by Jesse Walker
Those anxieties were fuel for the Puritans’ paranoia. When societies are still acquiring a sense of identity, Slotkin suggests, “the simplest means of defining or expressing the sense of such a norm is by rejecting some other group whose character is deemed to be the opposite.”28 For many New Englanders, the Indians filled that role, with the undisciplined, Indianized frontiersmen forming a potential fifth column. The temptations of native culture had to be resisted, and clear lines were needed between the community of the devout and the hostile outer world.29
The Puritans weren’t the only colonists struggling with the Enemy Outside. The fear of unlikely Indian conspiracies flared up in settlements ranging from Quaker Pennsylvania to Anglican Virginia. In 1689, it sparked a revolution in Maryland.
A Protestant rebellion in England had deposed the Catholic king James II just a year before. In Maryland—the only colony in English America to be ruled by Catholics, though it had a predominantly Protestant population—a rumor started to circulate that “the great men of Maryland hath hired the Seneca Indians to kill the protestants.”30 Ten thousand Seneca Indians were said to be gathering at the head of the Patuxent River; when that army turned out to be a fiction, a new report claimed that nine thousand were gathered at the mouth of the river and another nine hundred had already invaded a settlement. One man swore that he had overheard some drunken Eastern Shore Indians blabbing that a man on the Provincial Council had hired them to attack the colonists. The rumors cooled down for a spell when the invasion didn’t materialize, only to flare up again when the colony’s government failed to recognize the new king and queen of England. A Protestant agitator named John Coode raised an army, seized the State House, and installed himself as the new governor of Maryland.31 The colony then banned Catholic worship, a restriction that would not be lifted until after the American Revolution.
As with the French soldiers who bedeviled Cotton Mather, this was a case of an alleged alliance between the Indians and a white foe. Usually such alliances involved one Enemy Outside joining forces with another. The Maryland rumors were different in that they combined the Enemy Outside with a cabal in the highest reaches of the government—in our terms, the Enemy Above. The fear of the Indian/Catholic conspiracy had at least as much to do with resentment of Maryland’s autocratic regime as it did with the fear of an external attack. A similar tale took hold around the same time in the Dominion of New England: An unpopular governor, Edmund Andros, was accused of conspiring with the Wabanaki, deliberately sending white troops to be slaughtered by the Indians. (In one soldier’s words, his comrades wondered whether Andros had “brought them theither to be a sacrifice to their heathen Adversaries.”)32 As in Maryland, such reports fed a revolt, and in 1689 Andros was deposed.
From Isaac Kelso, Danger in the Dark, 1855
But the Indians’ alleged allies were usually based outside the community’s gates. At different moments, Philip was said to be a pawn or partner of an Old World power, of a Catholic conspiracy, or of a Quaker conspiracy. He was hardly the only Indian whose purported plots were supposedly linked to the machinations of white allies. In 1653, while England and the Netherlands were at war in Europe, the colonists of New England looked suspiciously at the colonists in New Netherland. A belief took hold that, in Increase Mather’s words, “there was an horrid Conspiracy amongst the Indians throughout this Land to cut off all the English, and that they were animated thereto by the Dutch.” (The evidence for the plot, Mather conceded, was “vague and uncertain.”)33 In 1700, in turn, the former New Netherland—now controlled by the English and known as New York—barred all Catholic clergy from the colony, citing among its reasons the Church’s alleged efforts “to Debauch, Seduce and Withdraw the Indians from their due Obedience unto His Majesty; and to excite and stir them up to Sedition, Rebellion and Open Hostility.”34 In 1736, the founder of Georgia claimed casually that “the French and Spaniards” were “labouring to debauch [the Indians] from us.”35 In 1755, part of Pennsylvania went into an uproar after news spread that a “parsell of Indians” had gathered a few miles from the local Catholic chapel.36 The fretful colonists didn’t worry that the Indians were about to attack the building. They worried that the Indians and the Church were in cahoots.
Catholic conspiracies are, in fact, the second most significant form taken by the Enemy Outside. The pope was perceived as a master manipulator; priests and nuns were seen as his corrupt and licentious lieutenants. Anti-Catholic sentiment has deep European roots, but it found a new shape in North America, particularly after independence. Nineteenth-century nativists believed that the Church was plotting to impose its hierarchy on an egalitarian American republic. If Indian conspiracies embodied the settlers’ fear of the anarchic New World, papal conspiracies embodied their fears of the aristocratic Old World they had left behind.
Yet both Enemies Outside were closely linked to anxieties about Satan, sexuality, and ethnic impurity, and the two were often imagined as allied. There was even an anti-Catholic equivalent of the Indian captivity story, with books like Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836) claiming that convents were prisons filled with sex slaves. Under the influence of such tracts, Protestant Americans sometimes invaded the institutions and attempted to free the nuns.37
So not every Enemy Outside had red skin. The Enemy Outside isn’t defined by any particular origin; he’s defined by the fact that you think he’s out there trying to come in. The details vary at different times and places, but several characteristics recur. There is the image of the world outside your gates as an unfriendly wilderness where evil forces dwell. There is the proclivity to see those forces as a centralized conspiracy guided by a puppet master or a small cabal. There is the fear of the border zone where cultures mix, the suspicion that aliens at home are agents of a foreign power, and the fear that your community might be remade in the enemy’s image. And there is the tendency to see this conflict in terms of a grand, apocalyptic struggle—if not literally against Satan, then against something deeply evil.38
If you didn’t have to be a Native American to be seen as the Enemy Outside, you didn’t have to be a colonist to suspect the Enemy Outside was on the prowl. Some Indians of colonial New England believed in a malevolent creature they called Cheepie, a spirit whose apparitions were thought to bring disease and death. According to one tribesman, Cheepie resembled an “Englishman, clothed with hat and coat, shoes and stockings.” When the folklorist Richard Dorson repeated that statement, he found a lesson in it: Perhaps the Indians, like the white man, “equated the Devil with their enemy.”39
For the United States, the Indian wars effectively ended in 1877, when U.S. forces fought several Sioux tribes, seized the gold-rich Black Hills, and completed the conquest of the Plains Indians. Over the previous two centuries, the colonies and then the independent United States had subdued a series of tribes—or, if you were tuned more closely to cultural myths than to the facts, a series of superchiefs, from Philip of the Wampanoag to Geronimo of the Apache. The end of the Black Hills War didn’t put an end to the fighting between the white man and the red, but from that point forward the battles would consist of rebellions by the natives and crackdowns by the government, not clashes between independent nations.
But the fact that the most notorious Enemy Outside was no longer actually outside the country’s borders didn’t mean the whites were ready to retire their Indian conspiracy stories. When a millennial faith called the Ghost Dance started sweeping through Native America in 1889, many officials and reporters were already primed to perceive it as a sign of trouble. And when the Ghost Dance was embraced by Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Sioux leader who had fought in the Black Hills War, the conspiracy story took over: Out in the wilderness, in strange ceremonies, the aliens were plotting an attack.
Sitting Bull had already been cast in the role of superchief, literally playing the part when he went on tour with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West troupe. (The show touted the Indian as the man behind the death of General
George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In fact, he probably wasn’t present at the battle at all.) It is true that in 1867, Sitting Bull had been anointed the supreme chief of the seven Lakota tribes. But though that sounded impressive, several important tribes that he allegedly led—and even some of Sitting Bull’s own Hunkpapa people—had never recognized his authority.
Still, even as late as 1890, if there was any area where Sitting Bull and his Caucasian foes agreed, it was, in the words of the historian Rex Alan Smith, that both “believed Sitting Bull to be the most important and powerful Sioux alive.”40 He was charismatic, mysterious, and intransigent, an imposing figure with an even more imposing reputation. When the children’s writer Elbridge Streeter Brooks described Sitting Bull in a novel about Little Bighorn, he presented the old Indian as a manipulator operating behind the scenes, with the Midnight Strong Hearts, a prestigious order of Sioux warriors, recast in conspiratorial terms:
“Why, Sitting Bull is the Master of the Strong Hearts; and they don’t give in, I can tell you.”
“The Master of the Strong Hearts?” Jack was certainly learning many new things, and each one only increased his curiosity. “What’s that?” he queried; “some sort of a secret society?”
“That’s just where you’re right, sonny,” the squaw-man assented with an emphatic nod. “The Strong Hearts are just the biggest, secretest, most consarnedly bravest and determined of all the Sioux societies. And their main point, in all their doings is just this: never to back down, back out, or give up, when once they’ve determined to do anything. And that’s what the Bull meant. . . . I never knew him to lead on the war-path never. He leaves the real fighting to some of the other big chiefs—like Red Cloud, or Gall, or Iron Hawk, or Rain-in-the-Face. The Bull, he just makes medicine for the boys, and they pitch in and fight, while he dreams things out for ’em and eggs ’em on. . . .”41
The Ghost Dance, meanwhile, was a messianic movement centered on a Northern Paiute Indian named Wovoka. Around 1869, Wovoka’s father, Tavibo, claimed that the Great Spirit had told him a new world was coming, one where the whites would all be swallowed by the earth, the ghosts of dead Indians would return, and everyone would be immortal. To bring this day, Indians needed to perform a sacred ritual called the Ghost Dance, which Tavibo began to teach.
Tavibo’s movement faded fairly rapidly, and he died when Wovoka was in his teens. His son was adopted by a white family, who renamed him Jack Wilson and gave him a conventional Christian upbringing. He took in other Christian ideas as well, studying the tenets of groups ranging from the Shakers to the Mormons. In the late 1880s, he announced that he too had encountered the Great Spirit, and he started preaching doctrines that drew at least as much on Christianity as they did on traditional Indian spirituality. The son of God would usher in the new age, Wovoka promised. Many of his followers decided that the son of God was Wovoka himself.
There were other differences between Wovoka’s vision and his father’s. Most notably, Wovoka did not teach that the white people were all to die. But he still saw the end of the familiar world and the arrival of a new one, the return of the dead and the immortality of the living. To bring that day, he proclaimed, Indians of all tribes must set aside their differences, give up guns and alcohol and idleness, dance the Ghost Dance, and spread the good news.
Since the new faith was transmitted orally, it mutated and adapted rapidly, absorbing different attributes in different places as different tribes encountered it. Among the recently defeated Sioux, living hungry and resentful lives in the Dakotas, the religion took on a militant flavor. The idea that the whites were to be wiped out crept back into the creed, and the notion took hold that special ghost shirts would make the wearers impervious to bullets.42
All the same, it remained an explicitly nonviolent religion. Indeed, it may well have tamped down the impulse to attack the whites, since it allowed angry Indians to believe that the intruders would soon be removed by supernatural means. Nonetheless, when Sitting Bull endorsed the Ghost Dance he broke a peace pipe in public and announced that he was ready to fight and die for the faith. And with the old chief’s reputation, that was enough for the local Indian agent, Major James McLaughlin, to fire off a letter to the commissioner of Indian affairs. After insisting that he was not “an alarmist” and did not expect an “immediate” Indian attack, McLaughlin went on to describe
the excitement existing among the Sitting Bull faction of Indians over the expected Indian millennium, the annihilation of the white men and supremacy of the Indian, which is looked for in the near future and promised by the Indian Medicine men as not later than next spring. . . .
Sitting Bull is high priest and leading apostle of this latest Indian absurdity; in a word, he is the chief mischief-maker at this agency, and if he were not here this craze, so general among the Sioux, would never have gotten a foothold at this agency. Sitting Bull is a man of low cunning, devoid of a single manly principle in his nature or an honorable trait of character, but on the contrary, is capable of instigating and inciting others (those who believe in his powers) to do any amount of mischief. He is a coward and lacks moral courage; he will never lead where there is danger, but is an adept in influencing his ignorant henchmen and followers, and there is no knowing what he may direct them to attempt.43
The McLaughlin letter leaked to the papers, which couldn’t resist the combination of a mysterious ritual and an infamous superchief. The Chicago Daily Tribune published a version of the document under the headline “TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES: What the Indians Expect of the Coming Messiah.”44 The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph fretted that “Army officers may be perfectly well informed of Sitting Bull’s intrigues, but they can do nothing until he deliberately perfects his rascally plans and gets ready to start his young bucks on a raid.”45 The New York Times announced that “the redskins are dancing in circles,” then quoted a “half-breed” courier as to what such symbolism must mean: “The Sioux never dance that dance except for one purpose, and that is for war.”46 At one point the Tribune reported that a battle with the Indians had already left sixty people dead or wounded. In fact the clash had never occurred.
By that time the more nervous whites were begging the government for greater protection, steeling themselves for a fight of their own, or in some cases simply fleeing. More responsible papers attempted to debunk the rumors. (The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer editor L. Frank Baum, later to become famous as the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, wrote that “the Indian scare” was “a great injustice” fanned by “sensational newspaper articles.”47 Baum was no friend of the Indians—he would soon call for their extermination—so you can’t accuse the man of special pleading.) But fear carried the day, particularly after President Benjamin Harrison sent the military to suppress the dancing. On December 15, 1890, a botched attempt to arrest Sitting Bull ended with the chief, several of his supporters, and some of the arresting officers dead. Fearing retaliation, hundreds of the Hunkpapa fled. The Seventh Cavalry caught up to them and took them to Wounded Knee Creek on December 28. The soldiers ended up killing between 170 and 190 of the Indians, including at least 18 children. More than two dozen whites died too, largely from friendly fire. And with that the great dancing conspiracy was eliminated.
When Elbridge Streeter Brooks’s book describes the death of Sitting Bull, there is no reference to the massacre at Wounded Knee. Wovoka’s religion rates only a passing allusion, when an Indian character mentions that he had caught “the Messiah craze and the ghost-dance fever.” The explanation for the superchief’s death is much simpler: “Sitting Bull had stirred up his followers—Strong Hearts, most of them, you know.”48
Once the Enemy Outside story line was established, it could be applied to all kinds of alleged villains, not just popes and superchiefs. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, joining the alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary, its battles were fought far away in Europe, but much of the country was sei
zed by a fear that the enemy’s long tentacles had entered the U.S. heartland.
The domestic struggle against the alien octopus was sometimes horrifying, sometimes comic, sometimes a bit of both. Some towns prohibited performances of German music. Pittsburgh banned Beethoven. There was a vigorous crackdown on German-owned breweries. The comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids retconned the title characters’ national origins, reassuring readers that the boys were really Dutch.
Harold H. Knerr, the Katzenjammer family revises its origins
German books were burned at rallies around the country. Vigilantes seized and tortured German immigrants and vandalized their property. In Collinsville, Illinois, a mob lynched a German-American miner on a groundless suspicion that he was a spy. A jury quickly acquitted the killers, following a trial in which the defense attorney described the crime as a “patriotic murder.”49 The town’s mayor argued that the whole episode could have been avoided if only Congress had done more to prevent disloyalty.
Some of this was simply traditional ethnic bigotry brought to new heights by war fever. But the hysteria represented paranoia as well as prejudice. Germany’s head of state, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was imagined as the monstrous Beast of Berlin, and every adult American with German blood was suspected of being a spy in his employ. “On the assumption that all were potential enemy agents,” the historian Frederick Luebke wrote, German Americans “were barred from the vicinity of places deemed to have military importance, such as wharves, canals, and railroad depots. Moreover, they were expelled from the District of Columbia, required to get permission to travel within the country or to change their place of residence, and forbidden access to all ships and boats except public ferries. . . . Subsequently several thousand were interned in concentration camps as minor infractions of the rules were exaggerated into major offenses.”50 Shades of Deer Island.