Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha

by Harvey Rachlin

  Still, Americans turned their backs on government policy and continued to settle lands not ceded. In defiance of the encroachment, the Indians, despite the treaties they negotiated with the U.S. government, menaced the settlers. American troops were sent to impose peace, and one such expedition, led by General Arthur St. Clair, resulted in a clash with Indians on the Wabash River during the summer of 1791 and ended in the loss of six hundred soldiers.

  With Indian raids in the west endangering American settlement, President George Washington ordered General Anthony Wayne in the spring of 1792 to lead troops in the Northwest Territory against the frontier Indians. The following year Wayne commenced a campaign against the Indians, who were receiving encouragement from British troops in the area. As they moved north, building forts along their line of progress, Wayne’s troops were attacked by Indians, but on August 20, 1794, “Mad Anthony” brought about the defeat of the united Northwest Indians at Fallen Timbers in Ohio, and then continued to harass them and destroy their villages without interference from the British. Wayne finally called a meeting, and from mid-June through early August 1795, delegates from the Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot, Kaskaskia, Miami, Pottawatomie, Chippewa, Wea, Kickapoo, Ottawa, Eel River, and Piankashaw met at Fort Greenville, Ohio. The defeated and demoralized chiefs were compelled to comply with Wayne’s demands, and in the Treaty of Greenville, signed on August 3, 1795, they ceded Indian claims to the Ohio Valley, involving some 25,000 square miles.

  On August 7, General Wayne announced to the gathering of tribes: “Listen! All you Nations present. I have hitherto addressed you as brothers. I now adopt you all, in the name of the President and Fifteen Great Fires of America, as their children, and you are so accordingly. The medals which I shall have the honor to deliver to you, you will consider as presented by the hands of your father, the Fifteen Fires of America. These you will hand down to your children’s children, in commemoration of this day—a day in which the United States of America gives peace to you and all your Nations, and receives you and them under the protecting wings of her eagle.” The next day the medals were distributed to the tribes, and some time after this first Greenville treaty engraved silver peace medals were distributed to signers of the treaty, including Chief White Swan of the Wea tribe, a sub-tribe of the Miami (Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri), and Chief Tarhe (also known as “The Crane”) of the Wyandot (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia).

  Soon, Americans settled the Ohio Valley and moved on further—to lands inhabited by the dislodged Indians. Tecumseh, a brilliant chief of the Shawnee tribe who envisioned an Indian nation separate from that of the white men, traveled far and wide in an attempt to unite the many Indian tribes in resisting American attempts to take still more of their land, but he was successful only to a limited extent. Some Indian chiefs such as the Miami chief Little Turtle instead advocated peace and continued to enter into treaties with the U.S. government.

  The governor of the territory of Indiana—later the states of Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and a small part of Minnesota—William Henry Harrison, was concerned by the Shawnees’ disruption of peace in the Wabash Valley and angered by Tecumseh’s refusal to recognize the Indian land cessions. Harrison made it his goal to expel the Indians from the Northwest Territory, from which the Indiana Territory had been carved, and which now consisted essentially of the land that later formed the state of Ohio. Harrison gathered an army at the Tippecanoe River, near the village of Tecumseh’s brother, Prophet. The Native Americans, alarmed, advanced on the white soldiers, but they were repelled and their village torched.

  During the War of 1812 Tecumseh joined forces with the British, hoping that a Redcoat victory would enable him to realize his dream of a separate Indian nation. But the British were defeated, and in the Battle of the Thames in Canada, the Shawnee Indian leader was killed while fighting off the advancing Americans. Debilitated and now further set upon by encroaching settlers, the Indians were compelled through additional treaties to cede more lands. The Second Treaty Council of Greenville, Ohio, was held on July 8, 1814, and not only provided for the Indians to give up more land but served to formally uphold the cessions made over the years and to recognize the Indians’ support of the United States in its fight for independence from England. Here, on behalf of President James Madison, Major General William Henry Harrison presented silver peace pipes to the Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot Indian tribes that attended the treaty council. Representatives from each tribe received a pipe from Harrison; for the Shawnee, it was Blackhoof, one of his tribe’s delegates to the U.S. government; for the Wyandot it was Chief Tarhe.

  Over the years the U.S. government had bestowed gifts on Indian tribes when they ceded land to the government, but the Harrison peace pipes were the most elegantly adorned pipes it ever commissioned for the Indians. They were not meant to be smoked—their silver composition and the shape of their bowls would have made that difficult—but were rather “presentation pieces,” made to symbolize the cordial relations between the giver and the recipients, and at the treaty Harrison expounded on the meaning of the pipes. Authentic Indian pipes, those smoked for religious purposes, were usually made of stone and wood. Harrison’s long, slender pipes with their engraved silver bowls were all in one piece as opposed to the normal pwagan, or peace pipe, which comprised separate bowls and stems joined together to form one piece. As most of the Indian language was (and remains) verbs, or action words, so too was the peace pipe considered a tool of action, as it created a link to the Creator.

  The pipe given by William Henry Harrison to the Shawnees in 1814. Its stem is intact, unlike the surviving Delaware pipe, which as a repair made on its stem.

  But a peace pipe was also a religious action tool, in that its pwag ne, or rising smoke, made the smoker’s thoughts and words and prayers visible to the Creator. The Creator in the Indian concept was not an entity on whom was bestowed worship and praise, as in the Judeo-Christian concept, but was rather considered an egalitarian being, having created the earth equal to heaven. Different Indian tribes have different traditions about the origin of their pipes. For several tribes in the Ohio Valley, it derived from Wabozo.

  According to Indian tradition, tobacco is the means of prayer. A person asking a favor would give a gift of tobacco, and the person fulfilling the favor would smoke it. Offerings of tobacco had long ago replaced blood sacrifice in prayer, a transition in Indian theology akin to the New Testament replacing the Old Testament in Christianity.

  It is not known where or by whom the Harrison treaty pipes were made, but it is possible they were fashioned by a silversmith in Philadelphia or Montreal, where pipes at the time were sometimes made. It is also not known how the Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot pipes were used after their receipt from Harrison, since they were not smoking pipes (later testing of the pipes revealed that the Shawnee pipe was never smoked, but there was some evidence of smoking in the Delaware pipe); presumably the pipes were kept wrapped and brought out on special occasions. The Wyandot pipe seems to have disappeared from history, and its whereabouts are unknown.

  William Henry Harrison's defeat of the Indians in November 1811 led to great popularity, an 1840 campaign slogan with running mate John Tyler of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!" and a decisive election to the office of president of the United States.

  The injustice of Americans exacting cessions from Indians whose land they trespassed and settled on is manifest. Indeed, the first colony in North America was founded by the English navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert, whose 1578 charter authorized him “to discover and to take possession of such remote, heathen and barbarous lands as were not actually possessed by a Christian prince or people.” Unwittingly, perhaps, the spirit of this haughty notion was aggressively embraced by Americans in their newly independent republic in the late eighteenth century. But the acquisition of land from the North American Indians was actually nothing new at this time; the French, British, Dutch, and Spanish over the course
of a few hundred years had all colonized North America, trading for land or seizing it in battles.

  The peace pipes presented to the Indian tribes at the Second Treaty Council of Greenville played an important role in the negotiation of the treaty in which the Delaware “ceded to the U.S. all claim to the thirteen sections [a section is 640 acres] of land given to them by an act of Congress March 3, 1807.” The Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot were granted a nine-square-mile tract of land with unrestricted rights.

  Today Harrison’s peace pipes are not just reminders of the treaties early-nineteenth-century American Indians were compelled to enter into, but of the natives’ spirit of willingness, if not forced resignation, to live in harmony with white men even when they had to give up their land to do so. Indeed, besides being symbols of the establishment of relations between Indians and early Americans, the pipes are emblematic of the early evolution of the midwestern United States. At the time, the pipes testified to the United States’ appreciation of the concessions made by the Indians and its hope for renewed friendship, a bond which would unfortunately be stained by further bloodshed on both sides as the rest of the century unfolded.

  LOCATIONS:

  Delaware peace pipe: National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.

  Shawnee peace pipe: The Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, Missouri.*

  Footnote

  *The Delaware peace pipe came to the National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, as a private gift from Victor Evans. The Shawnee peace pipe was acquired by a Civil War veteran named Daniel Dyer, who, with his wife, Ida, collected Indian relics. Daniel Dyer became an Indian agent, first at the Quapaw Agency in Kansas, where he appears to have been respected by Native Americans, then at Fort Reno, Oklahoma, where his habit of requesting soldiers every time he thought the Indians were ready to go on the warpath caused Generals Nelson A. Miles and Philip Sheridan to come to investigate; after one summer at Fort Reno, Dyer was removed from his post as agent. Although most of the artifacts, particularly the quality pieces, in the “Dyer Collection” were acquired by Ida, the Dyers divorced in 1897 (for the second time; they first divorced in 1876 and then remarried the same year) and the entire collection became the property of Daniel. In 1898 the Dyer Collection went on loan to the Kansas City Board of Education, and it became the board’s property in 1910. In 1939, several small museums and historical societies merged into the Kansas City Museum, and the Dyer Collection, along with the Kansas City Board of Education’s collection of artifacts, became one of the museum’s founding collections.

  JOHN ADAMS’S PIGTAIL

  DATE: 1829.

  WHAT IT IS: The pigtail of the last Bounty mutineer to survive on Pitcairn Island.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The hair is braided and bound at one end, and is 7½ inches in length. It is a light sandy color.

  It is a quaint relic of a man whose lifespan encompassed the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812, but whose own life was imbued with adventure and romance half a world away from those momentous events. One can imagine that this relic, a pigtail, imparted a distinctive look to the man, John Adams—the seaman, the mutineer, the fugitive, the compatriot, the progenitor, the last survivor, the teacher, the missionary, the New World paterfamilias—who in his remote world struggled from the depths of fear to the peak of sublime happiness. Evoking the man, the pigtail of John Adams opens the storybook of history to one of the most compelling chapters of human drama and pathos on the high seas, and its extraordinary aftermath.

  Pitcairn Island, the South Pacific, January 1790. The Bounty sailed cautiously along the rocky coast of the island, its crew apprehensive about dangers lurking beyond the shores. After more than one hundred days at sea, the men and women aboard the 215-ton ship were anxious to disembark and settle into a refuge they could make their home. But it would have to meet their peculiar needs. They had been searching for an island that was uninhabited and fertile, and which ships cruising the South Pacific would probably not draw near. This seemed the ideal choice. Fletcher Christian, who had led the mutiny aboard the Bounty, read about this island in a travelogue of the South Seas he found in Lieutenant Bligh’s quarters after Bligh and eighteen crew members were put out to sea in the ship’s launch, but the island’s position was charted incorrectly, and it had proved difficult to find.

  The occupants on board this pirated vessel were nine of the Bounty mutineers—Fletcher Christian, Edward Young, Matthew Quintal, John Mills, Alexander Smith, John Williams, William Brown, Isaac Martin, and William M’Koy—and twelve women and six men from the South Pacific islands of Otaheite and Tubuaï. The crew of the Bounty was coming to start a new life, to stake a claim in paradise and isolate themselves from the rest of the world. None on board could have imagined the events that would unfold, what fate lay in store for them as the Bounty cruised in, ready to launch an exploratory party to survey this Eden before stepping into it.

  How these men and women came to arrive on Pitcairn is a vital component of the tale. It had all begun in England with the government-ordered botanical mission of the Bounty, an exploring ship that was to obtain breadfruit plants on Otaheite, or Tahiti, and transport them to the West Indies, where they would be introduced as food to the native slaves there. England, by the late eighteenth century, was the strongest colonial empire in the world, and it sought lands unclaimed by European powers that could be of benefit to its commerce. English explorers such as James Cook and Samuel Wallis sailed the Pacific and visited many islands in the 1760s, but it was on July 2, 1767, on Lieutenant Philip Carteret’s worldwide voyage aboard the Swallow, that a young midshipman named Robert Pitcairn was the first to spot the uninhabited island that was named for him.

  The Bounty, fitted in 1787 at Deptford, England, for its mission, had more than forty men aboard when it left for the South Pacific. Lieutenant William Bligh, who had sailed with James Cook in his second expedition around the world—during which the breadfruit plant was discovered on Otaheite—was the commander of the ship, with Fletcher Christian serving as the master’s mate. The vessel set out in December 1787 and soon incurred heavy damage from a storm and rough waters, making it necessary to lay over in the Canary Islands for a refitting before continuing.

  The ship picked up the breadfruit plants in Otaheite, but its crew remained on the island for half a year making further collections. On this tropical island, no doubt more than a few of the crew members were captivated by its charms—the breathtaking landscape, the simple, peaceful lifestyle, and, not least, the beauty of the women.

  Finally the Bounty left Otaheite for the West Indies with its breadfruit cargo, but when it was about three hundred miles out to sea, several members of the crew mutinied. Over the years various dramatizations of the revolt have villainized Lieutenant Bligh for treating his crew harshly. But while he was irascible, he was not as tyrannical as were other contemporary ship commanders: for example, flogging on board the Bounty was substantially less frequent than on other vessels. The cause of the mutiny has been examined and debated, but most likely it was a combination of Bligh’s vituperative language and the sensitivity of Fletcher Christian, who inspired some of the crew to revolt early in the morning of April 28, 1789.

  Sometime after four A.M., Christian and three men—John Mills, Thomas Burkitt, and Charles Churchill—burst into Bligh’s cabin, yanked him out of bed, and tied his hands tightly behind his back. The mutineers, armed with muskets, machetes, and bayonets, led Bligh to the deck. One of the men following with a loaded firearm was a seaman who went by the name Alexander Smith, but whose real name was John Adams. While this sedition was transpiring, other crew members were forcibly restrained below. The bo’sun was brought up on deck, and under the threat of immediate death was ordered to raise a launch. Christian had decided that Bligh and his party would be put to sea in the ship’s cutter, which was in a deteriorated condition and mean
t to hold no more than ten persons, but the frantic appeals of the bo’sun and some others persuaded him to use the longboat instead. As this whole drastic enterprise was proceeding, Bligh was urging his captors to come to their senses and importuned the other crew members not to participate in it. He was repeatedly warned, “Hold your tongue, sir, or you are dead this instant.”

  Some men were forced into the longboat immediately; others were permitted to collect food, supplies, and navigational instruments before leaving the ship. The ship’s officers were ordered into the boat while Christian gripped Bligh’s hand rope. Bligh dared the armed mutineers to shoot, but instead they un-cocked their weapons. Still others of the crew had to be prevented from leaving the ship with Bligh, and they cried out to the captain to remember that they were not participants in the mutiny. Others followed into the twenty-three-foot launch, including, finally, Bligh, who was untied just before he climbed in. Bligh, who had made two previous voyages with Christian, asked him if his action was a proper restitution for the friendship he had shown him, and Christian replied in an agitated tone, “That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing. I am in hell. I am in hell!” It was an answer that was to bring a degree of satisfaction to the commander during the perilous voyage he was about to make. By means of the rope that tied the Bounty and the launch together, the mutineers moved the launch astern, threw some additional provisions out to them, including scraps of pork, and then taunted the nineteen unfortunate men aboard the launch before setting it adrift.