American Heroes (7 page)

Christianity, education, marriage, and slavery—all were pressed upon the Indians, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. All except marriage they rejected, and in marriage they generally won the upper hand. In the end the only part of the white man's civilization they would accept was its material goods. They knew at a glance that guns were better than spears or arrows, iron hatchets than stone tomahawks, cloth than fur. Each of these things they cheerfully appropriated and fetched beaver skins for the English Americans in order to purchase them. In so doing, they had to alter many of their traditional ways and devote themselves more and more to trapping beaver, less and less to their customary handicrafts, but they managed to subordinate the new products to their own ends. Guns and hatchets were useful weapons for defense against their enemies, perhaps including the men who sold them to them. Cloth was only a more manageable and uniform kind of fur. The Indians thus appropriated the materials of the English and used them in their own way. They were not lured into the white man's civilization by them.

If, then, the English Americans did not exert themselves as much as they might have to assimilate the Indian, the fact remains that the Indians showed an extraordinary resistance to whatever efforts
were
made, an extraordinary refusal to accept the manners and methods of a people who were obviously more powerful than they. And we find this intransigence among Indians of every kind, among Westos and Creeks, Iroquois and Algonquians. Diverse as these different tribes may have been, they all possessed some quality that made white civilization unattractive to them.

One must, therefore, look beyond their apparent diversity and seek the common element or elements in their ways of life, the elements that led them to reject so firmly the opportunities of white civilization. If we read the early accounts with this purpose in mind, one fact immediately presents itself: the early observers were all struck by the unusual kind of government that the different tribes practiced. Europeans were accustomed to governments that claimed an absolute authority. Among the Indians absolute governments did develop in South and Central America and in a few parts of North America, but most of the tribes encountered by the English Americans lived in a state that might be described as orderly anarchy. Each tribe had its own customs, which exercised a powerful influence on the members, doubtless much more powerful than European observers realized, but the heads of the tribes, the chiefs or sachems, seem in most cases to have had no coercive authority. The Indians' resistance to white civilization was not organized and directed from above by powerful rulers, for Indian rulers were not powerful, in fact were scarcely rulers at all.

James Adair, a trader who lived among the southern Indian tribes for many years in the eighteenth century, has left us an illuminating account of their government. There was no such thing among them, he says, as an emperor or a king. Their highest title signified simply a chief, and “the power of their chiefs,” according to Adair, “is an empty sound. They can only persuade or dissuade the people, either by the force of good-nature and clear reasoning, or colouring things, so as to suit their prevailing passions. It is reputed merit alone, that gives them any titles of distinction above the meanest of the people.”

Henry Timberlake, whose memoirs I have already quoted, was familiar only with the Cherokee Indians. Of them he says, “Their government, if I may call it government, which has neither laws or power to support it, is a mixed aristocracy and democracy, the chiefs being chose according to their merit in war, or policy at home.” Timberlake gives an interesting example of the helplessness of tribal government to control any member, even in matters of great importance. It seems that a number of British soldiers in the garrison at Fort Loudoun on the Tennessee River had taken up with some of the local Cherokee girls. Later, when the Cherokees besieged the fort (in the French and Indian War), the girls proceeded to bring food daily to their former lovers. The chief naturally forbade this breaking of the siege, but the girls, says Timberlake, “laughing at his threats, boldly told him, they would succour their husbands every day, and were sure, that, if he killed them [meaning the girls], their relations would make his death atone for theirs.”

The early cartographer Lewis Evans tells us, of the Indians in Pennsylvania, “that there is no such thing as coercive power in any Nation: nor does the government ever interfere between party and party; but let every one be judge and Executioner in his own Case.”

Even among the Iroquois, who appeared to have the most powerful government of all the eastern Indians, the authority of the chiefs rested only on public opinion. The New York savant Cadwallader Colden, in his history of the Five Indian Nations that made up the Iroquois, says, “Each Nation is an absolute Republick by its self, govern'd in all Publick Affairs of War and Peace by the Sachems or Old Men, whose Authority and Power is gain'd by and consists wholly in the Opinion the rest of the Nation have of their Wisdom and Integrity. They never execute their Resolutions by Compulsion or Force upon any of their People.”

If we turn from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth and from the Indians of the East to those of the Great Plains, we find the same observations. George Catlin, a Pennsylvania portrait painter, was so enthralled by the sight of a group of Indians who visited his studio in Philadelphia that he packed up his paints and brushes and headed for the Far West. There, on the banks of the Missouri and the Yellowstone and the Columbia, he lived for eight years among the Indians. That was in the 1830s when the only other white men on hand were a few fur traders and soldiers, before the slaughter of the buffalo drove the Indians off the plains. Catlin recorded his experience in hundreds of paintings and drawings and in a remarkable book.

He knew the Mandan and the Minataree and the Sioux and the Comanche and the Flatheads and dozens of other tribes, knew them intimately and described the peculiar customs and characteristics and physical appearance of each. But he observed that the governments of all the tribes were much the same, under the leadership of a chief. This chief, he observed, “has no control over the life or limbs, or liberty of his subjects, nor other power whatever, excepting that of
influence
which he gains by his virtues, and his exploits in war, and which induces his warriors and braves to follow him, as he leads them to battle—or to listen to him when he speaks and advises in council.”

In war as in peace, discipline imposed from above was at a minimum. Indian warfare was carried on mostly by small parties, among the eastern tribes seldom more than ten together. The leader of such a group had no more authority than the other members chose to allow him, and in the actual fighting it was every man for himself, each seeking to outdo the others in the fury of his attack. Indian warfare was not a pretty thing, no matter how one looks at it: no atrocity was too great for the Indian to commit against his opponent. Women and children were as fair game as men. But the object of war was as much to display the power and courage of the individual as it was to destroy the enemy.

The absence of coercive government, together with the horrendousness of Indian warfare, may suggest that Indian life was, as Hobbes would have maintained, nasty, brutish, and short. If we may believe the testimony of eyewitnesses, the opposite was true: the Indians who move through the pages of the early accounts display an extraordinary dignity and decorum. They appear very much indeed like the noble savages of fiction.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a body of literature composed by the Indians themselves, the Indian treaties. The Indians, of course, did not actually write the treaties, for they did not know how to write. Like other illiterate peoples, they relied heavily on their memories. And in order to establish so important an event as a treaty in the tribal consciousness, they did their peacemaking in an impressive ceremonial manner. The records of these ceremonies, taken down by white observers, were so beautiful, so moving, and withal so aesthetically satisfying, that colonial printers brought them out in pamphlet form for sale.

In the treaties we begin to get a glimpse of what contemporary writers meant when they said that the authority of the chiefs depended solely on merit and persuasive powers. The stature and eloquence of the Indian sachem at the council table speak strongly to us even at this distance in time and circumstance: a chief who relied solely on persuasion may not have been altogether helpless among men who valued dignity at a high rate. And if we look at the everyday life of the everyday Indian, we may see that it was not merely the chiefs who had dignity. For people to live together in the absence of coercive government, even in so small a unit as a tribe, it was necessary that everyone maintain a barrier of dignity around oneself and respect the same barrier in others. The English traveler John Lawson says of the southern Indians, “They never fight with one another unless drunk, nor do you ever hear any Scolding amongst them. They say the Europeans are always rangling and uneasy, and wonder they do not go out of this World, since they are so uneasy and discontented in it.” The famous frontiersman Robert Rogers, who knew only the northern Indians, says much the same of them: “if any quarrels happen, they never make use of oaths, or any indecent expressions, or call one another by hard names.” Indians were not long on conversation, and white guests used to find their silence quite unnerving at times. When they did speak, courtesy required that it be in a low voice. They spoke so low, in fact, that Europeans found it difficult to hear what they were saying, while the Indian was often obliged to ask white visitors if they supposed him to be deaf. No matter how angry he might be, an Indian never raised his voice.

Obviously not all Indians were faultless, even by their own standards, but when any one of them violated the customs or mores of his tribe, the treatment he received either from the chief or from the offended party was calculated to shame, rather than force, him into reform. In some tribes the most deadly weapon of authority seems to have been sarcasm. If a man was thought guilty of theft, for example, he might be commended before a large audience for his honesty. If he ran away from the enemy in battle, he would be praised for his courageous actions, each one of which would be related so as to bring out his cowardice. Adair says, “They introduce the minutest circumstances of the affair, with severe sarcasms which wound deeply. I have known them to strike their delinquents with those sweetened darts, so good naturedly and skilfully, that they would sooner die by torture, than renew their shame by repeating the actions.”

The whole Indian mode of government was designed to emphasize the dignity of the individual. The same emphasis may be found elsewhere in Indian life. The Indian was so fond of his dignity and so proud of his ability to sustain it by strength of character alone, that he completely discounted the props by which the European supported his. The Indian lacked entirely the European's respect for worldly goods. In Europe, and indeed in most of the world, the acquisition and possession of riches constitutes the ultimate basis for social esteem. We may think it better to be born rich than to become rich, but in our society wealth has seldom been thought a handicap. Among the Indians, on the other hand, there existed a deliberate indifference to wealth, an indifference that could sometimes be infuriating to the white man.

Consider, for example, the Puritans of Massachusetts, who in 1643 were trying to take under their protection a group of Narragansett Indians. The immediate object was a land grab, to get the Indians' land away from Rhode Island, but Massachusetts felt obliged to conduct the transaction in such a way that the Indians would appear to be receiving a favor. Since Christianity was the greatest favor a white man could confer on a savage, the authorities of Massachusetts undertook to instruct the Indians in the Ten Commandments. There is no record of what was said about coveting neighbors' lands, but Governor Winthrop noted in his journal the Indians' response to the fourth commandment. Will you agree, the men of Massachusetts inquired, not to “do any unnecessary work on the Lord's day”? To which the Indians replied, “It is a small thing for us to rest on that day, for we have not much to do any day, and therefore we will forbear on that day.”

By Puritan standards, the Indian was not only lazy; he was proud of his laziness. The settlers observed this fact at the beginning and never forgave him for it. But those observers who saw the Indian in his tribal life and made some attempt to understand him, knew that his unwillingness to labor for riches was something more than mere laziness. Rather, it was the result of a genuine scorn for the riches of this world, to which the Puritans themselves were constantly professing their own indifference. The Indian could afford to scorn riches and to shun the industry necessary to acquire them, because in his society it was the man that counted, not what he owned. The observers are surprisingly unanimous in their statements on this subject. Let me give you a few of them. Robert Rogers, speaking of the northern Indians: “Avarice, and a desire to accumulate…are unknown to them; they are neither prompted by ambition, nor actuated by the love of gold; and the distinctions of rich and poor, high and low, noble and ignoble, do not so far take place among them as to create the least uneasiness, or excite the resentment of any individual; the brave and deserving, let their families or circumstances be what they will, are sure to be esteemed and rewarded.” John Lawson, of the Indians of Carolina: “They are a People that set as great a Value upon themselves, as any sort of Men, in the World, upon which Account they find something Valuable in themselves above Riches. Thus, he that is a good Warriour is the proudest Creature living; and he that is an expert Hunter, is esteemed by the People and himself; yet all these are natural Vertues and Gifts, and not Riches, which are as often in the Possession of a Fool as a Wise-man.” James Adair: “Most of them blame us for using a provident care in domestic life, calling it a slavish temper: they say we are covetous, because we do not give our poor relations such a share of our possessions, as would keep them from want….”