Washita river in Oklahoma , killing more than 100.

1871 Indian Appropriations Act ends the practice of treating Indian tribes as sovereign nations.

1876 Federal authorities order the Lakota Sioux to move to their reservations.

Custer's Last Stand.

1877 Congress repeals the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, taking back 40 million acres of Lakota Sioux lands.

Nez Perce War begins when Nez Perce refuse to move from their homeland in Oregon 's Wallowa Valley .

1879 84 Lakota children become the first to attend the U.S. Indian Training and Industrial School, a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

1880 Sitting Bull returns from Canada.

1881 Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor.

1883 A group of reformers, clergy, and government officials, who call themselves “The Friends of the Indians, call for government policies emphasizing the assimilation of Indians into the mainstream of American life.

The U.S. government opens the Lakota reservation to white settlers.

Buffalo Bill Cody launches his Wild West show.

1886 After more than a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Apache leader Geronimo surrenders.

1887 Dawes Severalty Act provides individual Indians with up to 160 acres of land. The remaining tribal lands are sold. By 1934, Indian landholdings have been reduced from 138 million acres to 48 million acres.

1889 Wovoka, a Paiute holy man, teaches the Ghost Dance.

The federal government opens unoccupied lands in Indian Territory ( Oklahoma ) to white settlement.

1890 Sitting Bull is murdered during a confrontation with Lakota police officers.

Massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee.

1898 Curtis Act expands federal authority over tribes in Indian Territory.

1900 to the Present

1901 Congress confers citizenship on all Native Americans in Oklahoma Territory.

1924 Citizenship Act declares all Native Americans to be U.S. citizens.

John Meriam leads an investigation of conditions on Indian reservations.

1934 Indian Reorganization Act encourages the preservation and recovery of Native Americans' cultural traditions.

1950s Termination Policy withdraws federal services from some 60 tribes.

1961 American Indian Conference in Chicago promotes tribal sovereignty.

1968 American Indian Movement founded.

1969 Native American protesters occupy Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

1972 Native Americans occupy the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarter in Washington, D.C.

1973 American Indian Movement occupies Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

1978 The Indian Child Welfare Act gives tribes the authority to determine the tribal membership of children and to raise children as they see fit.

1987 The U.S. Supreme Court frees Indian tribes from most state gambling regulations.

1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act requires the return of human remains and sacred funerary objects to the tribes to which they belong.

1992 Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian and human rights activist, receives the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to protect indigenous people from discrimination.

1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act prohibits states from interfering with the practice of traditional Native American religions.

1994 Zapatista rebels in Chiapas state seize several towns to expose the exploitation of Mexico 's indigenous peoples.

1999 Canada splits its Northwest Territory into two parts; the eastern half, Nunavut, becomes the largest part of the Americas governed by its native peoples.

Bill Clinton visits the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota , becoming the first sitting president to visit an Indian reservation since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.