Most Native American traditions, such as folk legends and creation myths, existed primarily in oral form prior to European contact. They began to appear in written form because of Indians' fears that their traditions forever would be lost with Europeans' arrival in and conquest of the Americas. Although the traditions offered here were recorded and transcribed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they refer to a time long before contact.

Led by the Spanish and the Portuguese, Europeans began exploring the New World in the late fifteenth century. Thanks to these voyages, Europeans had "discovered" the Americas and gained a greater familiarity with Africa, a continent both very new to Europeans and central to Europe's actions in the New World of the Americas. Contact with these lands and their peoples heightened European interest in these faraway places.

Before Europeans ever set foot on the American continent, they had formed ideas and expectations about what and whom they would find. Likewise, their first encounters with the land and its peoples powerfully shaped their views of the New World. While some of the Europeans' expectations and impressions proved false or inaccurate, others were eerily prophetic of future relations between Native Americans and European colonizers.

Spanish expectations of finding vast resources of precious metals were fufilled in Mexico, and contact with sophisticated native civilizations soon led to serious conflict. The Spanish conquest of Mexico brought terrible slaughter, but also a more powerful, unseen enemy--disease.