The American West

by Robert V Hine

  The Russians were brutal colonizers, nasty as any expansionist power involved in North America in the eighteenth century. As they had done with native communities in Siberia, the promyshlenniki held Aleut villages hostage, forcing the men to trap and the women to perform sexual services. In 1748 the Russian state declared the Aleuts a conquered people and saddled them with the duty of paying yasak, or tribute, to the tsar, effectively legalizing their exploitation. Native resistance was sporadic and local at first, but it soon broadened into a large-scale revolt. The Aleuts had no military tradition, yet in 1762 natives from a number of villages coordinated an uprising that destroyed a fleet of Russian ships. They prevented the Russians from returning for three years, but in 1766 a force crushed the rebel Aleuts, destroying dozens of native villages and carrying out deliberate “reductions” of the population. When word of the revolt reached Moscow, a shocked Tsarina Catherine ordered her subjects to treat the Aleuts more like Russians, if not human beings: “Impress upon the hunters the necessity of treating their new brethren and countrymen, the inhabitants of our newly acquired islands with the greatest kindness.” But the promyshlenniki offered their own moral philosophy of the geographic margins: “God is in heaven, and the tsar is far away.” Tsarina Catherine abolished the yasak, but otherwise little changed.15

  Russians trade with the Aleuts. From Greigorii Ivanovich Shelikhov, Puteshestvie G. Shelekhova . . . (St. Petersburg, 1812). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The state-sponsored Russian-American Company, which took charge of operations in 1799, ameliorated the harshest practices, but by then the Aleuts’ population had been reduced to six thousand, only a quarter of their previous size. The causes were familiar: disease, warfare, and alcoholism. With so many deaths, hopeful signs of rebirth were hard to find in Russian America. Life did go on, however, and sexual relations and intermarriage between traders and Aleut women created a substantial group of mixed-ancestry people the Russians called Creoles—comparable to the French métis and the Spanish mestizos—who assumed an increasingly prominent position in the northern Pacific fur trade as navigators, explorers, clerks, and traders.

  . . .

  The Russian presence on the Pacific coast upped the anxiety of officials in New Spain. When they looked at their North American domain, they must have felt like a dog with a bone surrounded by a pack of hungry competitors. In the early eighteenth century, the Spanish countered French designs in the lower Mississippi River valley by constructing a string of Franciscan missions among the Indian peoples of Texas. By the time the French ceded their trans-Mississippi claims to the Spanish in 1763, the main Texas settlement at San Antonio de Bexar, including the mission that would later become known as the Alamo, had become the center of a beleaguered frontier province.

  Once in Texas, fending off European rivals became a secondary concern to maintaining peaceful relations with the Comanches, who were extending their horse and bison empire into Mexico. They traded horses and mules with the French and English for guns and raided the provinces of Texas and New Mexico for food and captives. Some New Mexicans copied the Comanches and took to hunting bison on the southern plains. They were later joined by mixed-heritage traders known as comancheros, forming an intermediate group between colonials and Indians. Eventually the Spanish negotiated treaties with the Comanches. The peace held in New Mexico and the province thrived, but in Texas the violence continued. The different outcomes suggest the flexibility of the Comanches’ empire, playing each province to their advantage.

  The Spanish had more success in Alta California, where in 1769 they began planting missions along the coast. Gaspar de Portolá, governor of Baja California, established military headquarters at the fine bay of Monterey. From there he planned to defend the empire against Russian attack. The Russians had yet to establish a single permanent base on the American mainland, so Portolá’s fears were overblown. But such emotions stretched the boundaries of empire.

  As in Texas, the mission spearheaded colonization in California. Like backcountry log cabins, the old missions with their quaint adobe walls and cracked tiles, have become architectural attractions. But vacationers seldom perceive the flinty core of the mission institution: a tough, pioneering agency that served as church, home, fortress, town, farm, and imperial consulate. Through this corporate entity, two missionaries and three or four soldiers sought to create an orderly Spanish-style town out of a motley group of several thousand Indians, often from diverse and mutually hostile clans.

  THE SPANISH NORTH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

  Missions were to Christianize nonbelievers. But they did much more. They blended prayer with labor. Friars expected Indians to stop wandering the countryside hunting deer and acorns and settle down at the mission to grow wheat, fruit, and cattle. Native labor supported the colony. In theory it was a winning strategy, advancing Spanish dominion, spreading the faith, and turning a profit. There was no large population in New Spain hankering to move north and populate the frontier. Instead, the Spanish would create new subjects through coercion and instruction. The padres wrote letters extolling not only the conversion of the pagans but their production of wheat, grapes, wine, and cattle. The glowing reports kept support from the royal treasuries coming, though in fulfilling their chief purpose, the conversion and reeducation of Indians, the missions never met expectations. In Alta California, the harvest of souls never matched the harvest of produce.

  Spanish lancers bring captured California Indians to the San Francisco mission. From Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . . (Paris, 1822). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The Franciscans planted twenty missions from San Diego to Sonoma. Father Junípero Serra directed his brothers, while secular officials established a half-dozen garrisoned presidios and pueblos, including San Francisco, founded in 1776, and Los Angeles, started by a group of mestizo and mulatto settlers from Sinaloa in 1781. The colonial population of California never exceeded thirty-five hundred. Indians were the working class. They herded the cattle, sheep, and horses, and they irrigated the fields. The California economy flourished on their backs.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, twenty thousand “neophytes” (as the padres called the converts) resided in Alta California’s missions. Their rate of mortality was high. Their numbers had already fallen by about a third. They suffered from changes in diet and confinement in close quarters, and they died from dysentery, fever, and venereal disease. Father Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta, of Mission San Juan Bautista, wrote that “the number of deaths here exceeds that of births,” and the mission’s funeral records during a terrible smallpox epidemic in 1838 noted that “the old graveyard close to the church is filled up with bodies to such an extent as to saturate the Mission with their smell.” The fathers added to the misery by inflicting on their charges harsh discipline. They remedied misbehavior with shackles, solitary confinement, and the lash, always the lash. “The Indians at the mission were very severely treated by the padres,” remembered Lorenzo Asisara, who was raised at Mission Santa Cruz. Disobedience brought “the lash without mercy, the women the same as the men.”16

  California mission Indians gambling. From Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde . . . (Paris, 1822). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  On occasion, the neophytes met violence with violence. A priest at Santa Cruz, for instance, lost his life when he thrashed his flock once too often. There was native rebellion from the beginning. In 1775 the villagers around San Diego rose up and killed several priests, and the history of many missions is punctuated by revolts, although the arms and organization of Spanish soldiers were enough to quell most uprisings. Flight became the dominant protest, and sometimes whole villages decamped for the mountains.

  Observers noted the neophytes’ despondence. “I have never seen any of them laugh,” wrote one European. “I have never seen a single one look anyone in the face. They have th
e air of taking no interest in anything.” Visiting Frenchman Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse, charged the Franciscans with enslaving rather than enlightening, and compared the missions to slave plantations in the Caribbean. The missionaries, he wrote, were convinced “either by prejudice or by their own experience that reason is almost never developed in these people, which to them is sufficient motive for treating them as children.”17

  For all their moral failings, including acts of spectacular brutality, the Spanish padres were able to imagine a universe where Indians and colonists lived together as Christians, albeit unequal ones. This meager concession to shared humanity was becoming a radical position in eighteenth-century North America. Across the continent, in a colony once considered cutting-edge for its dedication to amity and uplift, people were dividing themselves into races and slaughtering each other. The Pennsylvania frontier made the California missions, which some historians have compared to Nazi concentration camps, look like peaceable kingdoms.

  . . .

  Far on the western fringes of Pennsylvania, in a cluster of log cabins along the Susquehanna River called Paxton, the frontier settlers viewed the government in Philadelphia as negligent if not downright hostile to their well-being. Largely Presbyterian, the Paxton community looked askance at the Quakers who controlled the government. How could those sons of William Penn, elite pacifists snug in their mansions, sympathize with farmers trying to wrest a living from the margins? Thirty miles from Paxton lay a village of Conestoga Indians—poor, peaceful descendants of a tribe that had long lived in submission. There were rumors, though, that the Conestogas were spies and abettors of hostile warriors who raided frontier homesteads. The whispers were enough to raise a lynch mob.

  In December 1763, a small band of men calling themselves the Paxton Boys massacred twenty Conestoga men, women, and children. Frightened survivors fled to Philadelphia for protection. Incensed that the government would harbor the Indians, the Paxton Boys marched on the capital. Philadelphia officials sent out the militia, including a troop of artillerymen, and dispatched negotiators led by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had already written an essay expressing his sympathy with the Indians and calling the Paxton Boys “Christian white savages.” But he satisfied the mob that their cause would be heard by the colonial assembly and the governor. After composing a long protest letter, the farmers marched home to Paxton.18

  The Paxton Boys admitted that their conduct bore “an appearance of flying in the face of Authority.” But, they argued, the extremity of their peril demanded radical countermeasures, especially since their own government showed a “manifest Partiality for Indians.” The Conestogas had been “cherished and caressed as dearest friends” by the politicians. The public had thereby been made “tributaries to savages,” and the poor frontier farmers had been cut loose to fend for themselves. The westerners wanted more effective political representation and the abolition of property qualifications for voting. Underneath the complaints lurked the stark inequality of western farmers in the midst of their fellow white Pennsylvanians. Many owed money to eastern financiers. The Paxton Boys had butchered innocent human beings in the spirit of democratic reform. The inspiring frontier tableau of regular folks seeking social justice through agrarian protest was often marred by the nauseating tendency of these same folks to terrorize their weaker neighbors.19

  The Paxton Boys murder Conestoga Indians, 1764. From John Wilmer, Events of Indian History . . . (Lancaster, Pa., 1841).

  In 1767 in the backwoods of South Carolina, murders, thefts, and anarchy reached a crescendo. Even members of a new religious sect, the Weberites, turned homicidal and murdered their “holy ghost” (a black man) and their “holy son” (a white man). Arrested backcountry criminals were often pardoned in Charleston. Justice seemed literally misplaced, and westerners complained about the failures of their eastern government. So they became law unto themselves. Neighbors profiled their neighbors, declared some outlaws, and drove them out through shows of mob force. The governor of South Carolina disapproved of the farmers’ actions, which prompted the farmers to ramp up their extralegal policing. They labeled themselves Regulators, and one thousand signed an agreement to protect one another until the crime wave subsided. Occasionally designated Rangers, they roamed the countryside on horseback, pursuing suspected criminals as far as necessary, whipping some, hanging others, but bringing most in for proper trials. For the most part, the Regulators were law-and-order rebels.

  Like the Paxton Boys, the backcountry Regulators dressed up their criminal activities in the cloak of political legitimacy. They wanted better representation in the colonial legislature, better courts in frontier areas, more schools and jails, increased regulation of taverns and public houses, more restrictions on hunters and lawyers (both offensive characters associated with carrion), and even the distribution of Bibles at public expense. A petition signed by four thousand men highlighted these demands. The popularity of populism, however, waxed and waned, and by March 1768 sentiment was rising against the Regulators’ illegal actions. Sensing a backlash, the Regulators declared victory—crime had declined and they had made their protest—and went back to shooting deer and squirrels instead of scofflaws.

  Paired in time and similarly spewing vitriol and inciting violence, the Carolina Regulators and the Paxton Boys often ride into history books together. They exemplify frontier rebellion and agrarian protest. Yet in some ways they were radically different. The Pennsylvanians challenged the authority of government. The Regulators were more concerned with ridding local areas of crime, and although they acted unlawfully, like the Paxton Boys, they endeavored to reestablish authority, not buck it. Both groups were agrarian dissenters. The men from Paxton, however, functioned like a lynch mob, attacking a minority and then using the occasion to carry their grievances further. The Regulators were vigilantes, allegedly responsible members of society trying to clean up local corruption. Examples of do-it-yourself justice, lynch mobs and vigilantes would appear and reappear in only slightly varied guises on every American frontier. Backcountry South Carolina pioneered the terms regulator and regulation, but the words and ideas spread and became standard until events in San Francisco in 1851 shifted popular usage to vigilante and vigilance committee.

  Frontier mobs and posses have infiltrated American culture as relics of a bygone era when good men had to take matters into their own hands to beat back chaos. The glow of these gatherings dims on closer inspection. A stew of racist bile and democratic outrage, the groups remind us that on the margins people sometimes called for violence and fairness in the same breath. Barbarity and democracy clasped hands in colonial British America. Their grip would grow stronger as new republics took over older frontiers.

  FURTHER READING

  Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (1963)

  Hector Chevigny, Russian America: The Great Alaskan Venture, 1741–1867 (1965)

  Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (1992)

  Kathleen Duval, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2016)

  Steven W. Hackel, Junípero Serra: California’s Founding Father (2014)

  Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2009)

  Terry G. Jordan and Matti Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (1989)

  Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of North America (1994)

  Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (2007)

  Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991)

  Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America (2013)

  4

  The Land and Its Markers

  The American Revolution unleashed a terraforming spree that turned the maps of colonial North America into antiques. By the nation’s centennial in 1876, th
e geographic footprint of the United States had stamped out empires built over many generations. The Spanish, French, British, and Russian, Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, and Comanche frontiers had given way to new territories and states. Many Americans of the late nineteenth century professed a belief that destiny had propelled them across the continent, that Providence had ordained the nation’s birthright to continental dominance, that the new maps were inevitable. In fact, the process was far more contingent and gritty, far less destined or divine.

  The United States acquired vast territories, but the incorporation of the West into the economy, the polity, and the culture of the nation took time. This chapter and those that follow tell the story of how the nation gathered, organized, and reimagined the land. It’s a story of expedient real estate deals and negotiations conducted at the point of a gun, of democratic yearning and appalling greed, of seemingly boundless opportunity and the destruction of entire ways of life. It’s an American story to the core. Several engines of change and development propelled the creation of the American empire, among them nationalism, familialism, capitalism, racism, and religion. Running the gamut from the admirable to the loathsome, they carved out the nation’s future.

  . . .

  The American Revolution further fragmented the native and settler peoples of the backcountry. The Carolina Regulators, for instance, balked when coastal planters organized to take up arms against the crown. The politics of independence and loyalty mixed with fiercer animosities on the frontier. The farmers and hunters in the West—native Indian peoples, settlers born and raised in-country, as well as recent migrants from Germany, Ireland, and Scotland—ripped into one another from multiple angles. Relative to population, the backcountry suffered losses greater than any other region during the Revolution. There were some ten war-related deaths for every thousand persons in the thirteen coastal colonies, but more than seventy per thousand over the mountains in Kentucky. Moreover, the violence in the West continued long after the treaty of peace was signed in 1783. The fighting that began with the French and Indian War in 1754 did not cease until the Battle of Fallen Timbers forty years later in 1794. It was the bloodiest phase of the three-century campaign for the conquest of North America.