Natural speed please.
Many distinctive Native-American cultures existed when Europeans arrived in the mid-1500s. An estimated 10 million Indians then lived in cultures with several hundred mutually incomprehensible languages and widely varying social structures. Any survey of cultural regions in such a diversity of group must focus on broad similarities. In the woodland Eastern half of the country were areas now known as the Northeastern and Southeastern Maize regions, where a variety of native cultures depended on different combinations of hunting, fishing, farming and gathering. These are called maize cultures because maize or corn was the most important staple of the Indians' diet. The longer growing season in the Southeastern Maize Region resulted in more extensive and highly developed agriculture. In the East as a whole, most housing was constructed of wood, bark, and thatch. Women ans children usually farmed while men hunted and fished. Well-known cultural groups here were the Iroquois, Huron, Mohican, Delaware and Shawnee in the North and the Powhatan, Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, and Natchez in the South. The Indian cultural area in the prairies and Great Plains is known as the Plais or Bison Region. For thousands of years the population of this area was sparse compared with other parts of the continent. People lived along waterways and depended on riverbank farming, small-game hunting, and gathering. Lacking any other means of transportation, they went on a communal buffalo (bison) hunt once a year on foot. Then between 1700 and 1750 they discovered how to use the horses that reached them from Spanish-controlled areas to the south, and Native-American Plains culture was transformed. The population grew because the food supply increased dramatically when bison were hunted on horseback. Learning of this, some tribes, such as the Dakota, migrated from nearby woodlands to the open steppes farther west. Plains people exchanged their settled farming customs for the nomadic culture of year-round buffalo hunters, discarding sod lodges for the poprtable tipi and evolving a society dominated by a warrior hunting-class. The groups transformed by the arrival of the horse ( the Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, and Dakota) are among the best-known of Indians, largely because of their fierce resistance to white settlement on their hunting grounds.
