The US southwest and west has an abundance of pre-Columbian pictoglyphs in the desert areas - it seems the people who lived there hundreds of years ago wanted to make their marks.
It varied. There were large settlements in places like Cahokia along the Mississippi, and even in post-contact times peoples such as the Iroquois, the Cherokee, and Choctaw had good-sized towns, as did many Southwestern tribes.
In other words, aside from the people who lived there nobody lived there. Or at least nobody important, i.e., European.
Even if one defines "history" as "what's been recorded", US history does go back further then that, back to the Spanish settlements in Florida (and if you count Puerto Rico, even earlier). There's a building in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that's been used as a government building almost continuously since 1608 (there was this thing called the Pueblo Uprising in the late 1600s).
If you can find a copy where you live, I recommend Charles Mann's book 1491 for a glimpse of current thinking on the pre-contact Americas.
