The Wild Frontier (45 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
O
NE OF
the great tragedies of the war between the Indians and the settlers was that there was plenty of land for both. Black Hawk returned from a hunt in 1829 to find a settler family settled in his lodge. He got an interpreter and told the squatters not to occupy those lands and that “there was plenty of land in the country for them to settle upon.” The family didn’t leave, more settlers arrived, and the Black Hawk War started. S. L. A. Marshall observed in
Crimsoned Prairie
that at the time of the Plains wars, “the Far West was still a largely unpeopled land of magnificent distances. There remained plenty of room for the red man and for the white man.”
26
As late as 1872 any newly arrived foreigner who declared his intention to become a citizen was given 160 acres of land and tools and stock.
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As W
E
have seen, diseases were as destructive to the Indians as anything else. Carl Waldman in
Atlas of the North American Indian
put it succinctly:
As devastating as warfare and forced removals were to Indian peoples, another result of contact with whites proved to be even more debilitating, demoralizing, and deadly—the spread of European diseases. It is estimated that, whereas many tribal populations declined by more than 10 percent from Indian-white conflicts, the average tribal loss of life from infectious diseases was 25-50 percent. For some tribes, these diseases meant near extinction….
The extent of the tragedy is staggering. The subject of infectious European diseases pervades every aspect of Indian studies. Disease was a principal disrupter of Indian culture, with shattering impact even on Indian faith and religion. The debilitating effects of these diseases also helped the whites win many of the Indian wars…. As for land cessions, disease through depopulation played a large part in the ultimate displacement of tribes.
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It may be that more Indians were killed by disease than by intertribal warfare and fighting the settlers combined,
29
and William T. Hagan concluded that had it not been for Indian diseases, the war “would have
been bloodier and more protracted.”
30
Wilcomb E. Washburn believed that “unwittingly, disease was the white man’s strongest ally in the New World.”
31
Three years before the
Mayflower
arrived, an epidemic decimated the Indians from Rhode Island to Maine. Thus the Indians were not in as strong a position to oppose the Plymouth colony. “If they had been, it [Plymouth] could not have survived.”
32
A smallpox epidemic struck the New England Indians in 1633 and 1634. Thousands died. Plymouth and the other colonies got a new life.
33
In 1849, cholera swept through the western tribes. The Cheyenne were devastated, the Flexed Leg band vanished, the Sioux reported terrible losses, and a Pawnee agent reported that one fourth of the tribe, or 1,200, had died, with the epidemic still raging.
Disease almost wiped out the Omaha tribe. In the smallpox epidemic of 1800, the tribe’s population dropped from about 3,000 to about 300. At that point, the tribe decided to commit collective suicide. Bordewich discussed how: “They formed a village-wide war party to attack their traditional enemies and fought through the Poncas, Cheyennes, Pawnees, and Otoes until those left realized some of them might survive after all. Then they returned home.”
34
Smallpox was the most harmful disease to the Indians. It was a serious disease among whites as well, but most survived it because they had built up some resistance by reason of centuries of exposure. This was not true, of course, of the Indians. The Mandan Indian tribe of 1,600 suffered a smallpox epidemic in 1837. Half committed suicide with knives, guns, or by leaping from a 30-foot ledge.
35
Only 31 survived. Those were enslaved by the Riccarees, a neighboring tribe, who later were attacked by the Sioux. The Mandan, not wishing to live, ran onto the prairie, calling out that they were Riccaree dogs and asking for the Sioux to kill them. The Sioux did.
36
Edward Jenner developed his vaccine for smallpox in 1796. It was available for use not long thereafter. Various government officials made efforts to see to it that the Indians were vaccinated, but it is clear from the fact that epidemics continued that those efforts were not successful.
37
There were smallpox epidemics in 1780-1800 in Texas, in 1830-33 in California, in 1837 in Wyoming, in 1837-70 in Kansas, and in 1869-70 in Montana.
38
In 1805, Blackfoot Indians hired Alexander Culbertson to get a keel-boat of goods for the Indians. Several passengers came down with
smallpox. When he learned about their smallpox, Culbertson tried to stop the boat until cold weather, but the Indians refused, so the boat went on. Ten days later, the Blackfeet had an epidemic. No fewer than 4,000 out of the 6,000 members of the tribe died.
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The Blackfeet raided a Shoshoni camp in 1781. They found all the Shoshoni dead or dying of smallpox. More than half the Blackfeet then died of smallpox as well.
40
In 1801, a Pawnee war party returning from a raid in New Mexico (then Spanish territory) brought smallpox back with them. It spread from their territory on the lower Platte to Texas.
41
A war party of Pawnee took several Sioux prisoners in 1838. The prisoners had smallpox. About 2,000 Pawnee died of smallpox as a result. They in turn carried it south to the Osages, who also suffered many deaths and then passed the disease on to the Kiowa and the Comanche. The latter 2 tribes moved to north Texas to try to escape.
42
George Catlin watched as Indians “in this [smallpox] as in most of their diseases, ignorantly and imprudently plunge into the coldest water, whilst in the highest state of fever, and often die before they have the power to get out.”
43
But something devastating happened beyond the diseases themselves. James Wilson claimed European diseases “undermined the Native Americans’ confidence in themselves and their view of the world. The failure of the shamans to contain and cure smallpox and bubonic plague was the failure of an entire system of belief.”
44
Diseases affected the soldiers as well and with similar consequences. Axelrod noted that “disease [in the army] was responsible for more casualties than Indian hostility.”
45
In King William’s War in 1690, the English army was overcome by both the French and by smallpox, which killed many soldiers, and the army withdrew.
46
During the French and Indian War, in 1757, the American army was in Halifax training for an assault on Louisbourg. The army was stricken with an epidemic, presumably smallpox. There were 200 deaths and an additional 500 hospitalizations. This army also withdrew.
47
In 1757, French general Montcalm promised the American commandant and his men safe passage out of their fort, Fort William Henry. His Indian allies ambushed the surrendered men and massacred the hospital patients, including the smallpox patients, and took their infected scalps back to their people, where many deaths occurred.
48
During the siege of Quebec in 1759, the British lost fewer than 250 soldiers. After the city was taken, however, an epidemic (no doubt smallpox) killed 1,000 more and 2,000 became unfit for service.
49
Disease was not a one-way street. Columbus perhaps brought smallpox,
but his crews took back syphilis and tobacco. The exchange was not a good one for the whites. Smallpox was made preventable in 1796 by Jenner’s vaccine, but syphilis could not safely be cured until the late 1940s, when antibiotics were developed. This was more than 325 years after Plymouth was founded in 1620.
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Syphilis was the most common medical problem for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
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Indians over almost all of North America used tobacco before Columbus came. Catlin found in the 1830s that “the luxury of smoking is known to all the North American Indians…. In their native state they are excessive smokers.”
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Columbus took it back with him to Europe and from there its use spread all over the world.
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More deaths have no doubt resulted from tobacco than from smallpox and syphilis combined. The World Health Organization estimates that about 2,500,000 people in the world die as a result of smoking each year, and about 400,000 of those deaths are in the United States.
54
Tobacco throughout the world kills more than 3 times as many people each year as there were Indians in the United States in 1492.
E
XTERMINATION WAS
a topic popular among both settlers and Indians. Indians and their advocates have argued that it was soon clear that settlers intended to exterminate the Indians either by deliberately spreading contagious diseases or by use of force. There is no evidence that settlers attempted to use diseases to exterminate Indians. The question remains whether the settlers tried to exterminate the Indians by use of force.
The Ottawa chief Pontiac said in 1763, “It is important to us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands this nation [Great Britain] which seeks only to destroy us.” He then led an assault on Fort Detroit, the strongest British garrison in the area, which was unsuccessful.
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A great pan-Indian council was held near Detroit in 1786. Bil Gilbert said the Shawnee and the Miami urged all the tribes “to exterminate all the Americans who might be in those lands [the Ohio River line].” The Shawnee began acting on that policy immediately.
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Thomas Jefferson, quoted by Bernard W. Sheehan, wrote in 1813 about the Indians that “ferocious barbarities justified extermination.”
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Jefferson had left office 4 years earlier.
As we have seen, at the time of the California gold rush in 1848, much of the gold country was inhabited by Indians known as Diggers because they dug roots and picked berries for food. The governor of
California announced that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged until the Indian race becomes extinct. This must be expected.”
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In very little time, the prospectors had killed 10 percent of the Diggers.
Around 1855, Oregon territorial governor George Curry called for a military campaign to exterminate the Indians in that state. Instead, army regulars defended Indians from aggressive settlers.
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After the Rouge River War of 1855, a Modoc chief said, “I thought if we killed all the white men we saw, that no more would come. We killed all we could; but they came more and more like new grass in the spring.”
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The fact that there were white people who did want extermination is exemplified by 3 editorials, the first from California in 1866, the next written in 1867 in Kansas, and the last dated 1870 in a Wyoming newspaper. The
Chico Courant
in California took the position that
it is a mercy to the red devils to exterminate them, and a saving of many white lives. Treaties are played out—there is one kind of treaty that is effective—cold lead.
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The Kansas editorial described Indians as
a set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless, faithless, gut-eating skunks … whose immediate and final extermination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for.
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The Wyoming editorial rationalized the elimination of the Indian in this way:
The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome, has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America. To attempt to defer this result by mawkish sentimentalism … is unworthy of the age.
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The Battle of the Little Bighorn of 1876 was a shock to the settlers—so much so that a bill was introduced in Congress by Senator Paddock calling for the extermination of Indians. But it did not pass.
After the Meeker raid in Colorado in 1879, Governor Frederick Pitkin even figured out the economic benefit of extermination:
My idea is that, unless removed by the government, they [the Indians] must necessarily be exterminated. I could raise 25,000 men to protect
the settlers in twenty-four hours. The State would be willing to settle the Indian problem at its own expense. The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers would more than compensate all the expenses incurred.
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Was it ever the policy of either Indian or federal governments to exterminate the other? No. The holders of these extreme views never spoke for the government or for all the tribes. Fergus M. Bordewich put it best:
Although many modern polemicists call upon Americans to regard the nation’s treatment of the Indians as a pattern of deliberate “genocide,” the physical extermination of Native Americans was never an official policy of the United States government. With more realism than racism, the new republic initially worried less about ridding itself of Indians than about how to protect them from the depredations of its own citizens.
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Was this a race war? Alan Axelrod commenced his book,
Chronicle of the Indian Wars
, with the statement that the book is a “chronicle of protracted racial warfare.”
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Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., in
The Indian Heritage of America
, correctly referred to the war as a “total conflict of one race against the other.”
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And Carl Waldman in
Atlas of the North American Indian
cautioned that “the hostilities [of the war] cannot be viewed simply in terms of Indian versus white. The Indian wars are now generally interpreted as wars of native resistance.”
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