The Transformation of the World (75 page)

The variety of frontier experiences was also reflected in the problems that came to the fore; there were asynchronies such as those already theorized in Turner's conception of social evolution through stages. Whereas, after the end of the Indian threat, the Great Plains farmers from Texas to North Dakota had to solve typical nineteenth-century problems—mortgages, railroad charges, cash flow—people in California were already debating issues that would be characteristic of the twentieth century, such as water supplies, fruit growing, transpacific trade, or urban real estate markets. Water was not by chance a keyword: none of the West's other ecological problems was more threatening. The myth of the frontier waxed lyrical about its “limitless” natural resources, but we need to remind ourselves that one resource was scarce from the very beginning: water.

Indian Wars and Pistol Terror

A frontier nearly always has violence as part of it, but the North American West is the paradigm. From the First Anglo-Powhatan War of 1609–14 in Virginia to the end of the last Apache war in 1886 in the Southwest, the relationship between whites and Indians was marked by one conflict after another.
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All in all, the Eastern Indian peoples—often joined together in a brittle confederation—held out longer and were comparatively stronger opponents. The last of them
were eliminated militarily only when the remaining Seminole warriors were deported from the Florida swamps in 1842. The battles in the East had lasted for roughly 240 years. West of the Mississippi, on the other hand, they were packed into just forty.

The invasion of the Great Plains by Euro-American settlers began in the 1840s. The first deadly Indian attacks on overland wagons were recorded in 1845, but the tribes were often content to extract a toll and to exchange provisions on terms that they considered fair; some of the most brutal raids on wagon trains were staged by white bandits in Indian dress.
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In the 1850s the number of incidents increased, and the 1860s witnessed the outbreak of the classic Indian wars so deeply rooted in the national memory and immortalized by Hollywood. In 1862, when Sioux warriors killed several hundred white settlers in the greatest massacre since the founding of the United States, fears were even rife of a major uprising in the rear of the Civil War armies.
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No more than a minority of tribes, however, were involved in the Indian wars. Only the Apache, Sioux, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Kiowa offered lasting resistance. Other tribes (Pawnee, Osage, Crow, Hopi, etc.) fought on the side of the federal troops.
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A military frontier against hostile Indian tribes came into being after 1850, when New Mexico was added to the Union as war booty and the Southwest was strewn with army camps to keep the “savages” under control.
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Although they found it hard at first to beat off Apache and Comanche attacks, the forts later became bases for an effective “pacification” of the region. Troops that had fought on the Union side in the Civil War were sent to the South to break the independence of the Indians.

Modern European thinking was by no means inapplicable to many of the Indian wars. Excellent strategists appeared on the Indian side and, given the approximate material balance, were able to inflict many a defeat on the whites. The Indians of the Great Plains were probably the best light cavalry in the world, extremely effective against an enemy that was inadequately trained and equipped. Their often undermotivated adversaries suffered from the harsh conditions in the forts and on the battlefield. Apart from young elite cavalrymen, the motley crew included often overage Irish veterans of the British army, Hungarian hussars, and in the early years even some survivors of the Napoleonic wars. The weaknesses of the Indians were, of course, their inferior weaponry (they were ultimately powerless against the dreaded mountain howitzer), but also their inadequate discipline, lack of a proper command structure, and poor protection of camps and villages. The asymmetries that favored Europeans militarily in many Asian and African theaters were repeated here too.
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The transition from war to massacres and attacks on defenseless settlements was fluid enough. Both sides were armed, and lawless violence was part of everyday life in large parts of the frontier; it was a legacy that all had inherited from the colonial wars of the late eighteenth century.
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The use of force between civilizations was interconnected with the general violence of civilian life on the Euro-American side of the frontier. The pioneers of the “Wild West,” who settled their
everyday disputes with a handgun or rifle, were among the most heavily armed populations in the world. The readiness to “shoot it out” marked social life in peacetime, in a way that is usually characteristic only of civil war situations. Extreme standards of male honor, unknown in the cities of the East, meant that it was more normal to sharpen a conflict than to soften it (“No Duty to Retreat”). People took their own initiative in defending their interests, sometimes with a suicidal cult of “valor.” Typical was the vigilante band, operating in situations where the law held no sway, as a kind of revolutionary force, as it were, taking the place of the locally absent state. Behind this stood the idea of a right to self-defense and a highly muscular interpretation of popular sovereignty. Richard Maxwell Brown surmises that despite the high human costs, this practice preserved order more cheaply than a regular judicial system.

The reign of terror exercised by pistol-packing heroes reached its maximum intensity and compass in the four decades or so after the end of the Civil War. Brown actually describes it as a kind of mini civil war in its own right: most of the two hundred or three hundred most famous or infamous killers (plus a large number who are less well known) were acting on the orders of big landowners and enforcing their interests against those of small ranchers and homesteaders. They were not social bandits with a sense of justice and a sympathy for ordinary people but rather agents in a class war directed from above. In contrast, the great massacres of Indians—such as the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 in eastern Colorado, where some two hundred Cheyenne men, women, and children were slaughtered—tended to be organized by regular troops rather than by militias or vigilantes. The fact that in many other cases the army protected Indians against private white violence makes the complexity of the situation apparent.
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Deportations

Indian policy was overwhelmingly made in Washington but put into practice at the frontier. At the time of the founding of the United States, most Indian communities already had considerable experience of external challenges. They had undergone medical, ecological, and military shocks and repeatedly found themselves in the situation of having to react and reinvent themselves. Around 1800, it was by no means the case that cunning “civilized people” stood face to face with dimwitted “savages.”
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At times the Indians had been fairly treated, especially by Quakers in Pennsylvania, but much more often vile behavior toward them had clashed profoundly with their sense of justice. The attitude of the US government was contradictory. On the one hand, it recognized their de facto nationhood, by entering into treaties that were by no means always a one-sided diktat. On the other hand, the old Puritan belief in the superiority of Christians over pagans passed into the Enlightenment idea of a civilizing mission: the “Great Father” in Washington would watch strictly and benevolently over his Indian “children”;
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the civilizing influence would initially come from outside. Until midcentury there was no legal provision for intervention in the
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affairs of the tribes, but they were subjected to a special kind of indirect rule. Only after 1870 did it become accepted that the Indians, too, should obey the general laws of the land.
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In 1831 the aged Chief Justice John Marshall, for thirty-five years one of the most influential figures in the country, declared that the Cherokee nation was “a distinct political society, separated from others, [and] capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” The “tribes” were therefore not sovereign states on American soil but, as Marshall put it, “domestic dependent nations.”
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On paper this influential formulation seemed to give the Indians protection. But the executive had long since taken a different course, ignoring the judgment of the constitutional court. General Andrew Jackson, who took office in 1829 as the seventh president of the United States, had already shown himself to be an energetic fighter against the British, the Spanish, and the Indians. He thought nothing of breaking treaties with the Indians, and he did not share Marshall's view that any expropriation of Indian land should at least have a solid legal basis. Jackson's popular and effective policy of deportation (“Indian removal”) has occasionally been explained in individual psychological terms, as if the president's unhappy childhood had made him envious of the Indians as “eternal children” and, at the same time, aroused in him a desire to exercise overpowering paternal authority over them.
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That may well be. What matters more are the results of his policy.

In Jackson's eyes the civilizing mission of the Jefferson generation was a failure. He took his cue instead from the mentality of the so-called Paxton Boys, who in the 1760s had perpetrated horrific massacres of Indians in Pennsylvania.
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He thought there was no point in tolerating Indian enclaves. His aim—with methods that one would today describe as “ethnic cleansing”—was to drive the Indians beyond the Mississippi. During the 1830s, a cataclysmic decade second only to the 1870s, some 70,000 Indians were deported, mainly from the Southeast. The expulsion drive stretched right up to the Great Lakes; only the Iroquois in New York State put up successful resistance. Concentration camps were built, and whole Indian communities were force-marched with few personal belongings (and in sometimes extreme weather conditions) to the so-called Indian Territory. The great efforts that some tribes had made to “civilize themselves” gave them no protection. On the endless long marches, thousands of Indians died of disease, malnutrition, and hypothermia. But the horror of it all should not make us forget that Jackson's “Indian removal” only intensified an older process. As early as 1814 people had been induced of their own free will to leave the Creek homelands for the West. For many enterprising Indians, the “open” West held the same kind of attraction that it had for white settlers.
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The worst episode was the deportation of the Seminole people from Florida, in which Jackson's campaign was intertwined with the issue of slavery. The whites of Florida were less interested in the swampland abode of the Seminole than in the Afro-Americans, some of them runaway slaves, who lived there either in separate villages or as part of the Indian community. But the Seminole fought
back, and in several years of war many white soldiers also lost their lives.
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Some of the deported tribes kept up their (disregarded) adaptation to Euro-American ways in the new areas to which they were sent. The “Five Civilized Tribes”—Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—fared relatively well between 1850 and the beginning of the Civil War. They got over the effects of the removal, found their way to a new unity, adopted constitutions of their own, and built political institutions combining the old Indian democracy with the institutional forms of US democracy. Many ran family farms, others worked black slaves on plantations. They developed a bond with their new lands, in the same way that white farmers did with theirs. In the 1850s they created a school system that could have been the envy of whites in the nearby states of Missouri and Arkansas. Missionaries were warmly welcomed and accepted into the community. In all these ways the five tribes followed the prescribed path to civilization and moved ever farther apart from their Indian neighbors.
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If the Indian peoples had received firm guarantees that they could remain in the new areas allocated to them, Andrew Jackson's brutal policy might have foretokened the final phase in the development of the Indian frontier. But no such security was forthcoming.
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The land hunger of the settlers and railroad companies, together with encroachments by undisciplined miners, prevented the consolidation of viable communities. The general brutalization of American society during the Civil War carried over into new assaults on the Indians and a discourse of extermination like that heard a century before. The notorious saying that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” first appeared in 1860, and it represented the spirit of the age.
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It proved fatal for the Five Civilized Tribes in their so-called Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma) that they sided with the Southern states, since federal government policy after the end of the Civil War punished them for disloyalty and treated them as vanquished Confederate troops. The Indian peoples lost large tracts of their land and had to let the railroad companies in. Within twenty years they became minorities in the very territory that they had been forced to exchange for their homelands under President Jackson.
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The major Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s should be seen in this light. Following the war in the East, a new influx of settlers, and a series of local provocations, Indian resistance became more intense throughout the Great Plains. Previously the US Army had cultivated a neutral relationship with the Indian tribes and repeatedly defended them against acts of violence, but now it became a tool of the government's policy of finally resolving the “Indian question.” The resistance eventually collapsed in the early 1880s, as the famous Lakota chief Sitting Bull capitulated in 1881, and the Apache wars in the Southwest came to an end.
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