Category Archives: Indian Wars

Father Rale.

Posted on by
Reply

By the middle of the 17th Century the fires of the Counter-Reformation had begun to cool.  New ways of thinking emphasized skepticism and tolerance and not fighting over religious issues.  Father Sebastien Rale (1657-1724) belonged to another era than the one in which he lived.  He grew up on the eastern fringe of France, then joined the Jesuits when young.  He taught for a stretch in southern France, but reciting “amo, amas, amat” to blubbering school-boys didn’t hold his attention.  So he volunteered for the New World and the Jesuits shipped him off to a place better suited to his commitments.  In 1689 he went to Canada.  The Jesuit Superior in New France sent him to an Abenaki village near Quebec to learn the language, then to a mission in Kaskaskia in the Illinois country for two years, and then (1694) to Norridgewock on the Kennebec River.  Today, that’s in central Maine; then it was the frontier between Catholic New France and Protestant New England.

In Norridgewock, Father Rale both served the spiritual needs of his parishioners and wound-up the local Indians against the English-speaking Protestants moving up relentlessly from the southwest.  When Queen Anne’s War (1703-1713) broke out Father Rale’s parishioners joined in a Fall 1703 raid that killed 150 English settlers.  This raid fell within a larger pattern.  For example a raid on York, Maine in 1692 had left 100 people—men, women, and children—dead and many others taken captive.  Among the captives carried off to Canada and later ransomed, was Jeremiah Moulton (1688-1765).  English settlers—understandably—became obsessed about the danger.[1]  The governor of Massachusetts put a price on Rale’s head and New England militia were inclined to a literal interpretation.  Ten years of unsuccessful man-hunting and border war followed.  In 1713 “peace” broke out.

It wasn’t much of a peace in Maine, whatever it was in Europe.  The exact border between New England and “Acadia” hadn’t been defined in the peace treaty.  The French said it ran along the Kennebec.  The Indians—the Wabanaki Confederation—didn’t agree that they were under British authority.  The government of Massachusetts (which then owned Maine) built some forts on Wabanaki land and settlers moved north and east.  Father Rale urged the Indians to attack the English settlers, although they didn’t need any encouragement to defend their lands from outsiders.  Small raids went on until, in January 1722, the governor of Massachusetts launched an Indian war on the frontier of the province.

Massachusetts militia troops just missed capturing Father Rale, but did get a strong-box full of papers that seemed to show that he acted on behalf of France.  “Father Rale’s War” then began in earnest.  The Wabanaki retaliated with attacks on the frontier forts and settlements.

During 1723, Indian attacks had a devastating effect.  Spring 1724 began as 1723 had ended.  Wabanaki raiders killed farmers and loggers, fishermen (they captured a bunch of fishing boats), and soldiers sent to fight them.  The governor of Massachusetts ordered all settlers to move to the forts or to fortified houses.[2]

In August 1724, a group of militia—now much experienced at Indian fighting–surprised the Indians at Norridgewock.  Afterwards, a scalped Father Rale lay among the dead.  The English burned the village and the crops in the field.  The Indians then moved north out of reach of the English.[3]  The commander of the English attack was Jeremiah Moulton, who had been kidnapped in York many years before.  There is something Biblical in that.

[1] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wgkpfa5HMw  and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV2JPv1EFww

[2] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrison_(architecture) for the architectural style.

[3] British colonists settled the now-empty site of the village only in 1773.

My Weekly Reader 3 June 2019.

Posted on by
Reply

After the British surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, the Revolutionary War finally ended.  It had been a long war and a hard war.  The weary nation returned to peace.

Actually, that’s not what happened.  After Yorktown, war continued in the South and on the frontier.  The war on the frontier is particularly badly understood.[1]  Now, however, the war in the South can be better understood thanks to John Buchanan.[2]

Buchanan takes up his story well before Yorktown,  Horatio Gates, the “hero of Saratoga,” led the Army in the South to disaster at Camden (August 1780).  George Washington sent Nathaniel Greene[3] to clean up the mess.  He gave him a free hand and the assistance of Daniel Morgan.  Greene and Morgan rallied what troops they could—a core of “Continentals,” a fluctuating number of state militia, and a swarm of irregulars—and began a war of attrition.  Worn down by small defeats and Pyrrhic victories, the British commander Lord Cornwallis made fatal errors.  In April 1781, he divided his forces and led one element north toward Virginia.  The rest stayed in the South to try to hold what the British had won.

Rather than follow Cornwallis northward, Greene targeted the smaller force left behind.  Between May 1781 and December 1782, Greene carried on his earlier approach to fighting the British.  He achieved much the same result.  Small defeats and Pyrrhic victories wore down the British forces.  In the end, their main forces fell back on the heavily fortified ports of Savannah and Charleston.  Here they held out until July and December 1782 respectively.

The Royal Navy had controlled the seas since the beginning of the Revolution, with the sole—catastrophic—exception of the period around the siege at Yorktown.  Had the British won the “Battle of the Capes” against the French (September 1781), then Cornwallis could have been reinforced and re-supplied.  The British would have controlled New York, the Chesapeake, Charleston, and Savannah.  Those positions could not have been taken by siege.  The bargaining for a peace treaty might have been less favorable for the Americans.

With the British confined to coastal enclaves, the main effort of the war in the South became a gory combination of civil war and race war.  Patriots and Tories fought each other with a ferocity not limited to the battlefield.  Pro-British Indians raided the frontier and the Patriots struck back in their accustomed manner by burning villages, storehouses of food, and crops in the field in order to drive their enemy far away.  African-American slaves fled to the British lines, even though savagely punished when captured in flight.  One Patriot commander later recalled the Revolution in the South Carolina Upcountry: “in no part of the South was the war fought with such asperity as in this quarter. It often sank into barbarity.”

None of this was decisive.  Yorktown had led to the opening of peace negotiations.

Over the longer term, the civil war and race war in the South may have contributed to that culture of violence that long marked the South.[4]

[1] Still, see Glenn Williams, The Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign Against the Iroquois (2006), for a skillful introduction.  See also: “Oliver Wiswell” https://waroftheworldblog.com/2017/07/27/oliver-wiswell/

[2] John Buchanan, The Road to Charleston (2019).

[3] Greene was a 38 year-old quick-learner.  His political sympathies had led him to abandon Quakerism for war.  Between 1775 and 1777, the British had helped along his learning with a bunch of hard lessons.  He profited greatly from them.

[4] See: Fox Butterfield, All God’s Children (1996).

My Weekly Reader 19 December 2018.

Posted on by
Reply

What we think of as the British Empire of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries did not yet exist in 1763.  It was aborning, however.  Britain had defeated France in the Seven Years War (1756-1763).  Britain then took possession of French North America between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.  British North Americans saw their long-standing hopes of expanding beyond the Appalachian Mountains fulfilled.  These hopes failed at first.  The British Empire’s managers in London saw themselves juggling a diverse American community.   British “America” contained largely Protestants, mostly of Anglo-descent; Canada contained Catholic former French subjects; and in the Wilderness, the Native Americans offered access to the riches of the fur trade.  Containing the British North Americans offered the best path to peace and prosperity, especially after Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763) showed how difficult it might be to conquer the Native Americans.

The conflict crystalized in two remarkable figures.[1]  George Croghan (1718-1782), an Irish immigrant fur trader and land speculator, had become the vastly influential deputy to Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  James Smith (1737-1813), a Pennsylvania farmer, had been an Indian fighter and then became  a charismatic figure.  Both had lived among the Indians, and knew their languages and culture.  Their fundamental dispute gave human faces to the essential difference between the Anglo-American colonists and the British government.  Croghan saw the path to prosperity for himself and for the Empire running through peaceful trade with the Indians.  Smith saw the path running through driving away the Indians and expanding farming settlements.

To seal the deal with the Native Americans, in February 1765 the British dispatched a huge column of gifts to a peace treaty ceremony with Pontiac in the Ohio country.  Croghan added in many of his own trade goods from a desire to revive trade after the war and Pontiac’s Rebellion.  The Pennsylvania settlers[2] saw the presents—including rum and gunpowder–as the basest form of appeasement and as likely to provoke another Indian war as to forestall one.

Smith formed many of the settlers into an impromptu militia called “The Black Boys” after their use of bunt cork to disguise their faces.  The “Black Boys” tried to stop the caravans.  The 42nd Highlanders provided the hard core of the British escort, so the rebel settlers tended to steer around them.[3]  For a time, the rebels even blockaded Fort Loudon.  The British, short of supplies, abandoned the fort in November 1765.  Then peace with the Indians came and the “Black Boys Rebellion” died down.

In “Patriot,” Mel Gibson’s character announces that “the [coming] war [with England] will be fought not on the frontier or on some distant battle-field, but here among us…”  In truth, it was fought everywhere.  The wars on the frontier played a vital role in determining the American victory.  However, the frontier fights began well ahead of the formal “Revolution.”

[1] What follows is a part of the story told by Patrick Spero, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (2018).

[2] Now in central Pennsylvania near Gettysburg, but then the far West.

[3] The 42nd had seen a good deal of service in North America, having fought at the first—disastrous—and second battles of Fort Ticonderoga, in the siege of Montreal, and in the bloody Indian fight at Bushy Run during Pontiac’s Rebellion.

My Weekly Reader 14 June 2018.

Posted on by
Reply

Well before the arrival of Europeans on the Eastern seaboard of North America, the Native Americans had advanced far beyond simple bands of wandering hunters-and-gatherers.  They had become settled hunters-and-farmers; their communities had grown from bands to confederations of tribes.  It would be easy to portray their situation as an Eden and the Europeans as the snake in the Garden.  This over-simplifies things.

First, the Native Americans were Stone Age people whose lives could be very hard.  Europeans were an Iron Age people whose axes, knives, cooking pots, and muskets could ease those hard lives.  Second, many tribes disputed with others.  Trading with Europeans gave them access to European technology, but alliances could give them the bulge on rivals.  Cooperation co-existed with conflict between .Europeans and Native Americans.

Yet conflict became endemic.  The two different peoples despised one another.  The Europeans—Spanish, French, Dutch, and English—were all monotheists, believing themselves to be in the left lane of the highway to Heaven and everyone else to be taking the off-ramp to Hell.  Endlessly busy in pursuit of gain, the Europeans found the Native Americans to be an idle lot.  The Native Americans were commonly animists, believing that each living thing possessed a spirit.  Lacking much material wealth, the Native Americans couldn’t comprehend the acquisitiveness of the Europeans.

The imbalance in real strength between the two sides doomed the Native Americans.  Certainly, the Europeans possessed an immense technological advantage over the Native Americans.  Sailing ships, firearms, and iron tools all surpassed anything Native Americans could produce.  More importantly, there were just a lot more Europeans who wanted to live in North America than there were Native Americans who might want to keep them out.  The spread of European diseases compounded, but did not cause, the imbalance.

The first American “way of war” rested on the English understanding of the Native Americans.  The Native Americans could not stand and fight against heavily armed and armored Europeans.  They faded away into the forest at the English approach.  So march to a stockaded village, burn it down along with stored food and crops in the field, then go home.  On occasion, the English could trap the enemy inside their stockade.  Then they applied fire and sword.

An early war in New England illustrates these realities.[1]  Before 1600, the Narragansett confederacy had dominated southern New England.  Then the Pequot tribe intruded itself into the Connecticut River valley.  In 1622, they had expanded their territory by defeating the Narragansett.  In 1630, the Puritan settlers began to arrive in Massachusetts Bay.   Conflicts arose between the Narragansett and the English from time to tie, but the Narragansett understood the danger to themselves.  In 1636, they palmed off the murder of a rough-around-the-edges merchant ship captain by some of their own allies as the handiwork of the Pequot.  Then they sent a bunch of warriors to fight with the English against the Pequot.  The war ended with a gory massacre of many Pequot trapped inside their own stockade at Mystic.  Some of the survivors became slaves of the Narragansett.  Forty years later it would be the turn of the Narragansett in King Philip’s War (1675-1678).

[1] James A. Warren, God, War, and Providence (2018).

The Missing and Ulzana’s Raid.

Posted on by
Reply

From “Broken Arrow” (1954) through “Little Big Man” (1970) to “Dances with Wolves” (1990), Hollywood Westerns fell into step with the spirit of the times.  They took an ever-more sympathetic view of the Indians and an ever-more negative view of the white Americans who conquered the West.  Occasionally, some people have taken a more “classical” view.  In particular, “Ulzana’s Raid” (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1972) and “The Missing” (dir. Ron Howard, 2003) focused their attention on Apaches out for blood.  In part, they are effective because they take Indian beliefs seriously as a motivation to action.

In “Ulzana’s Raid,” an Apache warrior named “Ulzana” (Joaquin Martinez) jumps the San Carlos Reservation.  Basically, he’s fed up with the smell of women, children, dogs, and old people.  He wants to smell ponies running, burning, and blood.  In short, he chooses Life over Death.  He takes along his teen-age son and a few other young warriors.  He gets right to business, while the Army tries to track him down.  The Army patrol is “led” by a young lieutenant fresh from West Point (Bruce Davison).  The lieutenant’s father is a Protestant minister in favor of “humane” treatment of the Indians.  The real leader of the patrol is an old scout named “Mr. McIntosh” (Burt Lancaster).  The scout is assisted by an Apache from the San Carlos Indian Police, who happens to be Ulzana’s brother-in-law (Jorge Luke).  (This seems more credible once you’ve been married for a while.)  The patrol revolves around the education of the lieutenant.  Ki-Ne-Tay, the Apache policeman, explains that Apaches torture prisoners to obtain their power: “in this land, you must have power.”  He also learns to command, although his commands are not always for the best and are not always well-received by his troopers.  The movie ends badly for a number of those concerned, as was common in that time and place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCFiO3Kb1ms

 

The Missing.

In “The Missing,” Samuel Jones, a white man who “went Apache” years before (Tommy Lee Jones) appears at the ranch of his daughter, Maggie Gilkerson (Cate Blanchett).  She is a “grass widow” who also works as the local “healer.”  She hates her father and rejects his effort to make amends.  At that same moment, an Apache called “El Brujo” jumps the reservation and goes on a rampage.  He kills white settlers and other Apaches, and kidnaps young women of both races for sale as sex-slaves in Mexico.  One of the kidnapped girls is Maggie’s rebellious daughter, who wanted bright lights instead of the homestead.  Maggie’s ranch-hand/lover is among the slain.  The local sheriff can’t help because it’s outside his jurisdiction.  (Sound familiar?)  The Army can’t help because it is busy with other stuff.  (Plundering the homes of murdered settlers for example.)  Maggie tells her father that he can make amends by helping her get the kidnapped daughter back.  So Maggie, and her youngest daughter, and her father set off in pursuit of the Apaches.

One problem is that “Brujo” is the Spanish word for “witch.”  This “El Brujo” has mystical powers and can change into a wolf or an eagle.  Probably he found this a stressful experience as a child because he’s crazy and sadistic.  (There having been too few trained talk therapists in Arizona in the 1880s.  Sad, but true.)  Eventually, the dysfunctional little family teams up with a couple of Chiricahua Apaches who are hunting “El Brujo” for the same reason.  They get the girls back and kill “El Brujo” and his merry men, but at a cost.  On the other hand, there’s a certain amount of reconciliation between the generations, a la Mark Twain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI3IKUa9HyA

The Apache Wars.

Posted on by
Reply

The Apache started out as nomadic buffalo hunters on the Southern Plains.  The “Apacheria” ran from north of the Arkansas River  in Colorado and Kansas into what are now the northern states of Mexico and from Central Texas through New Mexico to Central Arizona.   Central Texas is where the Spanish first ran into them in the 1540s.  The two groups got along, until they didn’t.[1]  Spanish did some slave raiding; then the Apache did some “I don’t want to be a slave” raiding.  Then the Comanche showed up.  The “Comanch” were scary, so the Apache moved off the Plains.  They concentrated in the mountains and deserts of what would become New Mexico, Arizona, Sonora, and Chihuahua.  Hard lands made hard people.  Constant small-scale warfare made them harder still.  Raiding and warfare between first Spain and then Mexico continued until the middle of the 19th Century.  By the 1830s, the state governments in Mexico were offering large bounties[2] for Apache scalps.  Scalp hunters took up the offer.

Then the United States showed up.  Mexico lost the resulting war.  They also lost Arizona and New Mexico.  They also lost most of the Apache.  The American won everything the Mexicans lost.  A series of wars followed: the Jicarilla War (1849-1854); the Chiricahua Wars (1860-1862); the Texas-Indian War (1861-1865, involving Apache but mostly Comanche); the Yavapai War (1871-1875); Victorio’s War (1879-1881); and Geronimo’s War (1881-1886).  In theory, that ended the Apache Wars, but small groups of “renegade” Apache continued to “jump the reservation” from time to time.  The last of these incidents in the United States occurred in 1924; the last in Mexico in 1933.[3]

How does this relate to the movies “The Missing” and “Ulzana’s Raid”?

Part of the reason that the United States defeated the Apache is a numerical advantage.  The Army sent 5,000 soldiers to hunt Geronimo’s band of thirty men.  Another part of the reason lay in the Army’s recruitment of Apache scouts to hunt Apache “hostiles.”  Apaches shared a common culture, but they didn’t have a strong sense of identity beyond their own bands.  Often they quarreled among themselves.  So, some Apache warriors enlisted as scouts with the Army.[4]   Sometimes—as was the case with the “Apache Kid–they then fell out with their employers.

Mexico and the United States had a testy relationship after the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).  Mexico viewed the Americans as predators to be kept at arm’s length.  “Pity poor Mexico: so far from God, so near the United States.”  Mexican reluctance to allow American troops chasing Apaches to cross the border turned Mexico into a “safe haven” for the raiders.

“Brujo” is Spanish for “witch.”  This isn’t the same as a “medicine man” or “shaman.”  The latter use their skills—“white magic” in Medieval European terms—to heal or protect.  In contrast “brujo/bruja” use their skills—“brujeria” or “black magic” in Medieval European terms—to harm others.  As part of their art, it was believed that they could take the form of animals like owls or snakes or coyotes.  This transformation allowed them to travel secretly and to strike at their victims.  Furthermore, it was believed that they could make “corpse powder” from powdered corpses.  The powder could induce the symptoms of painful or lethal diseases.

[1] Just like Canadians are really nice, until they’re not.  Ask the Waffen SS troops in France who shot a bunch of wounded Canadians in June 1944.  Wait, you can’t.  Never mind.

[2] The equivalent of a year’s pay for a working man for one scalp.  Scalps were supposed to come from males aged for years or older, but how could you tell from just the scalp?  Lots of women and kids got killed in attacks on Apache “Rancheria.”

[3] The best book on this is Dan Thrapp, The Conquest of Apacheria (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967).

[4] See: “Mickey Free.”

Mickey Free.

Posted on by
Reply

Boundaries and identities could be murky in the West.  For example, between the end of the Mexican-American War (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854) a little strip of what is today southern Arizona and New Mexico belonged to Mexico.  Mexicans and Apaches vastly outnumbered any American immigrants.  Jesusa Martinez (b. 1830) lived with a part-Irish Mexican named Santiago Telles.  They had a couple of red-haired kids, so the Irish ancestry may have been real.  Their son was called Felix (1848-1913 or 1915) and their daughter was called Teodora.  So, all of them were Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in the United States.  In 1859, she either left Telles or he died.  In any event, she moved in with John Ward (1806-1867), another Irish immigrant who had come to the area to ranch.  They more or less got married and Ward more or less adopted the kids.  Felix Telles became Felix Ward.

No sooner did they get these matters sorted out than some White Mountain Apaches rustled a bunch of Ward’s cattle and kidnapped young Felix Ward in January 1861.  The U.S. Army sent a small detachment to try to get the kid back.  This effort misfired and led to Cochise’s decade-long war with the United States (1861-1872).  Felix Ward was adopted into the band, with whom he lived for about ten years.

You might have thought that the Indian tribes would all stick together against the Americans.  Not the case.  The Yavapai Indians continually fought with the Apaches.  In late 1871 war broke out between the Americans and the Yavapai.  In December 1872, Ward and his White Mountain foster-brother, came down out of the mountains to enlist as scouts for the US Army.  Whites had a hard time with Apache names, so Felix Ward became “Mickey Free” and his brother “John Rope.”  They scouted for George Crook in the Yavapai War.

They may have been scouting for Crook later that month when the Army besieged a large band of Yavapai in a cave in Salt River Canyon.  Eventually the Yavapai were defeated and forced onto a reservation at Camp Verde, Arizona Territory.  Mickey Free went there as an interpreter.  So did Al Sieber, Chief of Scouts for Crook.[1]  Sieber appears to have thought well of him.  So he probably moved to the San Carlos Apache Reservation with Sieber.

Life on the reservation wasn’t very tranquil.  For example, in August 1878, September 1881, and May 1885, Geronimo “jumped the reservation” in raiding expeditions.  Free scouted for the Cavalry as they hunted these and other bands of “renegades.”  He and his brother John Rope stayed with the scouts until the final capture of Geronimo in 1886.

One of Free’s fellow scouts was the “Apache Kid” (sometime in the 1860s-1894 or perhaps not if you believe the legends).  Like Free and Rope, the Kid did good service in the hunt for Geronimo.  However, in 1887, the Kid and some of his friends were involved in a shooting affray with some other Apache scouts; the Army arrested the Kid; and he promptly escaped and took to the hills.   In May-June 1887, Free helped Sieber in the successful hunt for the Kid.  Since the Apache Kid again escaped and was hunted by various groups, Free may have been a bounty hunter for a while.

Free left the Scouts in 1893.  He took up farming at the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, where the White Mountain Apaches lived.

I suspect that he inspired the fictional character “John Russell” in Elmore Leonard’s novel Hombre (1961).  A Mexican-Irish-Apache in Arizona and Mexico.  Murky boundaries.

[1] Al Sieber (1843-1907) was a German-born immigrant.  In the Civil War he fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.  After the war he went West to prospect and ended up ranching in Arizona.  He served as Chief of Scouts from 1871 to 1890.

Oliver Wiswell.

Posted on by
1

My Dad was the finest man I’ve ever known, but he didn’t have a lot of formal education or refined taste in literature.   He read the novels of John D. MacDonald, C.S. Forester and Kenneth Roberts.  Cheap paperbacks you could buy in the Rexall drugstore on 45th in Seattle.  So I read them as well.  It was a productive use of my time.  Kenneth Roberts (1885–1957) started as a journalist, tried his hand at soldiering in the First World War (Siberia expedition), went back to journalism (Saturday Evening Post), and ended up as a historical novelist.

Roberts was a cross-grained guy.  Arundel (1931) and A Rabble in Arms (1933) celebrate Benedict Arnold—before the treason.  Northwest Passage (1937) centers on Robert Rogers, the subsequently disgraced American hero of the French and Indian Wars.[1]  Oliver Wiswell (1940) is a view of the American Revolution from the perspective of a Tory.  After Arundel[2] it is his best book.

In Oliver Wiswell the hero instinctively helps a man who is being tarred and feathered and ridden on a fence rail for dissenting from common opinion; helps treat the British wounded after Bunker Hill (one guy is gut-shot by a musket ball with a nail pounded through it); interviews New York Loyalists who have been driven into hiding in a swamp to escape their tormentors; hears of other Loyalists who have been imprisoned in the depths of Connecticut’s Simsbury mines; investigates the mass murder of American prisoners of war by their British guards in New York; wanders in disguise through the back-country in search of the troops that General John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga[3]; travels for a while with the many people migrating West of the Appalachians to escape the war and the “Land of Liberty”; arrives in South Carolina in time to hear of the bloody civil war underway in the South and to participate in the Loyalist defense of Ninety-Six; learns of the American assault upon the civilized Cherokee; returns to New York to share in the whale-boat fights on Long Island Sound as Loyalists sought to escape the United States; and ends by helping found new colonies in Canada for the Loyalists.  So, reading this book could give you the idea that the American Revolution involved a lot of informal violence on both sides, but especially against the opponents of the “Empire of Liberty.”

While not an “academic” historian, Roberts did a lot of research for his books.  He consulted both published primary sources and the “literary” histories of an earlier time.  Like any journalist, he sought out dramatic human stories that illustrated larger patterns.

In recent years, academic historians have systematically exploited many more sources that were used by Roberts.  However, their books largely confirm what Roberts intuited.[4]  There was nothing gentlemanly or moderate about the Patriots’ war with the allies of the British Army.  Roger Parkinson, The Common Cause, examines how Patriots nurtured white fear and hatred of blacks and Indians as a way to bind people to the Revolution.  Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost, shows how on the Southwestern frontier many hopes for the future—especially among the Indians–failed when the United States succeeded.  Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, tracks the fate of losers red, white and black.  Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence, speaks directly to Robert’s theme of ruthless liberty.

All this emphasizes the achievement of the Founders in calming America after 1783.

[1] The first third of the book, on Rogers’ raid on the St. Francis Indians, is marvelous.  The rest is a dog.

[2] In one of the novels, an English noble-woman says “You live in a rundle?  Oh, you mean Arun-dell.”

[3] They were promised parole, but the Americans declined to fulfill this promise—or adequately care for their captives.

[4] See the discussion of books in Jane Kamensky, “Red, White, Black and Blue,” NYT Book Review, 21 May 2017.

Lord Dunmore’s War.

Posted on by
Reply

From 1756 to 1763, Britain fought France for command of eastern North America.  Britain won, but then had troubles with its Indian and Anglo-American allies in that war.  The British government found itself ruling a multi-lingual, multi-racial empire in America.  French-speaking Catholic Canadians and Native Americans were suddenly joined with the English-speaking Atlantic Americans.  Were the Atlantic Americans to be the favored constituency or should the imperial government try to hold the ring between three equally valuable groups?  The latter made the most sense from a Justice perspective, and economic rationality supported Justice.  The fur trade with the interior regions generated wealth, while new wars would load the British government with more debt.  However, the Atlantic Americans bucked against imperial limits on their Westward drive, as they did against resistance from the Native Americans.

Trying to bring the territories of the Ohio Valley (western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky) under effective control, in 1768 the British signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with the formidable Iroquois Confederacy.[1]  The Treaty didn’t hand over to the British any lands actually occupied by the Iroquois.  It handed over lands used by the Shawnee and others as a common hunting ground.  The Iroquois had beaten all of these Native American peoples into submission in the many days ago.  The Shawnee didn’t like this deal (who would?) and weren’t anywhere as near afraid of white settlers or British soldiers as they were of the Iroquois.  So, trouble brewed, needing only an incident to set off a real war.[2]

Incidents began to accumulate from late 1773.  More and more Atlantic Americans crossed the Appalachians in search of trade, then of land.  A few of them bore names that ring out in American history: Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark.  Most, though, are known only to specialist historians: Michael Cresap (1742-1775), Ebenezer Zane (1747-1811), John Gibson (1740-1822), and the awful Daniel Greathouse (1752-1775).  The migration led to conflicts in which the Native Americans got rather the better of it.

In 1774, the royal governor of Virginia, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, responded by launching two columns of militia totaling about 2,500 men into the Ohio country.  The basic, usually effective, strategy consisted of marching cautiously toward the home villages of the Indians; hoping that they would retreat to save their families; and then burning down the villages, burning any food stores, and burning the crops in the field.  The Indians then could starve at their leisure.  This kinda-sorta worked in what came to be called “Lord Dunmore’s War.”[3]  The Shawnee took advantage of the separation of the two militia columns to try to destroy the enemy in detail by concentrating against first one, then the other.

On 10 October 1774, at Point Pleasant in what is today West Virginia, the Shawnee attacked.  The Shawnee did a lot of damage to the militia column, but could not defeat it.  The day ended in a victory for the American militia.  On 19 October 1774, faced with the prospect of a militia advance on his villages, the Shawnee chief signed over most of his lands.

“Lord Dunmore’s War,” as it came to be called, opened the country south of the Ohio River to settlement.  At the same time, it did nothing to settle the question of the country north of the Ohio.  It also offered another warning to the Native Americans that their future could not be reconciled with that of the Atlantic Americans.  Future wars loomed.

[1] See: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2017/07/15/iroquois-confederacy/

[2] Glenn F. Williams, Dunmore’s War: The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era (2017)

[3] It certainly worked a lot better than did two later expeditions by the U.S. Army in 1790 and 1791.  Both of those ended in disastrous defeats.  See: https://waroftheworldblog.com/2017/07/14/my-weekly-reader-14-july-2017/

Iroquois Confederacy.

Posted on by
1

The Iroquois Confederacy united the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes.  Sometime, perhaps around 1570, the five tribes had agreed to organize a confederation.  They had an elaborate government structure.  At its peak each tribe got one vote in the grand council and decisions had to be unanimous.  Why did they form this confederation?  Probably because they were under attack from all sides by more powerful tribes.  They concentrated in remote areas of central New York, building fortified villages on high ground.

Then they began to make a cult out of personal glory in warfare.  (Cultural values matter.)  The women of the tribes took over the farming duties.  This freed up the men for other activities.  Today it would be sitting in the recliner drinking a beer and watching sports.  For the Iroquois it was ranging through the forests to fight people.  Either you get good at this or you get dead.  The Iroquois got good at it.  Really, really good.  A total population of about 12,000 could produce 2,200 warriors at any one time.

At this time Europeans wanted beaver pelts in immense quantities.  (They made really sharp-looking and water-proof hats.)  Traders were taking 10,000 beaver a year out of upstate New York.  They were willing to pay Indian trappers a lot to get the pelts to satisfy the demand in Europe.  The first Iroquois treaty was with the French in 1624.  The two groups then fell out over the high price of French goods and the French favoritism for the Algonkins and Hurons, who seemed willing to accept Jesuit missionaries.  Also, the French did not want to sell the Iroquois guns.  The Iroquois got in touch with the Dutch fur traders on the Hudson River.  The Dutch tried to trade alcohol for furs.  The Iroquois wanted guns.  So the Dutch sold guns.

By the 1630s the over-hunting of beaver on Iroquois land threatened to undermine the economic basis of confederation power.  What to do?  Perhaps we should work to create a “sustainable” economy in harmony with Nature, instead of engaging in thoughtless resource depletion.  Perhaps we should reject consumerism, which puts a premium on “having things” at the expense of emphasizing nurturing relationships with the friends and family who give life real meaning.  Nope.  There’s lots of beaver on the lands of other tribes.  We’re going to conquer those tribes and take their beaver.

Between 1648 and 1675 they were on the offensive.  In a quarter of a century they smashed up all the major tribes to their west as far as Ohio and as far south as Georgia.  This gave them control of all the fur trade of the northern forests.  Tribes moving furs from up-country either paid a share to the Iroquois or they made a long detour to avoid coming into contact with the Iroquois.  Either way the “tax” on the fur trade pushed up the price of furs delivered in Montreal.  This greatly annoyed the French.  Anyway, between this and the butchering of Jesuit missionaries, the French got all bent out of shape with the Iroquois.  They launched several major invasions of Iroquois country.  This, in turn, greatly annoyed the Iroquois, who launched a whole series of raids against the French settlers in Canada.

Once the British got New York away from the Dutch, they started dealing with the Iroquois.  When France and Britain fought for control of North America, the Iroquois provided a valuable ally to the British.  (Certainly a lot more valuable than the useless American colonists who were afraid of the woods.)  The British would give you the guns for free, then they would pay for scalps on top of that.  Iroquois heaven.