The Wild Frontier Read online

  This book is dedicated to the memory of the victims of the atrocities on the wild frontier. Settlers, soldiers, and Indians often fought dishonorably there in our longest and cruelest war.

  Acknowledgments

  My 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.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Settler and Other American Attitudes About the Indians

  2. Some Indian Cultural Characteristics

  3. Some Settler Cultural Characteristics

  4. Pre-Colonial Atrocities

  5. Colonial Atrocities

  6. Atrocities During the Eras of the British Wars: The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812

  7. Atrocities from the Trails of Tears to the Civil War

  8. Atrocities in the Civil War and Post-Civil War Eras

  9. Some Other Aspects of the War

  10. Government Indian Policy

  11. Where We Are and Where We May Go

  Appendix A. Intertribal Indian Wars

  Appendix B. Deaths Caused by Specific Indian Atrocities

  Appendix C. Deaths Caused by Specific Settler Atrocities

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  The 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.

  IN 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:

  For history is to the nation rather as memory is to the individual. As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.4

  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:

  A book covering such a wide range of material can be no more accurate than its sources. Much of the material comes from writers who were explorers, missionaries, traders, or army officers first, in addition to amateur historians or anthropologists. Hearsay and legend play a part in what has been passed down. Contradictions abound.7

  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:

  Until not long ago, Americans were generally taught to view the nation’s westward movement as a saga of heroic pioneering and just wars that carried European immigrants from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific. At the center of that essentially mythic vision stood the Indian, simultaneously noble and barbaric, man of nature and bloodthirsty savage, and destined for tragic extinction. The epic of the Indian wars added color and grandeur to the saga of national expansion: in their apparent savagery, Indians dramatically underscored Euro-Americans’ notions of civilization, while their repeated military defeats seemed unchallengeable proof of the white man’s technological and moral superiority.

  More recently, revisionist scholars and educators have tended to portray that same history as one of deep, unredeemed tragedy, of which the destruction of the Indian is a central, equally mythical example, apparent proof of the barbarism of Euro-American civilization.9

  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

  NO 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,

  Many groups of native Americans were given their historic names by white men who either contrived descriptive terms of their own for them (Cre
eks) or adopted expressions by which they were known to other tribes.16

  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

  SOME 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

  CHAPTER 1

  Settler and Other American Attitudes About the Indians

  There 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

  Brian W. Dippie, in The Vanishing American, summarized the important east-west division of opinion about the Indians:

  So vivid was the contrast between eastern and western attitudes that few writers on the Indian question failed to mention it. One experienced observer pictured the states “divided into two great parties, one crying for blood, and demanding the destruction of the Indians, the other begging that he may be left in his aboriginal condition, and that the progress of civilization may be stayed.” Their views, another writer noted, were conditioned “by contact, cupidity and prejudice, on the one hand; and enthusiasm, benevolence and remoteness, on the other.” The pertinent point was that easterners had solved their problem by moving the Indians out of the way, and had “long since forgotten the savage war whoop”; while in the West, “the Indian question is a live question,” men live “in constant danger,” and their “only appellation” for the Indians is “red devils.”4

  The Times pointed out that “contemporary treatment of Indians in the West simply paralleled what had begun on the East Coast a century ago.”5

  FROM THE beginning of the European invasion of the New World, those attempting to exploit the Indians claimed that they “were not normal people but rather members of a subhuman or animal species, lacking souls.”6

  The first settlers were English for the most part, and a flood of reports from the New World presented a grim picture of what they might encounter. Gary B. Nash gave one example in Red, White, and Black:

  Crafty, brutal, loathsome half-men whose cannibalistic instincts were revealed, as one pamphleteer wrote in 1578, by the fact that “there is no flesh or fishe, which they finde dead, (smell it never so filthily) but they will eate it, as they finde it, without any other dressing [cooking].”7

  Other more dread aspects of Indian conduct circulated among settlers before they left their ships, according to Michael Kraus in The United States to 1865:

  The “noble savage” had, however, a terrifying aspect also; stories were told of how he attacked in the dead of night with blood-curdling yells, how he set houses afire with flaming arrows, and how he scalped the fleeing inhabitants. There were horrifying narratives, too, of cannibalism told with all the grisly details. The earliest settlers, leaving the comparative safety of their ships, were understandably fearful about the reception that awaited them.8

  But as Page Smith pointed out in A New Age Now Begins, there was another view vying for settlers’ consideration, that of Voltaire and Rousseau, whose philosophy was so important to the framers of the Constitution of the United States, but who had never been to the New World. These philosophers romanticized the Indians, whom they saw as being natural men:

  The European mind was captivated by the idea of the noble savage as it had been by few ideas in its history. Both Voltaire and Rousseau, philosophers who nurtured the Enlightenment, saw society as corrupt and decadent, far removed from the wholesomeness and simplicity of the natural man. They romanticized the savage man, whom they saw as being close to nature, his intelligence unclouded by priestly superstition, by social conventions, fashion, greed, and ambition.9

  The settlers were thus faced with strongly conflicting attitudes toward Indians. They chose to emigrate in great numbers. Why would they continue if these terrible stories were true?

  INDEED, THEY lived in relative peace with the Indians for almost 15 years from their arrival at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, although there were skirmishes. Then attitudes changed dramatically with the Powhatan Wars, which also were the beginning of the American-Indian War. In 1621, before war had even commenced, a Virginia poet wrote that Indians were irrevocably “Rooted in Evill, and opposed in Good; errors of nature, of inhumane Birth, The very dregs, garbage and spanne of Earth.”10 Opechancanough became the dominant leader of the powerful Powhatan Confederacy in 1618. He attacked Jamestown and other settlements on the James River in 1622 without warning, killing hundreds.11 After that, according to Roy Harvey Pearce in The Savages of America, the settlers “ceased trying to understand the Indian; for such understanding would avail them little.”12 And in retaliation for the massacres noted, Bernard W. Sheehan in Seeds of Extinction said, “the Virginians followed a policy of extermination.”13 The Indian attitude toward the settlers hardened as well.

  When the administrators of the Virginia Company protested that the colonists had gone too far in dealing with the Indians following the 1622 attack, the Virginia Council of State replied that

  wee hold nothing inuiste [unjust] … that may tend to theire ruine…. Stratagems were ever allowed against all enemies, but with these neither fayre Warr nor good quarter is ever to be held, nor is there other hope of their subversione, who ever may inform you to the Contrarié.14

  This was about as bad as settler attitudes could get.

  The American-Indian War—rightly characterized by Bil Gilbert in God Gave Us This Country—was one of

  unique ferocity…. Generally the antagonists believed that this was a winner-take-all competition, that compromise and accommodation were neither possible nor desirab
le…. The savages—red and white-did things to each other which sensitive outsiders found unbelievable.15

  That ferocity surely arose out of the 2 parties’ conflicting cultures and characters involved, a principal theme of this book.

  TO THE north, the attitude of the Massachusetts colonists toward Indians was much the same. William Bradford was governor of the Plymouth colony from 1621 until 1656 except for the years Edward Wins-low served. He maintained peaceful relations with the Wampanoags, but made war on the Pequot.16 Bradford wrote in his history of the colony that the English had come expecting the “continual danger of the savage people, who are cruel, barbarous, and most treacherous,” which made “the very bowels of men to grate within them and make the weak to quake and tremble.”17

  The Reverend Cotton Mather, who was influential in Massachusetts Bay Colony government, believed it was futile to attempt to Christianize and civilize Indians. He contended they were sent to North America by Satan and should therefore be exterminated.18 Mather preached after the Indians were defeated in a battle of the Pequot War that “in a little more than one hour, five or six hundred of these barbarians were dismissed from a world that was burdened with them.”19

  BEFORE THE Revolutionary War started (1775-83), Prime Minister North in Parliament tried to defend use of Indians as British allies. Opposition leader Lord Chatham called Indians scalpers, cannibal savages, roasting and eating, torturing, murderous barbarians, and savage hellhounds,20 statements not likely to improve settler attitudes. The war itself only aggravated settler feelings against the Indians. The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, declared that one of the charges against King George III was that he “had endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”