Founding Myths (37 page)

The expedition into the Cherokee settlements diffused military ideas, and a spirit of enterprise among the inhabitants. It taught them the necessary arts of providing for an army, and gave them experience in the business of war. . . . [T]he peaceable inhabitants of a whole state transformed from planters, merchants, and mechanics, into an active, disciplined military body.
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This war had a particularly Southern bent. As in the Sullivan campaign against the Iroquois, the object was to starve Indians into submission—but once they did submit, some of these Indians were taken as slaves. William H. Drayton, one of South Carolina's leading patriots, instructed members of the expedition against the Cherokees: “
And now a word to the wise.
It is expected you make smooth work as you go—that is, you cut up every Indian cornfield, and burn every Indian town—and that every Indian taken shall be the slave and property of the taker.”
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Enslavement of captured Indians, however, proved controversial; since this might result in Indians enslaving their white prisoners, the practice was eventually banned. Although whites were forced to turn over Indians they hoped to keep as slaves, this Southern scorched-earth campaign still accomplished its desired result: a total
disruption of Cherokee society. Colonel Andrew Williamson, commander of the South Carolina forces, reported back to Drayton on the success of the mission: “I have now burnt every town, and destroyed all the corn, from the Cherokee line to the middle settlements.”
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The impact on Cherokee society was profound. Elders signed two treaties in which they relinquished over five million acres of land (an area the size of New Jersey) and agreed to end their hostilities—but young warriors, the ones who initiated the conflict, refused to give in. Instead, many moved to the South and West, and they vowed to continue fighting. These people, called the Chickamaugas after their new home, refused to recognize the treaties negotiated by Cherokee elders. The Cherokee, like the Iroquois, became divided by differing responses to the American Revolution. Further, as some native people were forced from their homes, competition for land increased among multiple Native nations. By the war's end in 1783, these sorts of internal and external tensions had affected all indigenous people in the vast stretch of land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

After the Treaty of Paris
. For many Indian nations, the War for Independence—
their
independence—continued long after the British conceded defeat. They continued to fight because so much was at stake. Before the war, Britain had restrained white Americans from settling in the West. After the war, unrestrained, settlers streamed over the mountains at a breakneck pace and claimed Indian land. It had taken Euro-Americans more than a century and a half to settle the thin strip of land east of the Appalachians, but it took them scarcely a decade to extend their reach across a broader area to the west of the mountains. The Revolutionary War had made that possible.

Indian resistance did not fall away, even in the face of this onslaught. In the South, factions within the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee nations, including the breakaway Chickamaugas, formed a pan-Indian confederacy dedicated to fighting white encroachments on all of their lands. By procuring arms from Spain, which controlled
the mouth of the Mississippi and lands to the south and west, they made a show of force that slowed, but did not stop, white advances. White Americans assumed they now owned the western lands—but many Indians thought otherwise. Alexander McGillivray, a half-Creek, delivered the message of the pan-Indian Confederacy to the United States Congress:

We Chiefs and Warriors of the Creek Chickesaw and Cherokee Nations, do hereby in the most solemn manner protest against any title claim or demand the American Congress may set up for or against our lands, Settlements, and hunting Grounds in Consequence of the Said treaty of peace between the King of Great Britain and the states of America declaring that as we were not partys, so we are determined to pay no attention to the Manner in which the British Negotiators has drawn out the Lines of the Lands in question Ceded to the States of America—it being a Notorious fact known to the Americans, known to every person who is in any ways conversant in, or acquainted with American affairs, that his Brittannick Majesty was never possessed either by session purchase or by right of Conquest of our Territorys and which the Said treaty gives away. . . .

The Americans . . . have divided our territorys into countys and Sate themselves down on our land, as if they were their own. . . . We have repeatedly warned the States of Carolina and Georgia to desist from these Encroachments. . . . To these remonstrances we have received friendly talks and replys it is true but while they are addressing us by the flattering appellations of Friends and Brothers they are Stripping us of our natural rights by depriving us of that inheritance which belonged to our ancestors and hath descended from them to us Since the beginning of time.
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To the north, nations from the Great Lakes region—the Mingo, Miami, Wyandot, Chippewa, Ottawa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and
Delaware—continued to fight as well. Officially, the British in Canada could give them no support, but Indians were still able to get unofficial aid in the form of arms and favorable trade. In 1790, Miami fighters defeated an onslaught of soldiers led by Josiah Harmar, commander of the United States Army. In 1791, when white militiamen marched in full force into the Ohio country, warriors from across the North, and even some from the South, stood up to the intruders and killed 630 troops in a single battle along the banks of the Wabash River.

Until recently, these successful acts of Indian resistance were rarely noted. White victories, on the other hand, have not only been noted but celebrated. Historically, American history texts have seen fit to include the story of Fallen Timbers, when Washington sent “Mad Anthony” Wayne and 2,600 soldiers of the United States Army to confront a force of 2,000 Indians—the largest and most diverse force of Native Americans ever assembled against the United States government. This time the whites won and the Indians lost, and that triumphant story gets told.

From an Indian perspective, the American Revolution was pivotal, a global war that encompassed all people proximate to their known world. Fighting continued nonstop for two decades in the Native fights for independence that swept one-third of the way across the North American continent, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. If we view those fights as “fringe,” we undermine the whole concept of a people's independence.

“WHO DEFENDED SETTLERS IN THE WESTERN LANDS?”

Of the many narratives featuring Native people in the Revolutionary War, which do we choose to tell—and why? Consider these two alternatives:

       
(1)
   
In what is now Kentucky, a local militia leader, George Rogers Clark, hatched a scheme to end Indian raids on white
settlements: strike the British outposts that supplied the arms. In the summer of 1778 and the winter that followed, Clark led a band of fewer than two hundred frontiersmen down the Ohio River to the Mississippi Valley. This small group of patriots captured three British forts along the Mississippi and Wabash Rivers, placing a wedge between Native people and their British patrons and thereby “winning the West” for the fledgling United States.

       
(2)
   
In the summer of 1779, the Continental Congress trained and outfitted some four thousand soldiers to take control of the countryside occupied by four Iroquois nations that had allied themselves with the British. This expedition, under the command of General John Sullivan, was by far the largest campaign conducted by the Continental Army in 1779. It destroyed forty Iroquois towns and a major portion of the food supply for the Iroquois people.

Textbooks through much of the nineteenth century included the latter story, a major military operation, but ignored Clark and his small band. Sullivan's purposive destruction of farms, orchards, and towns presented no ethical problem; it was done in “retribution” for the “horrible massacres” and “dreadful atrocities” committed by “bands of ferocious Iroquois,” who had attacked “defenceless mothers, wives, and children” and tortured “prisoners in every way that savage cruelty could devise” in Wyoming Valley (Pennsylvania) and Cherry Valley (New York).
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In a businesslike manner, authors reported that Sullivan, “according to his instructions, proceeded to lay waste their country.”
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After stating that “Sullivan marched to and fro through that beautiful region, laying waste their corn-fields, killing their orchards, and burning their houses,” one author added a descriptive footnote: “The Indians, in the fertile country of the Cayugas and Senecas, had towns and villages regularly laid out. They had framed houses, some of them well finished, painted, and having chimneys. They also had broad and productive fields, and orchards of apple,
pear, and peach trees.” Destroying all this was perfectly legitimate because “the atrocities of the Indians had kept the inhabitants of the Wyoming and Mohawk valleys in continued terror.”
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Toward the end of the nineteenth century, after Indian nations from coast to coast had been defeated, textbooks shifted. Sullivan's destruction of an obviously civilized society undermined the principal justification for displacing Indians: they were allegedly “savages.” No longer proud of Sullivan, authors dropped him from their rosters, filling his spot with George Rogers Clark. The “Indian massacres” remained, but through narrative sleight of hand, a new hero took the stage:

In the summer and autumn [of 1778] horrible Indian massacres were committed by bands of ferocious Iroquois led by Tory captains at Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and Cherry Valley, New York; there were also towns attacked and burned to ashes along the coast; but no great battle was fought. In the West, Captain George Rogers Clark of Virginia by his resolute bravery drove the British out of Illinois and later from Indiana, thus securing that immense region to the United States.
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No matter that Clark's exploits had nothing to do with Wyoming or Cherry Valleys; his “resolute bravery” served as a narrative counter to those “horrible” massacres. In a survey of twenty-three textbooks published between 1890 and 1955, every single one featured Clark, dubbed the “Washington of the West,” while only three made any mention of Sullivan.
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“Clark's expedition deserves to be ranked among the world's great military campaigns,” boasted
A History of Our Country for Higher Grades
, published in 1923.
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From a storytelling point of view, Clark's tale seems preferable to Sullivan's. Clark can be portrayed as a David, battling against formidable odds, while Sullivan is undeniably a Goliath. Clark's story appeals precisely because his force was so small. In the traditional telling, Clark and his men braved flooding rivers in the dead of winter to
surprise Henry Hamilton, the British commander at Vincennes. The Americans, supposedly outnumbered, yelled and marched back and forth to give the illusion of a much larger army. The ploy worked, and Hamilton surrendered. “Clark belonged to the men of genius who persist in accomplishing tasks which men of judgment pronounce impossible,” stated the popular textbook writer David Saville Muzzey in 1934.
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The authors of a 1942 text pronounced proudly: “The final result of this exploit was to give the Americans the territory that now forms the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.”
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The story here is that so few—just “a small but effective force of backwoods riflemen”—could accomplish so much. “Clark's victories opened the way for the march of the American people across the continent,” wrote William Backus Guitteau in 1919.
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The Sullivan story, by contrast, has little appeal. His expedition conducted a terrorist campaign against a civilian population. Until just recently, textbook writers preferred to stay with the romantic image of valiant frontiersmen while suppressing the genocidal policies of the United States government. All six of the elementary and middle-school texts displayed at the 2002 National Council for Social Studies convention featured Clark, while not one mentioned Sullivan. Five of the seven high-school texts at that time included Clark's tale, and, again, none said a word about Sullivan's scorched-earth campaign, sanctioned by the Continental Congress.
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All these texts whitewashed the story of George Rogers Clark, who in fact engaged in dubious practices rarely mentioned. Clark tortured and scalped his prisoners. When they captured Indians outside Vincennes, he and his men tomahawked them and threw them in the river. To avenge the “Widows and Fatherless,” he claimed afterward, “Required their Blood from my Hands.”
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Clark, like Sullivan, systematically destroyed Indian food sources, and he allowed his men to plunder Indian graves for burial goods and scalps, but such details did not find their way into the usual telling.
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Instead, Clark has now become a “protector” rather than a “conqueror.” Here is a question posed to wiki.answers: “Who defended the settlers in the western
lands?” And the answer: “George Rogers Clark helped protect settlers in the western lands.” In this one question and answer, a war of conquest is turned on its head.
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WE MEAN TO KEEP IT