The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  Ten years later, General Sherman observed,

  I have seen some Indians willing and able to take farms, build houses, and join in the white man’s ways; and I honestly believe the Army could induce hundreds, if not thousands, of others to do the same, but if left wandering about, hoping to restore the old order of things, an Indian will be a curiosity here in twenty years.185

  Senator Henry L. Dawes, however, predicted after Wounded Knee in 1890 that “without doubt these Indians are somehow to be absorbed into and become part of the 50,000,000 of our people. There does not seem to be any other way to deal with them.”186

  Some tribes, like the Cherokee, did assimilate to a considerable extent. Helen Hunt Jackson believed that “there is no instance in all history of a race of people passing in so short a space of time from the barbarous stage to the agricultural and civilized [as the Cherokee].”187 Assimilation had widely begun as early as the start of the nineteenth century. By then, Fergus M. Bordewich observed, almost all tribes east of the Mississippi were abandoning wigwams for cabins, buckskin for cotton clothes, and hunting for agriculture.188 The commissioner of Indian affairs reported in 1860 that

  the Winnebagos continue steadily on the march of improvement…. The progress of the Winnebagos in agriculture growths by individuals is particularly marked with success. There have been raised by individuals as high as sixty acres of wheat on a single farm…. Wigwams are becoming as scarce as houses were two years ago.189

  The next year, the commissioner

  was much surprised to find so many of the Sioux Indians wearing the garb of civilization, many of them living in frame or brick houses, some of them with stables or out-houses, and their fields indicating considerable knowledge of agriculture.190

  Around 1875, Helen Hunt Jackson noted that the Winnebagos were nearly civilized, with all engaged in civil pursuits and the men working with their own hands.191

  By the twentieth century, the process had gone much further, as Russell Thornton explained in American Indian Holocaust and Survival:

  A point will be reached—perhaps not too far in the future—when it will no longer make sense to define American Indians in genetic terms, only as tribal members or as people of Indian ancestry or ethnicity.192

  These conclusions follow in part at least from Indian intermarriage.

  Yet the National Indian Youth Council reported in 1964, according to James Wilson, that “we do not want to be pushed into the mainstream of American life.”193

  Indians have things to gain and something to lose by assimilation. What they do is of course their decision. Some tribes have demonstrated that assimilation does not necessarily mean destruction of Indian culture.

  INDIANS HAD completely different ideas about property than the settlers, and this created many difficulties. It is clear that the Indians maintained that personal property such as weapons and clothing could be owned by one individual Indian. Although their slaveholding was widespread,194 there is no indication that slaves were held in common by the entire tribe.

  Their attitude concerning land was communal. Alan Axelrod stated the most commonly expressed Indian view:

  No one “owned” a particular parcel of land. A given tribe might claim the right to hunt or live on it and might defend that right by force of arms; however, most tribes were willing to make agreements allowing other tribes or individuals to hunt on “their” land. Such an agreement did not convey ownership of the land to the other party.195

  Relying on the view that the Indians only possessed or occupied the land, Indians and Indian advocates charged in the past—and some of them charge today—that even though they signed treaties ceding the land to the federal government, the settlers “stole” the land from them. An 1864 speech of Sioux chief Tall Soldier is typical:

  Let the wretches die, who have stolen our lands, and we will be free to roam over the soil that was our fathers’. We will come home bravely from battle. Our songs shall rise among the hills, and every tipi shall be hung with the scalp-locks of our foes…. The inferior race, who have encroached on our rights and territories, justly deserve hatred and destruction…. The Indian cries for vengeance.196

  The treaties themselves do not bear out the Tall Soldier claim. A standard cessation clause is found in the first removal treaty, the 1830 treaty with the Choctaw. It reads in part, “The Choctaw nation of Indians consent and hereby cede to the United States, the entire country they own and possess east of the Mississippi River.”197 Both the ownership rights and the possessory or occupancy rights of the Indians are transferred by this language. They retained nothing for themselves.198

  SEVERAL TRIBES were imperialistic. During the 1600s, the Iroquois “expanded their territories in every direction.” In the mid-1600s, they decimated the Hurons, Tobaccos, Neutrals, and Eries. They attacked the Susquehannocks, Algonquins, Ottawas, Illinois, Miamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, Mahicans, and Wappingers. Their extended territory went from the Hudson River to the Illinois River and from the Ottawa River to the Tennessee River.199 In the late 1600s, Crees and Chippewas drove the Sioux westward, taking their land. The Sioux later developed faith in their own superiority, according to Bordewich, and “seized land with virtual impunity from the Ioways, Omahas, Arikaras, and Mandans.”200 By 1776, the Sioux had reached the Black Hills on the western edge of the Dakotas, where, in the early nineteenth century, they expelled the Kiowas and the Cheyennes.201

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  ALTHOUGH WOMEN often had unique roles in the tribes, more often than not their position was weak. The Shawnee war chief Tecumseh made a mistress leave him for the sole reason that she had improperly boned a turkey, causing him disgrace.202 Comanche chief Big Wolf had 4 wives. He tied a deerskin cord to the corner of the mattress of each so that with a small pull the wife he wished would come to him.203 Roy Harvey Pearce observed that one tribe even had “the wondrous custom of offering maidens of the village to distinguished visitors.”204 Sioux chief Black Buffalo offered Lewis and Clark young women as bed partners. Clark later wrote that “a curious custom with the Sioux is to give handsome squars [sic] to those whome they wish to Show some acknowledgements to.”205 The Arikara offered women to all the men in the Lewis and Clark party; many accepted, and left with venereal disease.206 Clark wrote that the Chinooks “will even prostitute their wives and daughters for a fishinghook or a stran [sic] of beads.”207

  Jefferson charged that Indian women “are submitted to unjust drudgery.”208 Catlin went further. He said that Indian wives not only “stand rather in the light of menials and slaves,” but “are kept at hard labour during most of the year.”209 He noted, “I have never seen an Indian woman eating with her husband. Men form the first group at the banquet, and women and children and dogs all come together at the next.”210

  In many other tribes, however, women occupied much stronger positions. In Iroquois political life, women held important posts. The mother and all her children constituted a “fireside,” which was the foundation of society. All authority came from the groups and the women who headed them. The group named the sachems or peace chiefs who made up the ruling council of the Iroquois and the Five Nations as well.211 Half of the 6 priests were women.212 Shawnee women were organized like the men. Their chiefs directed matters such as farming, certain ceremonies, and women’s affairs. Although they didn’t go into battle, female chiefs helped with logistics. They held something like a veto power over the deliberations of the men.213 The Navajo women were very influential in family life.214

  Indian women sometimes did take part in the fighting. In a battle in Powder River country in 1864 against the Arapaho, one of General Connor’s officers observed, “I was in the village in the midst of a hand-to-hand fight with warriors and their squaws, for many of the female portion of this band did as brave fighting as their savage lords.”215 When the army was fighting the Modocs in the lava beds in 1872, the soldiers moved close to the Modoc stronghold and were met with fire from both male and female warriors.216 Accord
ing to Cyrus Townsend Brady, Sioux leader American Horse was trapped by soldiers in 1876 with four warriors and several women and children in a cave. “Even the women had used guns, and had displayed all the bravery and courage of the Sioux.”217 Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce reported after the 5-day Battle of Bear Paw Mountain in 1877 that on the first day his tribe had lost “eighteen men and three women.”218

  As we have seen, Indian women could be as cruel as Indian men. A U.S. Army captain described how after a battle Cheyenne squaws helped “scalp and torture the wounded, shooting arrows into their bodies and cutting off fingers and toes, even when they were alive.”219

  MANY AUTHORS have commented on how much the Indians loved their children. “He is affectionate to his children, careful of them, and indulgent in the extreme,” wrote Roy Harvey Pearce. “His sensibility is keen, even the warriors weeping most bitterly on the loss of their children.”220 “The Indians were usually affectionate toward their children,” observed Harold E. Driver, “rarely punishing them, and an Indian mother would treat an adopted white child as her own.”221 Indian Commissioner George W. Manypenny also praised them in this regard: “His love for his offspring is intense.”222

  Infanticide was practiced, however, in many tribes. If the mother died at childbirth and no wet nurse could be found, the infant usually was buried with its mother. If the father died, the mother might kill the baby to free herself for other children. Where illegitimacy was strongly disapproved, the mother might put such a baby to death. Deformed infants were often killed. Infants would sometimes be killed in times of famine.

  There were some instances where mothers killed their children because of the exigencies of warfare. Sometimes they would be killed so that the mother could fight without encumbrance. Some Seminole women and children were captured in 1836. One of the women gave her 3 children a drink from a coffeepot. She escaped, but her children remained in captivity. The children were then found dead from poison administered by their mother.223 The same year, the Seminoles were defeated in battle; before they retreated, “they strangled their children by stuffing their mouths and nostrils with mud moss.”224 Some of the Creek women trying to escape from their group, which was being removed to Oklahoma in 1836, killed their young children, perhaps because they might make noise betraying their parents when secrecy and silence were vital.225

  The elderly sometimes fared no better. Captain William Clark, when he was among the Mandans, heard what happened when an elderly Indian asked for something to ease the pain in his back. His young grandson said it was not worthwhile, “that it was time for the old man to die.”226 Later, George Catlin told about being directed by the Indian agent, Major Sanford, to a member of the Puncah tribe, “one of the most miserable and helpless looking objects that I had ever seen in my life, a very aged and emaciated man.” He had once been a chief and was now too old to travel with the tribe, which was going to move to where there was more food. He told Catlin he was “to be exposed,” that is, left to die when the others departed. He sat by a small fire with a few sticks of wood within reach, a buffalo’s skin over his head, a few half-picked bones, a dish of water, and nothing else—nothing even to defend himself with against the wolves.

  Before they left, his children gathered around him and he said,

  My children, our nation is poor, and it is necessary that you should all go to the country where you can get meat,—my eyes are dimmed and my strength is no more; my days are nearly numbered, and I am a burthen to my children—I cannot go, and I wish to die. Keep your hearts stout, and think not of me; I am no longer good for anything.227

  Catlin went to the old chief after this farewell, they talked, they shook hands, the chief smiled, they shook hands again, then Catlin left to catch his steamboat on the Missouri. He returned a few months later and found everything as it had been except that the chief’s skull and some of his bones had been picked clean by the wolves. Catlin concluded that “this cruel custom of exposing their aged people, belongs, I think, to all the tribes who roam about the prairies.”228

  FREQUENT ADOPTION existed among the tribes before and after the settlers came.229 Some tribes gave a widow or a mother who had lost a child the option of adopting a captive to replace the lost relative. The person might be inducted into the tribe as an equal or as a semislave. Many settler captives eventually found Indian life so attractive that they resisted being rescued. Frederick Drimmer outlined what often happened:

  It is interesting to observe that a captive was usually adopted in the place of someone who had died or been killed in war. He was given not only the name, but also the privileges and responsibilities of the person whose place he took—was expected to be a husband to the dead man’s wife and a father to his children. Sometimes a party of warriors would set out with the express aim of taking a white captive to replace a deceased member of their family or clan.230

  There was even a “significant number of whites who resisted or declined ‘rescue.’” Benjamin Franklin put the problem this way in 1753:

  When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading [sic] him ever to return. When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short Time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.231

  Eunice Williams was captured by the Iroquois in the 1704 Deerfield raid. Her father found her in Montreal in 1714 and tried to persuade her to leave her Indian husband and return. He said, “She is yet obstinately resolved to live and dye [sic] here, and will not so much as give me one pleasant look.”232 Frances Slocum was captured in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania in 1778. She married a Delaware Indian, who left her, and later married a Miami chief. After searching for many years, her brothers found her in 1837 and urged her to return, at least for a visit, but she said, “I can not. I can not. I am an old tree. I can not move about. I was a sapling when they took me away. It is all gone past. I am afraid I should die and never come back. I am happy here.”233

  Another captive who refused to return to settler civilization was Cynthia Ann Parker, mother of Comanche chief Quanah Parker. She was captured in Texas in 1836 by Caddos Indians when only 9 years old. The Caddos sold her to the Comanches, and she became the wife of a Comanche chief, by whom she had 3 children. She preferred Indian life to settler life. She was recaptured, but died 4 years later.234 Angie Debo observed that “no other tragedy of frontier life brought such anguish [as Cynthia’s kidnapping], no other phase of Indian warfare aroused such hatred as this capture of children.”235

  Children below the age of 12 taken captive by Indians were easily assimilated or Indianized, but older children often retained the desire to return to their families.236 Those who had been captive for many years eventually took on Indian dress, talk, thought, and values. Frequently they took on an Indian identity. Such captives often faced prejudice if they returned to white society. Many never found themselves completely accepted or assimilated there.237

  Why did some captive settlers not want to return? Several reasons suggest themselves. Gary L. Ebersole observed that

  captivity was not a negative experience for everyone. For some individuals, captivity opened up hitherto unimagined opportunities and lifestyle choices. Some individuals enjoyed a newfound freedom, unknown in the white world. This was obviously the case with many black slaves, but others, too—indentured servants, battered wives, overworked young boys, and young women—also realized an independence or a new social identity among the Indians that literally opened new worlds to them.238

  Indian child-rearing practices may also have been a factor.
The maxim “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was followed by most settler parents. In many families, children were viewed primarily as a source of labor and were exploited as such. One 12-year-old who had been forced by his father to watch sheep alone for long periods of time joined an Indian band after Indians had glowingly described to him a life of hunting, fishing, and riding and even promised him a pony if he would come with them. He did.239

  Another reason white captive males might not want to return was that, as Alexander Kellet put it in 1778, “Indian maidens positively desire white men because they are better lovers and know what women want.”240 From what he had seen, Indian men treated their wives coldly; therefore, Indian women “are consequently very prone to European attachments, where they are agreeably surprised by a fondling and dalliance which is quite novel to them, and not the less captivating.”241

  J. Norman Heard, in his book White into Red, concluded, “The number of captives living out their lives with Indians was probably considerably smaller than the number restored to their white families.”242

  ——

  THE INDIAN certainly had a sense of humor. William Brandon quoted a writer in the 1800s who said about one tribe, “Wit, merriment and practical jokes enliven all their gatherings.”243 The Indian humor has come down to us as a black humor sometimes, perhaps because of the circumstances out of which it arose.

  One day in 1808, Tecumseh called William Henry Harrison* a liar. Harrison drew his sword, the soldiers aimed their guns at the Indians, and the Indians raised their tomahawks at the soldiers. Harrison declared the meeting ended, and no one was hurt. The next morning, Tecumseh apologized. Harrison then visited the Indian camp, where the two sat on a log. Tecumseh kept scooting over toward Harrison; Harrison kept moving away, but finally reached the end of the log and objected to Tecumseh. Tecumseh laughed, saying that was what the white man was doing to the Indians.245