The Transformation of the World (76 page)

A rough pattern can be discerned behind the Indian wars. Long before whites and Indians became locked together in military hostilities, most of the contacts between them had been marked by growing distrust on both sides. The federal government played a major role in this, since it had responsibility for Indian
affairs, and its civilian or military representatives often claimed to stand above local parties (therefore to some extent above Euro-Americans) and to bring the wisdom of statecraft to bear on problem solving. The result was often confusion all around—a situation that could easily give rise to military conflict. Early hostilities were rarely due to calculated aggression; it was more typical for spontaneous clashes to escalate into something more serious. The Euro-American side did not generally see itself as the agency of a great historical trend to expansion, and local developments often sufficed for it to consider itself in the right. Whereas whites seldom differentiated between Indian fighters and civilians, they invariably cited Indian attacks on settlers as proof of their own moral and legal superiority. Any atrocities were used to underline the justice of their position.

Until the final phase of the wars, the Indians pulled off surprising tactical victories even against the Federal Army. The white side tended to overestimate its own strength and to underestimate the enemy's prowess in battle, considering them to be primitive and inflexible. It is indeed amazing how such arrogance prevented the learning of lessons. Yet despite their tactical successes, the Indians had no way of avoiding defeat in the end. Hostilities rarely ended in the conventions of the time for “civilized” warfare. Once the Indians' resistance was broken, they appeared not as an enemy army to be honored in defeat, but as a mass of impoverished, half-starved, and half-frozen people struggling to survive in makeshift accommodations or on the road of flight. Mighty warriors could instill fear; defeated Indians were a pathetic sight to behold. At the end of the wars, so much bitterness remained among victors and vanquished that no one ever imagined the transfiguration they would later undergo in literary and cinematic romanticization. The brutality on both sides often left behind such traumas that anything like reconciliation or even peaceful coexistence seemed scarcely possible.
⁷⁸

If the legendary West of the cowboys-and-Indians movie ever existed, then it was limited temporally to the period from 1840 to 1870 and spatially to the Great Plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. What had “closed” by 1890, when Frederick Jackson Turner formulated his theory, was not the settlement frontier—many of today's historians think that that remained open until the 1920s—but the military and economic-ecological dimensions of Indian resistance. At the same time, the commercial carve-up of the great expanses of the Midwest had made great advances. After barbed wire was patented in 1874 and produced in massive quantities, the consolidation of private ownership drew a line under the “open West.”
⁷⁹
The “wilderness” was divided up and colonized, until no space was left over for “wandering savages” (to use the language of the time). A single measurement grid was now applied in practice to the whole territory of the United States, making cross-boundary ways of life impossible.
⁸⁰
The age of the reservation was dawning. Even the last Indians became “captive peoples under relentless pressures to make themselves into something that seemed to contradict all they had ever been.”
⁸¹

In the 1880s, the last combatant peoples had been disarmed and turned into dependent charges of the state. The Indian “nations” were no longer regarded even nominally as negotiating partners, as the decision of 1871 to sign no further treaties with them had clearly shown. The old ceremonies, usually prepared by advance by both sides, had reached a climax at the Treaty Council of September 1851, which Thomas Fitzpatrick had staged at Fort Laramie as the Indian agent of the federal government. Some 10,000 Indians from various peoples and 270 white envoys and soldiers had come together to negotiate and to exchange gifts.
⁸²
Although the event went off peacefully, it had been made clear to the government negotiators that very few of the Indians were willing to be cooped up in reservations. By the 1880s the repetition of such a scene would have been unimaginable. Indians in California and the coastal Northwest had long ago been driven into reservations, and the same had happened in Texas, New Mexico, and the Great Plains after the Civil War. From the Indian point of view, it made a difference whether a reservation was in an area they considered ancestral land, or whether it counted as a permanent exile. It was mainly for this reason that in March 1850 some 350 Cheyenne, under their chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, embarked on an adventurous journey of more than 2,000 kilometers—a kind of parallel to the Long March of the Torghut Mongols in 1770–71 from the Volga back to their homeland.
⁸³
The impetus was not only sentimental, since the authorities had not been providing them with sufficient food. Suffering unprovoked attacks from the army, few of them would reach their destination. In any event, a commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that it made no sense to “civilize” Indians if they interpreted their situation as captivity.
⁸⁴

Property

Agrarian land use was not everywhere the kernel of the frontier constellation. In Canada, where there was no counterpart to the fertile Mississippi Plain and even the prairies were inhospitable, the assault on the wilderness and its inhabitants did not mainly involve agricultural colonization by settler families. The old Canadian frontier was a “middle ground” of hunters, trappers, and fur traders. The nineteenth century preserved its commercial character but gave it a new capitalist form. The fur trade, logging, and livestock farming were organized by large corporations on an industrial, capital-intensive basis; not independent pioneers but wage laborers bore the physical burden of the exploitation of nature.
⁸⁵
The US frontier, however, involved a permanent conflict over agricultural land. It was this, rather than racism or a belief in Christian superiority, that gave such a sharp edge to the clashes between indigenous people and newcomers. Trade contacts are “intercultural,” whereas control over land is an either-or question. European concepts of property armed the settlers ideologically and left little room for compromise.

The formula that European property concepts are individualist and exchange related whereas Indian ones are collectivist and use related is not entirely
inappropriate, although it greatly simplifies complicated matters. The American Indians, like many other hunter-gatherers and farmers around the world, were perfectly familiar with private property, but for them it referred not to the land itself but to things
on
the land. In principle, those who produced the crops also had them at their disposal.
⁸⁶
The idea of dividing up the land into fixed plots was as alien to the Indians as the idea that individual persons, households, or clans might take permanent possession of more land than they were able to cultivate. Claims to control land had to be justified over and over again by actual labor. Those who made due use of their land were allowed to continue doing so without hindrance. Communal control or “ownership” of the land, which nineteenth-century Europeans all over the world regarded as archaic, was paradoxically strengthened in response to the white invasion.
⁸⁷
Thus, for example, when the Cherokee realized in the late eighteenth century that they were being continually cheated in land deals, they forbade individuals to sell land to whites and made communal rights over the land stricter still.
⁸⁸
The exercise of such rights was a complicated business, especially in the British Empire with its sophisticated legal tradition.

The French never recognized Indian land rights in North America and appealed to rights stemming from conquest and effective occupation, as did the British in Australia. The English colonial authorities in America, however, claimed all land for the “sovereignty” of the Crown, while accepting the existence of “private” Indian land rights. Only this made it possible for Indian land to be directly assigned and sold. The US courts followed this practice. With the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, one of the founding documents of the new republic (adopted even before the Constitution and known mainly for the limits it set on the spread of slavery), the United States committed itself to the principle of contractual land disposal—not a good solution for the Indians, but not the worst possible either.
⁸⁹
In practice, however, the state did little to protect the Indians from the aggressiveness of frontiersmen. In this light, President Andrew Jackson's policy of deportation may indeed be seen as an adjustment to the reality on the ground. Around 1830 the position of the East Coast Indians was already unsustainable.
⁹⁰

The history of the North American frontier may therefore be written as one of continual and irreversible loss of land by the Indians.
⁹¹
Even impressive innovations such as the horse-and-bison culture of the eighteenth century offered no alternative in the long run. The native inhabitants of North America were separated from their natural means of production, in a classic example of what Karl Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital.” Since Indians were neither tolerated as owners of land nor indispensable as a source of labor, and since their role as suppliers of pelts and leather was over within a few decades, they were left with no dignified way of fitting into the social order created by European immigrants. The wilderness turned into a series of national parks, empty of residents or garnished with folkloristic trappings.
⁹²

3 South America and South Africa

Argentina

Did South America, with its even older European colonies, also have a frontier?
⁹³
Two countries in particular might be thought to have had a pioneer West: Argentina and Brazil. A third case is Chile where the military
pacificación de la Araucanía
was conducted in close coordination with the Argentine subjugation of the desert and its peoples (
conquista del desierto
).
⁹⁴
The earliest frontiers in South America appeared with the mining of gold and silver; agricultural ones came later. The greatest similarity with the United States was in Argentina, where the pampas stretched from the Gran Chaco region in the North to the Rio Colorado in the South, as well as a thousand kilometers westward from the Atlantic. There was a lack of rivers corresponding to the Mississippi, however, to carry immigrants into the heart of the continent. Until about 1860, unlike in the North American West, no changes were observable to the natural environment of wild vegetation, with a theoretically fertile soil. In the 1820s the pampas began to be “opened up” as land was acquired on a large scale.
⁹⁵
In contrast to the United States, the land in Argentina was not divided into small units; governments sold it off wholesale or donated it in the form of political gifts. Large cattle ranches therefore came into being, and sometimes their land was leased out to smaller ranchers. Only hides were produced at first; grains played no role and actually had to be brought in from outside.
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It was decidedly a “big man's frontier.” Legal regulations favoring small autonomous settlers could never be pushed through, and property rights in general took shape only slowly and patchily.
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The Italians who flooded into the country in the late nineteenth century were incorporated into the system as tenant farmers rather than as owners of land of their own. Few even became Argentine citizens. They therefore carried little political clout against the big
latifundistas
. There was no basis for the formation of a stable agrarian middle stratum, such as that which gave social coherence to the whole of the American Midwest. The small rural town with service functions and a gradually developing infrastructure, so typical in the United States, was absent from the scene.

Thus, in Argentine conceptions of the
frontera
, the opposition between civilized city and barbarian country, was not very sharply drawn. The lack of a credit system for small farmers and the failure to compile a land register made it even more difficult to gain a foothold. Strictly speaking, Argentina had no settlement frontier and no real frontier society that carried weight politically or could form the stuff of legend. The periphery never became—like the cities on the Mississippi or Missouri—a core area in its own right. When the railroad arrived, it facilitated the influx into coastal cities rather than settlement of the interior. In Buenos Aires, people feared that ill-bred migrants from the pampas would bring their uncouth ways into the city. The railroad led at least as much to a contraction of the frontier as to an expansion.
⁹⁸

A characteristic social type in Argentina was the gaucho: migrant worker, ranch hand, and horseman of the pampas.
⁹⁹
(The cowboy was essentially a
Latin
American invention, spreading from the huge ranches of northern Mexico to Texas and from there to the rest of the Wild West. The cowboy's first and last appearance on the
political
stage also took place outside the United States, in the shape of Pancho Villa's armed campaign after 1910 in the Mexican Revolution.
¹⁰⁰
) As a conspicuous social group, the gauchos were squeezed out in the last third of the nineteenth century by an alliance between the powerful landed elite and the state bureaucracy; this was a central process in the nineteenth-century history of Argentina.

The gauchos—a term apparently first coined in 1774—emerged in the eighteenth century out of big-game hunters, who were usually of mixed Spanish-Indian extraction and therefore subject to the racism virulent in both colonial and postcolonial Argentina. They earned a reputation as fighters in the War of Independence (1810–16), but they were unable to preserve the esteem that came with it. By 1820 the age of hunting game and wild horses was over, as was the uncontrolled slaughter of cattle for their hides and tallow. Ordinary firms now took up the processing of salted and dried meat, selling a large part of it to slave plantations in Brazil and Cuba.