5 Indians 1492–1920

We were happy when he first came. We first thought he came from the Light; but he comes like the dusk of the evening now, not like the dawn of the morning. He comes like a day that has passed, and night enters our future with him…

Plains Chieftain, c. 1870

Friends, it has been our misfortune to welcome the white man. We have been deceived. He brought with him some shining things that pleased our eyes; he brought weapons more effective than our own. Above all he brought the spirit-water that makes one forget old age, weakness and sorrow. But I wish to say to you that if you wish to possess these things for yourselves, 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 store-room filled, then look around for a neighbour whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.

Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux

Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall of our democratic faith.

Felix S. Cohen, 1949

Virginia and Massachusetts exacted the space devoted to them here, for not only did they retain their primacy among the English settlements down to the American Revolution and beyond, but between them they perfectly illustrate, indeed epitomize, the great colonizing movement and its roots. But the sister settlements that followed them rapidly must not be forgotten. As England put forth her strength in the seventeenth century her colonies spread further along the Atlantic coast of North America, and flourished in the West Indies. Massachusetts bred New Hampshire (finally created an independent province in 1692) as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island. The Dutch of New Amsterdam extinguished New Sweden (the future state of Delaware) only to fall themselves to English conquest in 1664, when New Amsterdam and New Netherland became the city and colony of New York. Further south three proprietary colonies were planted – ‘New Caesarea or New Jersey’ (1664), the work of Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret; Pennsylvania (1681), founded by William Penn to be a refuge for Quakers and to enrich his family; and Maryland (1632), founded by the first Lord Baltimore as a refuge (though it was not to be much used as such) for Catholics. Virginia sprouted North Carolina, on Albemarle Sound, first settled from the older colony during the 1650s, though its legal existence dates from 1663. South Carolina, on the other hand, though born legally of the same 1663 charter, acquired no settlers until 1670, when it began a thriving career. The last addition to this string of colonies was Georgia, founded in 1732, in part to serve as a place of rehabilitation for persons imprisoned for debt in England, partly as a plantation for the cultivation of silk, but chiefly as a buffer state against the Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana.

For while, to the north, the English colonies and their outposts – Nova Scotia and Newfoundland – jostled Canada, the southern boundary of English North America was a matter of continuous international strife from the foundation of South Carolina onwards. French enterprise linked the two areas of friction. Louis XIV’s brave explorers, inspired partly by an imperial vision and partly by a hunger to monopolize the fur-trade, claimed the Great Lakes and the Mississippi for their King; and in 1699 founded a colony about the mouths of the great river which they named Louisiana in his honour. The Spaniards, by contrast, stood mainly on the defensive, having much to lose. They still had the energy to reconquer New Mexico (lost to a great rebellion of Pueblo Indians in 1680) and, so late as 1769, to enter and settle Upper California. But their policy was dominated by dread of English competition to the north and French competition to the west. On their side the English dreaded encirclement and extinction by the French, or by a Franco-Spanish combination. The French dreaded an English challenge for control of the Mississippi.¹ The obsessive rivalries of Europe had reached North America; for more than a century they would determine its history.

The three competing empires differed in character. Florida’s value to Spain was chiefly strategic: the colony protected the Bahamas Channel and Spanish communications with Mexico and the sugar islands. Accordingly it was garrisoned rather than inhabited, though Franciscans did their usual excellent missionary work among the Indians. The English colonies, we have seen, were agrarian and commercial, and grew ever more thickly populated. New France gradually acquired a farming population, but its lifeblood, like that of Louisiana, was the trade in peltries – beaver fur and deer hides.

Such dissimilar entities, it may be thought, could well have afforded to co-exist. Unhappily they were not different enough. All had an interest in the fur-trade, for one thing; and the habit of suspicion, fear and rivalry, common to all three, did the rest. In this, we see, Old and New Worlds were much alike.

But in the means of competition the continents differed sharply. Not for many years could there be a conventional war of regular soldiers in North America, or even conventional commercial rivalry. The tangled forests were too wide, white numbers (for warfare) too few, European tactics too inflexible. All Europeans had to learn the lessons taught New Englanders by King Philip’s War (1675–6), that ‘it is one thing to drill a company in a plain champaign and another to drive an enemy through the desert woods’; and that Indian allies were absolutely necessary, to act as auxiliaries and scouts. The Indian, it emerged, was the key to dominion in the wilderness. When North America was at what passed for peace, imperial success was measured in terms of influence with the tribes. When, as repeatedly happened, peace was admitted to be war, the Europeans, it has been well said, showed themselves ‘ready to fight to the last Indian’.²

Luckily for the intruders, the tribes were commonly happy to fight each other. They had the usual human grievances against their neighbours, and war was a principal occupation among them. Success in war was the leading source of individual prestige. Indeed, before the European arrival, wars seem to have been waged in many cases solely to provide chances for warriors to win this prestige. It was a lethal game, with elaborate rules, and so addicted were most of the Indians to it that in the early eighteenth century the Cherokees could remark, ‘We cannot live without war. Should we make peace with the Tuscaroras, we must immediately look out for some other nation with whom we can engage in our beloved occupation.’ The skill gained in this wilderness conflict proved invaluable for attacking or defending European possessions.

Furthermore, only Indians could provide the commodities of the peltries trade; and there was much money to be made out of them. For as time went on the Indians grew ever more dependent on European goods. By the same token they grew more and more manipulable. Those who controlled the supply of essential articles such as guns controlled their customers. And so the curtain rose on the tragedy of the native peoples of North America.

There had been a long prologue. It is easy to forget, when studying the comparatively gentle rule of Spain north of Mexico (at any rate after the Pueblo revolt), what the conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas had involved. The crimes of the Anglo-Americans pale beside those of Cortès and his successors. Hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed outright; even more were worked slowly and horribly to death as slaves. The fact that European diseases were even more destructive hardly excuses the conquistadores. One Carib Indian, about to be burned to death after a rebellion, refused baptism, though it could take him to heaven, because he feared he would find more Christians there. Genocide is an unpleasant word, but it seems appropriate here. If the North American Indians had known what had happened south of the Rio Grande, they might well have trembled at the future.

2. The Indians and the Anglo-Americans

But they were blessedly ignorant. They did not even know how completely they were trapped in the destiny of the Europeans. Towards the end of their days of freedom and power one man of genius among them, the Shawnee Tecumseh (1768–1813), saw the truth and realized that only by uniting in one nation might the Indians save themselves. Tecumseh (‘Crouching Tiger’) was a great general, a compelling orator, a generous and humane man. But his vision came too late, the red men had thrown away their safety and their numbers in ceaseless wars among themselves; after delusive early success Tecumseh failed, and died in battle.³ The Fates were not to be balked.

Few historical themes are of greater fascination than the tale of the North American Indian; but it cannot be told here for its own sake. A history of the United States must be a history of victors; the defeated are relevant chiefly for what they tell us of their conquerors. Sed victa Catoni; the sage Auden, however, tells us that

Few even wish they could read
the lost annals
of a cudgelled people.⁴

Honour to those few; but they must seek satisfaction elsewhere. Let us see what the cudgelled can reveal of their oppressors.

Names are revealing. What did the races call each other?

The Anglo-Americans had a long list of savoury adjectives and nouns for the Indians: for example, besotted, childish, cruel, degraded, dirty, diseased, drunken, faithless, gluttonous, insolent, jealous, lazy, lying, murdering, profligate, stupid, thieving, timorous, uncivilizable, vindictive, worthless; barbarians, demons, heathen, savages, varmints (vermin). The red men were no less definite. At first, by the gentle Caribs, the Europeans were called ‘The People from Heaven’. Later, Indians to the north, who came to know them well, dubbed them ‘People Greedily Grasping for Land’. Members of the Algonquian group most commonly called the English ‘The Coatwearing People’; next often, ‘The Cut-Throats’.

In many respects the Indians badly needed to be discovered by Europe. The greatest intelligence⁵ must be limited by the means available to it, and Indian technological backwardness was largely inevitable, because of the absence in the Americas of easily worked tin and iron deposits, and of draught animals (hence the principle of the wheel could not be exploited). The sacred book and higher mathematics of the Maya, staggering stone and metalwork achievements, the great Inca political system, might make Central and Andean America glorious: they could not nullify the Indians’ weakness in other respects. So it was in part with delight and fascination that the intelligent red men greeted the coming of the People from Heaven and their marvellous possessions. When the Spanish entered New Mexico⁶ in 1598 they brought with them sheep, goats and horses. Time, chance and the Pueblo rebellion gradually spread these things among the western tribes who thereupon began to evolve the dazzling Plains culture which has so long enchanted the world’s imagination. Many Indians now became shepherds and horsemen (and brilliant horse-thieves);⁷ mounted on piebald ponies and armed, originally, with spearheads made from old Spanish sword blades, then with guns got in trade from the East, they became mighty hunters of buffalo. No longer was it necessary to stampede a herd over a cliff, or to wait for a weak or injured beast to stray; now swift riders could select, pursue and bring down their prey whenever they chose. The result was health and wealth: finally abandoning almost all sedentary pursuits to the women, the men brought in meat in such vast quantities that there was more than enough for everybody. As a result the population grew strong and numerous. Male leaders of the Sioux, resplendent in eagle-feather war-bonnets, made the most picturesque appearance; but it is through the women’s work that we can most clearly see what the new way of life amounted to. Men might be artists and paint pictorial calendars on buffalo leather; it was the women who, for example, jerked the surplus meat; that is, sliced it thin and dried it; or pounded it together with berries and poured melted fat and marrow over it to make pemmican. It was they who ornamented clothing and parfleche (bags made of raw buffalo hide) with porcupine needles, beadwork, elks’ teeth and paint; they who made and painted the buffalo hide lodges (tipis). Meantime the men danced the annual Sun Dance, to win supernatural favour for the tribe; or ritual dances to secure a good hunt; or the war dance, after which they would go off to raid rival tribes and earn personal glory. The greatest feat was to count coup, that is, to touch a chosen foe with a special stick and get away without harming him or being harmed. At times war would be suspended. Then there would be great gatherings, for gambling, trade, foot races, horse races; it was thus that the sign language of the Plains developed, to make communication possible between tribes that spoke different languages. The problem of communication with fellow-tribesmen over a distance was solved by the device of signals made with smoke from buffalo-dung fires. It was a good life; small wonder that many tribes abandoned their settled villages for a nomadic existence. All was well so long as the buffalo herds lasted; and they teemed inexhaustibly until the white settlers came.

All the same, the Plains culture was the outcome of a meeting between the Indians and the Europeans. The same was true in the dense eastern forest. The horse was less valuable there, but brass kettles replaced earthenware cooking pots, English cloth replaced attire of fur and hide, and, above all, guns replaced bows and arrows. Everywhere the Indians welcomed the coming of European animals and artefacts with joy, and their cultures burst into brief, beautiful flower.

Even had that been all, a price would have had to be paid, some of it in currency: guns and powder could be obtained only by barter, and to get them eastern Indians had to hunt their woods bare of beaver and deer.⁸ This in turn bred trouble. For example, when the Iroquois (or Five Nations)⁹ had run through their local supply of furs they chose to secure a continuing flow of trade goods by becoming middlemen in the traffic which brought furs from the unexhausted West to the rivers Hudson and St Lawrence. This was simple to arrange: all they had to do was massacre the previous middlemen, Hurons and related tribes, which they duly did (1648–53); then they settled down for the next century as the lords of the North-East, one of the most formidable obstacles to French and English advance. Similar convulsions occurred everywhere beyond the frontier of white settlement. They were not too important: long before the coming of the European, tribes and confederacies had risen and fallen. And the presence of whites, in forts or townships, might stabilize, rather than inflame, a perilous situation. The coastal tribes of South Carolina welcomed the planting of Charles Town in 1670: it protected them from the wild Indians of the interior.

For the blessings of trade, such prices were not too high; but more was exacted. The Puritans, not content with earnestly trying to convert the Indians to Christianity, characteristically tried to impose the prim Sabbatarian manners of rural England on them: this was one of the contributory causes of King Philip’s War.¹⁰ The provincialism of Anglo-American culture, its complacency in front of the exotic, was a perpetual source of friction, and of misery to the Indians. Indian customs were condemned by successive generations as sinful, un-Christian, uncivilized, unprogressive. In the later nineteenth century the agent for the Yankton Sioux wrote:

As long as Indians live in villages they will retain many of their old and injurious habits. Frequent feasts, heathen ceremonies and dances, constant visiting — these will continue as long as people live together in close neighbourhoods and villages. I trust that before another year is ended they will generally be located upon individual land or farms. From that date will begin their real and permanent progress.

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,¹¹ 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,¹² 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 1887,¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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,¹⁵ 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’),¹⁶ 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 Christianity¹⁷ 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.

It may also be considered that it is only in the last fifty years or so that regular association with animals of many kinds – horses and cows as well as dogs and cats – has ceased to be universal. Today, it is easy enough for the white man to see red men, black men, yellow men, as human, for their likeness to himself strikes him instantly, their likeness to animals not at all, since he does not know many of these. The reverse was true during the settlement of America. The pre-Darwinian Englishman, supposing himself to be a little lower than the angels, his perceptions stultified by a narrow creed and culture, saw the differences between himself and other races as vastly important, and the same went for their likeness to the brute creation. The African was clearly a beast of burden, and might be enslaved; the Indian was a hunting beast, and might be shot (especially since on the whole he made poor material for slavery). The note of contempt (Prospero on Caliban) runs right through the literature and cannot be missed. It is to be found in Hakluyt (‘more brutish than the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly than that unmanned wild country, which they range rather than inhabit’), in eighteenth-century Virginia (‘Indians and Negroes… they scarcely consider as of the human species; so that it is almost impossible, in cases of violence, or even murder, committed on those unhappy people by any of the planters, to have the delinquents brought to justice’), Pennsylvania (‘the animals vulgarly called Indians’) and even in the enlightened nineteenth century, when the coming of Darwin merely encouraged the whites to hold that the law of the survival of the fittest had condemned the ‘Vanishing Indian’ to the usual fate of obsolete species (‘they do accept the teaching that manifest destiny will drive the Indians from the earth,’ said Bishop Whipple of Minnesota in 1881. ‘The inexorable has no tears or pity at the cries of anguish of the doomed race.’).

Mercifully, the time has come when, as Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey hoped in 1830, ‘it is not now seriously denied that the Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves’. Progress is possible. But its very fact makes the past more difficult to understand imaginatively. White contempt for the red man now seems so absurd as to be almost incredible. We can see that over a period of millennia the Indians, making use of very limited resources, had in every part of the Americas evolved ways of life that were almost perfectly adjusted to the environment, and in many cases held out high hopes of future evolution. More, we can see that in some respects – and those which were most universally to be found among the tribes – Indian culture too was superior to the European.

Thus, the idea of co-operation was central to Indian life, as competition is to ours. The Indians were highly individualistic, and vied with each other in the performance of brave deeds. They adored dressing up, and cherished favourite horses, favourite guns. And among the far tribes of the North-West there was even competition in the acquisition and display of personal wealth.¹⁸ But their essential social belief was one of property-as-use. The Indians shared what they had, especially food: it was noted that while there was any to share, all shared it; when there was none, all starved. Most of all, they shared the land. The tribe had its territory. Any member might set up his lodge on any part of it and there grow his corn. The Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek) explained in 1881:

Improvements can be and frequently are sold, but the land itself is not a chattel. Its occupancy and possession are indispensable to holding it, and its abandonment for two years makes it revert to the public domain. In this way every one of our citizens is assured of a home.

The Indian could no more understand the Europeans’ conception of perpetual personal title than they could understand his conception of none. Nor could he understand the accumulating itch. Why did the People Greedily Grasping for Land want more acres than they needed to grow food on? Why did they build houses that would outlast their occupants? Why were Indians called thieves for helping themselves to what they needed, as they always had? Above all, why, even when he had acquired it honestly, did the white man insist that land he had bought became his exclusively, and for all time? How could he make such a claim? It was ridiculous. ‘Sell a country!’ exclaimed Tecumseh. ‘Why not sell the air, the clouds, and the great sea?… Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?’¹⁹

The issue of land cannot be shirked. Although, from one point of view, the mystery of the relations between the English settlers and the North American Indians cannot ever be understood, any more than any other great evil (for why should men oppress each other?), the temptation to which the settlers succumbed is all too plain, and all too familiar. It was the usual temptation to believe that what we want with passion must be right; and that the means of obtaining it cannot be sinful. The passion for landed property, that guarantee of independence, prosperity and prestige, which, as we have seen, uprooted the English and carried them across the Atlantic to Virginia and New England, also carried them and those who came to join them into the practice of atrocious crimes. Land-hunger is too weak a phrase, for hunger can be sated. It were better called land-lust: it was as insatiable as the sea. Like all great desire, it was fertile in rationalizations which satisfied those who felt it, if no one else. When the American Republic was established, its President became the Great Father of the Indians. Even in his most enlightened incarnations, he was swift to evade his paternal obligations; and sometimes he committed infanticide. ‘The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life… and must yield to it… A compulsory process seems to be necessary, to break their habits, and civilize them’ (James Monroe). ‘Their cultivated fields; their constructed habitations … are undoubtedly by the laws of nature theirs. But what is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?’²⁰ (John Quincy Adams). ‘The game being destroyed as acknowledged by all, the right of possession, granted to the Indians for the purpose of hunting ceases, and justice, sound policy, and the constitutional rights of the citizen, would require its being resigned…’ (Andrew Jackson). ‘Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?’ (William Henry Harrison). It was the universal argument; its rightness was the universal feeling. No wonder, then, that the history of the Indian in the English colonies, and in the United States afterwards, can best be sketched in terms of the development of the white programme for depriving the red man of his lands.²¹

The tragedy had three acts, corresponding roughly to the three principal eras of American history. During the colonial epoch the Indian position remained, once the European coastal settlements had been established, surprisingly stable. The Iroquois League to the north, the looser Creek Confederation to the south, anchored as they were on the line of the Appalachians, markedly held up white expansion, particularly after the Iroquois had realized that the best way for the Indians to remain numerous and prosperous was to stay neutral in the Franco-British quarrel and not to fight each other more than they could help. There was a gradual erosion of the Indian position, but it remained a strong one so long as the English dared not attack the tribes for fear that they would go over to France. Even after the French defeat in the Seven Years War²² and the expulsion of the British in the American Revolution, the Indians of the South could still play the same game, using Spain (now mistress of Louisiana as well as Florida) against the Americans. The last triumph of this period was the Creek War against the brigand state of Georgia (1786–90), which was masterminded by the great chief Alexander McGillivray,²³ who signed a treaty with George Washington in 1790 that protected the bulk of the Creek lands against encroachment for the next twenty-five years.

By the end of that period the second act had fairly begun. This was the epoch in which the American people, relieved of almost all international anxieties and gaining in wealth and numbers every day, asserted their complete dominance over the continent. To the Indians they proved their power by stripping the tribes of almost all they possessed, thus ensuring that the third act should show the Indians as paupers dependent on the harsh, irregular and frequently stupid charity of Uncle Sam. It is the process of spoliation as carried out in the second act that raises the most serious questions about the American national character. Thus under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 the 60,000 Indians of the Five Civilized Tribes were moved from the lands they had always occupied, lands which were guaranteed to them on the honour of the United States as pledged in treaty after treaty, to lands far across the Mississippi – lands which in due time were also to be filched from them. Many other Indians, until the very end of the nineteenth century, were to be uprooted. But the Great Removal sticks in the memory because of its scale, and because of the ostentatious bad faith of all concerned, from President Jackson down to Greenwood Leflore, a renegade Choctaw chief, and because of the immense human suffering involved. One example: when the Choctaw migration was arranged, the whites of Alabama and Mississippi descended on the unhappy tribe like so many horseflies, to bully and trick the Indians out of most of their movable property as well as their lands. The tribe then had to trek to Indian Territory (today, Oklahoma) during the winter of 1831–2 – the coldest since 1776. At least 1,600, or nearly a tenth of the entire tribe, died as a result of the hardships of the emigration and a cholera epidemic to which, in their starving, naked, shelterless, hopeless and unclean condition, the emigrants could offer little resistance. Most of those who died were children or old people. Another example: the 16,000 Cherokees²⁴ realized, long before 1838, when they were removed by force from their ancient homelands in the mountains of western Georgia and North Carolina, that the only way to survive the impact of the white man was to learn his ways. Accordingly they turned themselves into a successful farming people; Sequoya, a Cherokee half-breed of genius, invented an alphabet for their language, which rapidly spread literacy among them; they had a printing-press and a weekly newspaper, and in 1827 adopted a constitution modelled on that of the United States. All in vain: the usual cold, greedy hostility went to work, and the Cherokees had to labour along their own path of agony into the West. They called it the Trail of Tears; and at least 4,000 died, either in the concentration camps where they were assembled for deportation or during the removal itself.

Contemplation of these and all the other atrocities at length forces the historian to face fundamentals. He will remember the crusades, the religious wars, the Reign of Terror, the Russian purges, and the extermination of the Jews, and see that the treatment meted out to the American Indian was not exceptional, it was characteristically European, if not human, and gentler than many comparable manifestations. He will look with doubled and redoubled scepticism on all expressions of missionary zeal, remembering that though many good men set out to bring Christianity to the Indians, they were almost ludicrously fewer in number than the multitudes who, professing similar motives, were concerned only to gratify their lust for land at any price, and than the still larger numbers who apathetically allowed evil to triumph. More, he will doubt the depth and sincerity of most men’s professions of civilization, democracy and benevolence at most times, since they have so often proved such feeble checks on conduct, and compatible with actions of the utmost injustice. Yet he will not despair either of humanity or of the possibility of progress. For even on the frontier the Europeans were not uniformly or perpetually vicious. Many (if too few) deeds of kindness and truth from white to red, red to white, are known, especially in the relations of the US army with the Indians. And the faithlessness, inhumanity and greed displayed by the whites to the Indians were to prove their own punishment. It was the operation of these characteristics in Georgia which, first, expelled the Cherokees and then, in 1864, laid the state open to Sherman’s devastating march to the sea,²⁵ when the whites paid the penalty for their headlong course via the oppression of the Indians and the enslaving of the Africans into rebellion and bloody civil war. More generally, we can say that as the whites did to their red victims, so they did, and do, to each other and to the blacks – with what results the criminal statistics of the United States today make plain. Yet it must be added that as time has passed, more and more white Americans have come to see the folly and loathe the evil of this legacy of violence, and have tried, pari passu, to behave more justly and mercifully to the Indian as they have tried to be more just, more merciful, in their other social relations.

But this has been mostly a twentieth-century development. The nineteenth century was the Indian’s era of defeat, which was only made worse (for punishment followed) by each temporary victory: that, for example, of the Little Big Horn, when some Sioux, under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, wiped out an American regiment. The news reached the East, it is pleasant to report, on 5 July 1876, in nice time to spoil the celebrations of a hundred years of freedom and independence; but the retaliation was all the more cruel.

A year later some of the Nez Percés, generally reckoned to be among the most intelligent and large-minded of the tribes, were forced off their homelands in the Wallowa valley in eastern Oregon,²⁶ and, after drunken outrages by a handful of their young men, were hunted by army detachments 1,500 miles across Idaho, Yellowstone Park and Montana. They fought a brilliant campaign which earned them the ungrudging respect of their antagonists: ‘they abstained from scalping,’ said General Sherman, ‘let captive women go free; did not commit indiscriminate murders of peaceful families and fought with almost scientific skill’. But in the end they were caught at a place called Snake Creek, forty miles south of the Canadian border and safety, and realized, like Lee at Appomattox twelve years before, that they faced a choice between annihilation or surrender. Their war-leaders had almost all been killed, so it was left to Chief Joseph, the wisest man among them, to accept the inevitable. He came forward between the armies and spoke nobly of what broke the Indians:

…I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohoolhoolzote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes and no. He who led the young men is dead.²⁷ It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food; no one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

Nor did he; Chief Joseph spent the rest of his life (he died in 1904) in patiently effective diplomacy, the object of which was to get his people back to their homelands, or at least somewhere nearby. He surrendered, having received generous promises: all were broken, not by the officers who made them but by their superiors (‘White men have too many chiefs,’ was his comment). In the end, after years of suffering, he was able to lead the Nez Percés back to the North-West; but he never again lived in Wallowa.

Naturally enough, the defeat of the last Indian warriors (the Apaches under Geronimo, who ‘came in’ in 1886) did not end the spoliation. In 1890 the decennial census made it seem that there was no more unoccupied land available for white settlement in the United States; but in that very year the Indian tribes were robbed of a further seventeen million acres – one-seventh of the remaining Indian lands – under the Allotment Act of 1887, which Congress had passed solely, its supporters averred, in order to hasten the civilization and happiness of the Indians. It resulted in the Indians losing eighty-six million acres altogether between 1887 and 1934. They were the most valuable acres. Yet the Indians, as they grew poorer, grew also, by a process common in ‘underdeveloped’ countries, more numerous. It had once seemed that the race would gradually cease to reproduce itself. Now more and more Indians came into the world to suffer. Their reservations, narrow and poor to begin with, were less and less able to afford them the means of life. They became ever more expensive charges on the government, which yet continued callous and incompetent – so much so that by the 1920s destitution was bringing about famine. It seemed that the last ruin of the American Indian was at hand. By the same token, the white conquest of the continent, which had begun so uncertainly, so small, so long ago, was complete.