It’s now common knowledge that Leif Erikson came to North America before Christopher Columbus. This is to take nothing away from Columbus, as he kept coming back and established a much better link with the old world than Erikson did. The thing that I find interesting is that the Viking explorer found copious supplies and open land on the northern coast, even finding Vinland where grapes and wheat grew. Having come from Greenland where building materials and provisions of all sorts were relatively much more scarce, you’d think he would have stayed. But after one trip, he never went back.
Certainly, other Vikings followed in his path, but the few settlements they made there didn’t last, with the last know discovered settlement being discovered around 1000 AD, around the time the Viking Age was ending.
Did the Natives drive them off? That seems unlikely, given the relatively more advanced state of Viking culture and technology.
Were the stresses of the waning Viking culture too much to sustain the extension of those people into lands so far away? I lean towards this explanation, as just an inability to sustain themselves logistically in the evolving situation of the day.
But does anyone really know?