First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park
First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park is a Montana state park and National Historic Landmark in Cascade County, Montana in the United States. The park sits at an elevation of 3,773 feet, it is located about 3.5 miles northwest of the small town of Ulm, near the city of Great Falls. First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park contains the Ulm Pishkun, a historic buffalo jump utilized by the Native American tribes of North America, it has been described as, geographically speaking, either North America's largest buffalo jump or the world's largest. There is some evidence; the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December 17, 1974, designated a National Historic Landmark in August 2015. The former name of the park was derived from the Blackfeet word "Pis'kun," meaning "deep kettle of blood," and the nearby town of Ulm. Although there are more than 300 buffalo kill sites in Montana, First People's Buffalo Jump is one of only three protected buffalo jumps in the state; the other two are Madison Buffalo Jump near Three Forks, Wahkpa Chu'gn near Havre, both of which are on the National Register of Historic Places.
It may be the largest bison cliff jump in North America. The site's cliff face is 1 mile long, has been variously measured at between 30 to 50 feet in height; the east–west-trending cliff is composed of sandstone, part of the bentonitic Taft Hill Member of the Blackleaf Formation. Archeological research and carbon dating of evidence at the site indicates that Native Americans used the site as early as 500 CE However, in 2011, park archeologists found a point that initial estimates indicated might be as much as 5,000 years old, which would force a radical revision in the date of earliest use, but this early use appears to be infrequent. Most evidence indicates that the pishkun began to be frequented for hunting purposes around 900 CE; the site was used as a "buffalo jump," a place where American bison could be driven up a hill and over a cliff. Prior to 1700 CE, Native Americans lacked horses; because they utilized dogs as hunting companions and for transportation, this time period is known as the "Dog Days" by many tribes.
Bison served as a significant food source for many Native American tribes. Killing the animals, was difficult, as bison are notoriously difficult to herd or capture, can be aggressive. Buffalo jumps were one way to kill large numbers of the animals at once without many of the risks associated with close-proximity ambush. Once the animals were driven over the cliff and incapacitated, they would be slaughtered and their meat and bones used by the hunters to feed and clothe their families and to make various tools and weapons. Jumps were rare. There is conflicting evidence. There is some evidence that bison kills occurred between early fall and early spring, but evidence of unborn and young calf skeletons at the site indicate that slaughter may have occurred year-round. Under the most accepted scenario, hunters would encircle a bison herd several miles from the jump and subtly drive them toward the base of the hill leading up to the cliff. It's not known. Archeologists theorize. Low fences of rock and braided vines were built to help funnel the bison toward the summit.
These fences extended back at least half a mile from the summit. As the bison began moving toward the summit, hunters would leap up from their hiding places behind the rock fences and begin making loud noises; this would begin to stampede the herd, so that they could not stop at the cliff face and would plummet over it to their deaths. There are oral history traditions among some tribes about "buffalo runners" – swift, brave young men who would drape themselves in a buffalo robe and race ahead of the herd to help lead them toward the cliff summit; the young man would leap over the cliff and land on a ledge just out of sight below, while the herd would plummet over and past him. Others would kill any animals who did not die from the fall, butcher all the carcasses; the slaughtering process changed over time. An analysis of the deep piles of bone at the site revealed that the earliest hunters just stripped the hides and meat off the dead animals, but around 500 CE, Native Americans began using fire pits to cook or dry the meat pulverize it and mix it with dried berries and fat to create pemmican.
Tribespeople built shallow bowls in the earth and lined them with rock to create primitive cooking pots. These cooking devices were used to boil bison blood so that it would coagulate and to lessen its susceptibility to spoilage. Other foods would be mixed with the coagulated blood to form a sort of gelatinous food source high in protein and nutrients, or the cooked blood could be used with ground grain to make biscuits. People came together under temporary leadership to plan and carry out bison drives and in the huge butchering task that followed. Willingness to obey leaders lasted only so long as it was made necessary by the demands of the communal work. Communal hunts required leadership and organization, but neither was carried over as a permanent feature of the sociopolitical system; when the drive and the distributio
Great Lakes
The Great Lakes called the Laurentian Great Lakes and the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of interconnected freshwater lakes in the upper mid-east region of North America, on the Canada–United States border, which connect to the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence River. They consist of Lakes Superior, Huron and Ontario, although hydrologically, there are four lakes, Erie and Michigan-Huron; the connected lakes form the Great Lakes Waterway. The Great Lakes are the largest group of freshwater lakes on Earth by total area, second-largest by total volume, containing 21% of the world's surface fresh water by volume; the total surface is 94,250 square miles, the total volume is 5,439 cubic miles less than the volume of Lake Baikal. Due to their sea-like characteristics the five Great Lakes have long been referred to as inland seas. Lake Superior is the second largest lake in the world by area, the largest freshwater lake by area. Lake Michigan is the largest lake, within one country.
The Great Lakes began to form at the end of the last glacial period around 14,000 years ago, as retreating ice sheets exposed the basins they had carved into the land which filled with meltwater. The lakes have been a major source for transportation, migration and fishing, serving as a habitat to a large number of aquatic species in a region with much biodiversity; the surrounding region is called the Great Lakes region. Though the five lakes lie in separate basins, they form a single interconnected body of fresh water, within the Great Lakes Basin, they form a chain connecting the east-central interior of North America to the Atlantic Ocean. From the interior to the outlet at the Saint Lawrence River, water flows from Superior to Huron and Michigan, southward to Erie, northward to Lake Ontario; the lakes drain a large watershed via many rivers, are studded with 35,000 islands. There are several thousand smaller lakes called "inland lakes," within the basin; the surface area of the five primary lakes combined is equal to the size of the United Kingdom, while the surface area of the entire basin is about the size of the UK and France combined.
Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes, within the United States. The lakes are divided among the jurisdictions of the Canadian province of Ontario and the U. S. states of Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio and New York. Both Ontario and Michigan include in their boundaries portions of four of the lakes: Ontario does not border Lake Michigan, Michigan does not border Lake Ontario. New York and Wisconsin's jurisdictions extend into two lakes, each of the remaining states into one of the lakes; as the surfaces of Lakes Superior, Huron and Erie are all the same elevation above sea level, while Lake Ontario is lower, because the Niagara Escarpment precludes all natural navigation, the four upper lakes are called the "upper great lakes". This designation, however, is not universal; those living on the shore of Lake Superior refer to all the other lakes as "the lower lakes", because they are farther south. Sailors of bulk freighters transferring cargoes from Lake Superior and northern Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to ports on Lake Erie or Ontario refer to the latter as the lower lakes and Lakes Michigan and Superior as the upper lakes.
This corresponds to thinking of Lakes Erie and Ontario as "down south" and the others as "up north". Vessels sailing north on Lake Michigan are considered "upbound" though they are sailing toward its effluent current; the Chicago River and Calumet River systems connect the Great Lakes Basin to the Mississippi River System through man-made alterations and canals. The St. Marys River, including the Soo Locks, connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron; the Straits of Mackinac connect Lake Michigan to Lake Huron. The St. Clair River connects Lake Huron to Lake St. Clair; the Detroit River connects Lake St. Clair to Lake Erie; the Niagara River, including Niagara Falls, connects Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. The Welland Canal, bypassing the Falls, connects Lake Erie to Lake Ontario; the Saint Lawrence River and the Saint Lawrence Seaway connect Lake Ontario to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which connects to the Atlantic Ocean. Lakes Huron and Michigan are sometimes considered a single lake, called Lake Michigan–Huron, because they are one hydrological body of water connected by the Straits of Mackinac.
The straits are 120 feet deep. Lake Nipigon, connected to Lake Superior by the Nipigon River, is surrounded by sill-like formations of mafic and ultramafic igneous rock hundreds of meters high; the lake lies in the Nipigon Embayment, a failed arm of the triple junction in the Midcontinent Rift System event, estimated at 1,109 million years ago. Green Bay is an arm of Lake Michigan, along the south coast of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the east coast of Wisconsin, it is separated from the rest of the lake by the Door Peninsula in Wisconsin, the Garden Peninsula in Michigan, the chain of islands between
Great Plains
The Great Plains is the broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie and grassland, that lies west of the Mississippi River tallgrass prairie in the United States and east of the Rocky Mountains in the U. S. and Canada. It embraces: The entirety of the U. S. states of Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota Parts of the states of Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming The southern portions of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and SaskatchewanThe region is known for supporting extensive cattle ranching and dry farming. The Canadian portion of the Plains is known as the Prairies, it covers much of Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, a narrow band of southern Manitoba. Despite covering a small geographic area, the Prairies are home to the majority of each of the three provinces' respective populations; the term "Great Plains" is used in the United States to describe a sub-section of the more vast Interior Plains physiographic division, which covers much of the interior of North America.
It has currency as a region of human geography, referring to the Plains Indians or the Plains States. In Canada the term is little used. There is no region referred to as the "Great Plains" in The Atlas of Canada. In terms of human geography, the term prairie is more used in Canada, the region is known as the Prairie Provinces or "the Prairies." The North American Environmental Atlas, produced by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a NAFTA agency composed of the geographical agencies of the Mexican and Canadian governments, uses the "Great Plains" as an ecoregion synonymous with predominant prairies and grasslands rather than as physiographic region defined by topography. The Great Plains ecoregion includes five sub-regions: Temperate Prairies, West-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, South-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, Texas Louisiana Coastal Plains, Tamaulipas-Texas Semi-Arid Plain, which overlap or expand upon other Great Plains designations; the region is about 500 mi east to 2,000 mi north to south.
Much of the region was home to American bison herds until they were hunted to near extinction during the mid/late-19th century. It has an area of 500,000 sq mi. Current thinking regarding the geographic boundaries of the Great Plains is shown by this map at the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln; the term "Great Plains", for the region west of about the 96th and east of the Rocky Mountains, was not used before the early 20th century. Nevin Fenneman's 1916 study Physiographic Subdivision of the United States brought the term Great Plains into more widespread usage. Before that the region was invariably called the High Plains, in contrast to the lower Prairie Plains of the Midwestern states. Today the term "High Plains" is used for a subregion of the Great Plains; the Great Plains are the westernmost portion of the vast North American Interior Plains, which extend east to the Appalachian Plateau. The United States Geological Survey divides the Great Plains in the United States into ten physiographic subdivisions: Coteau du Missouri or Missouri Plateau, glaciated – east central South Dakota and eastern North Dakota and northeastern Montana.
The Great Plains consist of a broad stretch of country underlain by nearly horizontal strata extends westward from the 97th meridian west to the base of the Rocky Mountains, a distance of from 300 to 500 miles. It extends northward from the Mexican boundary far into Canada. Although the altitude of the plains increases from 600 or 1,200 ft on the east to 4,000–5,000 or 6,000 feet near the mountains, the local relief is small; the semi-arid climate opens far-reaching views. The plains are by no means a simple unit, they are of various stages of erosional development. They are interrupted by buttes and escarpments, they are broken by valleys. Yet on the whole, a broadly extended surface of moderate relief so prevails that the name, Great Plains, for the region as a whole is well-deserved; the western boundary of the plains is well-defined by the abrupt ascent of the mountains. The eastern boundary of the plains is more climatic than topographic; the line of 20 in. of annual rainfall trends a little east of northward near the 97th meridian.
If a boundary must be drawn where nature presents only a gradual transition, this rainfall line may be taken to divide the drier plains from the moister prairies. The plains may be described in northern, intermediate and southern sections, in relation to certain peculiar features; the northern section of the Great Plains, north of latitude 44°, including eastern Montana, north-eastern Wyomi
Blackfoot Confederacy
The Blackfoot Confederacy, Niitsitapi or Siksikaitsitapi is a historic collective name for the four bands that make up the Blackfoot or Blackfeet people: three First Nation band governments in the provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia, one federally recognized Native American tribe in Montana, United States. The Siksika, the Kainai or Kainah, the Northern Piegan or Peigan or Piikani reside in Canada. In modern use, the term is sometimes used only for the three First Nations in Canada; the member peoples of the Confederacy were nomadic bison hunters and trout fishermen, who ranged across large areas of the northern Great Plains of western North America the semi-arid shortgrass prairie ecological region. They followed the bison herds as they migrated between what are now the United States and Canada, as far north as the Bow River. In the first half of the 18th century, they acquired horses and firearms from white traders and their Cree and Assiniboine go-betweens; the Blackfoot used these to expand their territory at the expense of neighboring tribes.
By riding horses and using them to transport goods, the Blackfoot and other Plains tribes could extend the range of their buffalo hunts. In the mid to late 19th century, the systematic commercial bison hunting by white hunters nearly ended the bison herds and permanently changed Native American life on the Great Plains, since their primary food source was no longer abundant. Periods of starvation and deprivation followed; the Blackfoot tribe, like other Plains Indians, was forced to adopt ranching and farming, settling in permanent reservations. In the 1870s, their bands signed treaties with both the United States and Canada, ceding most of their lands in exchange for annuities of food and medical aid, as well as help in learning to farm, but the Blackfoot have worked to maintain their traditional language and culture in the face of assimilationist policies of both the U. S. and Canada. The Blackfoot/Plains Confederacy consisted of three peoples based on kinship and dialect, but all speaking the common language of Blackfoot, one of the Algonquian languages family.
The three were the Piikáni, the Káínaa, the Siksikáwa. They allied with the unrelated Tsuu T'ina, who became merged into the Confederacy and, with the Atsina, or A'aninin; each of these decentralized peoples were divided into many bands, which ranged in size from 10 to 30 lodges, or about 80 to 240 persons. The band was the basic unit of organization for defence; the largest ethnic group in the Confederacy is the Piegan spelled Peigan or Pikuni. Their name derives from the Blackfoot term Piikáni, they are divided into the Piikani Nation in present-day Alberta, the South Peigan or Piegan Blackfeet in Montana, United States. A once large and mighty division of the Piegan were the Inuk'sik of southwestern Montana. Today they survive only as a band of the South Peigan; the modern Kainai Nation is named for the Blackfoot-language term Káínaa, meaning "Many Chief people". These were also called the "Blood," from a Plains Cree name for the Kainai: Miko-Ew, meaning "stained with blood"; the common English name for the tribe is the Blood tribe.
The Siksika Nation's name derives from Siksikáwa, meaning "Those of like". The Siksika call themselves Sao-kitapiiksi, meaning "Plains People"; the Sarcee call themselves the Tsu T'ina, meaning "a great number of people." During early years of conflict, the Blackfoot called them Saahsi or Sarsi, "the stubborn ones", in their language. The Sarcee are from an different language family; the Sarcee are an offshoot of the Beaver people, who migrated south onto the plains sometime in the early eighteenth century. They joined the Confederacy and merged with the Pikuni; the Gros Ventre people call themselves the Haaninin spelled A'aninin. The French called misinterpreting a physical sign for waterfall; the Blackfoot referred to them because of years of enmity. Early scholars thought the A'aninin were related to the Arapaho Nation, who inhabited the Missouri Plains and moved west to Colorado and Wyoming, they were allied with the Confederacy from circa 1793 to 1861, but came to disagreement and were enemies of it thereafter.
The Confederacy occupied a large territory where they foraged. But during the late nineteenth century, both governments forced the peoples to end their nomadic traditions and settle on "Indian reserves" or "Indian reservations"; the South Peigan are the only group. The other three Blackfoot-speaking peoples and the Sarcee are located in Alberta. Together, the Blackfoot-speakers call themselves the Niitsítapi. After leaving the
Delaware
Delaware is one of the 50 states of the United States, in the South-Atlantic or Southern region. It is bordered to the south and west by Maryland, north by Pennsylvania, east by New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean; the state takes its name from Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, an English nobleman and Virginia's first colonial governor. Delaware occupies the northeastern portion of the Delmarva Peninsula. It's the sixth most densely populated. Delaware's largest city is Wilmington; the state is divided into the lowest number of any state. From north to south, they are New Castle County, Kent County, Sussex County. While the southern two counties have been predominantly agricultural, New Castle County is more industrialized. Before its coastline was explored by Europeans in the 16th century, Delaware was inhabited by several groups of Native Americans, including the Lenape in the north and Nanticoke in the south, it was colonized by Dutch traders at Zwaanendael, near the present town of Lewes, in 1631.
Delaware was one of the 13 colonies participating in the American Revolution. On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution of the United States, has since been known as "The First State"; the state was named after the Delaware River, which in turn derived its name from Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, the ruling governor of the Colony of Virginia at the time Europeans first explored the river. The Delaware Indians, a name used by Europeans for Lenape people indigenous to the Delaware Valley derive their name from the same source; the surname de La Warr is of Anglo-Norman origin. It came from a Norman lieu-dit La Guerre; this toponymic could derive from the Latin word ager, from the Breton gwern or from the Late Latin varectum. The toponyms Gara, Gaire appear in old texts cited by Lucien Musset, where the word gara means gore, it could be linked with a patronymic from the Old Norse verr. Delaware is 96 miles long and ranges from 9 miles to 35 miles across, totaling 1,954 square miles, making it the second-smallest state in the United States after Rhode Island.
Delaware is bounded to the north by Pennsylvania. Small portions of Delaware are situated on the eastern side of the Delaware River sharing land boundaries with New Jersey; the state of Delaware, together with the Eastern Shore counties of Maryland and two counties of Virginia, form the Delmarva Peninsula, which stretches down the Mid-Atlantic Coast. The definition of the northern boundary of the state is unusual. Most of the boundary between Delaware and Pennsylvania was defined by an arc extending 12 miles from the cupola of the courthouse in the city of New Castle; this boundary is referred to as the Twelve-Mile Circle. Although the Twelve-Mile Circle is claimed to be the only territorial boundary in the United States, a true arc, the Mexican boundary with Texas includes several arcs, many cities in the South have circular boundaries; this border extends all the way east to the low-tide mark on the New Jersey shore continues south along the shoreline until it again reaches the 12-mile arc in the south.
To the west, a portion of the arc extends past the easternmost edge of Maryland. The remaining western border runs east of due south from its intersection with the arc; the Wedge of land between the northwest part of the arc and the Maryland border was claimed by both Delaware and Pennsylvania until 1921, when Delaware's claim was confirmed. Delaware is with the lowest mean elevation of any state in the nation, its highest elevation, located at Ebright Azimuth, near Concord High School, is less than 450 feet above sea level. The northernmost part of the state is part of the Piedmont Plateau with rolling surfaces; the Atlantic Seaboard fall line follows the Robert Kirkwood Highway between Newark and Wilmington. A ridge about 75 to 80 feet in elevation extends along the western boundary of the state and separates the watersheds that feed Delaware River and Bay to the east and the Chesapeake Bay to the west. Since all of Delaware is a part of the Atlantic coastal plain, the effects of the ocean moderate its climate.
The state lies in the humid subtropical climate zone. Despite its small size, there is significant variation in mean temperature and amount of snowfall between Sussex County and New Castle County. Moderated by the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay, the southern portion of the state has a milder climate and a longer growing season than the northern portion of the state. Delaware's all-time record high of 110 °F was recorded at Millsboro on July 21, 1930; the all-time record low of −17 °F was recorded at Millsboro on January 17, 1893. The transitional climate of Delaware supports a wide variety of vegetation. In the northern third of the state are found Northeastern coastal forests and mixed oak forests typical of the northeastern United States. In the southern two-thirds of the state are found Middle Atlantic coastal forests. Trap Pond State Park, along with areas in other parts of Sussex County, for example, support
Hudson's Bay Company
The Hudson's Bay Company is a Canadian retail business group. A fur trading business for much of its existence, HBC now owns and operates retail stores in Canada, the United States, parts of Europe including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany; the company's namesake business division is Hudson's Bay referred to as The Bay. Other divisions include Home Outfitters, Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue. HBC's head office is located in Brampton, Ontario; the company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol "HBC". After incorporation by English royal charter in 1670, the company functioned as the de facto government in parts of North America for nearly 200 years until the HBC sold the land it owned to Canada in 1869 as part of The Deed of Surrender. During its peak, the company controlled the fur trade throughout much of the English- and British-controlled North America. By the mid-19th century, the company evolved into a mercantile business selling a wide variety of products from furs to fine homeware in a small number of sales shops across Canada.
These shops were the first step towards the department stores. In 2008, HBC was acquired by NRDC Equity Partners, which owns the upmarket American department store Lord & Taylor. From 2008 to 2012, the HBC was run through a holding company of NRDC, Hudson's Bay Trading Company, dissolved in early 2012. Since 2012, the HBC directly oversees its Canadian subsidiaries Hudson's Bay and Home Outfitters, in addition to the operations of Lord & Taylor in the United States; the Hudson's Bay Company bought Saks, Inc. in 2013, German department store chain Galeria Kaufhof in 2015, online shopping site Gilt Groupe in 2015, 20 former Vroom & Dreesmann sites in the Netherlands in 2015. Gilt Groupe was sold to online fashion store Rue La La in 2018. In the 17th century the French had a de facto monopoly on the Canadian fur trade with their colony of New France. Two French traders, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers, Radisson's brother-in-law, learned from the Cree that the best fur country lay north and west of Lake Superior, that there was a "frozen sea" still further north.
Assuming this was Hudson Bay, they sought French backing for a plan to set up a trading post on the Bay, to reduce the cost of moving furs overland. According to Peter C. Newman, "concerned that exploration of the Hudson Bay route might shift the focus of the fur trade away from the St. Lawrence River, the French governor", Marquis d'Argenson, "refused to grant the coureurs de bois permission to scout the distant territory". Despite this refusal, in 1659 Radisson and Groseilliers set out for the upper Great Lakes basin. A year they returned with premium furs, evidence of the potential of the Hudson Bay region. Subsequently, they were arrested for trading without a licence and fined, their furs were confiscated by the government. Determined to establish trade in the Hudson Bay and Groseilliers approached a group of English colonial businessmen in Boston, Massachusetts to help finance their explorations; the Bostonians agreed on the plan's merits but their speculative voyage in 1663 failed when their ship ran into pack ice in Hudson Strait.
Boston-based English commissioner Colonel George Cartwright learned of the expedition and brought the two to England to raise financing. Radisson and Groseilliers arrived in London in 1665 at the height of the Great Plague; the two met and gained the sponsorship of Prince Rupert. Prince Rupert introduced the two to his cousin, King Charles II. In 1668 the English expedition acquired two ships, the Nonsuch and the Eaglet, to explore possible trade into Hudson Bay. Groseilliers sailed on the Nonsuch, commanded by Captain Zachariah Gillam, while the Eaglet was commanded by Captain William Stannard and accompanied by Radisson. On 5 June 1668, both ships left port at Deptford, but the Eaglet was forced to turn back off the coast of Ireland; the Nonsuch continued to James Bay, the southern portion of Hudson Bay, where its explorers founded, in 1668, the first fort on Hudson Bay, Charles Fort at the mouth of the Rupert River. Both the fort and the river were named after the sponsor of the expedition, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, one of the major investors and soon to be the new company's first governor.
After a successful trading expedition over the winter of 1668–69, Nonsuch returned to England on 9 October 1669 with the first cargo of fur resulting from trade in Hudson Bay. The bulk of the fur – worth £1,233 – was sold to Thomas Glover, one of London's most prominent furriers; this and subsequent purchases by Glover made. The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay was incorporated on 2 May 1670, with a royal charter from King Charles II; the charter granted the company a monopoly over the region drained by all rivers and streams flowing into Hudson Bay in northern Canada. The area was named "Rupert's Land" after Prince Rupert, the first governor of the company appointed by the King; this drainage basin of Hudson Bay constitutes 1.5 million square miles, comprising over one-third of the area of modern-day Canada and stretches into the present-day north-central United States. The specific boundaries were unknown at the time. Rupert's Land would become Canada's largest land "purchase" in the 19th century.
The HBC established six posts between 1668 and 171
Clovis culture
The Clovis culture is a prehistoric Paleo-Indian culture, named for distinct stone tools found in close association with Pleistocene fauna at Blackwater Locality No. 1 near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. It appears around 11,500–11,000 uncalibrated radiocarbon years before present at the end of the last glacial period, is characterized by the manufacture of "Clovis points" and distinctive bone and ivory tools. Archaeologists' most precise determinations at present suggest this radiocarbon age is equal to 13,200 to 12,900 calendar years ago. Clovis people are considered to be the ancestors of most of the indigenous cultures of the Americas; the only human burial, directly associated with tools from the Clovis culture included the remains of an infant boy researchers named Anzick-1. Paleogenetic analyses of Anzick-1's ancient nuclear, Y-chromosome DNA reveal that Anzick-1 is related to modern Native American populations, which lends support to the Beringia hypothesis for the settlement of the Americas.
The Clovis culture was replaced by several more localized regional societies from the Younger Dryas cold-climate period onward. Post-Clovis cultures include the Folsom tradition, Suwannee-Simpson, Plainview-Goshen and Redstone; each of these is thought to derive directly from Clovis, in some cases differing only in the length of the fluting on their projectile points. Although this is held to be the result of normal cultural change through time, numerous other reasons have been suggested as driving forces to explain changes in the archaeological record, such as the Younger Dryas postglacial climate change which exhibited numerous faunal extinctions. After the discovery of several Clovis sites in eastern North America in the 1930s, the Clovis people came to be regarded as the first human inhabitants who created a widespread culture in the New World. However, this theory has been challenged, in the opinion of many archaeologists, by several archaeological discoveries, including sites such as Cactus Hill in Virginia, Paisley Caves in the Summer Lake Basin of Oregon, the Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the Friedkin site in Texas, Cueva Fell in Chile, Monte Verde in Chile.
The oldest claimed human archaeological site in the Americas is the Pedra Furada hearths, a site in Brazil that precedes the Clovis culture and the other sites mentioned by 19,000 to 30,000 years. This claim has become an issue of contention between North American archaeologists and their South American and European counterparts, who disagree on whether it is conclusively proven to be an older human site. A hallmark of the toolkit associated with the Clovis culture is the distinctively shaped, fluted-stone spear point, known as the Clovis point; the Clovis point is bifacial and fluted on both sides. Archaeologists do not agree on whether the widespread presence of these artifacts indicates the proliferation of a single people, or the adoption of a superior technology by diverse population groups; the culture is named after artifacts found between 1936 at Blackwater Locality No. 1, an archaeological site between the towns of Clovis and Portales, New Mexico. These finds were deemed important due to their direct association with mammoth species and the extinct Bison antiquus.
The in situ finds of 1936 and 1937 included most of four stone Clovis points, two long bone points with impact damage, stone blades, a portion of a Clovis blade core, several cutting tools made on stone flakes. Clovis sites have since been identified throughout much of the contiguous United States, as well as Mexico and Central America, into northern South America. Clovis people are accepted to have hunted mammoths, as well as extinct bison, gomphotheres, tapir, camelops and other smaller animals. More than 125 species of plants and animals are known to have been used by Clovis people in the portion of the Western Hemisphere they inhabited; the oldest Clovis site in North America is believed to be El Fin del Mundo in northwestern Sonora, discovered during a 2007 survey. It features occupation dating around 13,390 calibrated years BP. In 2011, remains of gomphotheres were found; the Aubrey site in Denton County, produced an identical radiocarbon date. The most held perspective on the end of the Clovis culture is that a decline in the availability of megafauna, combined with an overall increase in a less mobile population, led to local differentiation of lithic and cultural traditions across the Americas.
After this time, Clovis-style fluted points were replaced by other fluted-point traditions with an uninterrupted sequence across North and Central America. An continuous cultural adaptation proceeds from the Clovis period through the ensuing Middle and Late Paleoindian periods. Whether the Clovis culture drove the mammoth, other species, to extinction via overhunting – the so-called Pleistocene overkill hypothesis – is still an open, controversial, question, it has been hypothesized that the Clovis culture had its decline in the wake of the Younger Dryas cold phase. This'cold shock', lasting 1500 years, affected many parts of the world, including North America; this appears to have been triggered by a vast amount of meltwater – from Lake Agassiz – emptying into the North Atlantic, disrupting the thermohaline circulation. The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, or Clovis comet hypothesis proposed that a large air burst or earth impact of a comet or comets from outer space initiated the Younger Drya
