by Cracked. com
Does that just sound right because we grew up on the Berenstain Bears? If the government were taken over by hippies tomorrow, the directionless, ecologically friendly society they’d set up is about how we picture Native American life.
THE TRUTH: Indians were so good at killing trees, a team of Stanford environmental scientists think they caused a mini ice age in Europe.
When all of the tree-clearing Indians died of the plague, so many trees grew back that it had a reverse global-warming effect. More carbon dioxide was sucked from the air, Earth’s atmosphere held on to less heat, and Al Gore cried a single tear of joy.
One of the best examples of how we get Native Americans all wrong is Cahokia, a massive Native American city located in modern-day East Saint Louis. In 1250, it was bigger than London and featured a sophisticated society with an urban center, satellite villages, and thatched-roof houses lining the central plazas. The evidence its residents left behind suggests a complex economy with trade routes from the Great Lakes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.
And that’s not even mentioning America’s version of the Great Pyramid of Giza: Monk’s Mound. You know how people treat the very existence of the Great Pyramid in Egypt as one of history’s most confounding mysteries? Cahokia’s pyramid dwarfs it both in size and in degree of difficulty. Monk’s Mound contains more than 2.16 billion pounds of soil, some of which was carried from hundreds of miles away to make sure the city’s giant monument was vividly colored. To put that into perspective, all 13 million people who live in the state of Illinois today would have to carry three fifty-pound baskets of soil from as far away as Indiana to construct another one.
While Egypt draws in millions of dollars in tourism and has dozens of Time Life documentaries dedicated to its boring old sand-colored pyramids, most Americans don’t even know there was a giant blue, red, white, black, gray, brown, and orange one sitting just outside of Saint Louis.
In the realm of personal hygiene, the Europeans out-hippied the Indians by a foul-smelling mile. Europeans never washed and were amazed by the Indians’ interest in personal cleanliness. The natives weren’t too fond of the cloud of shit-smelling awfulness the Europeans dragged around with them, and complained that the “physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, [and] atrociously ugly” Europeans “possessed little intelligence.” The Europeans didn’t do much to debunk the comparison in the physical beauty department. Giovanni da Verrazzano, the sailor who observed the densely populated east coast, called a Native American who boarded his ship “as beautiful in stature and build as I can possibly describe,” presumably adding, “you know, for a dude.”
FIGURE 6.2 When encountering evidence of advanced civilizations that weren’t helped by white Europeans, it is customary to speculate that they were assisted by aliens.
Indians Influenced Modern America
THE MYTH: The only influence natives seemed to have on the New World and the frontiersmen was giving them moving targets to shoot at, and eventually a plot outline for Avatar.
After natives helped the Pilgrims get through that first winter, all playing nice disappeared until Dances with Wolves.
THE TRUTH: Settlers defecting to join native society was so common that it became a major issue for colonial leaders—think the modern immigration debate, except with all the white people risking their lives to get out of American society.
According to historian James Loewen, “Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. [Conquistador] Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies.” Pilgrims were so scared of Indian influence that they outlawed the wearing of long hair.
Ben Franklin noted that “No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.” Franklin believed that Native American societies provided greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures—and he wasn’t the only founding father who thought settlers could learn a thing or two from them. They didn’t dress up like American Indians at the Boston Tea Party to be ironic: That was common protest gear during the American Revolution.
For a hundred years after the American Revolution, none of this was a secret. Political cartoonists used American Indians to represent the colonial side. Colonial soldiers dressed up like Indians when fighting the British. Documents from the time indicate that the design of the U.S. government was at least partially inspired by native tribal society. Historians think that the Iroquois Confederacy had a direct influence on the U.S. Constitution, and in 1988, the Senate even passed a resolution acknowledging that “the confederation of the original Thirteen Colonies into one republic was influenced . . . by the Iroquois Confederacy, as were many of the democratic principles which were incorporated into the Constitution itself.”
In 1987, Cornell University held a conference on the link between the Iroquois government and the U.S. Constitution. It was noted that the Iroquois’s Great Law of Peace “includes ‘freedom of speech, freedom of religion . . . separation of power in government and checks and balances.’” Wow, checks and balances, freedom of speech and religion. Sounds awfully familiar.
Thanksgiving Was Invented by a Women’s Magazine
THE MYTH: Thanksgiving is a holiday older than America itself, going back to 1621, when the starving Pilgrims shared a meal with the natives and formed a friendship that would last until syphilis and exposure killed them all.
THE TRUTH: Thanksgiving exists today thanks to a women’s magazine and partisan politics.
It’s true that a meal took place in 1621; there was just a 242-year gap before it became a national holiday. During that time, Thanksgiving was kind of a regional thing, like Mardi Gras—in much of the country, people barely knew what it was. It wasn’t established as a national holiday until Abraham Lincoln declared it so in 1863, setting it on the last Thursday of November at the behest of a women’s magazine editor.
Her name was Sarah Josepha Hale, and she was kind of the Martha Stewart of her day. She thought that taking this regional holiday they celebrated in the New England area national would bring the country together and prevent a civil war (spoiler: it didn’t). She completely reinvented the holiday in the process: Hale filled her magazine (Godey’s Lady’s Book) with recipes for turkey, pumpkin pie, and all of the other “traditional” Thanksgiving stuff you’ll eat each in November (almost none of which was at the original feast).
Oh, and the date would change one more time. Why? To make room for more Christmas shopping.
Remember that Lincoln had set Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November. But in some years, November has five Thursdays. This happened in 1939, when the United States was recovering from the Great Depression and the short Thanksgiving-to-Christmas shopping window threatened to hurt the economy. (This was before retailers started celebrating Christmas in August.) So President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up to the fourth Thursday instead, which of course set off a bitter dispute between red and blue states. For the next two years, people celebrated Thanksgiving on different days depending on their political orientation, until finally, in 1941, Congress set the date we still use today, to make sure everyone would have plenty of time to get their shopping in.
Coincidentally, this was only one year after America’s favorite turkey supplier first trademarked the name Butterball. How many people bought one that first year and were shocked to find that the package was not a basketball-size lump of butter?
The Old West Was Nothing Like You Think
THE MYTH: The Wild West
During the twentieth century, many a young boy spent his childhood sharing the same dream: the one where it turns out John Wayne’s your dad and he needs you to help him cut some bandits off at the pass before they can blow up the bridge and make off with their stolen bags of cash hidden in bulging sacks with dollar signs printed on them.
It’s not hard to understand why it appealed to young men—the Wild West was like an action movie in a giant sandbox. Life was cheap, and murde
r was considered a courteous way to greet a fellow cowboy. If you were the grit-faced resident of a dusty Western town, odds were good that the creepy old coroner was already assembling your coffin. Between getting scalped, shot by rustlers, stabbed by whores, gunned down in quick-draw duels, and beaten to death in bar fights, it’s a miracle so many of our favorite Western heroes were able to live long enough to die of typhus.
FIGURE 6.3 The Old West crime blotter as it exists in the public imagination.
THE TRUTH: The Mild West
The most murders any Western town saw during any one year of the “Wild West” historical period was . . . wait for it . . . five. Five murders. That’s one Deadwood episode.
In 1881, a particular town in Arizona saw its most violent year ever. The town? Tombstone. The violence in question? The famed shoot-out at the OK Corral. The total death toll? Three.
What about an old-timey Clint Eastwood fanning his gun and shooting six guys at a pop, or popping some poor schmuck in the heart in a showdown at high noon? Never happened. The inaccuracy of handguns used at the time meant quick-draw dueling would have essentially been a drunken darts game with higher stakes. Close your eyes, keep on firing, and hope you wing the other guy before you run out of bullets. Just like making love!1
Billy the Kid, for example, killed a total of four men in his lifetime, but watch any movie or read almost any book about him and he’s taking dudes out like Willis trying to jump-start another Die Hard franchise.
Despite what the movies have taught us, wearing a silly hat and unironically ending each sentence with “pardner” doesn’t make you a real cowboy. An uneventful life of working for minimum wage and poor personal hygiene are way closer to the mark. In reality, the only difference between a typical cowboy’s attire and a burlap sack was the occasional presence of buttons.
Even the traditional cowboy look—a ten-gallon hat, leather tassels, and guns slung low on the hip—was totally fabricated by hyperbolic entertainer Buffalo Bill for his carnival-like Wild West Show. The only people who dressed like that in the Wild West were stupid people from the East whose only previous interactions with the Wild West were the shows they’d seen. It would be like making assumptions about African culture based on the way lions interact with lion tamers at the circus.
In short, the whole concept of the Wild West is nothing but a marketing tool fabricated to make men spend money at the movie theater and chaps store. On the bright side, it was always like that! Kids going back generations have been just as misguided and lied to as you, and they didn’t have frosted toaster pastries.
FIGURE 6.4 What actual Wanted posters looked like.
FIGURE 6.5 Seriously now . . . you thought a lot of people chose to dress like this?
6.B
Miscast Stars of U.S. History
Any Similarities to Persons Living or Dead Is Probably Coincidental
Hey, we get it, textbook writers. We want the youth of the world to have heroes, and you can only write about Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln so many times before kids start exploding into balls of chest hair. So we look to other historical figures for inspiration, which is fine until you’re turning complicated men and women into absurd caricatures. Or until you get the story 100 percent wrong. Whichever happens first.
FIGURE 6.6 Paul Revere, as seen in the alternate version of events you learned growing up. The legendary Revere is far more effective than the real historical figure and rode a horse that farts explosions (also not present in the true story).
Paul Revere: Only Famous Because Nothing Rhymes with “Prescott.” Nothing.
THE MYTH: It takes almost a thousand words, but Henry Wadsworth Longfellow eventually spits out the story we’ve been told for more than two hundred years.
On the eve of a British invasion, Paul Revere and a handful of friends coordinate a secret warning signal to convey how the British troops were approaching. One lantern in the Old North Church if they’re invading by land, two lanterns if they’re coming from the harbor.
On the night of April 18, 1775, they flash Revere the double lanterns and it’s on. Dude springs into action as America’s one-man burglar alarm, galloping from village to village, warning all the locals to arm themselves. It might seem odd that so much attention is heaped on a middleman who performed the relatively straightforward task that was asked of him. But there’s just something romantic about the image of Revere riding like a madman out in front of the coming war, letting everyone know that it was time to invent America with murder.
FIGURE 6.7 Things that rhyme with “Revere.”
THE TRUTH: Longfellow, in case you haven’t figured this out yet, was a poet. Not one of those classy poets, like Robert Frost; one of the rhyming ones, like Dr. Seuss without the drawings.
And do you know why Dr. Seuss wrote about a cat in a hat, rather than a porcupine? Because “cat” rhymes with fucking everything. This is, it turns out, also the reason you’ve heard of Paul Revere.
Longfellow didn’t pluck Paul Revere’s name from obscurity until January 1861. The country was about to become the setting of the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, and the North needed something to get them in the spirit to protect them some Union. Since “Eye of the Tiger” hadn’t been written yet, they had to settle for poetry, and the poem they got was approximately as historically accurate as a nursery rhyme.
First of all, the midnight ride was a covert operation. Screaming “The British are coming!” when up to 20 percent of the population still considered themselves loyal Brits would have been a great way to screw up everything. More important, the British didn’t catch anyone off guard. The patriots had a plan in place to alert each other that the British were coming, and the most important part was getting the word out to as many armed men as possible. That’s why Paul Revere was one of forty different messengers who participated in the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
And it’s a good thing they didn’t rest the fate of the country on Revere’s shoulders. Do you know what slows you down when warning a militia about an imminent invasion? Getting captured by enemy sentries, which was exactly what happened to Revere before he ever made it to Concord. So, of the forty people involved in the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Revere was among the least effective of the group. But because his name is easy to rhyme, we celebrate his achievements instead of the guys who actually completed their rides.
Nice work, history.
FIGURE 6.8 Paul Revere, again seen in an artist’s depiction in which he was more effective than the real Paul Revere.
Abraham Lincoln: Badass, Supersize Giant with a Face Made of Magic
THE MYTH: He’s like America’s sweet, folksy grandpa. Sit on his knee and ol’ Honest Abe will tell you a story about log splitting, cabin building, and slave freeing.
If you only know a few things about Abraham Lincoln (our tallest and second-beardiest president to date), you probably know that he was a paragon of honor, a man who held a struggling country together with passion and focus, a man who carried himself with a quiet dignity that some would describe as downright Lincolnesque.
THE TRUTH: If you sat on Abraham Lincoln’s knee, he’d be much more likely to lift you up and throw you ten feet into the air than tell you a story about log cabins.
In reality, Lincoln had the heart and soul of an unpredictable cage fighter and the strength of several unpredictable cage fighters. He suffered from Marfan syndrome, a disorder that made his arms grow abnormally long—to lengths leading experts qualified as “Holy shit, giant!” He was like a dope-hat-wearing Mr. Fantastic, and he strengthened his bonus arms with a daily regimen of log splitting and house building. According to Henry Ketcham’s The Life of Abraham Lincoln, it wouldn’t have been uncommon to see the young Lincoln strutting around his hometown while carrying stone-filled crates weighing between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds. That’s not a typo, and it’s not like we weighed things differently in the past, as in, “Oh, back then one thousand pounds really weighed an ounce and only cost a nicke
l, and a woman knew her place.” The weight is accurate. Lincoln regularly lugged 1,200 pounds of stones around, just in case that skill might come in handy somewhere down the line.
FIGURE 6.9 Abraham Lincoln adds himself to Mount Rushmore. He also added himself to the front of the penny by headbutting a copper mine.
And it wasn’t just massive boxes of stones that Lincoln easily and carelessly tossed around town—it was also other human beings. We like to think of Lincoln as thoughtful and kind, like a gentle giant, but anecdotes about his early life suggest that he was violent and terrifying and not to be crossed, like an actual giant. When Lincoln moved to New Salem, Illinois, he ran into some trouble with the Clary’s Grove Boys, a local gang. Lincoln, having only lived in New Salem for about a week, was already tired of the Clary’s Grove bunch and demanded a fight with their leader, Jack Armstrong. Armstrong had Lincoln beat in fighting experience but was just outmatched in terms of Lincoln’s strength, arm size, and balls-out craziness. After circling each other for a bit, Lincoln simply picked Armstrong up by the throat, held him in the air, and shook him like a child until Armstrong surrendered. Lincoln would pull a similar stunt years later by lifting up a rowdy spectator out of a crowd and tossing him, but this time it wouldn’t be during a fight; it would be in the middle of Lincoln’s first public campaign speech for office in New Salem. Lincoln apparently campaigned for office on a platform of “I will straight-up hurl any motherfuckers who get on my nerves!” (he won, by the way).
So to recap, while shaping history into an easily digestible narrative, the media and your teachers decided to ignore the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a giant-armed, ax-wielding human tosser in order to focus on how honest he was.