How did Americans greet each other before "Hi"?

How do ye / How do you do / Howdy?

From the etymology.com page on howdy:

howdy 1840, first recorded in Southern U.S. dialect, contraction of how do you do (1630s), phrase inquiring after someone's health; earlier how do ye (1560s).

Note that a search for "how do you do" in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (1810s - 2000s) in particular brings results that are from the early 1810s (see number of occurrences per decade below). This supports that the usage of "how do you do" precedes the year in which Americans started greeting with "hi" according to etymonline.com (1862).

Similar searches in the COHA for "how do ye do" and "howdy" support that also their usage was prior to when "hi" started being used as a greeting.

Hal / Hail

Disclaimer: no evidence that these words were used in America. What follows is more like an interesting note on the history of greetings in English:

The book Speech acts in the history of English dedicates an entire chapter to greetings in English language history. Among the greetings that it covers, I would say that the closest one to hi! in spelling and usage is hail! The author describes hail as the Middle English daughter form of the Old English interjection hal. Hal! would literally mean health!.

You can browse the book here in Google Books.

The word hello was originated in 1865/1870s. These other words are considered much older and may have been used:

• Howdy, stereotypicaly Southern American greeting, Contraction of How do you do? (1820–30)
• How do you do?, seems like the most likely phrased used (1625–35)
• Good Day/Morning/Afternoon (1175–1225)
• Greetings (Before 900)

Source

Since this seems to call for some trend analysis data, I did the needful and used Google Ngrams.

American

British

...from which comparison I take it that

• 'hello' isn't that terribly unknown in British English.
• 'hello' even seems to follow (roughly) the same trends in both BrE and AmE
• 'hello' started to rise in popularity around the turn of the last century in both AmE and BrE.
• 'good X' combined seem to outweigh the others until 'greetings' took over in the 1870's

Of course there are all sorts of possible problems:

• I didn't use 'hi' because that got a zillion false positives from OR of 'III' in chapter headings and Old English 'hi' for ModE 'he'.
• these are from books, which tend towards the more formal. I find 'greetings' to be stilted and archaic even though it seems to be currently still quite popular.

I'm still left with the nagging feeling that, as pompous as it sounds to my 21st century AmE ears, 'greetings' was actually -used- at least in print. I woulda guessed 'howdy' but not in books.