The William and Mary Quarterly

European explorers and colonists and the Native Americans they encountered faced challenges from severe winters and droughts characteristic of the Little Ice Age in North America during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This article examines the impact of Little Ice Age climate and weather during the first century of European-Indian encounters in North America through a peculiar pattern of events found in many early colonial narratives: European and Indian efforts to predict and control weather through prayer and magic. Both textual evidence and high-resolution climate reconstructions indicate that these narratives were at least partly factual. Moreover, Native American groups described in these narratives likely did face real shortages of corn in times of adverse weather, threatening both their subsistence and the authority of chiefs and shamans. The encounters occurred during an important transition in European conceptions of prayer and magic, when Europeans were most likely to associate Indian weather rites with sorcery. Although European confidence in the power of their prayers to achieve weather miracles may have impressed some Indians at first, the efforts ultimately created mistrust and mutual suspicions of witchcraft.