The Wild Frontier (8 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
Indian raids on frontier settlers during the Revolution were a matter of great significance:
It was primarily an Indian war; without Indian allies the activity of the British in the West would have been confined to a few minor expeditions by British regulars and Tories…. With the involvement of the Indians, the frontier was devastated by a ruthless and barbarous total war. Indeed, the frontier settlers suffered, in the course of the raids and
counterraids of the border war, more casualties than Washington’s Continental Army suffered in all its major engagements.
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The Indians’ hatred was not directed only toward the settlers. That hatred was aimed at other tribes as well, presumably all those with whom the Indians made war. New York governor George Clinton, who was vice president from 1805 to 1812, under Jefferson and Madison, put it as graphically as anybody in an 1814 paper:
With savages in general, this ferocious propensity was impelled by a blind fury, and was but little regulated by the dictates of skill and judgment. The Indian tribes … engaged in interminable conflict that stunted their cultural progress and kept their numbers small. They utterly destroyed their enemies by eating their bodies, not because they had an appetite for such fare but in order to excite themselves to greater fury. Those unfortunate enough to be captured would be killed with “the most severe and protracted suffering.”
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James Mooney wrote from personal experience: “Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward the other, … could appreciate the effect of the Ghost Dance religion on those tribes.”
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As late as 1982 hatred still existed between the Hopi and the Navajo.
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R
EVENGE WAS
often inextricably a part of hatred. “For the Indians,” wrote Utley, “this revenge was not merely casual retribution for specific injustices. It represented a strong and moral principle in Indian life. To fail to repay an injustice was not charity or mercy, but itself injustice.”
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Frederick Drimmer also emphasized that “nothing is more sacred to a savage than revenge.”
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He went on:
The Indian had his grievances against the whites. To him, one American or Englishman was like another, and all were held responsible for the misdeed of one. Given the provocation and the opportunity, he often exacted the last full measure of revenge.”
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Bernard W. Sheehan went so far as to say that some observers thought the Indians fought mainly for revenge:
Revenge had the sound of an indiscriminate savage reaction; it made war arise from causes intrinsic to the Indian character. Jonathan
Carver wrote that “the passion of revenge, which is the distinguishing characteristic of these people, is the most general motive [for war]. Injustices are felt by them with exquisite sensibility, and vengeance pursued with unremitted ardor.” John Heckewelder, a usually sympathetic observer of Indian life, admitted that “the worst that can be said of them is that the passion of revenge is so strong in their minds that it carried them beyond all bounds.”
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T
HERE HAVE
been frequent observations that the Indian was childlike. The Indian allies of the British in the Revolution frequently killed cattle just to get their bells.
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Horace Greeley later found them to be “little more than children.”
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According to James Wilson, “Since the time of Columbus, Europeans had seen Native Americans as children—pastoral innocents or feckless, thoughtlessly cruel delinquents.”
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Thomas L. McKenney was the chief administrator of Indian policy under 3 presidents. After he left office, he wrote a 3-volume history of Indians in North America, which noted, among many things, their childlike quality:
Our Indians stand pretty much in the relation to the Government as do our children to us…. Indians are children and require to be nursed, and counseled, and directed as such…. Indians, I have found out, are only children, and can be properly managed, only, by being treated as such.
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Professor Logan Esarey noted something further:
Their senses were keen but their reason rudimentary. They believed in sorcery and witchcraft. Spirits, friendly and unfriendly, animated everything around them…. Their reverent, childlike minds were lost in the confusion.
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This childlike behavior of the Indians was demonstrated in their attitude toward gifts. Columbus noted that they were “delighted” with small gifts. Often they could not resist the attractive trinkets offered by the speculators for vast areas of land. Sheehan observed that
the artifacts of European civilization, although obviously increasing the efficiency of the Indian, set him adrift from his old manner of life, made him dependent on the white man, and gave him an insecure base on which to erect a new society.
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Fanny Kelly remembered this about the Sioux:
They were much like children … easily offended, but very difficult to please…. I was constantly annoyed, worried, and terrified by their strange conduct—their transition from laughing and fun to anger, and even rage. I knew not how to get along with them. One moment, they would seem friendly and kind; the next, if any act of mine displeased them, their faces were instantly changed, and they displayed their hatred or anger in unmeasured words or conduct—children one hour, the next, fiends.
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In getting ready for their great expedition in 1803, Lewis and Clark recognized the need for vast quantities of beads, scissors, thimbles, thread, silk, paint, 288 knives, rifles, balls, powder, combs, arm bands, ear trinkets, brass buttons, tomahawks, axes, moccasin awls, mirrors, tobacco, and whiskey to give to the Indians.
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The Sioux continued to exhibit these qualities as late as 1916. Cattle prices were inflated then. The Sioux sold almost all their cattle and bought white status symbols, especially automobiles. When they had no more cash, they sold their horses until they were all gone.
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Perhaps this childlike characteristic was put into perspective by ecologist John Stewart Collis, who called attention to a unique fact: when Columbus came to America, “the whole of the North American continent was six thousand years behind European civilization.”
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H
UNTING WAS
the favorite vocation of the Indians, next to war. The buffalo was the most important animal hunted on the Great Plains. Stephen E. Ambrose reported in
Undaunted Courage
that Meriwether Lewis and his hunting party killed 20 buffalo in a 2-day period in December 1804, but ate only the tongues.
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In the 1870s, the buffalo were almost exterminated for commercial purposes and finally for sport when they were shot from passenger trains. Indians were properly critical of the senseless killing. But it would appear senseless killing was not the province of the settlers alone. Ralph K. Andrist found that
the Indians did their part [in decreasing the number of buffalo]; they were not the great conservationists they are made out to have been, and did a great deal of wasteful killing. Many early travelers tell of Indians killing buffalo for nothing but the tongue, and the maneuver of stampeding a buffalo herd over a cliff, when one was handy, killing far more animals than could possibly be used, was standard practice. A
band of western Cree in Canada so thoroughly wiped out the buffalo in their area by driving them over cliffs that they were forced to move to new hunting grounds.
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A few days before Catlin went with the Sioux in 1832, an immense buffalo herd appeared. Five or six hundred Sioux horsemen went to the buffalo and came back in about 6 hours with 1,400 buffalo tongues, which were sold for a few gallons of whiskey. George Catlin sadly remarked on “this profligate waste of the lives of these noble and useful animals, when, from all that I could learn, not a skin or pound of the meat (except the tongues), was brought in.”
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Wilcomb E. Washburn determined that “buffalo might be driven into a buffalo pound, driven off cliffs, encircled with fire, or surrounded by mounted hunters using bows and arrows.”
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The great number of animal remains at excavated hunting sites raises the possibility that hunters may have lowered certain animal populations below the levels required for sustenance.
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Beaver and otter were nearly exterminated in Iroquois country around 1640.
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Great quantities of animals were killed just for the hides, leaving the meat to rot.
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Captive James Smith reported that the country around his tribe had been “hunted poor, so that few of even the best of hunters were able to kill game often.”
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Fanny Kelly saw the same wasteful activity:
Sometimes these animals [buffalo] number tens of thousands, in droves. The Indians often, for the mere sport, make an onslaught, killing great numbers of them, and having a plentiful feast of “tatonka,” as they call buffalo meat. They use no economy in food. It is always a feast or a famine; and they seem equally able to gorge or fast. Each man selects the part of the animal he has killed that best suits his own taste, and leaves the rest to decay or be eaten by wolves, thus wasting their own game, and often suffering privation in consequence.
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Even in thinly settled areas, tribes often carelessly exhausted the resources in the area and were obliged to move on.
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T
HERE ARE
a number of other Indian characteristics relating to their collective behavior. Almost every tribe broke into 2 major factions, one favoring accommodation with the settlers and adoption of white ways, and the other holding firm to the old ways and resisting the blandishments of the whites.
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It is clear that most tribal governments were weak. Most tribes had several chiefs. There were war chiefs and peace chiefs.
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The Sioux, for example, had 12 chiefs in 1878 and an unwieldy 63 chiefs in 1880.
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When the Iroquois Confederacy was organized, it had a council of 49 chiefs.
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This meant that Indians were handicapped in war because coordinated military action was usually impossible.
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“The Indians overall,” wrote Carl Waldman, “failed to present a unified and organized front because of long-standing feuds.”
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Tribal decisions were characteristically reached by highly democratic means—often through innumerable meetings or councils, which frequently came to no unanimous conclusion at all. Moreover, individuals, if they disagreed with a so-called tribal decision, were usually not bound by it. In short, tribes could rarely enforce treaties on their own people. Nash even said that “no party in disagreement with a majority decision was compelled to act against its wishes.”
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Grant’s commissioner of Indian affairs was a Seneca Indian chief, Ely S. Parker.
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His policies were fair and enlightened. In 1869 he made this assessment:
The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government of such inherent strength as would secure a faithful obedience of its people in the observance of compacts of this character.
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Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., concluded that Plains Indian tribes in general
had little formal government. Most bands were autonomous under their own leaders or chiefs…. But they gave advice rather than orders; councils of leading men made decisions based on unanimous agreement.
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Some tribes had no government at all. This was true of the Kiowa Apaches, the Lipans, the Jicarillas, the Mescaleros, the Western Apaches, and the Chiricahuas. With little or no government, it hardly need be said that “custom and tradition rather than law and coercion regulated social life.”
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Indians frequently acted without authority—as did the settlers—
which was a natural consequence of little or no government. Carl Wald-man concluded that
Indian proponents of peace, who believed that the long-term hope for their people lay in accommodation with whites, had their efforts undone by a constituency they could not control … often by young, volatile individualistic warriors in quest of personal honor.
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Washburn was not the only one who found that “Indian leaders could not easily control the warlike actions of youthful tribal members.”
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Stephen E. Ambrose explained that
hostilities could break out at any time, for no apparent cause other than the restlessness of the young warriors, spurred by their desire for honor and glory, which could only be won on raids, which always brought on revenge raids, in a regular cycle.
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When the Virginians were fighting the Susquehannock
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in 1676, Gary B. Nash reported that “the Susquehannock sachems could not control their own warriors, who were launching attacks even as their chiefs negotiated with the governor.”
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There was no peace until the Indians were crushed.
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Captive Charles Johnston observed that “young men of all the savage tribes frequently go out on raids without consulting their chief or nation.”
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In 1864, the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle tried to call off his warriors who had been in a fight with troops in which Lean Bear and another chief were killed. Angie Debo described how the troops retreated to Fort Larned, “chased by some vengeful Indians that Black Kettle could not restrain. Then these warriors raided the trail between Fort Larned and Fort Riley on the Kansas.”
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Black Kettle and other Cheyenne chiefs “freely admitted they could not always restrain their young braves.”
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