Penguin History of the United States of America (11 page)

For while, to the north, the English colonies and their outposts – Nova Scotia and Newfoundland – jostled Canada, the southern boundary of English North America was a matter of continuous international strife from the foundation of South Carolina onwards. French enterprise linked the two areas of friction. Louis XIV’s brave explorers, inspired partly by an imperial vision and partly by a hunger to monopolize the fur-trade, claimed the Great Lakes and the Mississippi for their King; and in 1699 founded a colony about the mouths of the great river which they named Louisiana in his honour. The Spaniards, by contrast, stood mainly on the defensive, having much to lose. They still had the energy to reconquer New Mexico (lost to a great rebellion of Pueblo Indians in 1680) and, so late as 1769, to enter and settle Upper California. But their policy was dominated by dread of English competition to the north and French competition to the west. On their side the English dreaded encirclement and extinction by the French, or by a Franco-Spanish combination. The French dreaded an English challenge for control of the Mississippi.
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The obsessive rivalries of Europe had reached North America; for more than a century they would determine its history.

The three competing empires differed in character. Florida’s value to Spain was chiefly strategic: the colony protected the Bahamas Channel and Spanish communications with Mexico and the sugar islands. Accordingly it was garrisoned rather than inhabited, though Franciscans did their usual excellent missionary work among the Indians. The English colonies, we have seen, were agrarian and commercial, and grew ever more thickly
populated. New France gradually acquired a farming population, but its lifeblood, like that of Louisiana, was the trade in peltries – beaver fur and deer hides.

Such dissimilar entities, it may be thought, could well have afforded to co-exist. Unhappily they were not different enough. All had an interest in the fur-trade, for one thing; and the habit of suspicion, fear and rivalry, common to all three, did the rest. In this, we see, Old and New Worlds were much alike.

But in the means of competition the continents differed sharply. Not for many years could there be a conventional war of regular soldiers in North America, or even conventional commercial rivalry. The tangled forests were too wide, white numbers (for warfare) too few, European tactics too inflexible. All Europeans had to learn the lessons taught New Englanders by King Philip’s War (1675–6), that ‘it is one thing to drill a company in a plain champaign and another to drive an enemy through the desert woods’; and that Indian allies were absolutely necessary, to act as auxiliaries and scouts. The Indian, it emerged, was the key to dominion in the wilderness. When North America was at what passed for peace, imperial success was measured in terms of influence with the tribes. When, as repeatedly happened, peace was admitted to be war, the Europeans, it has been well said, showed themselves ‘ready to fight to the last Indian’.
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Luckily for the intruders, the tribes were commonly happy to fight each other. They had the usual human grievances against their neighbours, and war was a principal occupation among them. Success in war was the leading source of individual prestige. Indeed, before the European arrival, wars seem to have been waged in many cases solely to provide chances for warriors to win this prestige. It was a lethal game, with elaborate rules, and so addicted were most of the Indians to it that in the early eighteenth century the Cherokees could remark, ‘We cannot live without war. Should we make peace with the Tuscaroras, we must immediately look out for some other nation with whom we can engage in our beloved occupation.’ The skill gained in this wilderness conflict proved invaluable for attacking or defending European possessions.

Furthermore, only Indians could provide the commodities of the peltries trade; and there was much money to be made out of them. For as time went on the Indians grew ever more dependent on European goods. By the same token they grew more and more manipulable. Those who controlled the supply of essential articles such as guns controlled their customers. And so the curtain rose on the tragedy of the native peoples of North America.

There had been a long prologue. It is easy to forget, when studying the comparatively gentle rule of Spain north of Mexico (at any rate after the Pueblo revolt), what the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas had involved. The crimes of the Anglo-Americans pale beside those of Cortès and his successors. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed outright; even more were worked slowly and horribly to death as slaves. The fact that European diseases were even more destructive hardly excuses the conquistadores. One Carib Indian, about to be burned to death after a rebellion, refused baptism, though it could take him to heaven, because he feared he would find more Christians there. Genocide is an unpleasant word, but it seems appropriate here. If the North American Indians had known what had happened south of the Rio Grande, they might well have trembled at the future.

2. The Indians and the Anglo-Americans

But they were blessedly ignorant. They did not even know how completely they were trapped in the destiny of the Europeans. Towards the end of their days of freedom and power one man of genius among them, the Shawnee Tecumseh (1768–1813), saw the truth and realized that only by uniting in one nation might the Indians save themselves. Tecumseh (‘Crouching Tiger’) was a great general, a compelling orator, a generous and humane man. But his vision came too late, the red men had thrown away their safety and their numbers in ceaseless wars among themselves; after delusive early success Tecumseh failed, and died in battle.
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The Fates were not to be balked.

Few historical themes are of greater fascination than the tale of the North American Indian; but it cannot be told here for its own sake. A history of the United States must be a history of victors; the defeated are relevant chiefly for what they tell us of their conquerors.
Sed victa Catoni;
the sage Auden, however, tells us that

Few even wish they could read
the lost annals
of a cudgelled people.
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Honour to those few; but they must seek satisfaction elsewhere. Let us see what the cudgelled can reveal of their oppressors.

Names are revealing. What did the races call each other?

The Anglo-Americans had a long list of savoury adjectives and nouns for the Indians: for example, besotted, childish, cruel, degraded, dirty, diseased, drunken, faithless, gluttonous, insolent, jealous, lazy, lying, murdering, profligate, stupid, thieving, timorous, uncivilizable, vindictive, worthless; barbarians, demons, heathen, savages, varmints (vermin). The red men were no less definite. At first, by the gentle Caribs, the Europeans were called ‘The People from Heaven’. Later, Indians to the north, who came to know them well, dubbed them ‘People Greedily Grasping for
Land’. Members of the Algonquian group most commonly called the English ‘The Coatwearing People’; next often, ‘The Cut-Throats’.

In many respects the Indians badly needed to be discovered by Europe. The greatest intelligence
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must be limited by the means available to it, and Indian technological backwardness was largely inevitable, because of the absence in the Americas of easily worked tin and iron deposits, and of draught animals (hence the principle of the wheel could not be exploited). The sacred book and higher mathematics of the Maya, staggering stone and metalwork achievements, the great Inca political system, might make Central and Andean America glorious: they could not nullify the Indians’ weakness in other respects. So it was in part with delight and fascination that the intelligent red men greeted the coming of the People from Heaven and their marvellous possessions. When the Spanish entered New Mexico
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in 1598 they brought with them sheep, goats and horses. Time, chance and the Pueblo rebellion gradually spread these things among the western tribes who thereupon began to evolve the dazzling Plains culture which has so long enchanted the world’s imagination. Many Indians now became shepherds and horsemen (and brilliant horse-thieves);
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mounted on piebald ponies and armed, originally, with spearheads made from old Spanish sword blades, then with guns got in trade from the East, they became mighty hunters of buffalo. No longer was it necessary to stampede a herd over a cliff, or to wait for a weak or injured beast to stray; now swift riders could select, pursue and bring down their prey whenever they chose. The result was health and wealth: finally abandoning almost all sedentary pursuits to the women, the men brought in meat in such vast quantities that there was more than enough for everybody. As a result the population grew strong and numerous. Male leaders of the Sioux, resplendent in eagle-feather war-bonnets, made the most picturesque appearance; but it is through the women’s work that we can most clearly see what the new way of life amounted to. Men might be artists and paint pictorial calendars on buffalo leather; it was the women who, for example, jerked the surplus meat; that is, sliced it thin and dried it; or pounded it together with berries and poured melted fat and marrow over it to make pemmican. It was they who ornamented clothing and parfleche (bags made of raw buffalo hide) with porcupine needles, beadwork, elks’ teeth and paint; they who made and painted the buffalo hide lodges
(tipis)
. Meantime the men danced the annual Sun Dance, to win supernatural favour for the tribe; or ritual dances to secure a good hunt; or the war dance, after which they would go off to raid rival tribes and earn personal glory. The greatest feat was to count coup,
that is, to touch a chosen foe with a special stick and get away without harming him or being harmed. At times war would be suspended. Then there would be great gatherings, for gambling, trade, foot races, horse races; it was thus that the sign language of the Plains developed, to make communication possible between tribes that spoke different languages. The problem of communication with fellow-tribesmen over a distance was solved by the device of signals made with smoke from buffalo-dung fires. It was a good life; small wonder that many tribes abandoned their settled villages for a nomadic existence. All was well so long as the buffalo herds lasted; and they teemed inexhaustibly until the white settlers came.

All the same, the Plains culture was the outcome of a meeting between the Indians and the Europeans. The same was true in the dense eastern forest. The horse was less valuable there, but brass kettles replaced earthenware cooking pots, English cloth replaced attire of fur and hide, and, above all, guns replaced bows and arrows. Everywhere the Indians welcomed the coming of European animals and artefacts with joy, and their cultures burst into brief, beautiful flower.

Even had that been all, a price would have had to be paid, some of it in currency: guns and powder could be obtained only by barter, and to get them eastern Indians had to hunt their woods bare of beaver and deer.
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This in turn bred trouble. For example, when the Iroquois (or Five Nations)
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had run through their local supply of furs they chose to secure a continuing flow of trade goods by becoming middlemen in the traffic which brought furs from the unexhausted West to the rivers Hudson and St Lawrence. This was simple to arrange: all they had to do was massacre the previous middlemen, Hurons and related tribes, which they duly did (1648–53); then they settled down for the next century as the lords of the North-East, one of the most formidable obstacles to French and English advance. Similar convulsions occurred everywhere beyond the frontier of white settlement. They were not too important: long before the coming of the European, tribes and confederacies had risen and fallen. And the presence of whites, in forts or townships, might stabilize, rather than inflame, a perilous situation. The coastal tribes of South Carolina welcomed the planting of Charles Town in 1670: it protected them from the wild Indians of the interior.

For the blessings of trade, such prices were not too high; but more was exacted. The Puritans, not content with earnestly trying to convert the Indians to Christianity, characteristically tried to impose the prim Sabbatarian manners of rural England on them: this was one of the contributory causes of King Philip’s War.
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The provincialism of Anglo-American
culture, its complacency in front of the exotic, was a perpetual source of friction, and of misery to the Indians. Indian customs were condemned by successive generations as sinful, un-Christian, uncivilized, unprogressive. In the later nineteenth century the agent for the Yankton Sioux wrote:

As long as Indians live in villages they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent feasts, heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting — these will continue as long as people live together in close neighbourhoods and villages. I trust that before another year is ended they will generally be located upon individual land or farms. From that date will begin their real and permanent progress.