The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.2

  “No sooner [he said] does an European arrive, no matter what his condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect.”3 Settlers arriving from Europe ceased to be Europeans after a time and became different from them.

  Crèvecoeur described the American melting pot and predicted that the country would be influential. “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”4 (If the reader could read only one book about the settler character, it should be Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer.)

  The settlers came to the New World to escape desperately hard conditions. Many fled Europe for spiritual betterment. A good many even came to escape hanging. European people arrived in the New World beginning around 1609, when the Jamestown colony was founded. There were emigrants from Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Russia as well, but the colonists were predominately English.5

  There was a depression in England—and thousands of gin shops.6 “The hard liquor consumed in one year (1733) in London alone amounted to 11,200,000 gallons, or some 56 gallons per adult male.”7 Page Smith sketched this picture of conditions in eighteenth-century England:

  It has been estimated that London in the eighteenth century had 6,000 adult and 9,300 child beggars. In the entire country of some 10,000,000 persons, there were estimated to be 50,000 beggars, 20,000 vagrants, 10,000 idlers, 100,000 prostitutes, 10,000 rogues and vagabonds, 80,000 criminals, 1,041,000 persons on parish relief. Indeed, over half the population was below what we would call “the poverty line,” and many, of course, were profoundly below it—below it to the point of starvation.8

  This was the involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor about which Crèvecoeur spoke. “In such circumstances there was ample incentive to emigrate almost anywhere.”9 There was great opportunity in the colonies. “Anyone willing to work could be put to worthwhile labor, and might (and often did) in a few years establish himself as an independent farmer or artisan.”10 There was a growing need for labor there. Agents would pay for the passage of those willing to work off the cost of the transportation.11 In addition, land was cheap and often free.

  English law in the 1600s made almost 300 offenses punishable by hanging. It became an increasing practice of English judges to pardon those sentenced to hang on condition that the defendant would leave England. From 1650 to 1700 thousands received such pardons, and most immigrated to the American colonies and to the West Indies. From 1619 to 1640 all pardoned felons were sent to Virginia. From 1661 to 1700, more than 4,500 convicts were sent to the colonies. From 1745 to 1775, 8,846 convicts were sent to Maryland.12 Criminals were not the best of settlers, and, Page Smith noted, “in one contingent, twenty-six had been convicted for stealing, one for violent robbery, and five for murder.”13 To a considerable extent, the frontier got the worst of the worst. In view of that fact, it is no surprise that the settlers as well as the Indians committed atrocities.

  AFTER A time, the colonists began heading into the frontier in great numbers. The consequences, according to Bernard W. Sheehan, were that

  the worst representatives of the white men’s society went into the wilderness first, fought with the natives, learned to hate them, and gave the impression of utter incompatibility between the white man’s world and the Indian’s world.14

  William Franklin understandably concluded that “some of the worst People in every Colony reside on the Frontiers.”15 By 1800, 50,000 families had settled along the Ohio River, 100,000 in Tennessee, and 200,000 in Kentucky. T. Walter Wallbank and Alistair M. Taylor in Civilization—Past and Present said, “Here land was to be had for the asking.”16 Out west between 1841 and 1859, more than 300,000 people and at least 1.5 million oxen, cattle, horses, and sheep had moved along the Sante Fe Trail alone.17 Author Howard H. Peckham reiterated that the frontier attracted the most undesirable settlers, “the congenitally dissatisfied, the fugitives from justice, the army deserters, the debtors, the swindlers, all were churned out of seaboard society and thrown to the frontier.”18 An anonymous English author wrote in 1812 that at the beginning of the war “the lower order of the white people in the United States of this new world, are, if possible, more savage than the copper-coloured Indians.”19 On the frontier, the Niles’ Weekly Register noted, “white traders encouraged the ‘worst passions’ and ‘most abominable vices’ among the Indians.”20 Crèvecoeur observed that

  men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them…. There, remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society…. Thus are our first steps trodden, thus are our first trees felled, in general, by the most vicious of our people.21

  Perhaps the principal characteristic of the settlers was their love of land. The Indians loved warfare, and the settlers loved land—the land occupied by the Indians—thereby making conflict between the 2 inevitable. Page Smith more generally stated that the disparity of 2 cultures was the problem:

  Whether the aborigines of North America were “squalid savages” or nature’s noblemen; whether the English settlers were ruthless exploiters or pious Christians anxious to save heathen souls, it is hard to imagine how the two cultures could have coexisted on the same continent without the bitter conflicts that marked their historic encounter.22

  The conflict over land started almost at once. Not long after Jamestown was founded, the settlers simply began taking over Indian fields rather than clearing new fields themselves.23

  Once the colonies had been established, there was a flood of land-hungry Englishmen, depicted by Carl Waldman:

  They came to North America primarily as families and farmers, and they came to stake a claim and stay. The overflow from the British Isles was furious…. Boatload after boatload of hopeful settlers arrived in the busy harbors…. It was the English drive toward privately held land that pushed most Indians … further and further back from the Atlantic seaboard, across the Appalachian Mountains and, eventually, after American Independence, across the Mississippi Valley as well.24

  Denis William Brogan in The American Character described the allure of the land:

  Land was abundant in America, scarce in Europe; owning land was socially and financially the aim of all climbing Europeans in the seventeenth century—and it was a climbing century…. The poor who came to America—the majority of the settlers—had fewer illusions to shed than the gentry…. The move to America was important and final. They did not expect to go back; if they were religious or political refugees they did not want to.25

  Crèvecoeur asked, “Does he [the settler] want uncultivated land? Thousands of acres present themselves, which he may purchase cheap.”26 As early as 1616 free land was available in Virginia. Gary B. Nash pointed out how easy it was to get it:

  Again the company raised the inducements for going to the Chesapeake. This time 100 acres of land were offered outright to anyone in England who would journey to the colony. Instead of pledging limited servitude for the chance to become sole possessor of land, an Englishman trapped at the lower rungs of society at home could now become an independent landowner in no more time than it took to reach the Chesapeake.27

  In the Carolinas, settlers were offered 150 acres of free land.28

  By 1770 more than 400,000 Scotch-Irish and other immigrants had spread through Pennsylvania, the valleys of the Appalachians, and the Carolinas. “As good eastern land became scarce,” noted Alan Axelrod, “they moved into the forests further west. Armed only with an ax and a flintlock, they knew great hardship and almost constant strife with the Indians.”29


  Secretary of War Henry Knox reported to Congress in 1787 that the settlers and the Indians were ever prevented from being good neighbors because “the one side [Indians] anxiously defend their lands which the other side [settlers] … claim.”30 The same year a congressional committee reported that “an avaricious disposition in some of our people to acquire large tracts of land and often by unfair means, appears to be the principal source of difficulties with the Indians.”31

  Elliott West put it somewhat differently: “Whites did not set out, directly at least, to destroy the Indians’ life. They were simply following a script that had no Indians in it, except as exotic relics.”32

  President Jefferson’s government wished ultimately to distribute the vast Indian-occupied acres among the members of civilized society, and consequently intended to take most of the land away from the Indians.33

  The Jefferson position demonstrates one of the defects of a democracy. It was difficult for any president to resist the settlers’ demands that their need for land be satisfied by the government, or at least that the government stand aside while they satisfied that demand themselves. Sheehan found the expansion inevitable:

  By the time Jefferson became president, all the efforts made by the government to protect the tribes from intruders seemed doomed to failure. The frontier could not be controlled. Threats to use the courts or to send in troops, instructions to agents to clear the native lands, all came to nothing. Even granting the Indian the right to kill the settlers’ cattle or drive the animals out of the tribal territory did not stop the avalanche of intruders. Tribal leaders petitioned the government, appealed to state authorities and to the intruders themselves, and attempted to curb the belligerence of their own younger tribesmen. Nothing helped; the white man kept coming.34

  And just after the Civil War, the federal Peace Commission with some sarcasm concluded that

  members of Congress understand the Negro question and talk learnedly of finance, and other problems of political economy, but when the progress of settlement reaches the Indian’s home, the only question considered is “how best to get his lands.”35

  Settlers were aggressive in displacing Indians on the frontier; more bluntly, they often stole lands occupied by Indians. The New York Times spoke of it frequently. In 1867 an editorial stated that “it has justly been said in Congress by those who have investigated the matter, that the Western settlers are a constant source of irritation to the Indians, committing petty depredations upon them, driving them from their lands, and in a thousand little ways stirring up their ill-blood.”36 Two years later, the Times said, “It looks as though the Indian might receive fair play, now that the army officers have so strenuously taken his part. Though, to say the truth, it is not the soldiery, but the settlers, and the sutlers, that have been the Indians’ worst foe.”37

  ONCE THE Declaration of Independence was adopted, an element of anxiety invaded the settler character. The Declaration was revolution against the British Empire. It was also treason and every delegate who voted for it knew it. The English punishment for treason was very specific, as J. W. Erlich pointed out in Erlich’s Blackstone:

  That the offender be drawn to the gallows, and not be carried or walk; though usually … a sledge or hurdle is allowed, to preserve the offender from the extreme torment of being dragged on the ground or pavement.

  That he be hanged by the neck, and then cut down alive.

  That his entrails be taken out, and burned, while he is yet alive.

  That his head be cut off.

  That his body be divided into four parts.

  That his head and quarters be at the king’s disposal.38

  In addition, the settlers on the frontier lived with the anxiety of what the Indians might do to them. (The Indians were equally desperate, of course. They were aware early on that the settlers wanted the land they lived on. They realized that if the settlers got it, their way of life would be completely changed. “They lived in constant fear of dispossession,” according to Angie Debo.)39

  HATRED OF Indians was a pervading characteristic of the settlers, as demonstrated by this assessment from The West: An Illustrated History:

  Continually exposed to the dangers of Indian hostility, white frontiersmen came to hate the red men with an intensity which Americans elsewhere could not understand. To the settlers there seemed only two possible solutions. Either the army must conquer the savages, then put them under close guard on reservations, where they could never again make trouble; or the cause of civilization demanded that they be exterminated.40

  The Virginia legislature in 1711 appropriated 20,000 pounds “for exterpating all Indians without distinction of Friends or Enemys.”41 Killing your friends as well as your enemies shows a savagery not shared by many Indians, if any at all. Crèvecoeur observed that between settlers and Indians “there is a sort of physicial antipathy, which is equally powerful from one end of the continent to the other.”42

  Hatred, of course, led to calls for revenge. Just as Indians had sought revenge, Andrew Jackson wrote William Henry Harrison in 1811 stating, “The blood of our murdered countrymen must be revenged. The banditti ought to be swept from the face of the earth.”43

  HATRED AND revenge were not the only attitudes held by the settlers. They felt they had actually conferred a great favor on the Indians by invading the land they occupied. This view was stated by Chief Justice John Marshall in the Johnson’s and Graham’s Lessee vs. William Mcintosh opinion:

  On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendancy. The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves, that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity, in exchange for unlimited independence.44

  James Fenimore Cooper was the first major author to depict sympathetically the plight of the Indian in the onslaught of the settlers. The prevalent view at the time was to consider Indians savages without redeeming qualities, but Cooper wrote about them as noble savages. William T. Hagan understood why this was:

  As usual, moral indignation over the plight of the red man varied with the distance from him. Those whites avid for Indian land or fearful for their scalps were ever inclined to classify him as subhuman and devoid of rights. Those far removed from the frontier detected great potential in the Indian.45

  Angie Debo pointed out much the same thing: “Too many white well-wishers had uncritically assumed that everything Indian was wrong.”46 She added that they were determined to dissolve plural marriages and educate Indian children to change them into white people. Wrong was done to the Indians by these well-meaning people.47 Bernard W. Sheehan wrote an entire book in support of this proposition. His conclusion was this:

  The Jeffersonian brand of philanthropy could be justly accused of treating the native more like a precious abstraction than a living human being. For the Indian, it wanted only the best, but that meant ultimately the elimination of the tribal order, for which the Jeffersonian age must bear its share of responsibility. Its crime was a willful failure of the intellect but not of the will.48

  SETTLERS, LIKE Indians, often acted without authority. The settlers had weak government and sometimes no government on the frontier. A law might be passed in the colonial, state, or federal capitol, but often there was no one to enforce it. When a sufficient part of the country did not want to abide by a law, it was easy for the democratic leaders to ignore any violations of it. Then, too, many of the settlers on the frontier were themselves by nature inclined to be lawless.

  Wilcomb E. Washburn concluded that “although discipline and control were perhaps more commonly accepted facets of European organization, white
leaders were often unable to control the actions of their ordinary citizens.”49

  Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., also wrote about how difficult it was to control events on the wild frontier:

  Jefferson, John Marshall, and many other leaders tried to inject morality, justice, and strict legal procedures in the headlong dispossession of the Indians. Almost without exception, however, their decrees, pronouncements, and pleadings were nullified by events on the frontier and by champions of the anti-Indian elements.50

  There are many specific instances of settlers acting without authority. When the Powhatan Nemattanow (or Nemattanew) came out of the woods wearing Trader Morgan’s hat, Morgan’s servants killed him without trial. John Smith reported that Nemattanow “so moved their patience, they shot him.”51 But creating impatience was not a capital crime. It seems very probable that Morgan’s people had no authority to kill Nemattanow. The Powhatan Wars resulted.

  In 1646, Jamestown concluded a peace treaty with Opechancanough’s successor, Necotowance. Boundaries were set. The treaty provided that neither the Indians nor the settlers were permitted to enter the other’s land without permission of the governor.52 According to Alan Axelrod, “The peace was an uneasy one. As would be the case well into the early 1800s, frontier settlers obstinately refused to recognize any limit to settlement. The government could not regulate westward expansion, though [Governor] Berkeley and Parliament tried.”53

  The Virginia Assembly in 1656 authorized an expedition to remove foreign Indians (Indians not subject to English authority), but “explicitly ordered restraint in the removal.” The commander, Edward Hill, called 5 chiefs out to parley with him, and when they came, they were killed by some soldiers.54