The King James Version (KJV) utterly dominated American Christian history until well into the 20th century.

The first Protestant European settlers in America actually predated the KJV (1611), so the earliest English Bibles in both the (eventual) southern and northern colonies were primarily the 1557-60 translation known as the "Geneva Bible." (Its translators had been exiles in Calvinist Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary). Geneva Bibles continued to filter into the U.S. even after the appearance and adoption of the KJV. John Winthrop, the early governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony who gives us the famous "city on a hill" Puritan ideal, cites from both the Geneva and KJV translations in his writing!

But the Geneva Bible wasn't just a translation of the biblical text. It followed the medieval tradition (to a much, much lesser extent) of annotating or glossing the text with interpretive annotations. And those glosses came out of a more original and hardcore Reformation theology of free grace than social order-minded leaders of early American churches wished to see in their congregations. Actually, in Anne Hutchinson's view, the Geneva Bible and its glosses outright refuted the entire idea of a governing, national-level theocracy and any importance of outward "works" (such as church membership) in revealing the state of someone's soul. The American Puritan leadership could not have this, and along with the expulsion of Hutchinson from Massachusetts came the condemnation of the Geneva Bible--and the triumph of the KJV.

So throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when English-speaking Americans cited the Bible, they absolutely overwhelmingly cited the KJV. American Catholics did have the Douay-Rheims translation, which contains the Old Testament apocrypha not found in standard Protestant Bibles.

The alphabet soup of English-language Bible translations that we know today didn't get started until the late 19th century or flourish until the 20th. This is entirely connected to the maturation of "modern" biblical scholarship, including new critical methods and philosophies of translation, the discovery of even older manuscripts and relations among known ones, and eventually the politics of word choice (e.g. mankind versus humanity). "KJV only!" is a modern rallying cry among certain American Christian sects. It's modern because, for most of the history of Protestant Christianity in America, there was no thinkable alternative.