How many north american indian tribes were there when the europeans first landed in the americas?
No systematic survey was done of the whole of North America (the continent that includes Canada) at the time of first contact, so most of the native population was unknown to the first settlers. They did not encounter the majority of native groups until hundreds of years after the first landings. Furthermore, native populations changed all the time, some tribes splitting in two (as in the case of tthe Pequots and Mohegans) as a result of internal disputes and others being absorbed by more powerful neighbours. Many tribes that existed at the time of Columbus became extinct even before white contact took place (such as a large number of very small groups in Ohio – “Late Archaic Indians” – who are extremely shadowy even today). To complicate matters even more, the natives themselves in many cases do not recognise or accept the neat divisions into tribal groups that modern historians have adopted. A rough guesstimate is all that we can hope for and some anthropologists have given 500 as th
