The Wild Frontier

by William M. Osborn

  Twenty years later, in 1676, the situation was about the same. Settlers in Virginia would go to Indian lands, turn loose their cattle and hogs, then if any were lost, would “beate and abuse them (notwithstanding the Governor’s endeavour to the contrary).”55

  The Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France (called the French and Indian War in America) resulted in France losing its interests in North America. The British then wished to separate the colonists and the Indians. The Proclamation of 1763 provided in part that the Indians

  should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds.56

  Note that the proclamation referred to these lands as “our Dominions and Territories.” They were not considered lands owned by the Indians.

  In order to carry out this purpose, it was provided that no further surveys or land grants were to be made west of the Appalachian watershed. All such land was specifically reserved for Indian nations, and all settlers already west of the Appalachians were to withdraw back east.57

  As British subjects, the settlers were of course obliged to obey the proclamation. It was not obeyed. In fact it was “immediately violated.”58 Gary B. Nash candidly noted that

  the Proclamation Line of 1763 existed only on paper, and neither colonists nor Indians took it seriously…. Few colonists on the frontier held back their land hunger when they saw that the Indians were bereft of a European ally [France] and an alternate supply of trade goods. Nor could anybody in England discover a means of compelling the Americans in the West to obey Crown commands at a time when even along the Atlantic seaboard the King’s authority was being challenged.59

  The British government was unable to hold the Proclamation Line. When colonial governors were instructed to enforce the policy, Pennsylvania defiantly responded by declaring a scalp bounty, attracting a horde of bounty hunters who raided the Indian borderlands and pushed back Indian settlement.60

  AFTER THE Revolutionary War ended, the 13 new states needed an Indian policy. General Washington wrote to James Duane in 1783, a letter that became the basis of the Indian policy of the Continental Congress. Washington said that the government should “establish a boundary line between them [the Indians] and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People from Hunting or Settling, and within which they shall not come [Washington’s emphasis].”61

  Washington was prescient. The Congress under the Articles of Confederation could not restrain the frontier. Settlers disregarded boundaries, advanced, and seized lands occupied by Indians.62 Watauga settlers seized Cherokee land. The Continental Congress issued a proclamation warning the invaders, but was too weak to enforce it. Squatters made what Angie Debo called “tomahawk claims” along the Ohio River, defying Congress and the Indians.63

  In 1783 Congress warned against purchasing or squatting on land occupied by Indians. In 1785 it ordered frontiersmen to stay south of the Ohio River. They disobeyed. Congress sent troops to evict the squatters and burn their cabins. The fighting between the squatters and the Indians simply increased.64

  The Continental Congress in 1785 authorized a 700-man militia under Josiah Harmar and charged it, as Alan Axelrod said, “with the hopeless task of keeping white squatters off public lands.”65 In 1790, after Washington had taken office, the Congress of the United States created a regular federal army of 1,216, augmented by 1,500 militia. This army was to police federal lands and keep order among settlers and Indians as well.66 Washington ordered that a line be drawn between the United States and the Cherokee. He said, however,

  The Indians urge this; The Law requires it; and it ought to be done; but I believe scarcely anything short of a Chinese Wall, or a line of Troops will restrain Land Jobbers, and the Incroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian Territory.67

  The Cherokee sued Georgia for passing oppressive legislation. The Supreme Court of the United States, speaking through Chief Justice Marshall, held in 1832 in Worcester vs. Georgia that “the Cherokee nation … is a distinct community … in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.” Jackson, however, “ignored the court ruling and advised the Georgia officials to continue their persecutions of the Cherokees.”68 This is the only known instance of a high federal government official refusing to obey the law in an Indian area. It was politically popular, however—an important factor in a democracy.

  A Joint Special Committee of Congress (the Doolittle Committee) reported in 1867 that

  even after territorial governments are established over them in form by Congress, the population [of settlers] is so sparse and the administration of the civil law so feeble that the people are practically without any law but their own will. In their eager search for gold or fertile tracts of land, the boundaries of the Indian reservations are wholly disregarded; conflicts ensue; exterminating wars follow, in which the Indian is, of course, at the last, overwhelmed if not destroyed.69

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  RELIGION HAD a great effect on most of the settlers’ lives, even though many were not particularly religious. In fact, said Crèvecoeur, “religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other, which is at present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans.”70 The settlers who came to America for spiritual betterment came in large part because the Protestant king James I of England refused to recognize the Puritans, who opposed him in Parliament. He said that if they did not recognize the authority of his bishops, “I will harry them out of the land.” Many of them left. Page Smith has assessed the influence Puritans had on their new country:

  If he [King James] did not thereby lay the foundations for English America (Virginia, after all, was founded without any direct reference to James’s hostility to the Puritans), he for a certainty provided the colonies with a company of settlers who, by transplanting that Puritanism that so enraged the king to the New World, determined the character, temper, consciousness—call it what you will—of that New World more conclusively than any other body of people who came to the English colonies.71

  Converting the heathen Indian to Christianity was important to the settlers.72 The missionary effort did not succeed to any great extent. Washburn discussed that failure in detail and pointed out that “very rarely was the pious ideal of conversion realized.”73 One of the problems was European hypocrisy, preaching Christian love but killing Indians. Another was that when he was converted, “the Indian often felt deracinated.”74 Yet another problem was that the Indian was confused and disillusioned by competing missionaries bearing conflicting theologies.75 In 1870, for example, Nez Perce chief Joseph advised an Indian commissioner that his people did not want schools because they would teach the Indians to have churches, and churches would teach them to quarrel about God “as the Catholics and Protestants do…. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”76 Crèvecoeur asked, “Shall we yet vainly flatter ourselves with the hope of converting the Indians?” and answered, “We should rather begin with converting our back-settlers.”77

  Seneca chief Red Jacket complained eloquently about the missionaries among his people:

  The black coats [priests] tell us to work and raise corn; they do nothing themselves and would starve to death if someone did not feed them. All they do is pray to the Great Spirit; but that will not make corn and potatoes grow; if it will why do they beg from us and from the white people?78

  A final problem, wrote professor Page Smith, was candidly stated by soldier John Smith:

  Captain John Smith, who had his hands full contending with the deceitful Powhatan, was constantly exhorted by the officers of the Virginia Company to make more progress in converting the Indians to Christianity. To one such admonition, the captain replied testily that he needed some soldiers to force the Indians to pay attention to the preachers.79

  John Smit
h added, “It was difficult to convert an Indian who was shooting arrows at you or was plainly intent on trying to scalp you.”80

  Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop considered that the Puritans had a divine right to the land occupied by the Indians. He thought that the Indians themselves were “evidence of a Satanic opposition to the very principle of divinity.”81

  The whole earth is the Lord’s garden, and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved by them. Why then should we stand starving here for the places of habitation … and in the mean time suffer whole countries, as profitable for the use of man, to lie waste without any improvement.82

  As a result, Roy Harvey Pearce wrote, “for those who lived in the frontier settlements … it came to be, simply enough, destroy or be destroyed; this was yet another skirmish in man’s Holy War against Satan.”83 Claims were made that there was even biblical authority for the invasion. Genesis 1:26 says, let man “have dominion … over all the earth.” The fact that the Indians had already obtained dominion over the earth of America could be overlooked because they weren’t Christians.

  The Times complained in 1870 that “thus far the churches [have] done almost nothing, being so much occupied with the foreign heathen that they have almost utterly neglected these wards of the nation.”84

  Religious leaders supported the Allotment Act of 1887, described below, which was detrimental to the interests of the Indians. Angie Debo charged that as late as 1944, “the first attempt to turn public sentiment away from the [Indian] reform policy came from the churches.”85

  THE PHILOSOPHY of colonial leaders and other colonists was Lockean. John Locke believed that people had the rights to life, ownership of property, and liberty (political equality), and the state had the duty to protect these rights. The philosophy concerning land was stated in the credo of newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan in the New York Morning News in 1845. He said,

  Our manifest destiny is to overspread and possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.86

  Americans and their then president, James K. Polk, fervently believed in the philosophy of Manifest Destiny.87

  THE SETTLERS had a great advantage in their numbers. This superiority, compared to the Indians, was the principal reason they won the war. “In the end, the Indians lost the Four-Hundred-Year War,” Carl Waldman concluded. “They were defeated … by overwhelming numbers—the spillover from an overpopulated Europe.”88 That superiority also kept Indian atrocities against the settlers down to a level permitting the frontier to advance. The Times made two predictions, said Robert G. Hays, one right and one wrong: “Civilization must ultimately overrun and surround them [the Indians], and gradually extinguish their existence as completely as it has that of the Mohawks and Senecas.”89 Although they were overrun and surrounded, they were not extinguished.

  In 1862, before the Santee Sioux Uprising began, when some in his tribe wanted to attack the settlers, Sioux chief Little Crow said,

  See!—the white men are like the locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm. You may kill one—two—ten; yes, as many as the leaves in the forest yonder, and their brothers will not miss them. Kill one—two—ten, and ten times ten will come to kill you. Count your fingers all day long and white men with guns … will come faster than you can count.90

  There are several problems in comparing settler populations with Indian populations. The United States Census did not begin until 1790 and did not include Indians until 1860. Any figures before 1790 for settlers and before 1860 for Indians are mere guesses and they vary wildly. The unreliability of such estimates is demonstrated by the following speculations as to the Indian population in the area of the United States in 1492: 200,000—Smith (p. 28); 750,000—Waldman {Atlas), who said that this was “the number most often heard”; 800,000 to 900,000—Leupp (p. 350); 850,000—Josephy (Indian Heritage); over 900,000—Drimmer (p. 15); 1,000,000—Collier (p. 172); as many as 3,000,000—Nash (p. 17); over 7,000,000 north of the Rio Grande River—Thornton (p. 36); between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 for the continental United States and Canada—Waldman (Atlas); and 1,000,000 to 18,000,000 in 1513 (not 1492, of course)—Steele (p. 3). The variations in population estimates for the entirety of North America are enormous as well. Kroker’s estimate was 4,200,000, but Dobyn’s was about 60,000,000.91

  Here is a rough estimate concerning how many Indians were available in the east to fight how many settlers:

  These figures make it apparent which side was likely to win the war. Robert M. Utley and Wilcomb E. Washburn put it succinctly: “The regular army supposed that it had conquered the Indians. But the real conquerors were the pioneers who tramped westward by the thousands and then the millions.”92

  ——

  TREACHERY WAS a characteristic of the settlers and soldiers as well as the Indians. Several such acts of treachery (in addition to those outlined above) are mentioned briefly here.

  In 1777 the Shawnee chief Cornstalk was talking neutrality with the Americans in the Revolutionary War. He went to the American Fort Randolph under a flag of truce. Fort commandant Matthew Arbuckle imprisoned Cornstalk, his son Elinipsico, and others. A party of settler hunters heard the prisoners were under light guard and shot, killed, and mutilated Cornstalk, his son, and a warrior named Red Hawk.93

  The Sac leader Black Hawk decided he would try to make peace with the soldiers in 1832. When a cavalry detachment led by Major Isaiah Stillman approached, Black Hawk sent out a party of 3 under a flag of truce. He sent a second party of 5 to observe. The troops attacked both groups, and 3 were killed.94 Three months later, Black Hawk tried again. He sent out a large party under a flag of truce to try to negotiate. Soldiers ignored the flag, fired on the Indians, and in the battle that followed, 23 warriors were killed.95

  Washington State territorial governor Isaac Stevens in 1855 encouraged the Nez Perce, Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, and Yakima Indians to give up most of the land they occupied in exchange for reservation land, homes, schools, horses, cattle, and annuities. He promised that they would be able to stay on their old land for 2 to 3 years after the treaty was ratified. The Indians agreed. Twelve days later, Stevens declared the Indian land open to homesteading. The Yakima War started soon after because of the broken promise.96

  The Apache chief Mangas Coloradas agreed in 1863 to meet with General Joseph West. He was immediately seized and delivered the next day to the general. West let it be known to the guards that night that he did not want the chief to awake to another day, because he had left a trail of blood for 500 miles. A witness, a miner named Connor, stated that the guards heated their bayonets in the fire, applied them to the chief’s feet and legs, and when he jumped up to protest, fired 4 shots into his head, killing him. General West conducted an investigation, which concluded that Mangas Coloradas had made 3 efforts to escape and was shot on the third attempt.97

  A Sioux war party under Sitting Bull saw some soldiers camped along the Powder River in 1865. Some of the young warriors rode to them under a flag of truce to see if they could get some tobacco and sugar. The soldiers waited until the Indians were in easy rifle range, then fired, killing and wounding some of the Indians. The survivors were able to steal some of the soldiers’ horses before retreating.98

  After the Battle of the Washita in 1867, the Indians fled. Two Kiowa chiefs, Satanta and Lone Wolf, approached General Philip Henry Sheridan to try to make peace. He put them under arrest and sent word to the Kiowa by Satanta’s son that the 2 would hang unless the tribe came into the fort. The tribe came in.99

  The next year, Custer, under Sheridan’s command, went out on a supposed peace mission to the Cheyenne. He invited their chiefs to his camp. When they came, he seized 3 of them. He then prepared a tree and ropes to hang them unless the tribe would carry out his demands, which were to surrender 2 settler women captives and to bring the tr
ibe into the post. The women captives were released, and Custer accepted the tribe’s promise to come to the post when the grass was green enough for traveling. They either did or didn’t keep their promise, depending on whom you believe. Everyone agrees, however, that Custer kept his captives. Two of them were later killed by their guards.100

  IT IS not surprising that none of the presidents of the United States before 1890, the date of the Wounded Knee Massacre, was an Indian advocate. Many of them fought against the Indians. It is unlikely that this experience was helpful to the Indians during their administrations. Certainly Washington and Jackson said some harsh things about them, and Jackson did some harsh things to them. George Washington fought against them and for the British in the French and Indian War and was at the battle in 1755 where General Braddock and 1,500 British were killed by Indians allied with the French.101 He fought against them again in the American Revolution and ordered the Iroquois country destroyed because of their depredations against settlers in their area. William Henry Harrison fought against the Indians as early as his 1794 victory on the Miami River. He fought the Shawnee and other tribes in the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe. Two years later he fought the British and their Indian allies at the Battle of the Thames. Andrew Jackson fought against the Creeks in 1813 and against the Seminoles and other tribes in 1818. Zachary Taylor fought the Shawnee in the War of 1812, the Sauk and Fox tribes in the Black Hawk War starting in 1832, and the Seminoles in 1837. Even Abraham Lincoln served briefly in the Illinois militia in 1832 during the Black Hawk War, but he did not see combat. The Santee Sioux Uprising in 1862 and the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 both occurred during his administration.