Alyce Hanlow, age 12, of East Cleveland, Ohio, for her question:

Why does Leif Ericson not get credit for discovering America?

America was discovered many times before the dawn of history by wanderers from Asia. Their descendants are the Indians that settled here. It has been rediscovered at least twice by Europeans. Leif Ericson is credited with discovering the New World long before Columbus.

Last Columbus Day certain scholars made an announcement about Leif Ericson. Many people were startled to learn that this bold Viking had discovered the New World centuries before Columbus landed here. Some Suspected hocus pocus and challenged Lucky Leif's claim, but they were wrong. Reliable scholars have enough evidence to satisfy themselves that Ericson and his Vikings crossed the Atlantic from Greenland and landed on our shores in about 999 A.D.

But the bold Viking himself never claimed to have found the New World. This outstanding son of Eric the Red was known to his friends as Lucky Leif because everything he did seemed to turn out well. But when he landed on our shores he did not know that his luck had led him to discover a whole new world.

The roving Vikings explored many strange lands and crossed many uncharted seas.  But the news of their discoveries had to be spread by word of mouth. In the days of  Lucky Leif, the Norsemen had no written language. However, they knew it was important to report their doings to their own people. They told the story of each voyage in accurate detail and retold it again to Each generation.

These repeated stories are the old Norse sagas. They are as accurate as the Norsemen could make them, for they knew that their information might mean life or death to wandering Vikings of the future. Each story was told first by the men who returned from a voyage; and each time it was retold, some old timer who had heard it before was there to correct the details. Later, the Norsemen wrote down their sagas, and Leif's visits to our continent appeared in 12 of these written reports. He was given credit for discovering a land he called Vinland. Nobody knew that his Vinland was part of our New World. Much later, historians studied the old sagas along with lots of other data, and they gave Lucky Leif Ericson the credit he deserved.

Columbus searched the old Norse sagas and many other old reports that hinted of land across the Atlantic. He thought this land was the East Indies and landed far south of the Viking's Vinland. This great man never tried to steal credit from Leif. Neither he nor Ericson suspected that they had both reached the shores of our vast New World.