The Iroquois’ political organization was no less highly evolved and far more fully structured than that of the Algonquians to the south and east. The league was not a state or a statelike confederation but a council of fifty sachems whose purpose was to preserve peace among the autonomous tribes through elaborate ceremonies and exchanges of ritual gifts, and to keep the league’s traditions and purposes alive. Similarly elaborate ceremonies were shared with tribes outside the league in order to maintain goodwill, and within the individual villages consensus was sought among kin groups by chiefs guided by councils of senior leaders, women as well as men. Unlike the Powhatan chieftains, the Iroquois village chiefs lacked coercive power; they were chosen for their negotiating skill and oratorical powers as well as for their personal stature and influence. Their political system—essentially a religious, ceremonial process rather than the working of formalized public institutions—was a delicate, ritualistic balancing of sensibilities, a constant search for reciprocity in which conflict and consensus were paradoxically braided. Invidious losses could not be tolerated nor undue advantages sustained.31
In much of this, the Iroquois were unique. The forms of community life and the practice of politics differed markedly from region to region, from tribe to tribe. So within the Iroquois villages women played a key role, precipitating wars, dominating councils, selecting male leaders, and largely deciding the fate of prisoners. But other communities (the southern New England tribes) were mainly male dominated. Among some people (the Pequots, Mashpees, and other New Englanders) leadership and family life were largely patrilineal; in others (the Mahicans, Susquehannocks, Munsees, and Lenapes), matrilineal; in still others (the Powhatans), leadership descended through both male and female lines. In New England success in leadership depended on charisma and persuasion; in the Powhatans’ chiefdoms sheer power, reinforced by priestly authority, decided people’s fates. In parts of northern New England, men provided the basic staple of life, game; in southern New England, women, working in the fields, produced an estimated 90 percent of all caloric consumption. Priestly—shamanistic—roles were important everywhere, but in some places, like the Virginia plain and the Pequot region of Connecticut, the shamans shared in, if they did not dominate, the ultimate group decisions.32
This was a diverse world—polylingual, polyethnic, regionally disparate in political and social structure, and economically multiform. Yet below these manifest differences lay the common civilization of people who lived at a distinctive level of culture. North and south, east and west, they were all villagers, most of them horticulturists, who lived in similar multifamily dwellings, acquired and prepared food in similar ways, dressed similarly in clothes of similar material, recognized similar signs of status, practiced the same division of labor, and fought wars in similar ways. Above all, they coped with their environment with similar skill.33
4
They had developed remarkable dexterities, highly refined skills. They fought principally with bows and arrows; these were not crude instruments. Their bows, five or six feet long, were deadly weapons. A typical bow, taken in Massachusetts in 1660, had a “pull” of forty-six pounds—less than that of English longbows but powerful nevertheless. With a maximum range of close to two hundred yards, the arrows, three feet or more in length, could be shot with great accuracy up to at least fifty yards. Their triangular projectile points, flaked from dense rock to razor sharpness, could tear through the hides of bears or moose, let alone human flesh; they penetrated deeply, were difficult to extract, and were likely to produce hemorrhages. An arrow that killed a Frenchman on Cape Cod in 1606 went through him and pinned his dog to his body. The arrows, made by craftsmen knowledgeable of both woods and minerals, could be shot one after another in rapid succession: seven could be released in the time it took a matchlock musketeer, propping his heavy, muzzle-loading weapon on a stand and igniting the powder charge to fire, to shoot once. Ordinary bowmen could hit racing deer and birds in flight “without a standing pause or left eye blinking.” And the weapons they used for close fighting were as effective as any in Europe: hatchets with heads of chipped stone tightly lashed to long hafts, war clubs topped with wooden balls studded with pointed stones, and knives, in effect elongated arrowheads, as lethal as steel daggers or finely pointed stilettos. And they knew about armor. The Mohawks and Munsees used wooden helmets, arrow-proof tunics of closely woven reeds, and wooden or moose-hide shields.
The craftsmanship in all this weaponry was highly refined, the raw materials subject to what might be called quality control. The favored woods for bows were hickory, ash, and witch hazel; for arrows, elder. The proper felsite or quartz for arrowheads might be brought in lots from distant quarries, to be selected on the basis of reliable knowledge of mineralogy. The bowstrings, made of sinews or twisted strips of deer hide, were strong, and all the joinings—of string to bow, of feathers and projectiles to arrow shafts, of hatchet heads and knife blades to handles—were done with precise windings of fine gut, secured with glue of melted horn.34
This devotion to patient craftsmanship carried over to all the vital work of life. The first European settlers marveled at the Indians’ skill in boat building. Large dugout canoes, made from trees felled by axes and fire, were fashioned by burning and chipping away the center, the smoldering fire limited by wet clay, until only a substantial shell was left. These narrow, round-bottomed troughs, some as long as fifty feet, could carry ten to twenty people; some were said to hold forty. Though blunt-ended and heavy, they could be paddled with speed, and though they rolled almost like logs, they were commonly used for spear fishing by men who managed to keep them in balance while standing and hurling harpoons. But it was the birchbark canoe, made in the north where paper birch trees were available, that commanded the Europeans’ greatest admiration. They wrote about these remarkable vessels again and again and described how they were made.
The bark of giant paper birch trees, pried off in sheets under special weather conditions, was wrapped around a frame of white cedar, whose gunwales were spread apart by thwarts fitted into drilled notches. Stakes held the bark sides upright while the sections were sewed and glued together, then folded over the gunwales and joined at the pointed ends. Every joint was tightly bound and glued. Fine adjustments were made for weight and balance, the seams waterproofed with deer fat, and the result was a vessel of extraordinary speed, capacity, and adaptability. Birchbark canoes could bear remarkably heavy loads but were light enough for one man to carry: two could carry a canoe that held ten or twelve men. With three paddlers, it was noted, they could outrace an English longboat with eight oarsmen. They were wonderfully maneuverable, slipping through rapids, swinging around rocks and whirlpools. More fragile than dugouts, easily torn by jagged debris, they were nevertheless durable if handled properly; a well-made canoe could last ten years, and if sunk, it could be repaired and reused even after long submersion.35
Bark, in the hands of even ordinary craftsmen, was a substance of many uses. Everywhere in the North American woodlands it was used, along with skins and rush matting, for the outer covering of all three of the most common dwellings—the elongated, high-arched longhouses, the small, conical tepees, and the hemispheric wigwams. Light, waterproof, durable sheathing, bark could easily be stripped off the house frames and tied into rolls for reuse when villages were relocated. It could be fashioned into large carry-alls, into buckets, even into cooking pots, with heat provided by hot rocks dropped into soups or stews.36
Their ingenuity and craft skills were especially refined in their provisions for basic subsistence. They were ingenious fishermen. Their needle-sharp fishhooks made of bone or antler were weighted by rock sinkers notched or drilled for the fastening of lines. Their bone harpoon points, wedged into, but detachable from, long shafts, were tied to ropes to haul in catches of sea bass, bluefish, even seals and whales—not only drift whales but whales active in the offshore waters. They constructed stone and reed weirs to catch fish during spawning run
s; trawling nets, some seventy or eighty fathoms long; hemp screens to hook fish by their gills; sieves to catch them descending through rapids; and hand nets to scoop them up as they battled their way upstream against the falls. They fished at night, by torchlight; in winter, through ice holes, with lines and spears.37
They were no less ingenious as hunters. Individual bowmen and spear throwers were skillful in hiding, lurking, tracking, and killing—and practiced in imitating animal calls and in disguising their human shape and sound and smell. They constructed traps of all kinds—deadfall traps of logs that could crush a bear to death; snares of bent saplings which when sprung could snatch anything up to the size of a deer in its thongs and fling it aloft, alive or dead. And they organized cooperative, mass game hunts: some, in which all the animals in a large area were driven between mile-long fences in the shape of a V, to be killed as they crowded through the narrow apex; others, in which the prey was forced over precipices or into creeks or rivers; still others, in which deer were terrorized into helpless packs by narrowing rings of fire.38
Food was thus produced—crops grown, fish and game caught, roots, nuts, berries, and fruit gathered—and it could be preserved. They froze meat in pine troughs, ice, and straw, as efficiently as later Americans would do, up to the age of refrigeration. The fish they did not eat they smoked for future use. And food of all kinds was preserved in storage pits, some seven or eight feet deep and five feet in diameter, lined with straw and bark or with stones and baked clay and periodically fumigated by smoke to kill off vermin and reharden the walls. With similar skill, they made wells to draw spring water by driving hollow tree trunks into the ground, tapped maple trees for their sap, and turned pine gum into tar and turpentine.39
Their ingenuity, their craftsmanship, reached into all areas of everyday life. They turned rough animal skins into soft leather, which, with furs, provided the clothes they needed. They made thread and cord from hemp, sinews, and vegetable fibers; sewing needles from horn; combs, tweezers, hairpins, hand tools, pottery, and baskets. Perhaps their most intricate technical accomplishment lay in turning the shells of the quahog, or hardshell clam, into the beads that came to be known as wampum. Carefully differentiating white from blue or purple shells, color having highly charged symbolic meanings, they perforated rectangular pieces of clamshell lengthwise with extremely thin wooden drills, threaded these blanks on strings of hemp, and then worked them through grindstone grooves to smooth off the edges and form them into short tubes or discs of uniform size. Patience and great manual skill were required to turn out these beads, which, when woven together into belts of various lengths, at five per inch on each strand, were objects of great value, the “diamonds of the country.” The sheer difficulty of producing them limited their number enough for them to serve as currency.40
Every measure that historians have been able to devise indicates successful adaptation to the environment. These were people skillful in producing what they needed—food, clothing, and shelter. Subsistence could at times be meager, forced tributes by demanding rulers like Powhatan could impoverish productive farmers and hunters, and overemphasis on starch and carbohydrates in some regions could have damaging effects. But most people were well fed: their diets—high in grains, fibers, and protein, lacking in sugar and milk products—were generally nutritious, much better balanced than that of the English, who lacked fruits and vegetables for much of the year. Starvation was not unknown, but it was rare, far less common than in the main population centers of Europe, notorious for filth, disease, crowding, and misery. They knew how to avoid polluted water, poisonous plants, and dangerous insects; in some areas they bathed frequently, and everywhere they found ways to inure themselves against the rigors of the climate—commonly protecting their bodies against cold in winter and insects in summer with thin rubbings of animal fat. And they did not overburden the natural resources available to them; nor did they disbalance their economies by excessive demands. Their mobility allowed them to travel seasonally to the available food sources and thus to take maximum advantage of ecological diversity—diversity that meant for them “abundance, stability, and a regular supply of the things that kept them alive.” Mobility also made it possible for them to avoid exhausting the soil. They preserved resources of all kinds, with important demographic consequences. The Western Abenakis, by limiting hunting to subdivisions of the territory physically available to them, “maintained their populations at about 25 percent of actual carrying capacity” and thus created “a margin of safety against potential hard times; it is unlikely that they would ever face starvation, as might have been the case had their populations been closer to carrying capacity.”41
Protective of the environment, sensitively attuned to ecological patterns, reasonably well fed, clothed, and sheltered, these were healthy people, by early modern standards, who impressed the first Europeans who met them by their robustness, their enormous physical endurance, their freedom from deformities, and their stature.42 Archaeologists, studying ossuary deposits, present a more complicated picture, but one not inconsistent with overall health. Because of high infant mortality—an estimated 30 percent before the age of five (not much higher than rates in many parts of Europe)—life expectancy at birth was only 21 to 23 years (it has been estimated at 23.5 for Paris in the early eighteenth century), but those who survived to age 15 could expect to live to 35—not much less than their English contemporaries. They were taller than Europeans, though not as much as the first settlers claimed, and they were largely free of rickets and other bone diseases that crippled so much of the European population. In some places, at certain times, some among them suffered from tuberculosis, dysentery, influenza and pneumonia, arthritis, and various kinds of bacterial and parasitical infections. But the spread of these diseases was quite confined; the attacks were relatively benign; herbal remedies were in part effective; and the worst killers that devastated the European population in great waves of epidemics—smallpox, plague, cholera, yellow and scarlet fever, diphtheria, chicken pox, whooping cough—were absent, as were the immunities that might limit their effect.43
5
How can one describe this world? For those who experienced it, it was spiritually hyperactive and crowded; it was integrated, from the cosmos to every animate and inanimate object within it; it was diverse—linguistically, ethnically, politically, and socially; and it was skillful in stone-age technology and competent in managing available resources and ensuring survival. None of this, however, was fixed, immemorial, or static. Explorers from abroad may have thought they had found a timeless world, frozen in an early stage of human development, awaiting its deliverance into modernity. In fact what they had found were societies very much within history—their own history—living on the wing of change, facing new challenges, adjusting, learning, gaining, and losing. It was still largely a traditional world, but a world, in Nancy Lurie’s phrase, “in a process of growth, elaboration, and internal change.”44
Among the many forces of change that had been building up in the years before the settlement at Jamestown and that were reshaping American domestic history, two were preeminent. Their effects were radiating out into ever larger realms.
The first, dominating the Virginia plain, was the brutally expansive “empire” of Powhatan. That dominant chiefdom had emerged only in the recent past, sometime between the 1550s and 1580s, and was still in the process of expansion and consolidation when the English arrived in 1607. Inheriting six chiefdoms on the upper James and York rivers, Powhatan had expanded the area of his control by sheer conquest, defeating or intimidating one neighboring group after another, absorbing their warriors into his own band, and turning his enlarged army on other neighbors who resisted his demands for tribute and subjection. There was constant opposition, especially at the southeastern extremities. It was only in 1596 or 1597 that Powhatan succeeded in conquering the powerful Kecoughtans, on the north shore of the James where it meets Chesapeake Bay, a hundred miles from Powhatan’s home
village. He killed the Kecoughtans’ chief and most of the warriors, took the survivors captive, and repopulated the territory with loyalists. A decade later, just as the Virginia Company’s first fleet was preparing to sail to its colony, Powhatan was waging his greatest campaign, to destroy the Chesapeakes, on the south shore of the James, just south of the present Norfolk. Hoping to frustrate his priests’ prophecy that his empire would be destroyed by people advancing from the bay, he turned on the Chesapeakes with fury and obliterated the entire community. Still there was no peace. Warlike, ethnically alien people hemmed him in on the west and raided his people repeatedly. The northern and eastern fringes of his territory were only weakly held; the groups there were eager to break away, and they were capable of doing so if given any effective support. And there were pockets of resistance even in the midst of Powhatan’s central domain, the most important of them the Chickahominies, near the present site of Richmond.45
There was nothing settled, final, consolidated, or secure in Powhatan’s realm on the Virginia coastal plain. It was a fluid world, a world in motion, with small-scale alliances forming and dissolving, skirmishes breaking out unexpectedly, and bloody repression imposed at points of chronic discontent. But however unsettled the results, Powhatan’s ambitions were powerful, and they affected, at least indirectly, even the outer fringes of peoples across Chesapeake Bay and north along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. The main northern groups, the Piscataways and the Patuxents, pressed by the Powhatans in the south, were at the same time beginning to be even more directly affected by a second field of force radiating out in all directions from the Iroquois tribes in the distant northwest.
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 4