SIX
I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle in him than the average Indian.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1886
The westward movement of the frontier brought catastrophic losses to native human and animal populations. Among some tribes and species the losses were so heavy as to bring about extinction. Disease was the primary cause, though it was compounded by other forms of destruction, from warfare to murder to over-hunting to alcoholism. Each of these was linked in some way to the abnormal demography of the white frontiersmen.
Disease. Warfare, and Frontier Demography
The historian William McNeill has provided a useful metaphor for understanding the catastrophe that befell the American Indians. All peoples, he ventures, are caught between two millstones that grind away at their populations. The lower millstone is that of microparasitism, which occurs when tiny organisms like wheat rusts compete with people for food or when pathogens like malarial protozoa invade and weaken human bodies. The upper millstone is that of macroparasitism, meaning largebodied predation (lion eats man) but also and more specifically the killing, abuse, and exploitation of one group or class of humans by another.1
Before Columbus Indians experienced both sorts of parasitism, enduring blights, disease, intertribal warfare, slavery, and even the ultimate form of exploitation, human sacrifice. Yet the grinding balance of the millstones was such that their overall numbers were not reduced. Indeed, they flourished. At the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 somewhere between 40 and 113 million persons, possibly more, were living in the Americas, an estimated 4 to 12 million of them in the lands north of Mexico.2 But after Columbus the grinding balance was decisively altered as Indians faced a deadly and ever-expanding array of new parasites from cholera bacilli to cannoneers. The 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee, at which 350 sick and hungry Sioux were surrounded by minatory troopers and raked with exploding shells from rapid-firing Hotchkiss guns, serves as a convenient symbol of four centuries of destruction.
Epidemics claimed the lives of the largest number of Indians who had little resistance to European and African diseases. Measles, influenza, bubonic plague, malaria, diphtheria, yellow fever, typhoid, and other infections reduced native populations by 95 percent or more. Smallpox was the most lethal and dreaded affliction; warriors who contracted it would rip themselves open with knives or hurl themselves into chasms rather than suffer a feverish and ignominious death. Those who sought relief in steam baths or cold streams merely hastened their ends. Entire tribes, such as the Mandan, disappeared in the wake of virulent smallpox epidemics. Their bodies rotted where they fell or were devoured by dogs and scavenging wolves.3
Warfare with and exploitation by whites aggravated the losses due to disease. The higher the white gender ratio the greater the aggravation. Even along the agricultural frontier the first whites Indians encountered were male interlopers, including a generous sprinkling of hard cases. Large-scale familial migration did not occur until after the Indians had been decisively defeated and removed from an area, or until a chain of fortifications had been established. Conversely, when Indians reasserted themselves, as in Ohio during the War of 1812 or in Minnesota in 1862, agricultural settlers fled until the shooting was over. A similar headlong retreat by Nebraska settlers toward Omaha in 1864 was dubbed "the stampede."4
This is not to say that pioneer women and children seldom saw Indians. Quite the opposite. But the Indians' contact was initially with white men who were unmarried or temporarily single: explorers, traders, trappers, soldiers, missionaries, prospectors, cowboys, and farmers moving ahead of their families to scout and clear the land.
Except for the missionaries the military potential of these groups was formidable. Their personnel were generally young, equipped with advanced weapons and ammunition, registered and drilled in militia companies, and, when mounted, able to move quickly. Indian braves were every bit as hardy, some so tough they struck matches from the soles of their bare feet. And they could move about even more quickly, aided by superior knowledge of the terrain.5
But Indian warriors were everywhere handicapped by the vulnerability of their noncombatants. Demographically, the Indian situation was just the opposite of that of the whites. Intertribal warfare (and, possibly, higher male death rates during epidemics) had produced chronically low gender ratios. Fewer braves had to protect more women and children, who were not as mobile and hence vulnerable to attack. In the 1620s and 1630s colonists in Virginia and New England learned that it was much easier to attack Indian villages than to go after bands of marauding warriors. This tactic was used repeatedly against Indians during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The dawn assaults by militia on Cheyenne encampments at Sand Creek in 1864 and by Custer's bluecoats at Washita in 1868 are among the most infamous examples. Wounded Knee, though not planned as an all-out attack, quickly turned into one, with 120 Sioux men and 230 women and children facing impossible odds against 500 soldiers from the Seventh Cavalry.6
Frontier demography worked to the advantage of whites, who had more potential combatants and fewer dependents per capita. Not only did Indians have to contend with the all-male army, they faced attack from militia, vigilantes, and other groups of armed frontiersmen who were less disciplined than the regulars, though often more ruthless. I have already mentioned the fate of California Indians, more than 4,500 of whom were killed between 1848 and 1880, mainly by miners, ranchers, and militia. The situation was similar in Texas, where the Rangers, unencumbered by regular military regulations and impedimenta, simply mounted their horses, ran down hostile Indians, and unceremoniously killed any they happened to capture.7
Cowboys were another force to be reckoned with. Though they did not always prevail in their skirmishes with Indians, they constituted a de facto corps of mounted scouts. Armed, vigilant, and constantly on the move, the cowboys were, as one contemporary put it, "an efficient instrumentality in preventing Indian outbreaks, and in protecting the frontier settlements of the entire range and ranch cattle area against predatory incursions and massacres by Indians." One trail outfit took advantage of cowboys' reputations as Indian fighters by spreading false rumors of war parties. This assured the outfit a welcome reception by local settlers who were otherwise hostile and obstructive.8
Casualties in any of these military or quasi-military groups could be replaced by internal or overseas immigration. The supply of male wasichus, the Sioux term for unwelcome and disagreeably persistent intruders, was both endless and global. Half or more of the troopers who fought in the climactic Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s were foreign-born, mainly Irish and German; they were joined by African-American soldiers and six thousand Confederate prisoners ("Galvanized Yankees") who volunteered for frontier garrison duty. Some Indians, isolated and without knowledge of geography, made the mistake of underestimating the population from which the wasichus could draw. But Little Crow, chief of the Mdewakanton division of the Santee Sioux, suffered no such illusions. "Count your fingers all day long," he warned his braves, "and white men with guns in their hands will come faster than you can count."9
Intertribal rivalries added to the immunological and demographic advantages of the intruders. Suspicion and a long history of warfare made Indian cooperation and concentration of force difficult, though there were exceptions, as Custer discovered at the Little Big Horn. Indian rivalries also gave whites the opportunity to play enemy against enemy, as in the army's use of Crow scouts, couriers, and warriors in its many campaigns against the Sioux. Even in the absence of recruiting, Indian competition played into white hands. When frontier expansion pushed one tribe onto another's land, the result was a chain reaction of lateral warfare, further thinning the warriors' ranks. The fur trade provided Indians with weapons that increased intertribal casualties while also providing an economic motive for aggression. Tribes that wrested control of hunting grounds from their neighbors could exchange more furs, and more enemies' scalps, for the European goods on which they were becoming dependent.10
Hunting Indians
Indians who survived epidemics and intertribal warfare faced a frontier immigrant population lopsided with men of military age. But if demography made whites potentially dangerous adversaries, it was white attitudes that made them actually so. Frontiersmen regarded Indians as disgusting, lazy, thieving, devious, and cruel, incorrigible obstacles to civilization's advance and, more tangibly, to whites' possession of western lands. This is, I know, a large generalization to which there were articulate exceptions, but the historical record is so freighted with white male contempt for Indians as "savages" and "gut-eaters" and worse that I feel entirely justified in making it.
Racial contempt made it socially and psychologically easier to exploit and kill Indians. Native slavery and peonage, common forms of exploitation in Spanish lands, were not widely practiced in the Anglo-American domain. Instead American Indians were driven from their coveted lands by a combination of negotiation, fraud, starvation, forced removal, and warfare. During the first half of the nineteenth century these means acquired a patina of respectability, or at least inevitability, through the doctrines of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority and America's Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent."
The way in which people are killed reveals a great deal about their assailants. The weapons and tactics employed against Indians bespeak Anglo-Americans' indiscriminate hatred and contempt: poisoned meat and drink, smallpox-infected blankets, booby-trapped bodies, cannon charged with slugs, dogs unleashed on captives, and the execution of the wounded, women, and children. California Indians found "naked or wild" were gunned down without pretense or hesitation while Indian women with children were dispatched with no more compunction than stray dogs. Some white men in California, wrote a disgusted French missionary, Father Edmond Venisse, "kill Indians just to try their pistols."12
Equally revealing are the many episodes of Indians being attacked under the white flag of truce or surrender or during negotiations when the norms of war or diplomacy would ordinarily confer immunity. Immunity, that is, to those regarded as human beings. Indians were dishonored even in death. White men fashioned their bones into curios; they played with their mummified remains by lashing them to sticks and making them stalk about in ghost-like fashion; they pulled down bodies left in trees and scaffolds and chopped them to pieces for bait.13
Indians, no strangers to cruelty, repaid whites in the same fashion. They mutilated bodies and desecrated graves, flayed and burned captives, raped and impaled women, killed and even tortured children and newborns. Such deeds made for long memories. They were kept alive and embellished by campfire stories, sermons, pamphlets, newspapers, popular fiction, and captivity narratives, an ever-popular genre of which no fewer than 339 works describing the experiences of 245 individuals and families had been cataloged by 1912. Indian raids were to the frontier what slave uprisings were to the plantation South, a fear so deep and pervasive that the least rumor, however unsubstantiated, spread like prairie fire.14
This same fear, which compelled frontiersmen to remain vigilant against Indian attack, helps to explain the violent cast of the frontier mind. The Indian threat legitimated violence and made men practiced in its most desperate arts. It also justified the carrying of loaded weapons by those who were not well versed in their safe use. During his western travels in 1859 Horace Greeley reported hearing of a dozen accidental shootings among gold miners in the space of just two months. "Had no single emigrant across the Plains this season armed himself," he commented, "the number of them alive at this moment would have been greater than it is."15
The obsession with Indian attacks invited criminal mischief. Pranksters maliciously spread false rumors, scaring settlers half out of their wits. Malefactors robbed and murdered their victims in Indian disguise. Foisting the blame on Indians was a flimflam as old as the Boston Tea Party, though carried out with more success in the nineteenth century, particularly in Texas, where it was a favorite trick of marauding outlaws.16
Yet there was quite enough of the genuine article to inflame whites' hatred and steel their determination to exterminate Indians. "I don't know what will be done with them," wrote Sergeant Edwin Capron in 1865, describing a group of Pawnees who, pretending friendship, suddenly attacked fourteen unarmed men en route to Fort Kearney, killing two and scalping one alive:
I think the Govt. is altogether too lenient with them and treats them too much like human beings, when the only way they can be governed is by fear. They never will be peaceable when they have the power to fight. Last summer [actually November 1864] Col. Chivington of Colorado attacked and destroyed a camp of Cheyennes who pretended to be friendly and were drawing rations from Fort Lyons. Now that affair has created much sympathy for the "poor Indian" and I have seen it referred to in many of the Eastern papers and in Congress as a "brutal Inhuman Massacre." In that camp of friendly Indians were found scalps of white men & women hardly yet dry—And property identified as having been taken from plundered [wagon] trains but a short time previous. So much for Friendly Indians. But that is enough of political economy—And the Noble Savage?17
Capron's remarks almost perfectly express the scorn prevailing among white frontiersmen. Indians were subhuman and treacherous. They were thieves and murderers who only understood force. Their depredations against noncombatants justified all-out attacks, parlor sympathizers be damned.
Almost perfectly: Capron, a New Englander of some refinement, was writing home to his sister and so may be presumed to have pulled his punches. His contemporaries employed harsher words, describing Indians as "incarnate fiends," "hellhounds," "beasts and dogs," "vermin," "cursed snakes," "guteating skunks," and "redskined Deavels," this last a bit of Irish-American malediction, phonetically spelled.18 The beastdevil imagery is oxymoronic. A devil is a fallen angel, not an animal. Yet the traits were conjoined in white minds by the reputed cunning and diabolical cruelty of their foes. Indians may have been subhuman outsiders, but they were also extremely dangerous ones, capable of ruses and outrages beyond the ken of any dumb creature.
All of which made their scalps very attractive. Killing Indians was not simply an exercise in preemptive defense. It was a sure way to establish one's manly bona fides, something, as we have seen, of central importance in male groups and subcultures. Indians were dangerous and hence worthy game; they were a threat to the future of the white community, symbolically and actually represented in women and children; and they were unlikely to be avenged by law officers and juries who were either indifferent to the deaths or busy killing Indians themselves. Father Venisse, a cultural outsider, was wrong when he said the Californians shot Indians just to try their pistols. They shot Indians for objective reasons, to control land and preempt threats to life and property, and for subjective reasons of prestige, so that they might boast about "Indian fighting" in the saloons and winter cabins of their lopsidedly masculine land.
The historian Joe B. Frantz went to the heart of the matter when he observed that there was a premium on killing Indians, a premium whose benefits continued through life. The benefits arguably extended, in the cases of Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, to the White House itself. One explanation of Custer's imprudent behavior before his annihilation at the Little Big Horn (to which he hastened without Gatling guns or mountain howitzers) was that he was determined to move quickly to secure a headline-making victory that might serve as springboard to the presidency. As it is, more people remember Custer in defeat than they do the rather undistinguished American presidents of the late nineteenth century.19
Achievements in Indian warfare were sufficiently important and prestigious that men took trophies to prove them. Scalping, an Indian custom adopted by whites, was common for reasons of both status and the claiming of bounties. "I regret to be obliged to admit," Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote in 1883, "that the majority of white men on the frontier are as prompt to take a scalp as any Indian." They also helped themselves to Indian heads, hearts, fingers, ears, bladders, breasts, and genitals. One soldier in Chivington's Sand Creek command declared his intention to fashion a tobacco pouch from a dead Cheyenne's scrotum. Here again the dead and mutilated bodies are a text in which is written the frontiersmen's sense of Indians as animals from which fleshy souvenirs might be taken.20
The expression "hunting Indians" appears frequently in frontier correspondence. "Genl. Mitchell is here now [at Fort Kearney] preparing to go on a grand Indian hunt. . .," Sergeant Capron observed in another 1865 letter, adding that "Mr. Indian is a difficult animal to catch, worse I think than the famous Irishman's flea." Difficult, but necessary and desirable, both from the standpoint of eliminating predators and for the prestige of bagging tricky game.21
The same, of course, was true from the Indian perspective. White frontiersmen were about as bad as interlopers can get. Killing them unquestionably enhanced the standing of braves, who were sensitive about matters of honor and vengeance. This was particularly true of teenage Indians who, like white boys of the same age, were anxious to prove their courage. "It is by war that they obtain wealth, position and influence within the tribe," explained one observer. "The young men especially look up to and follow the successful warrior rather than the wise and prudent chiefs." Some white veterans admitted they would rather fight Indian men than boys because the boys "had no sense, did not know what fear was and would take greater chances." By Indian accounts it was a small band of young warriors, the "suicide boys," who broke the resistance of the last knot of Custer's men at the Little Big Horn. The suicide boys were all mortally wounded, but the older warriors who followed them into the melee quickly finished the job.22
White women who killed Indians also achieved fame. Hannah Duston, who was captured during a 1697 raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts, tomahawked and scalped ten of her sleeping captors with the help of another woman and a boy. When Duston returned home she became, for a time, the most celebrated woman in New England.2' Episodes of this sort were rare, however, and motivated by self-defense or escape. Women were not expected to join in the grand Indian hunt, nor were they inclined to do so.
White women were more sympathetic toward Indians than white men or, if not sympathetic, at least willing to concede that they had virtues as well as vices. An analysis of 100 frontier women's diaries and memoirs reveals that 16 percent held strongly positive views of Indians, 18 percent strongly negative views, and the remaining 66 percent both positive and negative views, describing some Indians as trustworthy, others as treacherous. Caroline Phelps, a young woman married to an Indian trader active in southeastern Iowa in the 1830s, typically deplored the behavior of drunken Indians but wrote with interest and concern about those who befriended or assisted her. Achieving this sort of balance was not easy, for white women had had their heads stuffed as full of massacre stories as had men, and were at first inclined to view Indians through the lens of the Savage Other. But many frontier women overcame these prejudices and developed real friendships with natives, particularly native women, with whom they felt an empathic bond.24
The different ways in which white men and women viewed Indians are illustrated in a story related by Benjamin Franklin Bonney, who in 1846 migrated with his family and a group of other settlers from California to Oregon. His party happened upon an eight-year-old Indian girl, naked, starving, and covered with sores:
A council among the men was held to see what should be done with her. My father wanted to take her along; others wanted to kill her and put her out of her misery. Father said that would be willful murder. A vote was taken and it was decided to do nothing about it, but to leave her where we found her. My mother and my aunt were unwilling to leave the little girl. They stayed behind to do all they could for her. When they finally joined us their eyes were wet with tears. Mother said she had knelt down by the little girl and had asked God to take care of her. One of the young men in charge of the horses felt so badly about leaving her, he went back and put a bullet through her head and put her out of her misery.25
This was no act of sadism. The young man did for the girl what he would have done for one of his horses with a broken leg. Nevertheless, it is clear that the men—and it was they who determined the Indian's fate—were inclined toward a quick and final solution while the women (and one married man) wished to nurture her. To the former she was a wounded animal, to the latter a human being, to whom the duties and injunctions of Christianity applied.
The developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan believes this sort of difference is typical. Women emphasize human relationships and nurturing, while men tend to stress impersonal individualism and achievement, in this case pressing on to Oregon.26 Whether this generalization holds across cultures and time and whether it is rooted in biology are controversial questions, though it is safe to say that nineteenth-century frontier women, if for no other reason than their socialization into traditional gender roles, were more likely to display sympathy and empathy than men. These traits, at odds with the ethnocentric impulse, made women less inclined toward Indian hating and hunting, from which they in any case had little to gain. Their social standing rarely if ever depended on achievements in warfare.
The Failure of Government
Bonney's story of the Indian girl is revealing in another way. The decision to shoot rather than assist the child was technically a crime, though of course neither reported nor prosecuted. The killing of Indians by civilians occurred as often as it did because the federal government, nominally responsible for policing the western territories, and subsequently state and local governmerits, failed to stop it. Government policy toward the Indians was not, as is sometimes supposed, "genocidal." However, the desires of many individual frontiersmen clearly were. If unchecked, they produced the worst sort of depredations and retaliations. "Where the federal government . . . did not control relations between whites and Indians," sums up the historian Richard White, "conditions became a nightmare."27
The basic problem was that the American government was unable to stop the influx of the rapidly growing white population into Indian lands, an influx that constantly provoked the Indians and rendered futile the treaties negotiated with them. The British had originally attempted to deal with this conflict by turning the Appalachian Mountains into a racial cordon. However, the Proclamation of 1763 succeeded neither in halting white incursions nor in protecting Indians. Before the year was out a village of peaceful Conestogas had been massacred and dismembered.28
George Washington, who inherited the problem from the British, fared no better. In late 1795 he complained to Congress that the legislative "provisions heretofore made with a view to the protection of the Indians, from the violence of the lawless part of our frontier inhabitants are insufficient." Unless the murdering of Indians was restrained, he warned, "all the exertions of the government to prevent destructive retaliations . . . will prove fruitless." Washington's concerns were fiscal as well as diplomatic. The spiral of provocation, retaliation, and frontier warfare consumed no less than five-sixths of the government's general expenditures from 1790 to 1796.29
Congress responded with the 1796 Intercourse Act, which authorized punishment for white trespassers and death for those who murdered Indians on their own lands. This and subsequent nineteenth-century legislation, often of a paternalistic and wellintentioned character, nevertheless proved difficult to enforce. The army was spread too thin to control the movements of frontiersmen, while local courts and juries were invariably sympathetic toward white defendants and hostile toward the Indians.30
Armed and belligerent frontiersmen were more than just a problem for the natives. At times they posed a threat to their own government, particularly when they believed they were being given insufficient help against Indian attacks and outlaw depredations or otherwise felt themselves oppressed by tax, land, and monetary policies.31 The prototypical west-to-east uprising was Bacon's Rebellion. Though it assumed class overtones before falling apart in late 1676, the rebellion began as a dispute over frontier security, pitting western settlers against Governor William Berkeley and residents of the inland counties. In the eyes of Nathaniel Bacon and his supporters, Berkeley was long on taxes but short on scalps; they therefore assumed the task of killing Susquehannahs and Occaneechees for him. Berkeley equivocated, declared Bacon a rebel—and then found the upriver men coming for him.
The historian Edmund Morgan has argued that the economic and demographic conditions of late-seventeenth-century Virginia, a high-gender-ratio colony, made it especially prone to violent episodes like Bacon's Rebellion. Indentured servants kept pouring in to cultivate other men's tobacco but, as their terms expired, they found it difficult to marry and establish their own plantations. Their mobility, marital as well as occupational, was blocked. The rapid growth of African slavery ultimately provided an unintended solution to this problem by substituting a lower class that was despised, disarmed, and black for one that was discontented, dangerous, and white.32
But the solution was not perfect. White losers with guns did not disappear from the colonies. They went to the frontier, where they remained a potential source of insurrection. The pattern of west-to-east defiance and rebellion persisted through the eighteenth century, as in the Paxton Boys uprising in Pennsylvania in 1763-1764 or the Regulator movements in the Carolinas from 1766 to 1771. After the Revolutionary War (itself a revolt of a young, oppressed, "frontier" people against their indifferent eastern superiors) the west-east tension persisted, notably in Shays' Rebellion of 1786-1787 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. The latter featured backwoodsmen who had drunk deeply of the casus belli and then harassed and tortured federal excise collectors. They did not stop until Washington dispatched an army to suppress them.33
Disorders of this magnitude were rare during the nineteenth century despite the accelerating expansion of the frontier. This was largely due to the wisdom of the Northwest Ordinance, which established a procedure and a precedent for admitting western regions to the Union on an equal basis with existing states. Frontiersmen might have to endure a period of territorial government, but they knew that one day they would control their own political destiny.34 There was no reason for them to contemplate sustained, armed rebellion against the distant East; hence the potential for violence inherent in their population remained a problem mainly for themselves and the native inhabitants. Put differently, the central political issue of the colonial era, whether peripheral territories would remain inferior political entities, was neatly resolved, but in a way that indirectly increased pressure on the Indians.
Unfortunately for white Americans, another and more intractable regional tension quickly arose: whether the peripheral territories would become slave states or free. Antebellum politicians were unable to finesse the North-South conflict as skillfully as their Confederation predecessors had that of West and East. This misfortune was a temporary boon to the western Indians. The Civil War, which drew troops and men from the frontier to eastern battlegrounds, gave the Indians a brief respite from regular military pressure." White soldiers who killed one another were no immediate threat to them.
Hunting Animals
The soldiers came back after the Civil War, however. With them came a plague of lousy, foul-smelling men, the buffalo hunters, who symbolized the other great challenge to Indian life, the destruction of the animal life on which it depended. This destruction, which began almost from the moment of European contact, was the product of complex and often overlapping motives.
The most straightforward motive was subsistence. Frontiersmen had to eat, and the farther west they moved the more dependent they were on hunting for food. White and Indian hunters, in fact, became very similar in appearance and behavior, having borrowed and incorporated items of dress and hunting techniques from one another until they were virtually indistinguishable.36
But white hunters also killed for trade and profit, and so, eventually, did the Indians. The economic facts of frontier life were scarce labor, limited capital, and abundant resources, a combination that suggested to Anglo-Americans a strategy of gathering, selling, and shipping commodities for the growing Atlantic market, using as little labor as possible. An obvious resource that might be inexpensively skimmed from the environment was fur, which was taken by individual hunters employing firearms and steel traps and collected by the agents of various fur companies.
Native Americans were drawn into this enterprise by their desire to secure wampum and such trade goods as guns, gunpowder, knives, axes, kettles, blankets, sugar, molasses, tobacco, and rum, of which Indians in the northern British mainland colonies were consuming upwards of 50,000 gallons annually by the mid-1760s. Indians who became dependent on alcohol were effectively dependent on white traders, who made enormous profits by exchanging low-value liquor for the Indians' high-value furs. This was one reason why formal Indian slavery was rare along the British and subsequently the American frontier. The fur trade made it unnecessary, as Indians were induced to exchange their skilled hunting labor for liquor and other inexpensive trade goods. Some traders tried to stretch the profit margin further by diluting the liquor, though Indians caught on to the trick and began testing the spirits by spitting the first mouthful onto a fire to see if it flamed—hence the term "firewater.""
The notion that Indians lived in perfect harmony with the environment is a myth, though one with an important kernel of truth. Before European contact Indians were uninterested in accumulating commodities and imposed a relatively light, though appreciable, burden on their environment. After contact and the growth of the fur trade they imposed a much heavier burden, the classic instance being a band of Sioux hunters who exchanged 1,400 buffalo tongues for a few gallons of whiskey, leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot.38 Buffalo, beaver, deer, and other animal populations were rapidly depleted by Indian hunters, who began acting more and more like their white counterparts.
This was clearly self-destructive behavior. Overhunting increased the prospect of famine which in turn increased susceptibility to infectious disease. The Mandan, wiped out by smallpox in 1837, were suffering from depleted food supplies due to excessive hunting when the epidemic struck.39 Hunger everywhere increased the incidence of Indian begging, pilferage, and livestock raids, behaviors that reinforced white prejudices and provoked a contemptuous if not violent response.
White frontiersmen did their share of commercialized killing, especially of buffalo, whose hides brought skilled hunters thousands of dollars a year. The organized slaughter of the bison in the years after the Civil War, expedited by the railroads, finished off the great herds, whose numbers had already been substantially reduced by Indians, drought, and grazing competition. "No sight is more common on the plains," observed Theodore Roosevelt in 1886, "than that of a bleached buffalo skull."40
The connection between the disappearance of these herds and the disappearance of the Indians was not lost on whites, particularly ranking army officers. Instead of stopping the hunters, General Philip Sheridan admonished the Texas legislature, they ought to be commended and given bronze medals with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other. "Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated," he prophesied. "Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization." Readers of the previous chapter may entertain doubts about cowboys as forerunners of civilization, advanced or otherwise, but it is true enough that the destruction of bison opened millions of acres for cattle, followed by sheep and then agriculture, most often wheat farming.41
White Americans, who assumed that this transformation was inevitable and divinely ordained, employed two other means to bring it about, bounties and poison. To flourish, open-range livestock needed to be free of predators as well as grazing competitors like buffalo and Indian ponies. Bounties, always welcome on the cash-short frontier, encouraged the slaughter of foxes, coyotes, and wolves. These "varmints" were taken with guns and traps, though poisoned bait was the simplest and most effective means of destroying them. One technique was to lace the front quarter of a buffalo carcass with strychnine, hitch it to a horse, and drag it in a circle several miles in circumference, dropping off chunks of poisoned meat along the way. Scavengers who ate the carrion died, or perhaps vomited and drooled the strychnine over the grass, which was eaten by buffalo who in turn sickened and died. Either way the ranks of competing species were thinned.42
The broadcasting of poisoned bait, though devastating to the aboriginal ecosystem, was economically rational, as were all the forms of killing animals described above. But what is most striking about men's frontier memoirs, diaries, and letters is the slaughter of animals as a means of achieving masculine status and pleasure apart from commercial ends. The destruction of native animal life, which entailed the destruction of native human life, had an unmistakable element of gender.
Frontiersmen, always sensitive about their standing among male peers, could gain status through hunting. As with human enemies, the more they killed the better. Hunters often kept score, held contests, compared their prey, and, if they returned home laden with meat, had the satisfaction of being greeted as heroes. Samuel Crawford, later governor of Kansas, described a month-long hunt with fifteen companions in the autumn of 1860: "Having accomplished the purpose of the expedition and established a reputation as hunters," the men returned to Garnett, where the spoils, "four wagon-loads of choice meats and a train-load of romance . . . were distributed among the good people of Anderson County." In return, "happy girls with rosy cheeks and calico frocks" gave the hunters a rousing "buffalo dance," which Crawford reports was enjoyed by all, "especially by those who had roamed the plains for a month in search of something to kill."
There is something almost tribal in this account. At one point Crawford used the word "braves" to describe himself and his hunting companions, an interesting metaphor from the pen of a man who despised Indians. Like braves they brought home game ("choice meats") to their people and, like braves, were feted by women in communal ceremony, something deeply satisfying to the masculine ego. The event was still vivid in Crawford's memory more than fifty years later.43
Other frontiersmen memorialized their skill as hunters by means of trophies. Western saloons, where men gathered to drink and brag and swap stories, often resembled natural history museums with animal heads dotting the wall. In 1902 this decor moved upscale when Theodore Roosevelt, accidental president and eastern convert to frontier recreations, festooned the White House with big game trophies. Among them was a giant moose head, incongruously hung over the fireplace of the State Dining Room.44
The skill by which such trophies were won, marksmanship, was honed on avian life. Wild Bill Hickok liked to shoot quail at the stable yard, the birds still being abundant in the early 1870s and practically tame. A favorite pastime around Fort Laramie in the 1870s was shooting the heads off blue grouse, a competitive sport at which the participants kept careful score. And "pigeon shooting" everywhere meant banging away at live passenger pigeons sprung from traps. Captain A. H. Bogardus, the Champion Pigeon Shot of America, introduced glass balls as a more humane substitute, but his innovation failed to halt the slaughter of passenger pigeons for sport and table. The last of the once-abundant species died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.45
Male enthusiasm for guns, live target practice, and competitive hunting was not confined to the frontier. The pile-'em-high ethos also flourished in the South. Even so, western wildlife was subject to the same asymmetrical pressure as the Indians, an interloper population heavy with young men who were armed, restless, and anxious to prove themselves.
And bored out of their minds. "The West was not dull," observes Evan S. Council, "it was stupendously dull, and when not dull it was murderous." Hunting was the primary male antidote for boredom, or at least a close second to drinking. In October 1865 Lieutenant Charles Herrmann Springer, a young German bachelor who had survived the fiasco of the Powder River expedition, found himself encamped near Fort Laramie in Wyoming Territory. "The days are getting terrible monotonous," he confided to his diary:
October 10: I have the blues—
October 11:1 have the blues—
October 12: I have the blues like hell—
And so on until October 20 when he and a companion went hunting. They found a large gray wolf on the Platte River bottom and began firing their Spencer carbines and revolvers at the dodging, bristling, bloodied, terrified creature:
I finally shot him down. He tumbled over got up on his haunches and made hostile demonstrations. Just as I was in the act of dismounting he recovered and struck out for the bluffs again. Another shot broke his foreleg, but he kept on. We arrived at the bluffs. I dismounted and followed him on foot, but he gave me after all the slips, and gained his hole, where there was no chance of getting him out. We returned back to camp. I felt a great deal better after the exercise.46
Springer was a blundering amateur compared to Henry Heth, another bachelor lieutenant. "During my sojourn on the plains," Heth recalled, "... I killed over one thousand buffalo. I became a buffalo fiend. I never enjoyed any sport as much as I did killing them." He did not pronounce himself fully content until he had learned to bring them down Indian-style, using only a bow and arrow.47
Among the higher-ranking officers Sheridan, Custer, and Ranald Mackenzie were well known as extravagant hunters. The most systematic was General George Crook, who habitually rode ahead of his column on the lookout for animals to kill, sometimes using a telescopic rifle. Before he was through Crook managed to shoot or catch practically every known species of game or type of fish and had learned taxidermy to preserve his own trophies.48
Bad Habits
Indian acculturation into the ways of commercialized hunting is only one example of the influence of white frontiersmen. They in turn adopted many Indian practices, such as cultivation of corn and squash. Much of this cross-fertilization was beneficial, as when woodland Indians learned new techniques of log carpentry. Some was embarrassing, as when Indians began mimetically calling white men and their vilified freighting wagons "goddams."49 And some was deadly, especially when Indians acquired the vices of drunkenness and prostitution.
Indians who secured liquor from white traders often drank excessively, turned belligerent, and cut one another to pieces, a story so often repeated by so many different observers that it cannot be written off as prejudice. Drunken Indians exterminated themselves. Yet we know that violent conduct is not an automatic, biological response to alcohol. Aggressiveness and other forms of drunken comportment are learned behaviors. Normally these behaviors are acquired through socialization. People learn what their society "knows" about drunkenness, internalize it, and become living confirmations of their society's teachings. But the North American Indians, who had no distilled alcohol before white contact, had no store of social knowledge to draw upon. The only role models they had were whites who lived near or traveled along the frontier. Indians thus learned to drink from the worst possible tutors: coureurs de bois, soldiers, mule skinners, miners, cowboys, and the like. They did not see children sipping cider or the gentry nursing after-dinner brandies. They saw men who went on prolonged binges, swilling rotgut whiskey and becoming dangerously, obstreperously drunk. Small wonder that they did the same or suffered the same consequences.50
Indian prostitution went hand in hand with Indian drinking. While formal marriage between American frontiersmen and Indian women was comparatively rare, sexual relations were not. The situation was particularly bad in Gold Rush California, where the pent-up sexual demand of young white men was partly met by the supply of Indian women, some of whom were prostituted for a bottle of whiskey or a bit of sugar. Meretricious commerce, unknown before Spanish and especially American contact, demoralized the California Indians and further reduced their numbers. The spread of syphilis and gonorrhea, accelerated by prostitution, claimed more lives and undermined the capacity to produce new generations of healthy children, a price the rapidly disappearing tribes could ill afford.51
Beyond prostitution was the rape of Indian women. California newspapers published accounts of at least twenty-seven flagrant incidents during the 1850s, undoubtedly just the journalistic tip of the rape iceberg. Some of the victims were as young as ten years." Little was done about these outrages, although rape was then regarded as a heinous crime and, if detected and proved against white women, swiftly punished. The difference was the perception of Indian women as subhuman others against whom the baser instincts might be given freer play, much as they were against female slaves.
Sheriffs and vigilantes did not usually concern themselves when Indians were the victims of felonious crimes but acted otherwise when Indians were the accused. One hapless California brave named Collo, accused of murdering a white boy, was hanged before a crowd of nearly two thousand onlookers. Half were Indians rounded up to witness the execution so "that they might be impressed with a wholesome fear of the white man's justice, and thus be deterred from committing any more murders."53
The whites who viewed the execution were presumably impressed by another message, that Indians were killers. In fact the frequency of Indian homicide was increased by drinking and prostitution, activities that inevitably gave rise to violent quarrels, just as they did among whites.54 Violent crime by Indians in turn reinforced anti-Indian prejudice, even though the frontiersmen who judged the Indians were really glimpsing their own vices in the distorting mirror of the Savage Other.
Recent scholarship on Indians and frontier whites has emphasized the syncretic nature of their cultures, the mutual borrowing of customs, plants, and technologies that produced for both a genuinely new experience of the world. To this I would add an important qualifier. Because of the unbalanced character of frontier demography, Indians did most of their cultural borrowing from an atypical segment of white society, the one that was most prone to violent and disorderly behavior. It is not, I think, accidental that the high rates of alcoholism and violent death that have continued to plague Indians in the twentieth century were common problems among the frontier whites with whom they first came into contact. Frontiers, to paraphrase Turner, are like glaciers; when they are gone they leave a rocky cultural moraine."
They also left a large number of dead Indians. Though Turner's account of "advancing" whites settling on "free land" along an "empty" frontier has rightly been denounced as culturally biased, there is a sense in which it is biologically apt, for the deaths of millions of native inhabitants created an ecological opening into which immigrants and their livestock could move. The primary, unthinking agent of their destruction was disease. The age and gender structure of the white frontier population was relevant to Indian infection in the specific case of venereal disease and, more generally, through the effects of overhunting, starvation, and the combination of killing, abuse, and exploitation that William McNeill dubbed macroparasitism. Natives, as the medical historian Stephen Kunitz has pointed out, did not simply drop dead whenever they found themselves downwind from a European. They were most likely to succumb to disease when they suffered catastrophic displacement from their lands, typically at the hands of miners or pastoralists.56
The displacers were mostly armed young men, the segment of the white population that had the greatest potential for lethal and predatory behavior. The potential was compounded by ethnocentrism and unleashed by its triumphalist racial adjunct, the West as the White Man's Land. The determination of frontiersmen to achieve and profit from this expropriating vision despite the half-hearted attempts of their government to delay them and secure justice for the Indians produced the most tragic and sustained episode of violence in American history.