The Wild Frontier (11 page)

Ten years later Jefferson commented that in all the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, there was not a single passage superior to Chief Logan’s speech.
²⁵³

In 1834, a Tennessee weekly reported a story about a grieving Indian woman who spoke over the graves of her husband and child. She lamented that

One of the most memorable moments of Indian eloquence is undoubtedly the October 5,1877, speech of Nez Perce
*
chief Joseph. General Oliver Howard ordered the tribe to move from Oregon to Idaho. Joseph and his younger brother, Ollikut, agreed to the moving, but before the tribe left, some young members of the tribe who had been drinking killed 18 or 19 settlers, and it was decided they would head instead for Canada. In the last battle at Bear Paw, Joseph’s young daughter became frightened and fled from the others. Joseph decided to surrender. The interpreter wept as he translated Joseph’s words, which were recorded by the general’s aide:

The cause was lost. Brother Ollikut was dead, but his daughter was found and brought back to him.

General Howard had promised Chief Joseph that he could return to the Wallowa Valley in Oregon where he had lived, but the government refused to honor Howard’s promise. When Joseph died, one of the general’s aides commented, “I think that in his long career, Joseph cannot accuse the Government of the United States of one single act of justice.”
²⁵⁷
Not all the eloquence was Indian eloquence.

T
HEFT WAS
a characteristic of the Indians that repelled and angered the settlers. The intrusion of the settlers into Indian territory “exposed them to practices such as horse thefts … [which] outraged the intruders’ sense of morality and were opposed and ended by force and violence.” Alexander Whitaker, a minister from Henrico, Virginia, wrote in 1613 that Indians “esteem it a virtue to lie, deceive and steale as their master the divell teacheth to them.”
²⁵⁸
Indians did not consider theft a crime, according to George Catlin, but instead called it “capturing … considering it a kind of retaliation or summary justice.”
²⁵⁹

The Sioux loved horses, and although wild herds were available to them, they “preferred to steal horses already broken to riding.” The western Indians stole horses from the Spanish, the French, and the English. They stole horses from other tribes. Clark Wissler wrote that “all of the Plains Indians taught their youth that one of the most laudable acts was to steal the horse of a stranger. An Indian brought up under such a regime would be troubled by a guilty conscience if he passed a chance to steal a horse.” This was the principal cause of friction between them and the settlers.
²⁶⁰
Most Comanche raids were for horses. If scalps were taken, the raid was all the more successful, “but the taking of human life was ordinarily a secondary matter.” In
The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement
, Rupert Norval Richardson related how Chief Is-sa-keep stated that his 4 sons were a great comfort to him because “they could steal more horses than any other young men in the tribe.”
²⁶¹

In 1804, Lewis and Clark Expedition sergeant John Ordway wrote in his journal around the campfire that the Sioux would sing and “confess how many horses they had Stole.”
²⁶²
Indian thefts from the expedition were frequent. In December of that year, the Sioux stole 2 horse-drawn sleighs and a horse.
²⁶³
But in December 1805, the situation was reversed. When the expedition was getting ready to leave the Pacific to return to the East, Lewis desperately needed a canoe. The Clatsop Indians would not sell him one for what he considered a reasonable price, so the expedition took matters into their own hands. Ordway reported how 4 men went “over to the prarie
[sic]
near the coast” and took a canoe “as we were in want of it.”
²⁶⁴
Six days later, just as the party was starting back east, an Indian guide claimed the canoe was his, so Lewis bought it from him for an elk skin.
²⁶⁵

As they entered Chinook country in April 1806, a series of new thefts began. First, the Indians tried to steal a piece of lead and a tomahawk, and did steal Lewis’s dog, Seaman, an ax, an iron socket, a saddle, and a robe. Lewis ordered 3 soldiers to follow the Indians who had stolen the dog and recover it, which they did. Lewis was fed up. He later wrote that the Chinook were “the greatest thieves and scoundrels we have met with.” He told a group of Indians who were hanging about the camp that “if they made any further attempts to steal our property or insult our men we should put them to instant death.”
²⁶⁶

In July 1806, 7 of the party’s 17 horses were stolen, so Lewis sent the renowned woodsman George Drouillard, whose father was a French Canadian and whose mother was a Shawnee, to try to find them. He tracked them to where they crossed the Dearborn River, but gave up
because the thieves had a 2-day head start.
²⁶⁷
Lewis, Drouillard, and 2 others then took a side expedition along the Marias River. They came upon about 8 Blackfoot Indians, whom they approached. After some tense moments, Lewis asked them to camp with him that night, and they agreed. The next morning at dawn, one Indian stole a soldier’s rifle, and another stole Lewis’s as well. The Indians were chased, and a soldier, Reubin Fields, stabbed to death an Indian who would not give the rifles up.

In the meantime, the main party of Blackfeet was trying to steal the party’s horses. Lewis gave chase. An Indian with a British musket turned toward Lewis; Lewis (who was an expert marksman) fired, hitting the Indian in the stomach. The Indian raised himself to his knee and shot, coming so close that Lewis could hear “the wind of his bullet.” Only 4 of the party’s stolen horses were recovered, so Lewis stole 4 Indian horses to replace them.
²⁶⁸

S. L. A. Marshall saw this stealing by the Plains Indians as part of their culture:

Harold E. Driver estimated that “a hundred times as many horses were stolen on the Plains as were obtained in legitimate trade.”
²⁷⁰
Helen Hunt Jackson guessed that in 1860 the Sioux had stolen more than half the horses the Poncas owned. The Poncas moved down the Niobrara River to try to get away from the Sioux.
²⁷¹

In 1855, Nelson Lee
*
was captured by the Comanche together with 20 other men while driving some mules and cattle to California. Only 4 of them lived. Lee was held as a slave and a medicine man for 3 years. The first thing the Indians did after the attack, he said, “was to collect the plunder. Not only did they gather up all our buffalo skins, blankets, rifles and revolvers, culinary utensils, and the like, but the dead were stripped to the last shred, and everything was tied on the backs of their mules. Nothing was left behind.”
²⁷³

The paths of George Crook,
*
who fought Indians most of his professional life, and Apache leader Geronimo crossed more than once. Dee Brown reported that Geronimo led a raid into Mexico to steal cattle in May 1883. General Crook caught up with the Indians. They surrendered, but Crook allowed them to keep their weapons “because I am not afraid of you.” Geronimo told Crook he would need several months to round up all his people before returning to Arizona. Crook agreed. Eight months later, Geronimo returned from Mexico, according to his cousin, Jason Betzinez, who was on the trip, “driving along with him a large herd of cattle which he had stolen from the Mexicans.” Crook took the cattle away from Geronimo, had them sold, and sent the proceeds of $1,762.50 to the Mexican government with the request it divide the money among the owners.
²⁷⁵

I
T SEEMS
generally agreed that it was and is characteristic of the Indians that many have difficulty avoiding intoxication. There is disagreement about whether Indians had intoxicants before the settlers came, but most commentators believe that some form of liquor was made and used by the Indians early on. The Indians in Mexico had 40 distinct alcoholic beverages. There are several early references to American Indians drinking tiswin beer, which was made from corn.
²⁷⁶
Southwest Indians made wine from cacti. Southeast Indians made a persimmon wine. Papagos and Pima Indians believed the ingestion of liquor would cause it to rain.
²⁷⁷

Seneca mystic Handsome Lake, who was once an alcoholic, reported on the return of a 1789 Indian trading expedition:

In 1796 a government Iroquois agent wrote in understated fashion that “they have reed their payments and immediately expended it for liquor & in the course of a frollick have killed one or two.”
²⁷⁹

Fur trader Alexander Henry stayed with the Indians from 1800 to 1807 at a small trading post. His journal notes that during that time there were 77 gatherings of Indians for drinking purposes, during which there were 65 injuries ranging from death to minor wounds. “Love of liquor is the ruling passion, and when intoxicated they will commit any crime to obtain more drink.”
²⁸⁰

John Gannt built a trading post on the Arkansas River in Colorado in 1832, when he introduced the Plains Indians to hard liquor. According to Duane Schultz, “The Indians clamored for more, trading nearly all their possessions for the drink—valuable furs and skins, armloads of blankets, horses and weapons, even their clothing, and then their wives and children.”
²⁸¹

The devastating effects of liquor on Indians have been described many times. Wilcomb E. Washburn reported that

Whole villages, including women and children, fell into chronic alcoholism. Health deteriorated, and social cohesion inevitably dissolved.
²⁸³
Superintendent of the Indian Trade Thomas L. McKenney left a graphic description of the Indian addiction:

The detrimental consequences of alcohol on the Indians were even worse than might at first be expected. Alan Axelrod pointed out the remarkable speed with which the Indians degenerated in the early 1800s. He said, “The Miamis, for example, a numerous and proud people in the eighteenth century, had become a diseased, drunken group of 1,000 by 1810.”
²⁸⁵
Lazarus was writing about the Sioux when he observed the following, but he could have been speaking about most tribes:

The Comanche captive Nelson Lee reported the following after watching the chief during a night of the “usual”: