Imagine an encounter in California in about 1880 between four people; a former African slave, a Chinese labourer, a German who has come out in the Gold Rush and a native of the Hopitribe, and narrate their conversation.

1. In the seventeenth century, the European traders who reached the north coast of North America after a difficult two-month voyage were relieved to find the native peoples friendly and welcoming.
Unlike the Spanish in South America, who were overcome by the abundance of gold in the country, these adventurers came to trade in fish and furs, in which they got the willing help of the natives who were expert at hunting.
The expansion of the USA
2. Further south, along the Mississippi river, the French found that the natives held regular gatherings to exchange handicrafts unique to a tribe of food items not available in other regions.
In exchange for local products the Europeans gave the natives blankets, iron vessels (which they used sometime in place of their clay pots), guns, which was a useful supplement for bows and arrows to kill animals, and alcohol.
This last item was something the natives had not known earlier, and they became addicted to it, which suited the Europeans, because it enabled them to dictate terms of trade. (The Europeans acquired from the natives an addiction to tobacco.)
3. To the natives, the goods they exchanged with the Europeans were gifts, given in friendship. For the Europeans, dreaming of becoming rich, the fish and furs were commodities, which they would sell for a profit in Europe.
The prices of the goods they sold varied from year to year, depending on the supply. The natives could not understand this -they had no sense of the "market" in faraway Europe.
They were puzzled by the fact that the European traders sometimes gave them a lot of things in exchange for thier goods, sometimes very little.
They were also saddened by the greed of the Europeas. In their impatience to get furs, they had slaughtered hundreds of beavers, and the natives were very uneasy, fearing that the animals would take revenge on them for this destruction.
4. Following the first Europeans, who were traders, were those who came to "settle" in America. From the seventeenth century, there were groups of Europeans who were being persecuted because they were of a different sect of Christianity (Protestants living in predominantly Catholic countries, or Catholics in countries where Protestantism was the official religion).
Many of them left Europe and went to America to begin a new life. As long as there was vacant land, this was not a problem, but gradually the Europeans moved further inland, near native villages. They used their iron tools to cut down forest to lay out farms.
5. Natives and Europeans saw different things when they looked at forests - natives identified tracks invisible to the Europeans. Europeans imagined the forests cut down and replaced by cornfields. Jefferson’s "dream" was a country populated by Europeans with small farms.
The natives, who grew crops for their own needs, not for sale and profit, and thought it wrong to "own" the land, could not understand this. In Jefferson’s view, this made them "uncivilised"