The Wild Frontier (9 page)
Authors: William M. Osborn
M
ANY HISTORIANS
have commented that Indians lacked unity, which made it more difficult for them to defeat the settlers. Debo put it
directly: “Unrelated tribes never united in a general war.”
171
Alan Axelrod concurred when he said, “The exultation of individual virtue meant that so-called tribes did not often act with unity, and one tribe rarely formed a strategically effective alliance with another.”
172
There is no question, Carl Waldman concluded, “that the Indians were defeated by their own lack of unity.”
173
Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn argued in
Indian Wars
that perhaps
the tribes could have slowed the process, or compelled a more just conclusion, had they been able to unite against the common threat. But they failed to see the white advance as truly apocalyptic until too late, and they never overcame the cultural forces that made them see other tribes as greater enemies than the white people.
174
Ironically, many Indians wanted Europeans to settle their lands. This matter is gone into in some detail by Alvin M. Josephy. Sometimes they were “encouraging white settlement in order to gain European support and auxiliaries.”
175
Once in a while Indians begged or even demanded that forts be built in their territory in order to intimidate their enemies.
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A
NOTHER IMPORTANT
characteristic of the Indians from the time the war began was the refusal of many Indians to be assimilated into American life. To be assimilated in this context means to be absorbed or incorporated. But to the Indian it had bad connotations. This is because many Indians feared and still fear that assimilation would completely destroy the Indian culture and way of life.
The United States, speaking through its presidents, its Supreme Court, and its policy, has consistently urged assimilation. President Jefferson spoke to a group of Delawares, Mohicans, and Munries in 1808. He told them, “You will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great land.”
177
The Supreme Court said in 1823 in the case of
Johnson and Graham’s Lessee vs. William Mcintosh
that when a people is conquered,
most usually, they are incorporated with the victorious nation, and become subjects or citizens of the government with which they are connected. The new and old members of the society mingle with each other; the distinction between them is gradually lost, and they make one people. Where this incorporation is practicable, humanity demands,
and a wise policy requires, that the rights of the conquered to property should remain unimpaired; that the new subjects should be governed as equitably as the old…. But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war.
178
Not all Indians, of course, resisted assimilation. As early as 1847 the Sioux chief Red Cloud sensed the futility of the struggle. He advised the tribes to note the settlers’ example and follow it. But he put it rather sarcastically:
You must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.
179
Another influential Indian, Ely S. Parker, favored assimilation. Parker thought the Indians had more to lose by resisting assimilation, particularly the western tribes. “Unless they fall in with the current of destiny as it surges around them, they must succumb and be annihilated by its overwhelming force.”
180
The prevailing Indian view on assimilation, however, was held by Big Eagle, a Sioux leader, and it was uncompromising:
The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men—go to farming, work hard and do as they did—and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway…. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians.
181
Jefferson urged Indians to become farmers. In 1863 and again toward the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln spoke at length to a group of Indian chiefs in Washington. He deferentially suggested that assimilation was best for them:
You have asked for my advice. I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the Great Spirit, who is the great Father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life. I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth.
182
(That the Indians have not taken Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s advice is shown by the 1990 census, which indicated that only 7,000 out of 1,960,000 Indians and Aleutians are farmers.)
At the Medicine Lodge Creek peace conference in 1865, a United States senator from Missouri and peace commissioner named Henderson addressed 5,000 Indians in a blunt if not threatening manner concerning assimilation. He reminded them that the buffalo would not last forever. “When that day comes, the Indian must change the road his father trod, or he must suffer, and probably die. We tell you that to change will make you better. We wish you to live, and we will now offer you the way.”
183
The first Peace Commission report of 1868 elaborated on assimilation:
The white and Indian must mingle together and jointly occupy the country or one of them must abandon it. If they could have lived together, the Indian by this contact would soon have become civilized and war would have been impossible.
184
Ten years later, General Sherman observed,
I have seen some Indians willing and able to take farms, build houses, and join in the white man’s ways; and I honestly believe the Army could induce hundreds, if not thousands, of others to do the same, but if left wandering about, hoping to restore the old order of things, an Indian will be a curiosity here in twenty years.
185
Senator Henry L. Dawes, however, predicted after Wounded Knee in 1890 that “without doubt these Indians are somehow to be absorbed into and become part of the 50,000,000 of our people. There does not seem to be any other way to deal with them.”
186
Some tribes, like the Cherokee, did assimilate to a considerable extent. Helen Hunt Jackson believed that “there is no instance in all history of a race of people passing in so short a space of time from the barbarous stage to the agricultural and civilized [as the Cherokee].”
187
Assimilation had widely begun as early as the start of the nineteenth century. By then, Fergus M. Bordewich observed, almost all tribes east of the Mississippi were abandoning wigwams for cabins, buckskin for cotton clothes, and hunting for agriculture.
188
The commissioner of Indian affairs reported in 1860 that
the Winnebagos continue steadily on the march of improvement…. The progress of the Winnebagos in agriculture growths by individuals
is particularly marked with success. There have been raised by individuals as high as sixty acres of wheat on a single farm…. Wigwams are becoming as scarce as houses were two years ago.
189
The next year, the commissioner
was much surprised to find so many of the Sioux Indians wearing the garb of civilization, many of them living in frame or brick houses, some of them with stables or out-houses, and their fields indicating considerable knowledge of agriculture.
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Around 1875, Helen Hunt Jackson noted that the Winnebagos were nearly civilized, with all engaged in civil pursuits and the men working with their own hands.
191
By the twentieth century, the process had gone much further, as Russell Thornton explained in
American Indian Holocaust and Survival:
A point will be reached—perhaps not too far in the future—when it will no longer make sense to define American Indians in genetic terms, only as tribal members or as people of Indian ancestry or ethnicity.
192
These conclusions follow in part at least from Indian intermarriage.
Yet the National Indian Youth Council reported in 1964, according to James Wilson, that “we do not want to be pushed into the mainstream of American life.”
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Indians have things to gain and something to lose by assimilation. What they do is of course their decision. Some tribes have demonstrated that assimilation does not necessarily mean destruction of Indian culture.
I
NDIANS HAD
completely different ideas about property than the settlers, and this created many difficulties. It is clear that the Indians maintained that personal property such as weapons and clothing could be owned by one individual Indian. Although their slaveholding was widespread,
194
there is no indication that slaves were held in common by the entire tribe.
Their attitude concerning land was communal. Alan Axelrod stated the most commonly expressed Indian view:
No one “owned” a particular parcel of land. A given tribe might claim the right to hunt or live on it and might defend that right by force of
arms; however, most tribes were willing to make agreements allowing other tribes or individuals to hunt on “their” land. Such an agreement did not convey ownership of the land to the other party.
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Relying on the view that the Indians only possessed or occupied the land, Indians and Indian advocates charged in the past—and some of them charge today—that even though they signed treaties ceding the land to the federal government, the settlers “stole” the land from them. An 1864 speech of Sioux chief Tall Soldier is typical:
Let the wretches die, who have stolen our lands, and we will be free to roam over the soil that was our fathers’. We will come home bravely from battle. Our songs shall rise among the hills, and every tipi shall be hung with the scalp-locks of our foes…. The inferior race, who have encroached on our rights and territories, justly deserve hatred and destruction…. The Indian cries for vengeance.
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The treaties themselves do not bear out the Tall Soldier claim. A standard cessation clause is found in the first removal treaty, the 1830 treaty with the Choctaw. It reads in part, “The Choctaw nation of Indians consent and hereby cede to the United States, the entire country they own and possess east of the Mississippi River.”
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Both the ownership rights and the possessory or occupancy rights of the Indians are transferred by this language. They retained nothing for themselves.
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S
EVERAL TRIBES
were imperialistic. During the 1600s, the Iroquois “expanded their territories in every direction.” In the mid-1600s, they decimated the Hurons, Tobaccos, Neutrals, and Eries. They attacked the Susquehannocks, Algonquins, Ottawas, Illinois, Miamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, Mahicans, and Wappingers. Their extended territory went from the Hudson River to the Illinois River and from the Ottawa River to the Tennessee River.
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In the late 1600s, Crees and Chippewas drove the Sioux westward, taking their land. The Sioux later developed faith in their own superiority, according to Bordewich, and “seized land with virtual impunity from the Ioways, Omahas, Arikaras, and Mandans.”
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By 1776, the Sioux had reached the Black Hills on the western edge of the Dakotas, where, in the early nineteenth century, they expelled the Kiowas and the Cheyennes.
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——
A
LTHOUGH
W
OMEN
often had unique roles in the tribes, more often than not their position was weak. The Shawnee war chief Tecumseh made a mistress leave him for the sole reason that she had improperly boned a turkey, causing him disgrace.
202
Comanche chief Big Wolf had 4 wives. He tied a deerskin cord to the corner of the mattress of each so that with a small pull the wife he wished would come to him.
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Roy Harvey Pearce observed that one tribe even had “the wondrous custom of offering maidens of the village to distinguished visitors.”
204
Sioux chief Black Buffalo offered Lewis and Clark young women as bed partners. Clark later wrote that “a curious custom with the Sioux is to give handsome squars
[sic]
to those whome they wish to Show some acknowledgements to.”
205
The Arikara offered women to all the men in the Lewis and Clark party; many accepted, and left with venereal disease.
206
Clark wrote that the Chinooks “will even prostitute their wives and daughters for a fishinghook or a stran
[sic]
of beads.”
207
Jefferson charged that Indian women “are submitted to unjust drudgery.”
208
Catlin went further. He said that Indian wives not only “stand rather in the light of menials and slaves,” but “are kept at hard labour during most of the year.”
209
He noted, “I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband. Men form the first group at the banquet, and women and children and dogs all come together at the next.”
210
In many other tribes, however, women occupied much stronger positions. In Iroquois political life, women held important posts. The mother and all her children constituted a “fireside,” which was the foundation of society. All authority came from the groups and the women who headed them. The group named the sachems or peace chiefs who made up the ruling council of the Iroquois and the Five Nations as well.
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Half of the 6 priests were women.
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Shawnee women were organized like the men. Their chiefs directed matters such as farming, certain ceremonies, and women’s affairs. Although they didn’t go into battle, female chiefs helped with logistics. They held something like a veto power over the deliberations of the men.
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The Navajo women were very influential in family life.
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