Penguin History of the United States of America (12 page)

It is the voice of Gradgrind, condemning the intensely sociable Indians to dour, if virtuous, money-grubbing in freezing isolation; but the agent spoke for past and future, as well as for his own cold-hearted time. The obsession with private property which, as we have seen, made it impossible for the English to organize their original plantations on communist principles made it impossible for them or their descendants to respect, or even to comprehend, Indian communism, Indian clannishness, any more than they could respect or tolerate Indian polygamy or Indian religion; and in all too many cases this obsession makes such respect impossible today.

The social bigotry of the Anglo-Americans, then, was an affliction to the Indians; but their diseases were more punishing still. General Smallpox, General Cholera, swept the American plains as ruthlessly as their colleagues Janvier and Février did the Russian; and they were aided by measles, dysentery, scarlet fever, venereal disease, influenza and tuberculosis. The Europeans can hardly be blamed for spreading these infections,
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from which, after all, they suffered, if less catastrophically, themselves. Nor should they be condemned
en masse
for the worst disease of all, alcoholism.

Fermented and distilled drinks were unknown to the pre-Columbian Indians, so they had as little resistance to alcoholism as to smallpox, and for some reason, yet to be explained, their social organization was incapable of developing customs by which drinking could be rendered as comparatively innocuous as it is among black and white Americans (not that that is saying very much). From earliest times the white governments saw the danger and made earnest efforts to keep firewater away from the Indians. They were supported by all the wiser heads among the tribes. But these efforts were largely defeated by the mania for booze and by the readiness of too many whites to supply it in the desired, limitless quantity. The English traders found that glass beads, hatchets, hoes, knives, shirts, coats, hats, shoes, stockings, breeches, blankets, thread, scissors, guns, flints, powder, bullets, tobacco, pipes, looking glasses, ostrich plumes, silver medals, yards
of silk and bales of cloth (to name only some items of the trade) were often less desired than the means of getting dead drunk. ‘Brandy goes off incomparably well,’ they discovered, and was very easy to supply, particularly if adulterated. Drunk, an Indian was incapable of insisting on proper payment for his goods, and he seemed to be incapable of resisting the chance to get drunk. There were other consequences, however, than ruined Indians. Governor George Thomas of Pennsylvania summed the matter up in 1744:

Our Traders in defiance of the Law carry Spiritous Liquors amongst them, and take Advantage of their inordinate Appetite for it to cheat them out of their skins and their wampum,
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which is their Money, and often to debauch their wives into the Bargain. Is it to be wondered at then, if when they Recover from the Drunken fit, they should take severe revenges?

Indeed not; again and again the frontier of settlement was scourged by flame and tomahawk as the Indians paid for their treatment by the traders.

But the traders were universally held to be the dregs of the white race: ‘The Lewdness and wickedness of them have been a Scandal to the Religion we Profess.’ They were supposed to be unrepresentative of their people.

Perhaps they were; for though many were indeed unscrupulous rogues, who sold the Indians drink, and, in the South-East at least, did not hesitate to egg them on to inter-tribal wars, so that prisoners could be captured to sell into slavery, at least all were ready to live among the Indians, to adopt their ways and to marry their women. It was possible to be an honest Indian trader, and those that were acquired great influence. They married into chiefly families, and their descendants – bearing names like Brant, McGillivray, Ross – became great leaders of their people. Above all, the traders, who depended on the Indians for their livelihood as much as the Indians depended on them, did not want their customers to disappear. They injured, but did not hate, the Indians; just as trade disrupted – in a sense, fruitfully disrupted – but did not destroy the Indians’ way of life. Hatred and destruction were the specialities of the respectable, who taught the Indians that they were not to keep their independence when they were no longer required for use in the quarrels of the Spanish, French and British Empires.

For the respectable, typical, farming British wanted the Indians’ land; and, as time was to show, they wanted all of it. In due course they gained the strength to take it. And without land, the Indian must cease to exist; or at least go under, become utterly dependent and dispirited.

Two needs clashed when red met white; and so did two great principles: the principle of private property and the principle of common ownership. The English attitude was well stated by John Winthrop, in words which look forward to the doctrines of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau:

That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion, or as they can prevail against their neighbours. And why may not Christians have liberties to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods, leaving them such places as they have manured for their corn, as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites? For God hath given to the sons of man a two-fold right to the earth; there is a natural right and a civil right. The first right was natural where men held the earth in common, every man settling and feeding where he pleased; then, as men and cattle increased, they appropriated some parcels of ground by enclosing and peculiar manurance, and this in time got them a civil right.

Thus the patriarch of New England, justifying the robberies he meant to commit by the best social science of his day. Perhaps his style betrays a slightly uneasy conscience; but even if it does not, he should not be blamed overmuch. The migration of forty million Europeans between 1607 and 1914 is too great a matter to be dealt with by elementary moral texts, such as the Eighth Commandment. Migration, we have seen, is natural to man. It cannot reasonably be maintained that, once the Atlantic had ceased to be a barrier, the Europeans were wrong to better themselves by sailing to inhabit the largely empty land. Even the Indians might have benefited greatly from it. Anyway, there was (and is) room enough on the vast continent for both peoples.

The Indians knew it. It was hard, of course, on the particular tribes which had to be squeezed or dislodged to make way for English villages; conflict was therefore inevitable, but since the whites suffered as acutely as the reds during its course, they could have been held to have purged the crimes committed on arrival. The two peoples might have developed side by side in peace. Certainly the Indians hoped so. Nothing is more striking, throughout the long tale of their agony, than the manner in which, again and again, they waited to attack until driven to desperation, and, again and again, failed to unite against the foe, and, again and again, held their hands at the last, when they had him at their mercy. Of course there was always dispute within the tribes, between conservatives and those Indians who sought to profit, both in goods and instruction, from the Coatwearing People. But by and large it may be said that later generations were intelligent enough to repeat Powhatan’s reasoning, as he expressed it to John Smith:

Think you I am so simple, not to know it is better to eat good meat, lie well, and sleep quietly with my women and children, laugh and be merry with you, have
copper hatchets, or what I want, being your friend: than be forced to fly from all, to lie cold in the woods, feed upon acorns, roots, and such trash; and be so hunted by you, that I can neither rest, eat, nor sleep; but my tired men must watch, and if a twig but break, every one crieth there cometh Captain Smith: then must I fly I know not whither: and thus with miserable fear, end my miserable life.

It is true that on too many occasions, as on this, such words were not uttered in good faith, or received in it; but the history of the Indian supports them. Again and again he made treaties with the white man, to last, in the picturesque phrase, ‘as long as grass grows or water runs’; invariably the treaties were broken almost at once – by the whites.

Treachery was a principal theme in the whites’ treatment of the red men. The use traders regularly made of whisky to cheat Indians of their fair payment has already been mentioned. It was as regularly adopted to cheat them of their lands. Nor was it the only method. Illiterate Indians were induced to put their names to documents transferring land-title which they did not understand and had, anyway, no right to sign, but which were used to justify the expulsion of them and their fellows from their hunting-grounds. In 1686 the Delaware Indians ceded to William Penn as much land to the north as a man could walk in three days. The upright and moderate Penn (‘I desire to enjoy it with your consent, that we may always live together as neighbours and friends’, he had remarked in 1682) took only what he covered in a day and a half of easy strolling; but fifty-one years later his successors had the rest of the ground covered by relay runners, and claimed the whole enormous extent under the so-called ‘Walking’ purchase. (This led directly to the war of the 1750s in Pennsylvania.) In later years bribing the chiefs – particularly half-breed ones – to part with tribal land was found to be a good method. Another was to recognize, for the purpose of land transactions, a pliant Indian as chief, or an otherwise unempowered fragment of a tribe as competent to act for the whole. And where straightforward trickery was inapplicable, humbug, its twin, proved invaluable. The two greatest wrongs ever committed against the Indians as a group, the Removal Act of 1830 and the Allotment Act of 1887,
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were both made palatable to the Anglo-American conscience by sincere, semi-sincere and insincere assurances that they were passed chiefly to help their victims.

Cruelty was another leading theme. In extenuation it may be urged that the Indians (especially the sadistic Iroquois) were demons when on the warpath; but it should be observed that in their peacetime behaviour (unless demoralized by booze) they were, compared to the white men, models of decorum. They enjoyed a high degree of social cohesion and tolerance, and much about European manners astonished and distressed them. They could not understand child-beating, or indeed exclusive family loyalty: ‘I don’t
understand you Frenchmen – you love only your own children, but we love all children,’ said an Algonquin to a Jesuit missionary.
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Religious strife horrified them. An Indian chief who sheltered a persecuted Quaker in winter could only exclaim, ‘What a God have the English who deal so with one another about the worship of their God!’ Too often they showed themselves prejudiced against the black men, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century South-Eastern tribes owned many black slaves (of whom the whites were anxious to despoil them); but slavery under the Seminoles was a far gentler thing than under the whites. One witness was insistent that ‘an Indian would as soon sell his child as his slave, except when under the influence of intoxicating liquor’.

But it is not necessary, even if it is fair, to condemn white behaviour by contrasting it with red. It stands condemned by its own standards. The records of the American past re-echo with denunciations of the fiendishness of the savages, just as Africans were accused of insatiable lust, bloodlust and criminal propensities of all kinds; but the Christians themselves raped, scalped,
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looted, murdered, burned and tortured, the very deeds by which they justified their contempt and loathing for the Indian. Said U S Lieutenant Davis, who fought against Geronimo,‘… the Indian was a mere amateur compared to the “noble white man”. His crimes were retail, ours wholesale.’ Colonel Chivington (a Methodist minister) could, as late as 1864, organize the Sand Creek Massacre of 300 peaceful Cheyennes and Araphoes in Colorado. ‘Kill and scalp all,’ he said, ‘big and little; nits make lice.’ A US government commission subsequently commented:

It scarcely has its parallel in the records of Indian barbarity. Fleeing women, holding up their hands and praying for mercy, were shot down; infants were killed and scalped in derision; men were tortured and mutilated. No one will be astonished that a war ensued which cost the government $30,000,000 and carried conflagration and death to the border settlements.

No matter: in Denver, after the massacre, Chivington had exhibited a hundred scalps in a local theatre and had been hailed as a hero. The next year General Phil Sheridan gave a phrase to the language when he remarked ‘the only good Indians I ever saw were dead’. A few years earlier, on the West Coast, the cry had gone up: ‘Let our motto be extermination, and death to all opposers.’ In Kansas, in 1867, the Indians were attacked as
‘gut-eating skunks… whose immediate and final extermination all men, except Indian agents and traders, should pray for’.

Examples of such behaviour could be cited almost indefinitely. However, those given should be enough to account for the name Cut-Throats. It is more difficult to explain such inhumanity.

Certain considerations seem to be relevant. The North American Indians lived for the most part by hunting, and in the history of European colonialism it was always the hunters who were most exposed to exterminating practices. Mexico and Peru are still largely inhabited by descendants of the agricultural Aztecs and Incas; the hunting Caribs of the islands were completely wiped out. Secondly, it is noteworthy that while the Indian tribes were formidable – while, in other words, they occupied most of the continent and had French and Spanish allies – they were treated with considerable respect. It was before 1800 that the most magnificent promises were made; after, that the Americans, growing steadily bolder, committed their worst atrocities. Thirdly, there can be no doubt that the frontier area at all times had a high concentration of white rabble; and the further the frontier advanced away from the settled areas (which it did with enormous speed throughout the nineteenth century) the more completely did the rabble get out of hand. The Indians felt the effect. For example, although cruelty, humbug and land-hunger were conspicuous in New England at the time of King Philip’s War, the Puritan conscience also made itself felt in word and deed, and effectively protected peaceful Indians from the vengeful mobs that might otherwise have lynched them, as Indians were lynched in Pennsylvania during the Pontiac uprising (1763 – 4). The Reverend Increase Mather, gloating over the capture of King Philip’s wife and child (‘It must be bitter as death for him… for the Indians are marvellously fond and affectionate towards their children’),
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was more than counterbalanced by the Reverend John Eliot (1640–90), translator of the first Indian Bible, missionary to the tribes, who besides converting many to Christianity
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argued strongly against selling Indians as slaves and tried in vain to save the life of an Indian he believed innocent of any crime, retorting to the Governor’s assurances of guilt ‘that at the great day he should find that Christ was of another mind, or words to that purpose, so I departed’. Such doughty defenders of the natives were happily to arise at all periods and in all places of American history; but they were never again to be so effective as in New England until after the First World War, and in the Wild West’s palmy days they were repeatedly frustrated.