One contemporary Indian story great grandma told me was told to her by an Indian woman of the Potawatomy Tribe. It was about the first white man that the Indians of that tribe had ever seen.  Scraps of history suggest that the first white men in Iowa were Spanish explorers or miners in the 1500s, but were those what the Indians saw?

The First White Men

They camped by a river that flowed from a big lake "Too far to see across". Then one day the children ran into camp with tales of strange people. The men heard the alarms and ran from camp to question the terrified children who were in the trees, all pointing toward the lake. 

At the edge of the lake a strange boat had landing on the shore, and men with hairy faces got out and set up camp and built a fire. The Indians called them, "Men With Hairy Faces Who Have No Women," and they called the lake, "Water too wide to see other side."

Several men hid in the woods and watched the camp of hairy men. With darkness coming on, one brave cautiously approached the campfire. The hairy men were apparently friendly. They pointed across the lake and "signed" from whence they came. They had gifts, cloth, knives, and other things to trade, but no whiskey. 

They wanted to trade for skins of deer, elk, beaver, muskrat, etc. The men came again after that and  traded with the Indians and always treated the Indians fairly.

End

Based upon Canadian and American history, where that tribe lived in contemporary times, the events related in the story probably occurred in the 1600s, on shores of Lake Superior in what would later become Minnesota Wisconsin or Michigan. The hairy white men in all likelyhood were probably French from Quebec.

One comment in the story made little sense and that was the one about whisky. A tribe who had never seen a white man was not likely to know about whiskey. That apparent contradiction might have resulted from someone in the line of custody of the story taking literary license. 

History suggest that Indians native to that land were primarily farmers who lived in permanent camps and farmed land near those camps. The further suggestion is that Indians either cleared land for farming or selected naturally open land, like meadows, to farm. 

Typically after the crops were planted, braves went hunting and the women, children and older men traveled to an annual meeting place set up fish camp.

At fish camp they would catch running fish and dry them to take back home. If the big lake they visited was Lake Superior, and the white men were French traders, the story would make more  sense.