The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  The Indians’ hatred was not directed only toward the settlers. That hatred was aimed at other tribes as well, presumably all those with whom the Indians made war. New York governor George Clinton, who was vice president from 1805 to 1812, under Jefferson and Madison, put it as graphically as anybody in an 1814 paper:

  With savages in general, this ferocious propensity was impelled by a blind fury, and was but little regulated by the dictates of skill and judgment. The Indian tribes … engaged in interminable conflict that stunted their cultural progress and kept their numbers small. They utterly destroyed their enemies by eating their bodies, not because they had an appetite for such fare but in order to excite themselves to greater fury. Those unfortunate enough to be captured would be killed with “the most severe and protracted suffering.”124

  James Mooney wrote from personal experience: “Only those who have known the deadly hatred that once animated Ute, Cheyenne, and Pawnee, one toward the other, … could appreciate the effect of the Ghost Dance religion on those tribes.”125 As late as 1982 hatred still existed between the Hopi and the Navajo.126

  REVENGE WAS often inextricably a part of hatred. “For the Indians,” wrote Utley, “this revenge was not merely casual retribution for specific injustices. It represented a strong and moral principle in Indian life. To fail to repay an injustice was not charity or mercy, but itself injustice.”127 Frederick Drimmer also emphasized that “nothing is more sacred to a savage than revenge.”128 He went on:

  The Indian had his grievances against the whites. To him, one American or Englishman was like another, and all were held responsible for the misdeed of one. Given the provocation and the opportunity, he often exacted the last full measure of revenge.”129

  Bernard W. Sheehan went so far as to say that some observers thought the Indians fought mainly for revenge:

  Revenge had the sound of an indiscriminate savage reaction; it made war arise from causes intrinsic to the Indian character. Jonathan Carver wrote that “the passion of revenge, which is the distinguishing characteristic of these people, is the most general motive [for war]. Injustices are felt by them with exquisite sensibility, and vengeance pursued with unremitted ardor.” John Heckewelder, a usually sympathetic observer of Indian life, admitted that “the worst that can be said of them is that the passion of revenge is so strong in their minds that it carried them beyond all bounds.”130

  THERE HAVE been frequent observations that the Indian was childlike. The Indian allies of the British in the Revolution frequently killed cattle just to get their bells.131 Horace Greeley later found them to be “little more than children.”132 According to James Wilson, “Since the time of Columbus, Europeans had seen Native Americans as children—pastoral innocents or feckless, thoughtlessly cruel delinquents.”133

  Thomas L. McKenney was the chief administrator of Indian policy under 3 presidents. After he left office, he wrote a 3-volume history of Indians in North America, which noted, among many things, their childlike quality:

  Our Indians stand pretty much in the relation to the Government as do our children to us…. Indians are children and require to be nursed, and counseled, and directed as such…. Indians, I have found out, are only children, and can be properly managed, only, by being treated as such.134

  Professor Logan Esarey noted something further:

  Their senses were keen but their reason rudimentary. They believed in sorcery and witchcraft. Spirits, friendly and unfriendly, animated everything around them…. Their reverent, childlike minds were lost in the confusion.135

  This childlike behavior of the Indians was demonstrated in their attitude toward gifts. Columbus noted that they were “delighted” with small gifts. Often they could not resist the attractive trinkets offered by the speculators for vast areas of land. Sheehan observed that

  the artifacts of European civilization, although obviously increasing the efficiency of the Indian, set him adrift from his old manner of life, made him dependent on the white man, and gave him an insecure base on which to erect a new society.136

  Fanny Kelly remembered this about the Sioux:

  They were much like children … easily offended, but very difficult to please…. I was constantly annoyed, worried, and terrified by their strange conduct—their transition from laughing and fun to anger, and even rage. I knew not how to get along with them. One moment, they would seem friendly and kind; the next, if any act of mine displeased them, their faces were instantly changed, and they displayed their hatred or anger in unmeasured words or conduct—children one hour, the next, fiends.137

  In getting ready for their great expedition in 1803, Lewis and Clark recognized the need for vast quantities of beads, scissors, thimbles, thread, silk, paint, 288 knives, rifles, balls, powder, combs, arm bands, ear trinkets, brass buttons, tomahawks, axes, moccasin awls, mirrors, tobacco, and whiskey to give to the Indians.138

  The Sioux continued to exhibit these qualities as late as 1916. Cattle prices were inflated then. The Sioux sold almost all their cattle and bought white status symbols, especially automobiles. When they had no more cash, they sold their horses until they were all gone.139

  Perhaps this childlike characteristic was put into perspective by ecologist John Stewart Collis, who called attention to a unique fact: when Columbus came to America, “the whole of the North American continent was six thousand years behind European civilization.”140

  HUNTING WAS the favorite vocation of the Indians, next to war. The buffalo was the most important animal hunted on the Great Plains. Stephen E. Ambrose reported in Undaunted Courage that Meriwether Lewis and his hunting party killed 20 buffalo in a 2-day period in December 1804, but ate only the tongues.141 In the 1870s, the buffalo were almost exterminated for commercial purposes and finally for sport when they were shot from passenger trains. Indians were properly critical of the senseless killing. But it would appear senseless killing was not the province of the settlers alone. Ralph K. Andrist found that

  the Indians did their part [in decreasing the number of buffalo]; they were not the great conservationists they are made out to have been, and did a great deal of wasteful killing. Many early travelers tell of Indians killing buffalo for nothing but the tongue, and the maneuver of stampeding a buffalo herd over a cliff, when one was handy, killing far more animals than could possibly be used, was standard practice. A band of western Cree in Canada so thoroughly wiped out the buffalo in their area by driving them over cliffs that they were forced to move to new hunting grounds.142

  A few days before Catlin went with the Sioux in 1832, an immense buffalo herd appeared. Five or six hundred Sioux horsemen went to the buffalo and came back in about 6 hours with 1,400 buffalo tongues, which were sold for a few gallons of whiskey. George Catlin sadly remarked on “this profligate waste of the lives of these noble and useful animals, when, from all that I could learn, not a skin or pound of the meat (except the tongues), was brought in.”143 Wilcomb E. Washburn determined that “buffalo might be driven into a buffalo pound, driven off cliffs, encircled with fire, or surrounded by mounted hunters using bows and arrows.”144 The great number of animal remains at excavated hunting sites raises the possibility that hunters may have lowered certain animal populations below the levels required for sustenance.145 Beaver and otter were nearly exterminated in Iroquois country around 1640.146 Great quantities of animals were killed just for the hides, leaving the meat to rot.147

  Captive James Smith reported that the country around his tribe had been “hunted poor, so that few of even the best of hunters were able to kill game often.”148 Fanny Kelly saw the same wasteful activity:

  Sometimes these animals [buffalo] number tens of thousands, in droves. The Indians often, for the mere sport, make an onslaught, killing great numbers of them, and having a plentiful feast of “tatonka,” as they call buffalo meat. They use no economy in food. It is always a feast or a famine; and they seem equally able to gorge or fast. Each man selects the part of the animal he has killed that best s
uits his own taste, and leaves the rest to decay or be eaten by wolves, thus wasting their own game, and often suffering privation in consequence.149

  Even in thinly settled areas, tribes often carelessly exhausted the resources in the area and were obliged to move on.150

  THERE ARE a number of other Indian characteristics relating to their collective behavior. Almost every tribe broke into 2 major factions, one favoring accommodation with the settlers and adoption of white ways, and the other holding firm to the old ways and resisting the blandishments of the whites.151

  It is clear that most tribal governments were weak. Most tribes had several chiefs. There were war chiefs and peace chiefs.152 The Sioux, for example, had 12 chiefs in 1878 and an unwieldy 63 chiefs in 1880.153 When the Iroquois Confederacy was organized, it had a council of 49 chiefs.154 This meant that Indians were handicapped in war because coordinated military action was usually impossible.155 “The Indians overall,” wrote Carl Waldman, “failed to present a unified and organized front because of long-standing feuds.”156

  Tribal decisions were characteristically reached by highly democratic means—often through innumerable meetings or councils, which frequently came to no unanimous conclusion at all. Moreover, individuals, if they disagreed with a so-called tribal decision, were usually not bound by it. In short, tribes could rarely enforce treaties on their own people. Nash even said that “no party in disagreement with a majority decision was compelled to act against its wishes.”157

  Grant’s commissioner of Indian affairs was a Seneca Indian chief, Ely S. Parker.* His policies were fair and enlightened. In 1869 he made this assessment:

  The Indian tribes of the United States are not sovereign nations, capable of making treaties, as none of them have an organized government of such inherent strength as would secure a faithful obedience of its people in the observance of compacts of this character.159

  Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., concluded that Plains Indian tribes in general

  had little formal government. Most bands were autonomous under their own leaders or chiefs…. But they gave advice rather than orders; councils of leading men made decisions based on unanimous agreement.160

  Some tribes had no government at all. This was true of the Kiowa Apaches, the Lipans, the Jicarillas, the Mescaleros, the Western Apaches, and the Chiricahuas. With little or no government, it hardly need be said that “custom and tradition rather than law and coercion regulated social life.”161

  Indians frequently acted without authority—as did the settlers—which was a natural consequence of little or no government. Carl Wald-man concluded that

  Indian proponents of peace, who believed that the long-term hope for their people lay in accommodation with whites, had their efforts undone by a constituency they could not control … often by young, volatile individualistic warriors in quest of personal honor.162

  Washburn was not the only one who found that “Indian leaders could not easily control the warlike actions of youthful tribal members.”163 Stephen E. Ambrose explained that

  hostilities could break out at any time, for no apparent cause other than the restlessness of the young warriors, spurred by their desire for honor and glory, which could only be won on raids, which always brought on revenge raids, in a regular cycle.164

  When the Virginians were fighting the Susquehannock* in 1676, Gary B. Nash reported that “the Susquehannock sachems could not control their own warriors, who were launching attacks even as their chiefs negotiated with the governor.”166 There was no peace until the Indians were crushed.167

  Captive Charles Johnston observed that “young men of all the savage tribes frequently go out on raids without consulting their chief or nation.”168

  In 1864, the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle tried to call off his warriors who had been in a fight with troops in which Lean Bear and another chief were killed. Angie Debo described how the troops retreated to Fort Larned, “chased by some vengeful Indians that Black Kettle could not restrain. Then these warriors raided the trail between Fort Larned and Fort Riley on the Kansas.”169 Black Kettle and other Cheyenne chiefs “freely admitted they could not always restrain their young braves.”170

  MANY HISTORIANS have commented that Indians lacked unity, which made it more difficult for them to defeat the settlers. Debo put it directly: “Unrelated tribes never united in a general war.”171 Alan Axelrod concurred when he said, “The exultation of individual virtue meant that so-called tribes did not often act with unity, and one tribe rarely formed a strategically effective alliance with another.”172 There is no question, Carl Waldman concluded, “that the Indians were defeated by their own lack of unity.”173 Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn argued in Indian Wars that perhaps

  the tribes could have slowed the process, or compelled a more just conclusion, had they been able to unite against the common threat. But they failed to see the white advance as truly apocalyptic until too late, and they never overcame the cultural forces that made them see other tribes as greater enemies than the white people.174

  Ironically, many Indians wanted Europeans to settle their lands. This matter is gone into in some detail by Alvin M. Josephy. Sometimes they were “encouraging white settlement in order to gain European support and auxiliaries.”175 Once in a while Indians begged or even demanded that forts be built in their territory in order to intimidate their enemies.176

  ANOTHER IMPORTANT characteristic of the Indians from the time the war began was the refusal of many Indians to be assimilated into American life. To be assimilated in this context means to be absorbed or incorporated. But to the Indian it had bad connotations. This is because many Indians feared and still fear that assimilation would completely destroy the Indian culture and way of life.

  The United States, speaking through its presidents, its Supreme Court, and its policy, has consistently urged assimilation. President Jefferson spoke to a group of Delawares, Mohicans, and Munries in 1808. He told them, “You will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great land.”177

  The Supreme Court said in 1823 in the case of Johnson and Graham’s Lessee vs. William Mcintosh that when a people is conquered,

  most usually, they are incorporated with the victorious nation, and become subjects or citizens of the government with which they are connected. The new and old members of the society mingle with each other; the distinction between them is gradually lost, and they make one people. Where this incorporation is practicable, humanity demands, and a wise policy requires, that the rights of the conquered to property should remain unimpaired; that the new subjects should be governed as equitably as the old…. But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war.178

  Not all Indians, of course, resisted assimilation. As early as 1847 the Sioux chief Red Cloud sensed the futility of the struggle. He advised the tribes to note the settlers’ example and follow it. But he put it rather sarcastically:

  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 storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.179

  Another influential Indian, Ely S. Parker, favored assimilation. Parker thought the Indians had more to lose by resisting assimilation, particularly the western tribes. “Unless they fall in with the current of destiny as it surges around them, they must succumb and be annihilated by its overwhelming force.”180

  The prevailing Indian view on assimilation, however, was held by Big Eagle, a Sioux leader, and it was uncompromising:

  The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men—go to farming, work hard and do as they did—and the Indians did not know how to do that, and did not want to anyway…. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same way with many Indians.181

  Jefferson urge
d Indians to become farmers. In 1863 and again toward the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln spoke at length to a group of Indian chiefs in Washington. He deferentially suggested that assimilation was best for them:

  You have asked for my advice. I really am not capable of advising you whether, in the providence of the Great Spirit, who is the great Father of us all, it is best for you to maintain the habits and customs of your race, or adopt a new mode of life. I can only say that I can see no way in which your race is to become as numerous and prosperous as the white race except by living as they do, by the cultivation of the earth.182

  (That the Indians have not taken Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s advice is shown by the 1990 census, which indicated that only 7,000 out of 1,960,000 Indians and Aleutians are farmers.)

  At the Medicine Lodge Creek peace conference in 1865, a United States senator from Missouri and peace commissioner named Henderson addressed 5,000 Indians in a blunt if not threatening manner concerning assimilation. He reminded them that the buffalo would not last forever. “When that day comes, the Indian must change the road his father trod, or he must suffer, and probably die. We tell you that to change will make you better. We wish you to live, and we will now offer you the way.”183

  The first Peace Commission report of 1868 elaborated on assimilation:

  The white and Indian must mingle together and jointly occupy the country or one of them must abandon it. If they could have lived together, the Indian by this contact would soon have become civilized and war would have been impossible.184