[Military family member]

With all due respect, the Eastern tribes were not wandering. Their villages were organized on grids. They were heavy into agriculture.

Not every Indian comes from a John Ford Western

[Paisan]

Their villages were organized on grids. They were heavy into agriculture.

Yup, and those tribes and their villages are still there, organized into gambling casinos and heavily into Government subsidies.

America - What a country!

[dinoparty]

...which makes my point even better than I did. The vast vast majority of the continent was unused, and therefore rightfully unclaimed.

[ßuddaßudd]

And not one wheel anywhere in their nation.

[Gondring]

With all due respect, the Eastern tribes were not wandering. Their villages were organized on grids. They were heavy into agriculture.

That doesn't mean they weren't wandering. They exploited the soil and wood in an area for a while, then moved on to another area. After burning down the forests in a new area, they had newly fertilized lands.

As a review of Cronon's Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England points out:

"[...] for thousands of years, the people and animals of New England had traveled at will over a land sheltered by native trees and fertilized by fire. This migratory lifestyle was not only made possible by the richness of the land, it was a force for its active maintenance."

[SlowBoat407]

With all due respect, the Eastern tribes were not wandering. Their villages were organized on grids. They were heavy into agriculture.

And they were gathered into a military empire by Powhatan, the "Weroance of Weroances" (Chief of Chiefs), who wielded absolute authority over most of the tribes in Virginia. In fact, when a tribe disputed him, he had them wiped out (the Chesapeake, for example).

Powhatan also collected heavy tribute and brides from the tribes under his Paramount Chiefdom, and ensured that his children were seeded from women throughout the region to cement his grip.

He simply encountered a more resourceful tribe.

[Antoninus]

With all due respect, the Eastern tribes were not wandering. Their villages were organized on grids. They were heavy into agriculture.

True to a point. But their agrigulture was slash-and-burn. And when they exhausted the soil and surrounding wildlife, they tended to burn their village down and move elsewhere. That's if they weren't annihilated by a neighboring tribe first.

The Indian way of life that the early settlers "invaded" was neither safe nor pleasant. Life was rough, brutal, bloody, and often short.

[afraidfortherepublic]

The eastern tribes may not have been wandering, but they were quite skilled at annihilating some of my forebears. Read some of the history of the early settlers of Jamestown being massacred. In one family, only a small child survived a vicious Indian attack by hiding in the root cellar while he heard his mother and father being scalped above. He carried the name "Potato Hole Woodson" the rest of his life!

The peace accorded the settlers by Pocahontas' conversion and marriage was brought to a sharp close with the death of her father, Powhatan.