# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI.
COLONIAL RELATIONS WITH THE INDIANS.
There is matter of intensely exciting interest and of momentous bearing upon the fortunes of the red man running through the whole colonial period of our history before we had become a nation, with a central power and a common responsibility for our acts. During this colonial period, — beginning with the first scattered and independent settlements, from Acadia and Canada, down along the seaboard to the Gulf, and ending with the war of the Revolution, — each isolated group of colonists was of necessity left to its own methods and policy in intercourse and treatment of the savages. There was of course an ultimate reference to the authority of the different sovereignties at home, represented here by their respective subjects. Instructions were from time to time received as to the way in which the natives should be dealt with. But the straits and emergencies of each feeble and exposed band of settlers had to decide for them their own attitude and course of conduct towards the aborigines. It was from the beginning a steady struggle between the forces of civilization, aided by intelligence and arbitrary power, and the natural rights and the impotence of barbarians. The result was an inevitable one; but the wrongs and outrages which secured it sadly stain the record of the white man's triumph.
This chapter by its title covers the period and the events reaching from the first settlement of the territory of the United States by Europeans down to the Revolutionary ​War, which left us an independent people. It is to be limited in the main to the relations established by the colonists themselves with the natives, as it will be convenient to deal with the relations of the mother country, as a government with the same people and over the same held, in a separate chapter. A dividing-line might be drawn — at first sharp and distinct, afterwards becoming blurred — between the periods and the circumstances within which the English colonists, unrecognized and not interfered with in this matter by the mother country, disposed of all their relations with the savages, whether hostile or peaceful, by their own judgment, at their own charges, and the period and circumstances when foreign interference or help came in as a new element in those relations. The whole force of the distinction between these times and circumstances will present itself to us when we set in the strong contrast of the facts in either case the earliest with the latest relations of the colonists with the Indians, — the mother country in the former being an outside, indifferent, and unconcerned observer, if even so much as that; while in the latter she was the principal party, actor, and contributor of ways and means.
In the early wars of the New England colonists — and the same might be said of those of Virginia — with the natives, the whole brunt of the strife, in loss of life and goods, and in charges for military stores and operations, came upon the actual settlers. The three desolating “massacres,” wrought by conspiring Indian tribes in Virginia, found the colonists unaided from abroad, and uncompensated for their losses of property. In the Pequot war the New England colonists assessed themselves for all its charges. In the crushing and almost exterminating ravages of the conspiracy for their destruction by King Philip, we find that nearly two thirds of the plantations and towns were either wholly or partially destroyed; that one in ten of the men of military age were victims; while the expenses ​and losses of the war, including its episode against the Eastern Indians, were estimated at “more than one hundred thousand pounds.” Nearly one half of this charge fell upon the Bay Colony. The loss of Plymouth Colony was said to exceed the whole valuation of its personal property. But the English exchequer was not drawn upon. Such was the state of things in the earlier colonial times. In the later period, covering the whole century previous to the war of the Revolution, Great Britain came in as a party, with a stake of her own at hazard, amid steadily increasing risks, demanding mightier efforts and heavier charges, till at the settlemont the cost proved to be enormous. This of course was during the struggle between France and England for the dominion of this continent, the colonies coming in for attention either as allies or as needing protection. Whenever mutterings of war or open hostilities manifested themselves abroad between the two nations, their colonists on this side of the water, willingly or unwillingly, were compelled to imitate the doings of their respective principals. As we have said, the cost to England of extinguishing French dominion here was enormous. But a heavier penalty and sacrifice than that was to be visited upon her as a direct consequence, — even this of the loss of her colonies. At the close of the French and Indian War her prime minister called together the resident agents of the colonies then in London, laid the bill before them, with the amount of the debt incurred “for their defence,” and suggested that they should contribute to her revenue by a tax, for the relief of the suffering and protecting mother. The loyalists, in our days of rebellion, thought it was but fair that we should be thus taxed. The patriot party raised a question whether England came in upon a strife, which the colonies had long maintained at their own charges, for the motherly purpose of protecting them, or for securing aggrandizement in land and ​dominion for herself. At any rate the colonists thought they had borne their full share of the expense in life and treasure.
We turn now to the earlier colonial relations with the savages.
There are some general statements applicable to all the original settlements made by Europeans on our present domain; excepting always those invading raids of the Spaniards, which can hardly be classed under the designation of settlements.
In the first place, it may be said with equal truth alike of the French, the Dutch, the English, and the Swedish adventurers who came hither with a view to the permanent occupancy of American soil, — for tillage, traffic, and commerce, — that they had in mind no purpose of conquest, or of taking possession by violence, through war with the savages, or by driving them clear of the territory. Not a hint or intimation, I think, can be found in any of the primary sources of our earliest colonial history that the colonists in either settlement felt before their coming that they would have to fight for a foothold, or even contemplated the necessity of so doing. Of course they were wholly ignorant of the numbers and the strength of the native tribes. But they seem to have taken for granted the sufficiency of free wild space for themselves and the natives to live in amity. Doubtless, too, they felt sure that the barbarians would welcome them as bringing with them the blessings of civilization, the tools and implements, the food, the seed, the clothing, the habits, the redeemed humanity, which the savages would be so ready to accept with an overflowing gratitude as a substitute for their rude resources and their benighted, bewildered, and dismal way of life. But in the last resort, knowing themselves to be of a nobler stock than the red men, privileged too with a higher intelligence, and above all armed with deadly weapons in comparison with which the bows and the stone hatchets of the Indians were ​as toys, it was enough for the white man to feel that he was able to hold his ground.
Again, the early colonial enterprises were all feeble, and with scarce an exception attended with sharp and almost extinguishing disaster, in which, if the Indians appear at all, it is simply to give relief. Often did they perform these acts of mercy to wretched white men in their extremities. As has been said before, these kindly acts of the savages were in every case ill requited. The Spanish invaders of the south of the continent and the first French voyagers at the north, after partaking of a gentle wilderness hospitality, both kidnapped some of the Indians and carried them across the ocean, leaving their intimidated relatives to wonder over their fate.
Neither had our English seamen to our own coasts failed to commit the same treacherous acts. Captain Weymouth himself publicly told the story in London of his kidnapping five Indians at Pemaquid, in 1605, though he said that he treated them well, and that his object was to promote civilization and trade. Again, in 1614, Captain Thomas Hunt, without the knowledge of Captain John Smith under whose orders he was, kidnapped twenty-seven Indians, in or near Plymouth harbor, who were sold in Spain for slaves. By the humanity of Spanish friars some of these were redeemed and sent back. Some of the tribe to which these belonged — the Nausits — were those who had the first encounter with the Plymouth Pilgrims on their landing. The Pilgrims in their first straits of hunger, while exploring for a permanent place of settlement, helped themselves to some of the buried corn-heaps of the natives. The justifying excuse for the act was necessity, and a sort of restitution was afterwards made to the owners.
First impressions made and received when strangers come into intercourse often decide the future relations between the parties. If we could learn how the natives were affected by their first knowledge of the whites, we should ​probably find that they regarded the English as a somewhat unscrupulous people.
Further, we must note that it soon came to be understood that the relations of Europeans as they reached here, towards the native races, would be decided in each case by the intent and purpose of each party of the strangers as they appeared, whether that purpose involved transient traffic, as in the fisheries and the fur-trade, or permanent occupancy of the soil, with extending farms and towns. The Dutch and the French might, for their purposes, have had peaceful relations with the savages, to their mutual benefit. The English colonists, radiating from their original landings, and steadily extending into the interior, found, for obvious reasons, that their relations with the natives must be hostile. Why? Simply because the temper and habits, the prejudices and purposes of English yeomen made it utterly impossible for them to have the savages as co-residents on the soil, or even as proximate neighbors. In fifty years, more than as many English towns had been planted on our shores and in the nearest border of the wilderness, in valleys, on river bottoms and mill streams. In the skirting forests the savages still harbored, and the primary antagonisms of the two modes of life at once presented themselves with sharp and practical issues. When King Philip found that the value of the land which he had sold to the whites was so enhanced by their use of it, he regretted that he had parted with it. Conspicuously intelligent as he was for a savage, and proudly independent in spirit, like the other great conspiring chieftains with whom we have come into conflict, he stoutly withstood civilization and what was offered to him as Christianity. He forbade all mission work, all attempts to convert his people. He preferred by inclination and conviction the wild state as best and fittest for them. Such views of Christianity as he had formed from contact with its white disciples and the converts they had made from ​the red men were unfavorable, and he repelled it. He complained that his own people were withdrawn from allegiance and tribute to him, and that the white man's laws and court processes were forced upon him. The white man's fencings and fields prevented free travel, while the fencings did not prevent the white man's cattle breaking through them and trampling the Indians' corn. Though the whites seem to have taken for granted that a nomadic roving or a transient occupancy over wild territory gave no valid title to it to barbarians, yet the Indians evidently thought it theirs, at least as much as it was the white man's. So it was all over the continent. When the French colonist Ribault, entering the St. John River in Florida, in 1562, quietly set up by night a stone pillar bearing the arms of France, and took possession for his king, the savages, seeing it the next morning, gazed upon it with stolid bewilderment, regarding it as an altar of worship, not as a royal prerogative, not realizing that their territory had passed from their possession. When the Popham colony, in 1607, took their position for a fort on the Sagadahoc, the natives objected to the effrontery of the act, as no permission had been asked and no compensation offered. In 1631 a Dutchman, in Delaware, had set up a post with the arms of the Dutch. An Indian pulled it down. His chief had him killed to appease the Dutchman. This stirred up the Indians, and they “massacred” every one in the Dutch fort. When Lord Baltimore was making his first settlement on the Potomac, he asked the chief if he might plant himself there. The cautious savage replied “that he would not bid him go, neither would he bid him stay; he must use his own discretion.”
When the four New England colonies confederated themselves in 1643, the preamble to their covenant assumed a very lordly tone towards the natives, thus: —
“Whereas we live encompassed with people of several nations and strange languages, which hereafter may prove injurious to us or ​our posterity; and forasmuch as the natives have formerly committed sundry insolences and outrages upon several Plantations of the English, and have of late combined themselves against us, etc.”
It is to be remembered that our aborigines were the first of the class of human beings called “heathens” which our English ancestors had ever known or seen. The theory about them was that they were a wrecked and doomed portion of the race of Adam, under a curse, — the spoil of the Devil for eternity. The human form, with a mere fragment of the intellectual and moral endowment of our race, could secure at best only pity for such creatures. It was among the rough frontiersmen of the West that the saying originated, that the Indian has no more soul than a buffalo. Our ancestors allowed him a soul, though under the circumstances it was a questionable endowment. It may fairly be inferred from the estimate our fathers made of the natives, that they believed that existence had no intrinsic value for an Indian. Taking into view also the fact that the whole history of humanity on this globe gives us but a succession of wars of races, the strong against the weak, the lighter color against the darker color, the civilized against the barbarous, we have to add to it also another, — that the claim to possess, under divine mercy, a true and pure religion, has been made the pretext for visiting what is called the divine wrath upon all who are left in the darkness of heathenism.
Our colonial period covers a series of woful and racking experiences to the native tribes, uniformly disastrous to them and beyond measure demoralizing to them as regards any form of permanent good which they might have derived from intercourse with the whites. All the tribes that had any dealings with the Europeans, hostile or friendly, and even some distant tribes that had as yet been unmolested in their forest recesses, were from the first parties to all the fierce strifes waged by the white men of rival ​nationalities to obtain the mastery in dominion here. The contests in their prolonged and embittered animosities, with devastation, massacre, and the heightening of all the horrors of civilized warfare so called, were all of them waged at the expense of the natives for their own soil, and they were sure to be the chief sufferers whatever might be the result of each collision, and whichever party prevailed. But none the less, under the fatuity of their destiny, they became discreditable allies of one or another of the contending nationalities, and needless foes of each other in quarrels not their own. The same fatuity of circumstances which first assigned them to one or another party as friend or foe, forced them, in the changing relations of all parties, to shift their alliance here and there as fate impelled them. The Spaniards never concerned themselves with any anxiety or sense of responsibility as to the territorial rights of the savages: the Church's sacred prerogative carried all other claims with it. Nor was it within the purpose or practice of the Spaniards to become colonists or agriculturists through any outlay or labor of their own, in occupying and subduing wild lands. They looked for an easier and a more exciting thrift. The leaders, officials, and functionaries of their invading columns did indeed seek to become proprietors of islands and of immense stretches of territory for mining or cultivation, or for their products. But while the fee of these conquests might vest in Spanish nobles, hidalgoes, or ecclesiastics, the work upon them was to be done by the imported African slaves, and by the natives reduced to the same condition. And it was the Catholic monarch, not the natives, who transferred the title to these fair islands, fields, forests, and mines, and issued patents for their possession and government. Were it not for statutes of limitations, if the sense of natural justice and the benevolent impulse for the righting of all wrongs should ever reach a paroxysm over the hearts of civilized man, many descendants ​of the despoiled would furnish business for a high court of claims.
A selection from our local annals of a few of the numerous cases recorded of the sale of parcels of land or of stretches of territory, by the Indians to the whites, may help us to form some idea of the nature of the transaction and of the conditions involved in it. It is to be observed that the transaction was always a loose one, whatever attempt may in any instance have been made to make the terms and warrants formal. There was in most cases an utter neglect of all definiteness and precision as to boundaries; a disregard of all rival claims that might be set up by other parties than the sachem who made the transfer; and no absolute quit-claim as to any reserved rights which might be implied, and which in many cases, as it will appear, were afterwards asserted.
We find frequent positive and even boastful assertions in our early New England records, — like that repeated by Increase Mather, — that till Philip's war, in 1675, the English did not occupy a foot of land without fair purchase. This assertion, if true in the spirit of it as indicating the intent and will of the colonists, is subject to so many abating and qualifying conditions as greatly to reduce the seeming equity of the transactions to which it refers.
There were honest attempts from the first, on the part of the Plymouth and Massachusetts authorities, to prevent the trespass of white men on land that had not been purchased from the Indians. Intruders, in some cases, on complaint being made, were compelled to vacate. Laws were passed to prevent individual bargains. So far as the English were concerned, James II., by proclamation, made the right of purchasing territory from the Indians exclusively a government prerogative. The colonies and States have maintained the same prerogative; but the restriction has been little regarded. In some cases the Indians invited white men to settle and plant among them; but the ​privilege granted was considered revocable by the Indians whenever they were tired of their company. Plymouth court made an enactment that certain of the best necks of land in their bounds, — like Mount Hope, Pocasset, etc., — as being most suitable and convenient for the Indians, should not be purchased from them. In Increase Mather's History of Philip's War, he quotes the well-known letter addressed to him by Josiah Winslow, of Plymouth, in which the writer says that the court strictly reserved the first-mentioned sites to the Indians to prevent their parting with them, which otherwise they would have done. It is in this letter that Winslow makes the positive assertion, that “before these present troubles broke out the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” Yet Dr. Mather begins his History with this sentence: “That the heathen people amongst whom we live, and whose land the Lord God of our fathers hath given to us for a rightful possession,” etc. Dr. Mather furnishes evidences — of which there are so many more — of that relentless and vindictive, and we may say savage, spirit which burned in the hearts of magistrates, ministers, and people as the consequence of what they had suffered in their very first wars from the exasperated savages. This was invariably the effect on the feelings of whites who had had experience of Indian warfare. Not one throb of pity or sympathy for the natives softens the bitterness poured out upon them by the Mathers. More rancorous even are the terms used of the Indians by the Rev. William Hubbard of Ipswich, whom the Court made the historian of New England. He calls them “treacherous villains,” “the dross of mankind,” “the dregs and lees of the earth,” “faithless and ungrateful monsters,” “the caitiff Philip,” etc. Mather said, “The Lord in judgment had been riding among us on a red horse.”
Between holding lands by fair purchase from the ​Indians and receiving them as “a rightful possession from the Lord God,” there is certainly a confusion of title.
In 1610 Captain West, of the Virginia Colony, purchased of “King” Powhatan the region around the present city of Richmond — whatever that might include — for a small quantity of copper.
In 1626 Governor Minuit bought the Island of Manhattan (New York) for sixty guilders (twenty-four dollars).
In 1634 the Maryland Indians agreed that Lord Baltimore's Company, for the consideration of some cloth, tools, and trinkets, should share their town till the harvest; and then, on further like consideration, the Indians would move off, leaving the white man in possession. It is intimated, however, that the accommodating tribe were in dread of being driven from their land by a band of neighboring red men.
In 1638 the Swedes bought Christiana of the Indians for a kettle and some trifling wares.
In 1638 the island of Rhode Island was purchased of the chiefs by Roger Williams's company for “forty fathoms of white beads.” But Williams says that it was “for love and favor with the great sachem,” not for an equivalent value, that he received it.
In 1638 New Haven was sold to the whites by sachems, for “twelve coats of English cloth, twelve alchemy [metal] spoons, twelve hoes, twelve hatchets, twelve porringers, twenty-four knives, and four cases of French knives and scissors.”
In 1642 Gorton and his company bought Shawomet, of Miantonomo and others, for one hundred and forty-four fathoms of wampum.
In 1666 the site of Newark in New Jersey was paid for by fifty double hands of powder, one hundred bars of lead; of axes, coats, pistols, and hoes, twenty each; of guns, kettles, and swords, ten each; four blankets, four barrels of beer, two pairs of “breetches,” fifty knives, eight ​hundred and fifty fathoms of wampum, “two ankers of liquors, or something equivalent, and three troopers' coats.” This formidable inventory indicates either that the Indians had become more appreciative of their land and better skilled in bargaining, or that the white purchasers had become more conscionable.
In 1670 Staten Island passed to a white owner for four hundred fathoms of wampum and a number of guns, axes, kettles, and watch-coats.
The first settlers of Boston, besides buying out the right of the lonely first English occupant, paid a trifle to a survivor of the tribe killed off by the plague, and again to his grandson, in 1685.
The sea-shore town of Beverly, with an Indian village and “improvements,” was purchased for £6 6s. 8d.
The famous “Walking Purchase” of Pennsylvania land by the Quakers is variously viewed, as a fair transaction, or as an adroit trick of slyness against simplicity.
To one who should care to pursue and probe to the bottom any single case of controversy between the colonists and the Indians, which after being aggravated ended in ruthless slaughter, each side complaining that the other was the first aggressor, that of King Philip's war, in 1675 — involving, relatively, the most formidable conspiracy ever formed among the natives, and at one time threatening the absolute extermination of the whites — would furnish the most suggestive instance. Indeed this war, with its provocations, suspicions, and wrongs on either side, has been made a signal example of pleading and championship in our local histories. No Indian historian has left us the relation of its conduct and causes, from his point of view. But though the whites had the whole field for self-justification at the time, and find their side well argued in most of our sober and elaborate histories from their day to our own, there are not wanting vigorous, fair-minded, and effective pleaders who have told the story from the Indian point of ​view, in a way to vindicate Philip and his followers as altogether justifiable in their course of resistance to the white man's wrongs and outrages. These Indian advocates have cast upon our ancestral magistrates and soldiers the burden of what to us seems inhuman, and, of course, unchristian.
In the abundance and variety of the printed pages relating to the right and the wrong in Philip's war, it would hardly be worth our while to attempt another discussion of it. It is very easy to make and strengthen a plea on either side, for each had a cause and found justification for standing for it, even to the most dire extremities. It is enough to say that our sympathy, at least, goes with the barbarous victims of their own blind and dauntless effort to resist what we call their destiny; and that the weight of condemnation must come on the English for suspicions and unwise measures and actual wrongs, in the early stages of the strife. They were the intruders; they were arrogant and overbearing; they were the stronger party, and, in profession at least, held themselves more intelligently bound to justice, mercy, and righteousness. The blame, I say, is with them in the opening of the strife. But as it advanced, and in their dread consternation as it strengthened in extent and horror and success; as their frontiers were desolated, and fire, massacre, and torture came nearer and nearer to their centre, — the yell, the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the torch working up the nightmare of every man, woman, and child in their scattered settlements, — we can no longer interpose our scruples as to acts or apprehensions of the exasperated and almost desperate colonists. Probably we cannot overstrain the palliation we are disposed to find for the whites, alike in their opinion of the natural fiendishness of the Indian character and their horror of Indian warfare, after their first dire experience of both. White men all over this warring globe have generally suspended hostilities in the dark hours of night, if only that they might distinguish between friend and foe; ​but the darkness was the time for the Indian's revelry in horrors. The Indian, in his warfare with the English, availed himself of all those resources of his own which compensated his lack of the white man's means. The patience with which the savage would lie in the covert of the thicket, perhaps for one or several days, to watch the husbandman who might pass to his field or clearing, made the whole space around a settlement, and long reaches between the settlements, haunted as with imps of mischief. The savages, soon learning of the Sunday habits of the English in their rude temples, would steal upon the cabins, where only infants and the infirm were left, and ply the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, and the torch. They dashed the infants against rock or tree before the eyes of their mothers; they maimed and slaughtered the cattle; they bore their prisoners off for unnamed tortures. But it was their onset by night, or before the gray of morning, on an unsuspecting group of sleepers in the rude dwellings on the edge of the wilderness, with their yells and whoops, that heaped the dreads of their warfare. This experience, with all the variations of ferocity, malignity, and atrocity, was especially harrowing for those who shared the realities of Philip's dark conspiracy, and it struck deeply and burned sharply into their hearts and minds their hate of the Indian as an enemy.
I have selected King Philip's war in 1675, rather than the earlier Pequot war in 1636, as affording the specimen case for presenting all the elements which enter into a historical examination and discussion of the causes and occasion and conduct of a bitter strife between the English colonists and those upon whose lands and rights they were trespassing. Whatever was the territorial tenure of the natives here, they were justified in maintaining it, certainly against those who with no claim at all were evidently bent upon dispossessing them. The most significant and distinguishing quality in that war was, that the readiness with which ​the master mind of the great Indian chieftain succeeded in engaging in his conspiracy so comprehensive a body of the natives — many of them not of his own tribe — showed how widespread was the hatred of the English, and how easily the Indians could be banded against them. Another exceptional incident in that war was that the whites had no Indian allies, saving only a few individual informers, spies, and guides who were faithless to their own race. Some of the more melancholy complications and consequences of King Philip's war, as thwarting the best intentioned schemes formed by the most humane of the Massachusetts people for the civilization and security of the natives, will present themselves in our dealing with another theme.
The Pequot war of 1636, which was the first in the series of bloody and well-nigh exterminating campaigns of the New Englanders against the natives, involved some peculiar elements, which at least in their own judgment relieved the former of all blame for what they did, and even gave them the honorable merit of avengers of wrong. The Pequots — inhabiting the finest spaces in Connecticut, extending to the Hudson River — were a fierce and numerous tribe, who had driven off the former occupants of the territory in a series of conflicts, and so held by recent conquest. The English had consented to their own proffers of amity. A feud existed between them and their neighbors the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, who instigated the whites, upon provocations which they soon received, to accept them as allies against the Pequots. Even Roger Williams became the adviser and efficient helper of the magistrates and soldiers of the other colonies in the exterminating campaign which was soon opened against them. The Pequots had committed a succession of murders, on the land and river and bay, of individuals and small parties of the whites who had first ventured for trade or settlement upon their territories. They had accompanied these deeds with mutilations of the bodies of their victims, and with defiances and taunts ​of the English. Most summary was the vengeance which they had thus provoked. No feature of savage warfare was lacking in the night assault, the burnings, the impalings, the promiscuous slaughter, the pursuit into swamps, by which the whites with red allies extinguished that fierce tribe, reserving only a remnant to be sold for slaves. A modern historian must be excused from relating, as he could not essay to relieve, the sadness and shame of the truthful record of the conduct of the English in that dark episode, closed with their perfidy in sacrificing the noble Miantonomo.
We may infer somewhat of the opinion held beforehand by the Plymouth Pilgrims of the sort of human beings they were to find here, from what the excellent Governor Bradford tells us was in the minds of his associates in Holland when they were hesitating in their purpose to cross the ocean as exiles. He writes: “The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only salvage and brutish men, which range up and down little otherwise than the wild beasts of the same.” This was written many years after Bradford had been living here among the Indians, and had had full knowledge of them.
Cotton Mather writes: “These parts were then covered with nations of barbarous Indians and infidels, in whom the Prince of the power of the air did work as a spirit; nor could it be expected that nations of wretches, whose whole religion was the most explicit sort of Devil-worship, should not be acted by the Devil to engage in some early and bloody action for the extinction of a plantation so contrary to his interests as that of New England was.” He calls Satan “the old landlord” of the country. It certainly must have seemed to the Indians that the landlord ​had not improved upon his tenantry by substituting white for red men.
A journal written in the Dutch province, at Albany, New York, soon after 1640, traces the beginnings of discordant relations with the neighboring Indians to the misdoings of the whites. The writer says, that, instead of trading, as a company and by system, with the natives, each man set up for himself, roamed in the wilderness for free traffic, and was mastered by a jealous selfishness. They drew upon themselves contempt instead of respect from the Indians by over familiarity, — admitting them to their cabins, feasting and trifling with them, and selling them guns, powder, and bullets. At least four hundred armed savages were then found between the Dutch settlements and Canada, and were thus placed at an unfair and mischievous advantage over other Indians. These charges relate rather, at the time when they were written, to the Dutch than to the English, and were strictly true. The English governor of the province long after its transfer, Governor Colden, tells us how a chief complained to him of the stiffer attitude of pride which the English assumed towards the natives. He said: “When the Dutch held this country, we lay in their houses; but the English have always made us lie without doors.” Colden adds: “It is true that the Plantations were first settled by the meanest people of every nation, and such as had the least sense of honor. The Dutch first settlers, many of them, I may say, had none of the virtues of their countrymen except their industry in getting money, and they sacrificed everything other people think honorable or most sacred, to their gain.” This also was said of the Dutch, not of the English, colonists.
From 1640 to 1643 the war then raging between the Dutch and the Indians threatened to become general through the colonies. The traders up the Hudson had defied all the rigid prohibitions against the selling arms to the Indians, and the Mohawks with their confederates on the ​river nearly exterminated the settlers at Manhattan. Then the massacre of the Indians by the Dutch at Pavonia and Corlaer's Hook was attended by barbarous tortures, which rivalled in cruelty and horror even the savagery of the natives. Fearful devastation and terror followed. Two Indians were so shockingly tortured by the Dutch at Manhattan that even some squaws, as they looked on, cried, “Shame!” Captain Underhill, leading the Dutch, massacred nearly seven hundred Indians near Greenwich and Stamford. It was estimated that sixteen hundred savages were killed in this war.
Three distinct and most destructive massacres and onsets by the Indians are marked in the early colonial history of Virginia. The first settlers in their almost abortive efforts, renewed in spite of overwhelming disasters and failures, to obtain a foothold on the soil, had been frequently, we may say continuously, indebted to the generosity of the natives in rescuing them from starvation. In ungrateful return they insulted and spoiled their benefactors. Stirred to self-defence and revenge by a resolute chieftain, — successor and brother to the so-called “Emperor” Powhatan, who hated the encroaching whites, — a secret conspiracy was organized among them, long and carefully planned, without knowledge or suspicion by the settlers. On the day agreed upon, in concert, the scattered dwellings of the colonists were set upon, — March 22, 1622. Laborers and loiterers and whole families were taken in the panic of surprise, and in one and the same hour three hundred and fifty whites — men, women, and children — were slaughtered. The miserable remnant took refuge within their rude and rotting fort at Jamestown, and the wonder is that the savages did not follow up their furious onset by starving and extirpating that remnant. Nor did the whites learn wisdom, caution, or humanity from this visitation of vengeance from those whom they so outraged and oppressed.
​When the news of this massacre reached London, and it was brought there before the Council of Virginia, the word sent back to the dismayed wretches at Jamestown was this: “We must advise you to root out from being any longer a people so cursed, a nation ungrateful to all benefits and uncapable of all goodness,” — the “people” and “nation” thus described being the Indian, not the English. And again: “Take a sharp revenge upon the bloody miscreants, even to the measure that they intended against us, — the rooting them out for being longer a people on the face of the earth.”
Another concerted outburst of the savages in Virginia took place in 1644, when nearly as many of the whites as in the previous conspiracy were numbered as victims. Still a third similar combination of the hounded and abused natives, in 1656, renewed the efforts, at any cost to themselves, to visit the utmost vengeance upon their tormentors. Though the whites in this case had Indian allies, the result rather aggravated their disasters.
Were it worth the careful and thorough research which would be required for a full examination of all our materials of local and general history, to pursue the details of these various conflicts between the whites and the Indians as they were first enacted by the earlier bodies of the colonists on the regions nearest to the seaboard, it is believed that full verification would be made of the assertion, that, notwithstanding the white man's superiority in weapons and skill, the victims on his own side in all hostilities far outnumbered those of the red men. That, save in the Quaker proprietary province of Pennsylvania, there should not have been a single exception, near the close of the century so filled with savage warfare, to the universal enactment of these tragic massacres between the two races, might offer another subject for thorough investigation by an interested inquirer. Were there forces working through natural antipathies, through ​irreconcilable race instincts, and through the compulsion of circumstances, which made this struggle inevitable? If so, and if this view of the facts can be philosophically sustained, not in vindication of wrong, but in explanation of experience, then a lesson so signally assured as true in the past must furnish instruction and guidance for the future. But if all this direful rage and havoc of human passion, this goading purpose of mastery by the strong and privileged over the weak and incompetent, were merely a huge struggle of might against right, it is simple trifling to refer it to any principle rooted in the nature of things. Race prejudices have had range and opportunity sufficient to show their strength. Perhaps the world is wise and humane enough now to inquire whether they are just and right, whether they are to be yielded to or discredited.
During our whole colonial and provincial period it was the hard fate of the Indians, as we have seen, to bear the brunt of every quarrel between the rival European colonists in their jealousies and struggles for dominion and the profits of the fur-trade. No sooner had one of the rivals conciliated or established friendly relations with one or more of the tribes, than the representatives of the other rival would seek to thwart any advantage of their opponents by openly or covertly forming alliances with other tribes. Tribes which might otherwise have lived in a state of suspended animosities with each other were thus driven to take the war-path. So, too, it has happened that the whole or a portion of a tribe, or of allied tribes, in the course of a century was found in the pay and service of the French against the English; of the English against the French; of the Spaniards against the French, and of the French against the Spaniards; and then of the armies of Great Britain and our own provincial forces against the French, followed in a few years by their enlistment by Great Britain to aid her in crushing the rebellion of her own colonies.
​We have referred thus far only to such acts of warfare with the savages during our colonial period as were without concert between colonists in widely separated localities, each defending its own plantation with its own resources against its own assailants.
This statement, however, as to the separate conduct of hostilities in the early colonial period by each distinct plantation is subject to qualification in the case of the New England colonists. These came into a confederation in 1643, mainly with a view to mutual protection and defence against the savages. They were to be friends and allies in military operations, and to recognize their enemies as common. Though this confederation had not been formed at the time of the Pequot war, as the component parties to it were not all then in being, there was an anticipation of its objects so far as the case admitted. Soldiers from Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Rhode Island, with Narragansett and Mohican allies, composed the army of invasion and destruction. When the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, New Haven, and Connecticut came into confederacy, a jealousy and dislike of some of the characteristic principles of Rhode Island led to its exclusion, though it had liberty to come in as if really a part of Plymouth colony. In King Philip's war the confederacy proved to be very effective, though there were jars and much friction in its elements and in its executive workings. So this great conspiracy of the natives was met, as were the oppressive measures of the mother country just a century afterwards, by the union of confederated colonial forces. Gradually, as the drama advanced over the stage of the continent, not only did all the colonial governments find themselves drawn into more or less of combined hostility against the natives, but England came into the strife with fleets and armies.
The rivalry between the English and the French colonists, which for nearly a century and a half had been fomenting here, — varied by broils, intrigues, local conflicts, ​and bloody struggles in the wilderness and on the frontiers, with naval encounters, sieges, and changing success and failure, with occasional pauses by truce and diplomacy, — was substantially brought to a decision by what we call emphatically the French and Indian War. The final struggle was protracted for seven years, the period closing a little more than a decade before the opening of our Revolutionary War. By the Peace of Paris, in 1763, France ceded to Great Britain all her territory here lying east of the Mississippi; retaining Louisiana, as then so defined, which, however, by a secret treaty she ceded at the time to Spain, to be regained afterwards by France, and then sold to our Government. While France was still maintaining her hold upon Canada and the Ohio Valley, she had won to her side the Western Indian tribes, and had even to some degree conciliated her old-time relentless foes, the Iroquois of New York. But from the first tokens of the crippling and failing of the sway of France, her Indian allies began to manifest their inconstancy and fickleness and their mercenary spirit by trimming for English friendships. The English had already encroached upon the fur-trade; and though their enterprise of this sort had been perilous, it had proved profitable enough to prompt extension. England, as has been observed on a previous page, had now an opportunity which she wasted or trifled with, so as to turn against her the fiercest and most disastrous and the most concentrated struggle against their destiny which the Indian tribes had ever been goaded into making since their first collision with the white man. The effect in the diplomacy of the courts of the cession by France to Britain of Canada and the Ohio Valley was to transfer all the Indian tribes of those vast regions to British sway. The Indians became as much subjects of the British Crown as were the white colonists. They had no part in this treaty transfer, whatever might have been their part in the war which was closed by it. They had no idea of being thus made over, ​with their territory, by one foreign power to another, both being alike intruders and interlopers. England did indeed, after the treaty, by proclamation, reserve the Ohio Valley and the neighboring region for the Indians, and forbade the whites to intrude for settlement upon it. But the Indians had not at the time the knowledge of this royal provision for them; and in fact it was made too late, for the mischief which it was intended to avert had been already done. That country had been penetrated by English traders, who coursed over portions of it with their trains of pack-horses. More than this: daring and enterprising men, with or without their families, had cleared and occupied many settlements or isolated homes scattered over its attractive spaces. Wofully did they have to meet, in addition to the toils and bufferings of their pioneer life, the vengeance of their exasperated savage foes.
The first move of the regulars of the Crown with provincial troops was to take possession of the forts and strongholds ceded with the French dominion, to change their garrisons, and to substitute the British flag for that of France. These strongholds were sadly battered and decayed. The French had cajoled the ever-jealous savages to wink at their establishment, as trading-posts and mission stations, on the pretence that they would be a security to the favored tribes against their foes. The British forces at the time were much reduced; only skeletons of regiments left here and others weakened by service in the West Indies being available, as the body of the troops had been disbanded and sent home at the peace. It was under these circumstances and with such means that the lake and valley posts passing from the sway of France were to be occupied by the English at a cost not foreseen.
In reading from original and authentic sources the letters, journals, and narratives relating to the French and Indian wars and to our own immediately subsequent conflicts under Great Britain with the infuriated savages, we ​are profoundly impressed by the prowess, heroism, outlay of arduous effort and exhaustive toil by the English and provincial forces. Their work was in gloomy and almost impenetrable forests, often pathless and treacherous, beset by ambushed foes, whose stealthy tread was as noiseless as their fiendish shrieks and yellings were appalling, when they broke from the woods with tomahawk and scalping-knife upon their wretched victims. The policy of all the European colonists — whether their main object was the occupation of interior territory in their rivalry for possession, or to secure a centre of trade with the Indians — was to push forward armed parties, with supplies, to seize strategic posts for strongholds. These were advanced beyond the actual settlements, and were planted at the forks or near the sources of rivers, at portages, and on favoring sites on the shores of lakes. These forts were defended and protected as well as circumstances would permit. They would have been but as houses of cards in the warfare of civilized men; but they were of service against the simple tactics of the savage. A blockhouse of solid timber, with rude barracks, a magazine, a well, the whole surrounded by a high stockade with loopholes, — such was the wilderness fort. They were designed to admit of communication with each other, and so with the centres of civilization, whence from time to time supplies and reinforcements for their garrisons might be brought to them. Often when there were any outlying and scattered settlements near these defended posts, the dismayed and perilled frontier families, or fugitives escaping from a massacre, would flee to them for a refuge. When the savages in their rage and rapacity were lurking around one of these exposed forts, or daringly besieging it with their crafty demand for a parley, or their mocking taunts and hideous bellowings, they racked their barbarous ingenuity for means for outwitting the hated white man. Night and day the slender garrison, often weak from scant fare and exhausted by sleeplessness, ​would need to watch every moment lest an arrow, winged with flaming tow, should fire their combustible defences, or they should expose head or limb to foes armed now with the white man's weapons as well as their own, and skilled already in some of the arts and guile of their enemies.
The courage of the garrison was nerved in every fibre and muscle to hold the fort; bearing almost inconceivable drafts upon their fortitude and endurance, because they well knew what horrors and torments would attend their fate if they faltered and were vanquished. We read with creepings of our flesh, and as if we were having part in the long-drawn agony, the literally faithful reports from these forest strongholds. As when we witness the marvellous feats of acrobats and jugglers, or listen to the strains of some gifted musician, or admire the genius of an artist in some consummate work, we are led to marvel at the manifold and latent capacities and aptitudes of our common human nature in its play and in its finer endowments, — so, when we are made to realize what men have dared and done, what they have effected and endured, and how they have existed and also found the zest of a strange joy through perils and woes, even the relation of which we cannot bear, then also are we reminded of what there is of latent power and ability in men. One grows distasteful of sentimental romance and the creations of fiction who has informed himself of such real things in man's exposures and ventures and endurings. It seems heartless to play with such stern experiences as if fancy or rhythm could either soften or heighten them.
In keeping up communication between these forest garrisons with each other and with their base, it was always necessary — and the emergency was greatest when the peril or disaster was most threatening and dire — to send expresses through the haunted wilderness. Whenever the straits or the baffled wits or the deliberate judgment of the officer in command decided that a scout or messenger ​must be sent forth on that stern errand, he had a right to name his man. He knew whom to select; and very rarely — I know not if in any case — did the order find the man to refuse or to quail. To creep through the gate in the darkness; to track his way by night through forest, swamp, and watercourse, with snow-shoes or moccasons torn by the tangling briars or soaked with the ooze of the woods and marshes, listening to the music of howling wolves and hooting owls, as sweet compared with the shriek and yell of the red man; to find a covert by day, and so — alone, famished, fireless, and pinched by the cold to his very marrow — to alternate by light and darkness, still undismayed, till his errand was sped or dismally baffled; — this was his work and its conditions. Amazement comes over us when we know how often this venture of heroism succeeded. We willingly leave unveiled in tragic gloom the cases in which message and messenger were often shrouded.
What herculean toil, what a strain upon all human resources of vigor and endurance, were exacted in the planting and supply of a wilderness stronghold! The pack-horse was comparatively a deferred help in this work. Human hands and backs and shoulders did the earliest, the hardest, and the worst of it. If the convoy needed something broader than the Indian trail (the forest pathway) for a train in Indian file, then a military road was to be opened, the fallen trees making a lurking-place for skulking Indians, while the stumps and rocks impeded the lumbering wagons, with their cannon and flour-bags and meat-barrels. Cattle, too, were to be moved over those pastureless highways. When the English, after the cession of Canada, went with their scant forces and the help of provincials and occasionally some friendly Indian allies to take possession of the farther forts on the lakes, the enterprise was thick with the perils of sea and shore. On the route from the seaboard, whence artillery, ​munitions, and all heavy supplies were to be received, lay the carrying-place around the Falls of Niagara, — the most rough and dangerous of all portages, in which was the trap well called “the Devil's Hole.” While all supplies had to be carried in hand or on packs over this interval of precipices and maddened waters, the batteaux and the armed vessels for the lakes had to be constructed above it to receive the freight.
It is to this harrowing period of our colonial warfare with the savages, after the conquest of Canada and before our Revolutionary struggle, that Mr. Parkman devotes his marvellously skilful pen, in his “Conspiracy of Pontiac.” Though the theme of this work, wrought with such graphic power in its absorbing interest, properly closes the history of New France, in his series of volumes it was the first to be given to the public; and the author has since, in successive publications, been dealing with the periods and incidents preceding it. It was this, his first historical publication, that engaged for the author the highest appreciation of his readers, as one who had been long looked and waited for as competent, gifted, and inclined to give to the most characteristic and thrilling themes and scenes of our history a treatment worthy of their grand materials and actors. The wilderness opens its depths, its grandeur, its solitudes, and all its phenomena of scenery and adventure to his eye and thought, to his rare genius of description and interpretation. His delineation of the “Indian Summer” at Detroit is more a painting than a piece of writing. His portraiture of the savage on the war-path — in his fierceness and rage, in his weapons of hand and passion, in his weak as well as his strong qualities, in his inconstancy as in his resolve — is the most faithful that has ever been drawn in all literature. His relation of sieges, ambushes, stratagems, and fights, his details of the vigils of the imperilled in garrisons and in lonely cabins, and of the desolations and woes of victims amid scenes of horror, are relieved of actual ​torture for the reader only by the arrest of the pen when to be told more would be unendurable.
How far the Indian tribes with which in our turn we have to deal are to be regarded in blood and lineage, in descent or affiliation, as representatives of those with whom the European colonists came into these protracted conflicts, may be an intricate question for examination. There has been a series of such conflicts on successive strips or regions of the continent, and corresponding changes in the names of the tribes encountered and vanquished. The Indians with whom the first colonists came into collision may all be supposed to have seen the salt water, as living near the seaboard where they met the invaders. Their names have dropped from speech and their tribes are regarded as extinct, whether because they have wholly perished, or because what remnants of them remain in descent have been adopted or merged in other tribes. At all events we hear nothing nowadays of Pequots, Mohicans, Narragansetts, Pamankeys. In the second century of the colonies such familiar names as the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Delawares, the Shawanoes, and the Miamis, with the Ottawas and the Ojibways, engross our attention. Now with each new year of Western enterprise some of the old names of tribes drop out of use, and new ones appear in Government records and in the papers, as the Arapahoes, the Comanches, the Apaches, the Snakes, the Blackfeet. Whether these tribes last made known to us are affiliated with those of our earliest acquaintance, or have been disclosed to us as reserved and original sections of the same old race of red men, independent in lineage and position, certain it is that they are the same sort of men in all their marked characteristics, — in nature, habits, traits, ways of life, method of warfare, jealousy and hatred of the whites, and steadfast dislike of civilization. The exceptions to this statement are few and quite recent. The savages roaming near the passes and plains of the Rocky Mountains ​are identical in barbarousness with those once near our seaboard, and those once on the borders of the Great Lakes and in the Ohio Valley. The red race is unchanged in its specimen examples and in its staple, save as to the adoption by some of them of the white man's weapons and goods. In the mean time the characteristics, the habits, the feelings and sentiments of the white race have been modified even as regards the attitude assumed towards the Indians. No body of the whites now, holding relatively the same social and moral position as the stock of our first colonists, would maintain that the Indians are to be exterminated or denied the rights of humanity because they are heathens or because they are savages. Their claim to territory and to generous treatment is more frankly and emphatically recognized to-day than ever before; and this because of the white man's advance in humanity.
It is noticeable that the spirit of humane philanthropy, of leniency and sympathy as regards the Indians and their treatment, has been and is to-day exceedingly variable, not so much among classes of our people as in the places where they happen to live. The farther any community is in space, or in the dates of its history, from actual experience of Indian conflicts, the more kindly will the people in it be towards the savages in general; commiserating them, and advising their patient and forbearing treatment. Scarce one single loud breathing of pity or sympathy would have been indulged in our own neighborhood two hundred or more than one hundred years ago. Those whose eyes had beheld, or whose household memories and fresh traditions kept alive, the scenes of devastation, burning, and butchery in the New England settlements in King Philip's war would with scarce an exception have avowed, that absolute extinction, without mercy in the method, was the necessary and the rightful doom of the savage. Much the same, scarcely softened, would have been the judgment of our ​soldiers and their families, and of communities living but little more than a score of miles from Boston, when the Indians goaded and led on by their Jesuit priests and the French from Canada brought devastation and massacre on so many of our frontier settlements.
The wounds of those days of agony and torture are healed. The dismay and exasperation, the rage and deeply implanted hate which fired them have cooled. The Indian has passed from our sight and range. We know him only in story, or as our daily papers tell us of distant encounters with wasting tribes, and puzzle us with confused pleadings and reproaches as to the right and wrong of each fresh outburst. He would have been a hero in nerve, and a saint or a fool in spirit or judgment, who a little more than a hundred years ago had advocated the peace policy amid the border settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, when, goaded by the master-purpose and plan of Pontiac, the region between the Alleghanies and the Ohio Valley was the scene of the most dire carnage, desolation, and horror; when a thousand scattered households were destroyed with all the atrocities of savage warfare, and two thousand men, women, and children suffered all the ingenuities of mutilation and torture. It does not surprise us to read that even the peace policy of the Friends, under which they had lived for more than sixty years generally so amicably with the Indians, should have yielded — some think ludicrously, others think contemptibly — under the strain and agony of that bitter crisis for humanity. In its earlier stages that frontier havoc by the infuriated league of savages hardly disturbed the tranquillity of the thrifty Quakers in Philadelphia. It was charged that their pity and sympathy for the Indians exceeded their regard for the scattered settlers on their frontiers, principally Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who had all become victims or fugitives. The Friends, too, had a controlling influence in their provincial Assembly. When, ​after imploring appeals and impassioned remonstrances, they were induced to vote a sum of money as a supply for the defence of the province, they prudently called it a gift for the service of the King. But the time came, with the straits of dire necessity, when those Philadelphia Quakers were found armed and drilled, with all the stern paraphernalia of fight and battle, with cannon planted in their barricaded streets. And that battle array was forced upon them, not for an encounter with actual Indians invading their city, but to ward off a troop of well-nigh maddened rustics, — the Paxton Boys, — the survivors and champions of their murdered neighbors, who came to insist that the peace policy should no longer trifle with the dire emergency. Hardly, under the circumstances, are we staggered at reading the tariff of bounties already mentioned, which the governor, grandson of William Penn, offered by proclamation, — as, for a male Indian prisoner, above ten years old, one hundred and fifty Spanish dollars; for a female, one hundred and thirty dollars; for the scalp of such a male, one hundred and thirty-four dollars, — of a female, fifty dollars. The Assembly voted to send three hundred men to aid in protecting the frontiers; and by the earnest request of Colonel Bouquet, as he informed General Amherst, the commissioners agreed to send to England for fifty couples of bloodhounds to be used by the Rangers on horseback against Indian-scalping parties. It was remarkable that the accumulation of all that is harrowing and desolating in the methods and atrocities of Indian warfare should have been visited upon the province which in the purpose and policy of its proprietary founder was expressly and solemnly pledged to just and amicable relations with the savages. It is but right, therefore, to make recognition of the fact that the Quakers had no initiative agency in these hostilities, and did their utmost, even to what seemed an indulgence in supineness, apathy, and indifference to the calamities visited upon the white ​settlers on their bounds, to restrain the visiting of any vengeance upon the savages. The principal sufferers on the outskirts of the province were not Quakers, but, as we have noticed, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Though these venturesome pioneers themselves provoked the hate of the savages, they suffered as common victims of the great conspiracy of the tribes.
An important word, which we meet more frequently than any other in every historic reference to our Indian relations, is that word “Frontiers.” It is used to define a supposed and somewhat imaginary boundary line between the fixed white settlements and territory vacant or still occupied by the Indians. That boundary line has always been, as it is now, a very ragged and unstable one. It has proved to be like the horizon, when one is walking towards it; it has never been a real barrier, but always movable, and always a line of strife and conflict. It has been shifting between every mountain range and every broad river between the Gulf of Mexico and the Lake of the Woods, till it has become self-obliterated, and no longer a significant word. Our frontiers, which that boundary line was supposed to limit, have become merged and blurred on the whole of this side of our continent, and have begun to advance inwards from the Pacific coast.
Less than three hundred years ago, there was not that number of Europeans on our broad domain: there are now more than forty millions of that stock here. In the development reaching to that result, it would be difficult to say where, for the space of even a single year, the frontiers of the white man have rested. The present domain of the United States may be set before our view, under joint European discovery and occupancy, as parted in three longitudinal strips dividing the continent to three great nationalities. Thus to Spain would be assigned the Pacific coast, advancing towards the Rocky Mountains; to France, the middle strip, from those Mountains to the Alleghanies; ​and to Great Britain, the Atlantic seaboard. As we follow out in the records and romances of our history the steady advance of exploration and settlement under crown and proprietary grants, opening the inner recesses of our continent, we trace the workings of two great branches of enterprise, — the one, combined and public, associated and aided by royalty and patronage; the other, guided wholly by individual energy and resources. The rival efforts and conflicting claims of European sovereignties have set the great stake on trial by the ordeal of battle between white men. The ardor and heroism of individual pioneer adventurers have pushed beyond the ventures of any associated enterprise, and, with a persistency of purpose which has seemed almost like the goading of fate, have resolved that this magnificent domain should no longer serve for the tramping covert of roaming and yelping savages, but should yield itself to the uses of civilized man. Hard would it have been for the aborigines, at any time since their first sight of Europeans, to have said where the frontier boundary line was to be drawn.
Yet none the less has there been here always a line, however unstable and shifting, which may be said to have marked the frontiers of the white settlement. Deeply and distinctly, ineffaceably forever, has that line been drawn at different times, in the records of heroism and tragedy, in deeds and tales of courage, daring, barbarity, and agony. I think I speak within the bounds of sober truth, when I say that there is not anywhere on this continent an area of twenty square miles that has not witnessed a death struggle between the white and the red men, not merely as individuals, but in bands. Never was a people so concerned, as within the last half century our own people have become, in searching out the local history and tracing the human associations of every spot of our settled territory. Indeed, we are overlaying our history with piles and masses of literature which no one lifetime can ever master. ​And the records or traditions of every town and village narration begin with an Indian story. We might expect it would be so as regards our seaboard, but it is equally and even emphatically the same with the youngest settlement of the West. If there might be judicious digests of personal experience and adventure in our successive frontiers, with the fresh coloring of real nature and actual life, without any heightening from romance, what stores of exciting and thrilling literature in biography and ballad would be provided for our young readers in the coming generations! When there are no longer here any virgin soil, nor pathless forests, nor lurking beasts, nor rivers unbridged, undammed, reposing with their lakes in wild solitudes; when cities and villages, manufactories and railways, fast dwellings and secure highways, stretch from ocean to ocean, — how breezy and rejuvenating will be the gathered lore of our early days of pioneers and adventurers, of white men who became Indians, of hardy and self-reliant solitary explorers and trappers, who trod only on grass and leaves, lived on their surroundings, drank from the stream, slept under the stars, and were ready at any moment for the yelling savage and his tomahawk!
We are to remember that, with the single exception of the English Puritan colonists, the first Europeans to come here were for a considerable time only men, without women, and to a man adventurers, daring, self-reliant, full of nerve and vigor, — often, too, reckless. It was not in the nature of such men to remain still anywhere. They did not love any kind of industrious, quiet occupation any better than did the Indians. Tillage and handicrafts were an abomination to most of them; they meant that the soil, the waters, and the woods should yield them free sustenance. The large mass of them deliberately cast themselves upon the Indian supplies, meagre as these often were. But as the stream of colonization swelled, the necessity of labor for life became a stern one. Then single settlers, ​groups, or families began to trace the rivers inland to their sources, in search of fertile meadows and bottom lands, and game and peltry. From that time we began to have frontiers, and we have had them ever since. We may draw their lines as they advanced from year to year, by our river courses, and our mountain ranges and rich valleys. The Alleghanies seemed for a brief time as if they would be a permanent barrier to the English, especially as on the other side the Indians were already armed by the French and allied with them. If the genius of Walter Scott has invested with a romantic glow the raids of cattle-lifters and freebooters on the Scottish borders, as the Highlanders rushed from their glens to plunder the Lowlanders, what may not the pens of ready writers for all time to come do with a region like that which we first called the West, with its tales of prowess and heroism, of lonely settlers and sparse garrisons, and of fierce struggles in which every creek and meadow and hill-top was the prize at stake between red men and white men! The field for our story-tellers and romancers and poets is indeed a rich one. Cooper's tales and Campbell's “Gertrude of Wyoming” have hardly trenched upon its mines.
When enterprise, courage, and victory had secured the line at the foot of the Alleghanies, single pioneers had already advanced the line, and lonely settlers were carrying the frontier onwards. It crossed the territory of our Middle States; then Mississippi, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, Kansas, Dakota, and the Plains, reaching the foot of the Rocky Mountains; and then the restless and adventurous white man traversed the whole land course to meet from the Pacific coast the traffickers who had gone round by sea to exchange cargoes on the Columbia.
Stockade forts, army posts, sylvan camps, military roads, emigrant trains, and mail stations have year by year marked the advances of this frontier line. There is hardly a more interesting and suggestive theme than that caught either ​by a glance of the eye or by the close study of the mind over a full series of maps found in the journals of explorers or in our voluminous Government archives, illustrating the westward progress of our race and power on this continent. Along the courses and at the forks of all our great rivers, at their mouths and at their sources, on lake and creek, we find dotted the successive posts occupied for defence, for refuge, or for supplies. They are simply stages, — hardly so stable as that: they are scarcely more than the footmarks, the tread from step to step, of the restless white man. And the names which these earthen burrows or palisaded defences bear on the maps (for they are in many cases passing into oblivion) are the head-lines or titles of so many stories, — the names of military heroes, or hapless victims, or tragic scenes of endurance or massacre. It is hardly strange that our Western countrymen should be open to the charge from our mother land of having corrupted, or barbarized, or vulgarized the English language. Our Western explorers and adventurers have had occasion for words or vocables not found in the dictionaries, and they have not hesitated to invent them, or to let Nature do it for them. Our Government has under preparation an authentic and elaborate map, which is carefully to mark the original native names for the whole continent, and to note the successive nomenclature of red and white men. And the map will be a history. It will not, however, be desirable to perpetuate the names which pioneers and “prospectors” have transiently attached from their mean and often foul vocabularies to fresh wilderness scenes. Of these the following present specimens: “Tarryall Ranche,” “Cash Creek,” “Gulcher Diggings,” “Buckskin Joe,” “Fair Play,” “Strip-and-at-him Mine,” “Hooked-Man's Prairie,” etc.
And before or following after these military occupations of our inner expanses have gone the frontiersmen, alone or with their families. And what description, but one that ​includes infinite variety in feature, array, fortune, character, errand, and experience, will answer to that race of pioneers, borderers, or frontiersmen? They have been like the people in our cities and towns, — the best and the worst, and of all shades and textures. Looking to the promptings which move white men to turn their back upon all civilized scenes, we have to recognize alike what is noble and what is base in them, besides all those impulses which are indifferent as regards moral qualities, and partake simply of restlessness, enterprise, a love of adventure and variety. Misanthropes, outlaws, desperadoes, and barbarized Christians (so called) have sought the woods and wilds, and have moved on farther as they have heard behind them the tread of any followers who may represent humanity. It is curious to note how soon individuals taken prisoners, lost in the woods, or dropped out from the company of the first European explorers, — Spanish, French, and English, — long after they had been given up as dead, found a home among the natives, and became themselves Indians. From time to time we meet strange surprises in the old histories, as we read how these lost men, hardly preserving enough of the look and language of their former life to make themselves known or intelligible to their countrymen, turn up at the right moment to serve as interpreters to a later company of venturesome white men. Thus De Soto, on his first march into Florida from Tampa Bay, sent a detachment to charge upon a body of the natives, in 1539. An officer was startled by the cry, — seeming to come from one of them, — “Slay me not: I am a Christian!” The cry came from the man named on a previous page, Juan Ortiz, a native of Seville in Spain, who had eleven years before been taken prisoner by the Indians in the expedition of Narvaez. He had just the accomplishments which De Soto required in the emergency, and proved invaluable to him. Instances of like character were frequent; and such cases suggest the number of that ​class of men on our changing frontiers who have bridged over, in every respect, the whole dividing chasm between the European and the native, between civilization and savagery. The red man and the white man on the frontiers have very often interlinked their lot and destiny, and merged all their differences. Hundreds of white men have been barbarized on this continent for each single red man that has been civilized. The whites have assimilated all the traits and qualities of the savage, and mastered his resources in war and hunting, and his shifts for living, in tricks, in subtlety, and cruelty. And the savage has been an apt pupil of the companion with whom he has consorted on familiar terms. He has caught English words enough to enable him to swear, and, as has been said, has seemed to regard oaths as the root-terms of our mother tongue. And with the use of the rifle and ammunition the savage acquired the taste for “fire-water,” which turns him into an incarnated fiend. He has caught also the white man's guile and fraudulency, which, while perhaps no worse than his own, are of another species. Foul and debasing diseases have come in desolating virulence from the miscegenation of white and red men on the frontiers. Mixed breeds of every shade and degree have brought about the result, as on good vouchers we are informed that full one sixth of those classed among the Indians have white kindred.
Doubtless we must credit some advantages and facilities, as well as much trouble and mischief, to the score of these white men — recreants to civilization, outlaws, adventurers, prisoners, and half-breeds, in all their motley and miscellaneous crews — who have made themselves Indians among the distant tribes, in advance of white settlers of a better sort. They have served as go-betweens, as interpreters, as scouts and guides, and have enabled Government agents and military officers to hold some sort of intelligent intercourse with the natives. Something, however, is to be abated from any general statement of the ​use of these semi-barbarized white residents among the Indians, in their very responsible functions as interpreters. Grave consequences, very serious issues, costly money bargains, and complicated covenants in sum and detail have often been set in very risky dependence upon the intelligence, the skill, and the integrity of these interpreters. There is no question but that on very many important occasions of treaty and agreement in settling feuds and entering into stipulations, sometimes the Government, sometimes the Indians, sometimes both parties, have suffered from the incompetency or dishonesty of these interpreters. It has been comparatively easy for these men, living with and adopting the habits of the Indians, to catch the few words in common use, — names of persons and objects, terms of ordinary occurrence in the converse of the camp, the hunt, and the woods, — while at the same time the interpreter, if himself capable of evolving abstract ideas and of the higher processes of thought, explanation, and argument, would be wholly unable to make them matters of intelligible expression in the language or dialect of a rude tribe. And there are occasions in which an interpreter may find his account in deceiving and bringing about a serious misunderstanding between the parties with whom he is supposed to be a competent and trustworthy medium. Many shrewd agents and army officers have agreed with a remark made by Colonel Dodge, in his “Life on the Plains,” that there are special occasions on which there ought to be several interpreters present, so that each might, out of the hearing of others, give his version of what is said on either side.
But these individual whites and half-breeds who have affiliated and assimilated themselves with the Indians (outlaws, desperadoes, adventurers, or merely trappers, hunters, and restless roamers) are precursors of another set of men, — a class of frontiersmen, who are in the advance of actual settlers with their families on our shifting ​borders, intending at least a temporary occupancy of the bush or the valley, even if they afterward move or “locate” themselves, as their word is, on a new spot. These self-reliant men, not infrequently too with wives and children who match them in their vigor and resource, passing beyond the ever-moving line and tide of emigration, have been well described as hanging like the froth of the billows on its very edge. These, too, are a miscellaneous gathering from our common humanity. While there have been among them law-defying scoundrels and wretches, carrying with them every form of demoralization and disease with which depraved humanity in its most degraded wrecks is ever afflicted, there have been also some who, discouraged by the selfish competitions and the struggling rivalries of human society alike in city and village, have been ready to sacrifice what would be their stinted share in the blessings of civilization for a hap-hazard lot in the woods.
These, however, are all scarcely more than the rags and tatters of humanity, fringing the borders between civilization and savagery. The legitimate and substantial characteristics of frontier life, steady and permanent in its hold upon each league of advance on this continent, are found in a class of persons, always to be named with respect, and to be regarded with a profound and admiring sympathy. They have gone out to labor, and to endure all manner of sacrifices, buffetings, and risks, with a view oftener to the ultimate prosperity of their families than their own. The romance of their lives, their exposure, their general success, was an element in which they had no conscious share; for all was reality to them, — prose, not poetry: the romantic is for other persons and other times to appreciate. It has come to be a common and pleasant fancy or opinion among vast numbers of our citizens, that we must henceforward look for our great statesmen, our presidents and high officials in the nation's service, to ​those of a third or even a second generation in descent from such of these pioneers as in circumstance or training, through the brain, or fibre, or blood of parentage in father or mother, have developed their signal powers in frontier life, — as Lincoln, who, rising before us as if moulded of Western clay, was transformed before our eyes into a statue of Carrara marble.
It has been largely with these legitimate frontier settlers, and in their behalf and interest, that the successive contentions and quarrels of our Government with the savage tribes have found their origin and embitterment. I have used the word “legitimate” in reference to these advanced pioneers of civilization on our borders. The rightful use of the word will be disputed only by those who are prepared to stand for the theory that barbarism has prior and superior rights over civilization, to the occupancy of the earth's territory. As the waters of the sea seek their freest flow with their refreshing tides up every river, inlet, and creek, so vigorous and vitalized humanity expands and penetrates everywhere, seeking fresh fields. The people among us who are the Government claim freedom of unoccupied soil; and all soil is in their view unoccupied, which is not wrought upon by human toil, cleared, fenced, tilled, dug, and improved. Our frontier settlers are agents and witnesses of the transition between the wilderness and the cultivated field. They come into immediate contact with the Indians, by a collision of interests. The rights which each party assumes and claims cannot be adjusted between them, because the basis on which they respectively rest is not common in its nature and reasonableness to both parties.
* ↑ Records of the Commissioners of the United Colonies, iii. 508.
* ↑ Bradford's History of Plymouth.
* ↑ Magnalia, vii. 6.