Hundreds of thousands of years ago, America was very different. There was no civilization: no roads, no cities, no shopping malls, no Honda dealerships. There were, of course, obnoxious shouting radio commercials for car dealerships; these have been broadcast toward Earth for billions of years by the evil Planet of Men Wearing Polyester Sport Coats, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop them. But back then, you see, there was no way to receive them, so things were pretty peaceful.

The only inhabitants of America in those days were animals such as the deer and the antelope, who were engaged primarily in playing; and the buffalo, or “bison,” (Meaning “buffalo.”) who mainly roamed. The bison must have been an awe-inspiring sight: millions of huge, majestic animals, forming humongous herds, their hooves thundering like, we don’t know, thunder or something, roaming from the Mississippi River all the way across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, which they would smash into headfirst at speeds ranging upward of thirty-five miles per hour, then fall down. They were majestic, those bison, but stupid.

But all of this changed twenty thousand years ago with the construction of the Land Bridge to Asia, which was completed on October 8. Suddenly, the ancestors of the Indians and the Eskimos, clans who called themselves “The Ancestors of the Indians and the Eskimos,” had a way to get to North America. Still, it was not an easy trek: They had to traverse hundreds of miles of frigid snow-swept wasteland, which was cold, and each was permitted to carry only two small pieces of luggage. Eventually they arrived in an area very near what we now know as Kansas, and they saw that it was a place of gently rolling hills and clear flowing streams and abundant fertile earth, and they looked upon this place, and they said, “Nah” (“No.”). Because quite frankly they were looking for a little more action, which is how come they ended up on the East Coast. There they formed tribes and spent the next several thousand years thinking up comical and hard-to-spell names for major rivers. Also they made a great many Native American handicrafts such as pots, although at the time there was not much of a retail market for these, so the Native Americans wound up having to use them as household implements.