The Wild Frontier (13 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
T
HIS CHAPTER’S
listing of Indian characteristics, good or bad, is not complete by any means. Helen Hunt Jackson, a great Indian advocate, wrote in
A Century of Dishonor
that one or more tribes had these characteristics: there was no difference between educated white and educated Indian; they were religious; kind and honorable; had sound judgment; lively imaginations; ready conception; wonderful memories; they prosecuted ends by sure means; evinced coolness and composure; never indulged in passion; had a sense of honor and greatness of soul; were high-minded and proud; courageous; valorous; intrepid; heroic; had equanimity; were affable; generous; hospitable; the intellectual equivalent of Europeans; eloquent; had less criminality than among the French; no beggars; were temperate in their mode of living; not affected by suffering. But she also added that Indians were suspicious, vindictive, and cruel.
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Those who believe the Indians were or are innocent, noble, and non-savage victims are, in all probability, romanticizing a people with many good qualities, some of which are outlined in this chapter. For example, the painter George Catlin correctly referred to Indian men as “red knights of the prairie” and “red sons of the forest.”
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From the time of James Fenimore Cooper to the present, many people have tended to view the Indian emotionally instead of intellectually, just as some others have tended to romanticize Wild West train and bank robbers such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
John M. Coward discussed the concept of romanticizing the Indian at some length:
On a more psychological level, the Noble Savage was also an object of desire, a strange, exotic, and satisfyingly romantic figure. Romantic Indians, after all, were romantic precisely because they appeared to possess qualities highly desired by pioneering Americans: strength, dignity, boldness, and freedom. From colonial times onward, these ideals became exaggerated in the American psyche, a fact that reveals a deep-seated envy of Indians and Indian ways. Some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Americans came to love the Indian.
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What causes this perhaps misdirected admiration? Possibly it is because Indians are usually handsome and dignified people who at first glance can be admired without questioning their past. Columbus wrote that Indians were “well built and of handsome stature.”
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Robert F. Berkhofer described the concept of “the good Indian” to include handsomeness of physique and dignity in bearing.
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Their eloquence may play a part—few can fail to be moved by the speeches of Mingo John Logan and Nez Perce chief Joseph. It may be that it is the political anti-government feeling that makes itself known in certain quarters from time to time, an attempt to show that the government was wrong in displacing the Indians and in its dealings with them thereafter. Whatever the cause, to romanticize the Indians does them no good, because it masks their present-day problems and ignores some parts of their past that have contributed to those problems.
*
The Iroquois boys trained with knives, war clubs, and bows and arrows. They became warriors when in their teens. The confederation expanded in all directions in order, among other reasons, to get new sources of fur.
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*
Albert Gallatin lived with the Abnaki Indians for a while. He was a congressman and held several diplomatic posts. Interested in Indian culture, he supported a federal policy of educating Indians in order to assimilate them into mainstream society.
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†
The Delaware lived at first in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Settlers pushed them into the Ohio River area, then to the Great Lakes area, Missouri, Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. They sold Manhattan to the Dutch for 24 dollars even though the Manhattan Indians held the island.
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*
Red Cloud counted 80 coups (acts of courage). His warriors and other tribes fought the army in several battles, seeking to close the Bozeman Trail, which ran through Sioux territory. Finally, the government gave in to his demands and by treaty agreed to close its forts in return for the Indians stopping their raids.
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Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Sioux, killed his first buffalo at age 10 and counted his first coup at 14 in a battle against the Crow Indians. He led many raids on nearby tribes. After the Santee Sioux Uprising he fought soldiers pursuing them. He and his warriors participated in the Battle of the Rosebud and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
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†
Rain-in-the-Face was also a Hunkpapa Sioux war chief. He fought the Cheyenne and the Gros Ventres. Rain-in-the-Face fought in the Fetterman Massacre and the War for the Black Hills. It was his claim that he killed Custer. He had 7 wives over the course of his life.
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*
Ely S. Parker studied engineering, then worked at several government jobs, including one where he met Ulysses S. Grant. Grant later commissioned him captain of engineers, and he served with Grant’s army in two campaigns.
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Susquehannocks were bitter enemies of the Iroquois, and both tribes made frequent raids on the other. They were defeated by the Iroquois in 1675, and most left their original homeland. The tribe finally ceased to exist, with survivors living here and there among other Indians.
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*
William Henry Harrison fought with General Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. After he resigned from the army, he became the Northwest Territory delegate to Congress, then governor of the Indiana Territory. Harrison fought the Shawnees at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Harrison defeated Shawnee chief Tecumseh in 1813. He became president in 1841.
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The Nez Perce did not farm, but wandered searching for food, fish, and game. After Joseph and his people surrendered, they were sent to Kansas, then to the Indian Territory, and finally to Washington State.
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Nelson Lee worked as a boatman and was a Texas Ranger, a horse breaker, and a trader.
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George Crook was a West Point graduate. He fought in the Yakima and Rogue River wars against the Indians. In the Civil War he was in the Battles of Antietam and Chickamauga, and the Shenandoah campaign. Then he campaigned against the Paiute, the Apaches, the Yavapais, the Sioux, and the Cheyenne.
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CHAPTER 3
Some Settler Cultural Characteristics
J.
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
*
was perhaps more intimately acquainted with the English and French colonies, the frontier, and the wilderness than any other man.
1
His letters are said by some to be a mixture of fact and fancy, but, nevertheless, they are full of wise observations and conclusions about Americans. He was the first to ask, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” His much-quoted answer was this:
The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.
2
“No sooner [he said] does an European arrive, no matter what his condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect.”
3
Settlers arriving from Europe ceased to be Europeans after a time and became different from them.
Crèvecoeur described the American melting pot and predicted that the country would be influential. “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
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(If the reader could read only one book about the settler character, it should be Crèvecoeur’s
Letters from an American Farmer.)
The settlers came to the New World to escape desperately hard conditions. Many fled Europe for spiritual betterment. A good many even came to escape hanging. European people arrived in the New World beginning around 1609, when the Jamestown colony was founded. There were emigrants from Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Russia as well, but the colonists were predominately English.
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There was a depression in England—and thousands of gin shops.
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“The hard liquor consumed in one year (1733) in London alone amounted to 11,200,000 gallons, or some 56 gallons per adult male.”
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Page Smith sketched this picture of conditions in eighteenth-century England:
It has been estimated that London in the eighteenth century had 6,000 adult and 9,300 child beggars. In the entire country of some 10,000,000 persons, there were estimated to be 50,000 beggars, 20,000 vagrants, 10,000 idlers, 100,000 prostitutes, 10,000 rogues and vagabonds, 80,000 criminals, 1,041,000 persons on parish relief. Indeed, over half the population was below what we would call “the poverty line,” and many, of course, were profoundly below it—below it to the point of starvation.
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This was the involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor about which Crèvecoeur spoke. “In such circumstances there was ample incentive to emigrate almost anywhere.”
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There was great opportunity in the colonies. “Anyone willing to work could be put to worthwhile labor, and might (and often did) in a few years establish himself as an independent farmer or artisan.”
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There was a growing need for labor there. Agents would pay for the passage of those willing to work off the cost of the transportation.
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In addition, land was cheap and often free.
English law in the 1600s made almost 300 offenses punishable by hanging. It became an increasing practice of English judges to pardon those sentenced to hang on condition that the defendant would leave England. From 1650 to 1700 thousands received such pardons, and most immigrated to the American colonies and to the West Indies. From
1619 to 1640 all pardoned felons were sent to Virginia. From 1661 to 1700, more than 4,500 convicts were sent to the colonies. From 1745 to 1775, 8,846 convicts were sent to Maryland.
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Criminals were not the best of settlers, and, Page Smith noted, “in one contingent, twenty-six had been convicted for stealing, one for violent robbery, and five for murder.”
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To a considerable extent, the frontier got the worst of the worst. In view of that fact, it is no surprise that the settlers as well as the Indians committed atrocities.
A
FTER A
time, the colonists began heading into the frontier in great numbers. The consequences, according to Bernard W. Sheehan, were that
the worst representatives of the white men’s society went into the wilderness first, fought with the natives, learned to hate them, and gave the impression of utter incompatibility between the white man’s world and the Indian’s world.
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William Franklin understandably concluded that “some of the worst People in every Colony reside on the Frontiers.”
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By 1800, 50,000 families had settled along the Ohio River, 100,000 in Tennessee, and 200,000 in Kentucky. T. Walter Wallbank and Alistair M. Taylor in
Civilization—Past and Present
said, “Here land was to be had for the asking.”
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Out west between 1841 and 1859, more than 300,000 people and at least 1.5 million oxen, cattle, horses, and sheep had moved along the Sante Fe Trail alone.
17
Author Howard H. Peckham reiterated that the frontier attracted the most undesirable settlers, “the congenitally dissatisfied, the fugitives from justice, the army deserters, the debtors, the swindlers, all were churned out of seaboard society and thrown to the frontier.”
18
An anonymous English author wrote in 1812 that at the beginning of the war “the lower order of the white people in the United States of this new world, are, if possible, more savage than the copper-coloured Indians.”
19
On the frontier, the
Niles’ Weekly Register
noted, “white traders encouraged the ‘worst passions’ and ‘most abominable vices’ among the Indians.”
20
Crèvecoeur observed that
men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them…. There, remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society…. Thus are our
first steps trodden, thus are our first trees felled, in general, by the most vicious of our people.
21
Perhaps the principal characteristic of the settlers was their love of land. The Indians loved warfare, and the settlers loved land—the land occupied by the Indians—thereby making conflict between the 2 inevitable. Page Smith more generally stated that the disparity of 2 cultures was the problem:
Whether the aborigines of North America were “squalid savages” or nature’s noblemen; whether the English settlers were ruthless exploiters or pious Christians anxious to save heathen souls, it is hard to imagine how the two cultures could have coexisted on the same continent without the bitter conflicts that marked their historic encounter.
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The conflict over land started almost at once. Not long after Jamestown was founded, the settlers simply began taking over Indian fields rather than clearing new fields themselves.
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Once the colonies had been established, there was a flood of land-hungry Englishmen, depicted by Carl Waldman:
They came to North America primarily as families and farmers, and they came to stake a claim and stay. The overflow from the British Isles was furious…. Boatload after boatload of hopeful settlers arrived in the busy harbors…. It was the English drive toward privately held land that pushed most Indians … further and further back from the Atlantic seaboard, across the Appalachian Mountains and, eventually, after American Independence, across the Mississippi Valley as well.
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