Also, many leading American writers and historians of the early 19th century were New Englanders who elevated the Pilgrims to mythic status (the North's victory in the Civil War provided an added excuse to diminish the Virginia story). The easy answer is that winners write the history and the Spanish, like the French, were ultimately losers in the contest for this continent.
So why do Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving English - Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.) The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. The Spanish even established a Jesuit mission in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay 37 years before the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Santa Fe, N.M., also predates Plymouth: later came Spanish settlements in San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego and San Francisco. The Spanish didn't just explore, they settled, creating the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States at St. In all, Spaniards probed half of today's lower 48 states before the first English tried to colonize, at Roanoke Island, N.C. In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 2,000 Spaniards and Mexican Indians across today's Arizona-Mexico border - right by the Minutemen's inaugural post - and traveled as far as central Kansas, close to the exact geographic center of what is now the continental United States. Spanish ships sailed along the East Coast, penetrating to present-day Bangor, Me., and up the Pacific Coast as far as Oregon.įrom 1528 to 1536, four castaways from a Spanish expedition, including a "black" Moor, journeyed all the way from Florida to the Gulf of California - 267 years before Lewis and Clark embarked on their much more renowned and far less arduous trek. Within three decades of Ponce de León's landing, the Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains. But Spaniards pioneered the present-day United States, too. Most Americans associate the early Spanish in this hemisphere with Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. It was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, who landed in 1513 at a lush shore he christened La Florida. The first confirmed landing wasn't by Vikings, who reached Canada in about 1000, or by Columbus, who reached the Bahamas in 1492.
Few Americans do, after all.įorget for a moment the millions of Indians who occupied this continent for 13,000 or more years before anyone else arrived, and start the clock with Europeans' presence on present-day United States soil. Nothing in the sample exam suggests that prospective citizens need know anything that occurred on this continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620. These newcomers are well indoctrinated four of the sample questions on our naturalization test ask about Pilgrims. Even undocumented immigrants invoke our Anglo founders, waving placards that read, "The Pilgrims didn't have papers." Border vigilantes call themselves Minutemen, summoning colonial Massachusetts as they apprehend Hispanics in the desert Southwest. So amid the din over border control, the Senate affirms the self-evident truth that English is our national language "It is part of our blood," Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, says.
Jamestown also gets a nod, particularly in the run-up to its 400th birthday, but John Smith was English, too (he even coined the name New England). COURSING through the immigration debate is the unexamined faith that American history rests on English bedrock, or Plymouth Rock to be specific.
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