The Wild Frontier (5 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
S. L. A. Marshall observed with sarcasm that “quite familiar is the saying that the American Indian was a peace-loving, peace pipe-smoking being until the white man came.”
8
James Adair, for instance, claimed, “The Indians did not wage war on each other unless prompted to it by the white traders.”
9
Larry Lee Carey similarly argued that “although
some tribes (notably the Mohawks) had a predilection for warfare, most Indians did not become hostile except when seeking redress for blatant injustices.”
10
John Collier in his
Indians of the Americas
asserted that Indian warfare “was limited, not unlimited or excessive.”
11
James Wilson claimed that Indian warfare “was seldom undertaken either to exterminate or to dispossess an enemy,”
12
and that “after inflicting limited damage, the victors usually withdrew.”
13
The fighting “was (in some ways) closer to a sporting contest than to total war.”
14
But the 500 or so tribes were emphatically not “in balance with themselves,” nor were they “relatively free of warfare,” and they were certainly not “peace-loving … until the white man came.” Widespread fighting started long before then. Indian war was not limited or even close to a sporting contest. The fact is, according to Page Smith, the Indian loved warfare. “Cruelty, violence, and constant warfare were the facts of [Indian] daily life.”
15
In a tract published around 1504-06, Amerigo Vespucci observed that “the nations wage war upon one another without art or order. The elders by means of certain harangues of theirs bend the youths to their will and inflame them to wars in which they cruelly kill one another.”
16
The Iroquois Confederacy illustrates the Indian love of warfare. No Indians were more addicted. The first explorers of the American coast, and settlers as well, found many Algonquins fighting one another and the Iroquois.
17
The situation became so bad that the Iroquois Confederacy, or League of Five Nations, was formed among 5 tribes in an attempt to end the constant feuding.
18
The confederation consisted of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. Even after that, however, said Gary Nash, there was “an impressive amount of fighting … between the Five Nations and surrounding Algonkian people.”
19
From 1638 until 1684, 46 years later, the Iroquois
*
fought the so-called Iroquoian Beaver Wars against 13 other tribes—the Hurons, Tobaccos, Neutrals, Eries, Ottawas, Mahicans, Illinois, Miami, Susquehannocks, Nipissings, Potawatomis, Delaware, and Sokokis.
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The Iroquois, according to Alvin Josephy, “were almost constantly engaged in wars with Algonquians or with other Iroquoian peoples.”
22
They killed more than 10,000 Hurons. “They hated the Huron intensely, like brother against brother.”
23
The fall of the Iroquois has been attributed to fighting among those tribes. Wissler put it as bluntly as possible:
It was not the white man who destroyed the Iroquois Family, but a case of brother against brother. Probably this is a case of what was going on in America before the white man came and would have continued indefinitely had he stayed away.
24
Similarly, Sheehan noted that
one of the more gruesome episodes in the history of Indian warfare had been the Iroquois conquest of the Hurons. From it the Five Nations acquired their reputation for military superiority. Whatever the real reasons for the conflict and for the decisive victory of the Iroquois, it constituted a startling sample of the violent propensities supposedly inherent in the primitive state. And it occurred, in the Jeffersonian view, without the influence of the whites. Indian set upon Indian. Surely the inherent viciousness of the natives had caused the conflict.
25
About 1670 the Iroquois, who were based in New York, invaded the western country (what is now Indiana and Illinois) and caused a panic among the tribes there. They had succeeded in getting firearms from the Dutch about 1630. During the next 40 years they waged incessant and victorious war on all their neighbors—the Delawares on the south, the Eries on the west, and the Hurons on the north and northwest.
26
The war between the Iroquois and the Hurons finally ended in 1684. Francis Parkman had little sympathy for what happened:
It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet in this crisis of their destiny these doomed tribes were tearing each other’s throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction.
27
About 1776 there was an Iroquois civil war. Mohawks attacked Oneidas, and Oneidas attacked Mohawks. Iroquois fought Iroquois at the Revolutionary War battles of Bennington and Saratoga, both of which were won by the Continental army.
28
Speaking of the Iroquois, Albert Gallatin,
*
secretary of the treasury to Jefferson and Madison, tellingly noted that Iroquois “conquered only to destroy; and, it would seem, … solely for the purpose of gratifying their thirst for blood…. They made a perfect desert of the whole country within 500 miles of their seats.”
30
In the 1830s, Catlin discovered that the Crow and the Blackfeet “are always at war, and have been, time out of mind.”
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The Mandans were engaged in “almost continued warfare.”
32
He generalized that “many different and distinct nations, [were] always at war with each other.”
33
Catlin learned that little parties of 6 or 8 Delawares
†
from 2,000 miles away had visited tribes in the Upper Missouri. In several instances, the visitors, after being feasted and having solemnized articles of everlasting peace, received many presents, “and [having] taken affectionate leave, have brought away 6 or 8 scalps with them.”
35
In 1846 an Indian agent in the Upper Missouri Agency remonstrated with a Sioux chief about the perpetual wars Indians had with one another. The chief answered, “If their great-grandfather desired them to cease war with their enemies, why did he not send each of them a petticoat, and make squaws of them at once?”
36
In 1855 a group of 250 Comanche warriors out on a buffalo hunt encountered by chance a group of their old enemies, the Apache. There was a battle in which both sides lost about 17 men. Nelson Lee, who had been captured by the Comanche, observed that
at that time a deadly strife existed between the tribes, and it would have been a scandalous violation of an Indian’s idea of manhood to have separated without a bloody tilt at arms…. When a warrior dies on the field of battle, their joy knows no bounds.
37
Dozens of writers have commented on the warlike nature of the Indians. The warlike nature and bold provocations of some tribes or groups of warriors led to violence and injustices that might not otherwise have taken place.
38
An important conclusion was that “combat among different
tribes or among different bands within a tribe was, if anything, far more frequent than war between Indians and whites.”
39
Harold E. Driver even concluded in
Indians of North America
that “probably as many Indians were killed fighting each other after White contact as were killed in wars with the Whites.”
40
The
World Book Encyclopedia
states forthrightly that
the European settlers did not bring the first warfare to North America. Indian tribes had fought among themselves for thousands of years. They struggled constantly for the best hunting grounds and village sites, for revenge after the killing of a tribesman, and for personal glory…. But not all tribes were equally warlike. Some, including the Iroquois and the Apache, fought almost all the time.
41
Edward H. Spicer in
The American Indians
agreed:
A … characteristic of the … peoples of the northern plains was that they became especially concerned with and adept in warfare. The competition for hunting grounds was intense as more and more Indians moved into the region. Thus for survival they developed fighting techniques, and warfare became a major orientation of their cultures.
42
Warfare performed several valuable functions for the tribes. Bil Gilbert reported a Cherokee chief in the 1700s saying to an English agent that the idea of making peace with another tribe was not attractive because the Cherokee must then immediately look for another tribe with whom they could engage in “our beloved occupation.”
43
Carl Waldman listed a variety of functions served by war in tribal culture:
as ritual, a rite of passage to manhood or a means of achieving godlike qualities, such as among the Plains warrior societies; as economy, for a source of sustenance through raiding, as practiced by the Apaches of the Southwest; as limited political purpose, a way to establish tribal confederacies, as in the case of the Iroquois League of the Northeast; and as official state policy, as demonstrated by the Aztecs of Mesoamerica, who maintained their social structure through military expansion.
44
The Cheyenne fought for the joy of combat and to gain the approval of others. War was a great hunt, and the young braves went to war with
pleasure. To enjoy life fully, to feel satisfied, they needed someone to fight, and in their wanderings across the Plains, it was seldom difficult to find strangers to attack. To the Cheyenne, anyone who was not of their own tribe was an enemy.
45
T
HE SIOUX
started west around 1750 because their enemies, the Chippewa, had obtained guns from the French. The Sioux forced western tribes to move.
46
Sioux author Vine Deloria candidly admitted that the Sioux
have a great tradition of conflict…. And when we find no one else to quarrel with, we often fight each other…. During one twenty-four-year period in the last century the Sioux fought … against the Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Mandan, Ankara, Hidatsa, Ponca, Iowa, Pawnee, Otoe, Omaha, Winnebago, Chippewa, Cree, Gros Ventre.
47
Francis Parkman expressed the same view about the Sioux attitude toward warfare:
War is the breath of their nostrils. Against most of the neighboring tribes they cherish a rancorous hatred, transmitted from father to son, and inflamed by constant aggression and retaliation.
48
Harold E. Driver found even more significance in the Indian obsession with war:
No young man ever thought of getting married or of being accepted as an adult citizen until he had slain an enemy and brought back a scalp to prove it. So important was this achievement to the individual that when war parties failed to contact the enemy and to obtain the necessary scalps, they sometimes killed members of their own tribe, whom they accidentally encountered on their way home, rather than return empty-handed and in disgrace.
49
In the 1780s, Jefferson came to a similar realization. “Their [Indian] souls are wholly bent upon war. This is what procures them glory among the men, and makes them the admiration of the women. To this they are educated from their earliest youth.”
50
Intertribal warfare finally reached the point where, Brian Dippie claimed, “[m]any treaties negotiated by the government … attempted to establish boundaries between the tribes in the hope of ending internecine warfare.”
51
Clark Wissler, who lived with 10 Indian tribes in
1905,
52
noted another indication that Indians were natural enemies. “Many Indians were ambitious to collect scalps but usually preferred Indian scalps.”
53
Carl Waldman, however, concluded that land was the central issue in a majority of Indian wars.
54
He stated that the fighting among the Indians was for the same purpose that had occurred before and that would occur again when the settlers came, namely, “a stronger people pushing aside a weaker one while expanding territorially.”
55
Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn also found in
Indian Wars
that the Sioux (this applies to almost every tribe) “fought for possession of hunting grounds, in defense against the forays of equally aggressive enemies, and in reprisal when an enemy scored a success.”
56
The depth of feeling one tribe could have against another was illustrated when General George Crook was trying to get Crow scouts in the Great Sioux Wars. He called a general council with his officers and tribal chiefs. Old Crow, the paramount chief, made this statement:
These are our lands by inheritance. The Great Spirit gave them to our fathers, but the Sioux stole them from us. They hunt upon our mountains. They fish in our streams. They have stolen our horses. They have murdered our squaws, our children…. Our war is with the Sioux and only them. We want back our lands. We want their women for our slaves, to work for us as our women have had to work for them. We want their horses for our young men, and their mules for our squaws. The Sioux have trampled upon our hearts. We shall spit upon their scalps.
57
Crow-Sioux enmity erupted again in 1877 when 5 Sioux chiefs approached the camp of General Nelson A. Miles under a flag of truce. They were a peace faction which was gathering strength. Miles had anticipated their arrival, so he had instructed his Indian scouts to honor anyone approaching under a white flag. As the Sioux approached the camp of the Crow scouts, the Crows ambushed and massacred the Sioux, their ancient enemies.
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