The Wild Frontier

M
y debts to some of the many people who contributed to this book must be acknowledged.

First, to the Indians, explorers, settlers, soldiers, officials, and others who reported events relating to the American-Indian War. These were the raw materials from which this book was made.

Second, to the scholars and authors who took these reports, which often conflicted, and wrote about them in a coherent way. This is especially true of William Brandon, George Catlin, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Angie Debo, Harold E. Driver, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Fanny Kelly, Duane Schultz, and Carl Waldman.

Third, to Robert D. Loomis, my editor at Random House, who was always willing to contribute his advice, his wisdom, and his brilliance to the book.

Finally, to my wife, Pat, who saw too little of me while the manuscript was in preparation, and to our daughter, Amy, who provided inspiration in many ways, including presenting me with a beautiful pen for book signings even before the first draft was completed.

T
he wild frontier commenced in 1607 with the arrival of the first permanent settlers and was declared ended by the Bureau of the Census in 1890. The war between the settlers and the Indians began in 1622 in Virginia and also ended in 1890 in South Dakota. The outcome of this war determined who would control the North American continent. It was played on a stage that was new to European peoples, and many of its dramatic events had not been seen before in history and would never be seen again. This was a first-time clash between 2 cultures.
¹
Robert Hughes, in
Culture of Complaint
, said, “Surprises crackle, like electric arcs, between the interfaces of culture.”
²
Surprises also crackle with atrocities. The war lasted 268 years, the longest in the history of our nation. The United States itself will not be 268 years old until the year 2044.

I
N
The West: An Illustrated History
, edited by Henry Steele Commager, an article by M. A. Jones pointed out that “the realities of frontier life have regularly given way to the requirements of myth.”
³
Myths cloud history and impair its classic function—to help us solve present-day
problems. This accurate analogy has been drawn by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in
The Disuniting of America:

The Indians agreed. There is an old Sioux saying—”A people without history is like wind upon the buffalo grass.”
⁵

Military historian S. L. A. Marshall in
Crimsoned Prairie
said in some despair, “Taken as a whole, books about the Plains wars have one salient characteristic, that of discrepancy.”
⁶
As Carl Waldman noted in his preface to
Who Was Who in Native American History:

Edwin T. Denig, who lived with the Indians from about 1800 to 1850 and married 2 Indian women, noted another disagreement. “We find two sets of writers, both equally wrong, one setting forth the Indians as a noble, generous, and chivalrous race above the standards of Europeans, the other representing them below the level of brute creation.”
⁸

Generally speaking, most of the earlier writers were settler advocates, while many who came later were Indian advocates. Fergus M. Bordewich, who spent much of his childhood living on Indian reservations, put it this way in his book
Killing the White Man’s Indian:

The word
settler
is meant to include colonists, soldiers, militia, government people, farmers, hunters, trappers, merchants, miners, and other Americans who came in contact with the Indians between 1607 and 1890, as well as the English colonists before the American Revolution.

This war was a “complex and intense struggle,”
¹⁰
fought over a time span of more than 26 decades. Hundreds of Indian tribes were involved. The tribes were not only fighting one another, but the Dutch, the Spanish, the English, the French, and the settlers, often at the same time. European wars were frequently fought in part in North America. Participation in those wars by the Indians depended upon the wishes of each tribe. During the American Revolution, most tribes sided with Great Britain. One author, Carl Waldman, in
Atlas of the North American Indian
, concluded that if the British had given the tribes better support, they “probably would have won the war.”
¹¹

N
O ONE
knows for certain where the Indians originally came from. Some experts today believe that they came from some unknown part of Asia centuries ago over the Bering Land Bridge when Asia and America were connected. A growing number of other experts say the glacier there prevented use of the Bering route to our eastern seaboard until 11,500 years ago.
¹²
These experts believe Asians and perhaps even Europeans hugged the ice sheets in animal skin kayaks and reached America long before the Bering people.
¹³
There are also fairly recent archeological finds that hint that the Bering people may not have been in the first group to migrate to America. Anthropologist Walter Neves flatly stated, “We can no longer say that the first colonizers of the American continent came from the north of Asia.”
¹⁴
The Indians encountered in Virginia, Massachusetts, and elsewhere may or may not have been in the first group and, if not, would not have been the First Americans.

The Indians had no word for themselves similar to the word
Indian.
¹⁵
According to Alvin Josephy,

When they gave themselves a tribal name, however, as Clark Wissler in
Indians of the United States
noted, often it was something like “we, the people.”
¹⁷

S
OME HAVE
referred to the skirmishes and battles considered here as the Indian wars. Others have preferred to call them simply one war, the Four Hundred Year War (1492 to 1890) or the Four Century War. The latter is the approach taken here because the separate “wars” have been characterized by Alan Axelrod in
Chronicle of the Indian Wars
as “barely differentiated.”
¹⁸

Cheyenne chief Black Kettle said, according to Dee Brown in
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
, “There are bad white men and bad Indians. The bad men on both sides brought about this trouble.”
¹⁹
The war in the main was “ugly and dark,” according to Axelrod.
²⁰
For Marshall, “The war was waged with excessive brutality on both sides.”
²¹
Furthermore, as John Tebbel and Keith Jennison pointed out in
The American Indian Wars
, “There was little to choose in placing the blame for the atrocities.”
²²

A partial chronology up to the end of the war may be helpful to the reader.

1607—First English settlers arrived in the Jamestown area

1622—War between Jamestown settlers and Powhatan Indians began

1675—King Philip’s War began

1754—French and Indian War began

1763—Pontiac’s Rebellion began

1775—Revolutionary War began

1812—War of 1812 began

1824—Bureau of Indian Affairs established

1830—Indian Removal Act became effective

1831—Trails of Tears began

1832—Black Hawk War began

1848—California atrocities began

1861—Civil War began

1862—Santee Sioux Uprising in Minnesota

1864—Sand Creek Massacre

1866—Fetterman’s Massacre

1876—Battle of the Little Bighorn (Custer’s Last Stand)

1890—Wounded Knee Massacre

1890—Census Bureau declared the frontier ended

T
here was a “long-standing American ambivalence over Indians,” according to John M. Coward in
The Newspaper Indian.
¹
Changes in settlers’ attitudes resulted in part from the changes in writers’ attitudes. The
New York Times
editorials from 1860 to 1890 often reflected these changes. Although the
Times
was not as influential then as it is today, nevertheless it was a strong voice and, perhaps even more important, a spokesman for the East on Indian issues. The
Times
generally supported the Indian causes and concluded that most instances of open conflict between Indians and settlers were caused by settler injustice.
²
Paradoxically, the
Times
treated many of the chiefs harshly. Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Satanta especially were the subject of editorial wrath.
³