by David Treuer
So one wonders: Which was the better path, that of Chief John Ross or that of Osceola? Both men are remembered as having fought for their people, though in radically different ways. Both won Pyrrhic victories. Many of both tribes took up residence in what is now Oklahoma, but many refused to leave their homelands. Despite the best efforts of the government and the millions of dollars it spent, the Southeast was never entirely freed of Indians, and it likely never will be. They lived on in the swamps of Florida, the hills of southern Appalachia, the bayous of Alabama and Louisiana.
The Northeast
The prehistoric tribes of the American Northeast—stretching from Virginia all the way up to the Saint Lawrence—were as diverse as their homeland. From the Atlantic littoral to the Appalachians, the tribes seem to have kept close to the shores, so much of the record of their history was lost to rising water. Life seems to have been particularly good for them from about 3000 BCE to 700 BCE. According to Alice Kehoe, “After around 3000 BCE, sea level stabilized at its historical global level,” and the ocean provided seals and swordfish and cod. The innumerable rivers and streams ran with smelt, alewife, salmon, and herring every spring. The warming of the climate helped create vast beds of shellfish from Manhattan Island north to Maine. One archaeological site in southern Maine dated to 3000 BCE included the remains of deer, moose, seal, walrus, beaver, mink, sea mink, river otter, fisher, bear, swordfish, cod, sturgeon, sculpin, mallards, black ducks, loons, eagles, and shellfish. With the increasing availability of dependable calories came a population boom, which in turn facilitated cultural growth. Villages grew in size. Funerary rites and burials became more elaborate. By about 1000 BCE, pottery became prevalent.
Within a few hundred years the climate cooled again, calories became scarce (hickory nuts were particularly hard to find), and tribes fractured into smaller groups that seem to have relied more on inland hunting. Moose replaced deer, and foraging included wild grapes, hickory nuts, and acorns. Elaborate burial practices disappeared. During this time maize had begun its slow crawl as a domesticated food source from Mexico. It reached the Northeast and was in robust production by 1200 CE. Ever the companion of culture, corn caused populations to grow again. Internecine wars became common. By the time of contact with European fishing fleets in the early sixteenth century, there was a distinct division between what had become the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy inland and the polymorphous collection of Algonquian tribes scattered along the Atlantic coast. The perils and opportunities this division created played out very differently for the respective groups.
The Algonquian-speaking tribes included the Powhatan, Nanticoke, Pennacook, Massachuset, Mohegan, Delaware, Mahican, Abenake, Mi’kmaq, Pequot, Wampanoag, and scores of other small tribes. Opportunities for seasonal fishing, foraging, and hunting large game farther from shore encouraged the growth of numerous small seasonal villages of no more than a few hundred, organized by clan. The tribes spent the summer netting birds (loons, ducks, geese, and cormorants) and harvesting berries and nuts near the sea. In the fall they moved to other temporary villages better situated to net spawning fish. In the winter they congregated in larger villages and lived in multifamily longhouses to conserve heat, water, and material for shelter. They grew corn, beans, and squash but favored slash-and-burn methods that dictated moving to new planting grounds every few years. This is one reason early European explorers and colonists found cathedral-like old-growth forests and rich, open country ready for planting. The “virgin land” they described was hardly virgin at all, having been shaped by the tribes of the region for millennia.
The border region between the eastern Great Lakes and the Appalachian Mountains that was home to the five original tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy required a different kind of organization. By the end of the Woodland period (around 1100 CE) the separate Iroquoian tribes of the area—Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, Onondaga, and Mohawk—though to a degree united culturally and linguistically, had fought one another often for hunting and fishing grounds. But corn, when it arrived from Mexico, required intensive cultivation and a kind of seasonal stability not possible with constant, even if low-grade, conflict. The best way to organize in this region, compared to the resource-rich coast, seemed to be to create protected villages surrounded by cornfields and acres of squash and beans. As the Iroquois telling has it, members of three different tribes—two men, Dekanawida and Hiawatha, and one woman, Jigonhsasee, known as the Mother of Nations—met at Jigonhsasee’s home to discuss creating bonds of mutual protection that would enable them all to make the most of the gift of corn. They sought out men from two other tribes—Dekanawida and Tadadaho—to cement their union, which they referred to as the Great League of Peace. Each of the tribes had ownership and control of its own territory and its own political and spiritual functions.
By the time of European contact, the Onondaga, Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, and Cayuga were living in this way, their palisaded villages sometimes exceeding a few acres in size, surrounded by fields, with webs of tribal relations that extended over a wide territory beyond. (The Tuscarora would later join as well, when they arrived as refugees from wars in the Carolinas in the early eighteenth century.) In addition, the inland tribes, in an effort to increase the range of the American bison, burned large areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Bison were habituated as far east as central New York, which is why Buffalo, New York, bears that name; bison frequented the town site, where natural salt licks encouraged them to stay, though the name is lightly disputed to have come from a Seneca man named De-gi-yah-goh, which means “buffalo” in the Seneca language. Much has been said about the “warlike” aspects of the confederacy. But it wasn’t any more warlike than other nations or alliances of nations, though it did consolidate its power and expand its territory through armed conflict with neighboring tribes.
It is tempting to think of first contact in the Northeast as the binary story of Pilgrims arriving in New England in the early seventeenth century while the Wampanoag stood by and watched the English sails gradually grow nearer. In reality, contact was varied, complex, and gradual. One must imagine that many tribes—with intricate social networks that followed well-established trade routes and waterways—had heard of Europeans long before they encountered them: the first import to the New World was surely rumor. As it was, English fishing fleets—largely frozen out of the Icelandic cod fishery by Denmark and the northern European Hanseatic League—began plying Newfoundland waters beginning in the early 1500s. They sailed out of Bristol for twenty days until they reached the rich waters off the coast, fished the short summer months, and made the twenty-day journey back. During the weeks that they fished, they landed to replenish their fresh water, to pack fish, and to trade with northern tribes. Breton and Basque fishermen joined the fray, trading knives, cooking vessels, and other goods for food, fresh water, and animal hides. However much reciprocal trade there was in those early years, theft followed closely behind.
Portuguese explorer Gaspar Corte-Real, upon landing in Maine in 1501, captured fifty-seven Mi’kmaq and brought them back to Portugal, where they were sold into slavery. In 1580 an English crew who had landed in Maine found three hundred moose hides in an empty lodge and simply took them. French explorers brought Indians back to France, and in England, three Indians were put on public display, along with hawks and an eagle. In 1614, Thomas Hunt (on the same expedition as John Smith) captured twenty-six Wampanoag and brought them to Spain, where they were sold as slaves. John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, back after the failed Jamestown experiment, was involved in slave raids into New England, where his crew captured a number of Algonquian Indians, all of whom were sold into slavery. Although the English weren’t nearly as bad as the Spanish (at least as regards Indian slavery), the actions of northern European explorers and colonists—theft, massacres, slavery—should be remembered.
Still more disastrously, European diseases often arrived well in advance of Europeans and decimated Indian p
opulations even more ruthlessly, especially when paired with slavery. In 1592, well before the Seneca had direct and prolonged contact with Europeans, a measles epidemic spread among the tribe, killing many thousands of the population within a decade. The Pequot and Wampanoag and other New England tribes were laid low by an epidemic of leptospirosis. Between 1616 and 1619, as much as 90 percent of the population of the New England tribes was wiped out. Rather than welcoming Europeans with open arms when the Mayflower landed at Plymouth in mid-November 1620, precious few Indians remained alive on the Eastern Seaboard to lift their arms at all. Those who had survived were in turmoil, their homelands shifted and their old alliances and webs of trade arrangements—their very cultures—in tatters. Other tribes, untouched by disease, filled power vacuums. Some tribes ceased to exist at all.
As the Pilgrims and subsequent settlers flooded into New England, the tribes (and some of the settlers) tried to forge alliances and understandings that would benefit them all. But these efforts failed. In the 1630s, when Indian populations had rebounded to some extent, the Pequot launched an all-out war. It was crushed by the Pilgrims, and the remaining Pequot were sold into slavery. John Mason, after attacking a stockade filled with Pequot women and children and setting it on fire, wrote that God “laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven. . . . Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling [Fort Mystic] with dead Bodies.” The Pequot were exterminated not only from the land but from memory: uttering the tribe’s very name was forbidden. By 1890, all Indian lands in coastal New England had long since been expropriated, and most remaining Indians had been assimilated into other tribes, relocated, or exterminated. Most, but not all. Wampanoag, Mashantucket, Mi’kmaq, Abenake, and others made peace and endured. As in the Southeast, total war had not yielded total extermination. Indians remained.
The Great Lakes and Ohio River Valley
The Great Lakes region—including the Ohio River valley, the area around the lakes themselves, and the Mississippi basin up to the edge of the Great Plains—was home to some of the bloodiest fighting and also some of the most aggressive and effective Indian resistance to colonization on the entire continent.
Our present mapmaking turns the lakes into a border between the United States and Canada, an upper limit, rather than the crossroads that they were. Moving from south to north, the Mississippi River and its twin tributaries—the Missouri and the Ohio, draining the west and east, respectively—point like a trident at the belly of the lakes. The lakes themselves draw water from as far west as northern Minnesota and bring it all the way to the ocean. To the north of the lakes, great rivers like the Rainy, Hayes, Severn, and Albany feed north into Hudson Bay and beyond into the Arctic. Seen this way, the Great Lakes and the land that rises on their northern and southern flanks are the confluence of a vast network of waterways. For Indians as far back as the Paleolithic they were the hub of the New World.
Migrating waterfowl, fish, and game have followed these waterways since the end of the last North American ice age twelve thousand years ago. The earliest Native peoples, who lived alongside the game on which they depended, used these waterways, too. By the beginning of the Woodland period in 500 BCE there was a vast cultural and technological network that followed the water, spreading knowledge along with the cultures that carried it. The use of the bow and arrow, pottery, plant domestication, architecture, and burial practices flowed from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to north of Lake Ontario and back again. In the various climates found in this vast and fecund area native plants, including gourds, sumpweed, goosefoot, sunflower, knotweed, little barley, and maygrass, were cultivated long before the arrival of corn and beans. In the Middle Woodland period, what is known as the Hopewell culture (also called the Hopewell complex or Hopewell exchange network) arose. The Hopewell cultures typically made their homes in or near oxbows and floodplains that seasonally replenished rich planting grounds, aquatic food sources, and waterfowl. The villages could reach significant size and were surrounded by mounds of all shapes and sizes that were one of the hallmarks of the culture. The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks near Chillicothe, Ohio, for example, measures 1,254 feet long and connects thirty-eight mounds within an earthen rectangle measuring more than one hundred acres.
Most, but not all, mounds contained burials of staggering richness. (The purpose of many effigy mounds—like the Great Serpent Mound, southeast of Chillicothe, Ohio, the largest effigy mound in the world—remains unknown or, at the least, hotly debated among archaeologists.) The mounds themselves were constructed using large poles that supported a thatched roof. The deceased were placed inside the shelter and buried with an abundance of trade goods. In Ohio some mounds were found to contain thousands of freshwater pearls, mica, tortoise shells, Knife River flint (from North Dakota), and conch (from Mexico). The finds indicate that these communities were both well-off and well-connected. Around the burial structure, heaps of animal bones suggest that the dead were feasted in fine fashion by their relatives. After the feasting, the gathered goods were burned down and covered over with earth. Along with larger villages and greater economic and caloric security came an explosion in artistic expression. Hopewell Indians were expert carvers. One burial mound at the Mound City site in Ross County, Ohio, contained more than two hundred intricately carved smoking pipes.
But around 500 CE, the Hopewell exchange network, along with the large villages and the mound building, disappeared. So did the artwork. Populations seem to have gone into decline. No one knows why, exactly. Trade and commerce brought goods from all over the continent, but they might also have brought war: some villages from the end of the period were bounded by moats and wooden palisades. The climate grew colder, which may have made game grow scarce. Likewise, improvements in hunting technology may have caused a collapse in animal populations. Agriculture itself may have been a culprit: as of 900 CE, maize and beans were well established throughout the region, and the rise of agriculture could have generated a shift in social organization. Much later, the Mississippian period, from 1100 to 1541 CE, saw the advent of the bow, small projectile points, pottery, and a shift from gathering to intensive agriculture. Large villages replaced small seasonal camps. The largest Mississippian village was surely Cahokia, which was at its peak around 1050–1250 CE, situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near present-day St. Louis, spreading over five square miles and with a population estimated to reach thirty thousand. One burial site there contained twenty thousand shell beads, another eight hundred arrowheads. That, too, went into decline and was abandoned. Whatever the cause, by the time Europeans arrived in the region in the mid–seventeenth century, Cahokia and similar settlements had been long abandoned.
While tribes in the Southeast, Southwest, and Northeast were involved in countless local struggles (and not a few large ones) with the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French, Indians west of the Appalachians had at first only fleeting contact with the newcomers. But as happened elsewhere, harbingers arrived first, in the form of trade goods and disease. Some of this arrived with waves of tribal newcomers as refugees from the coastal groups headed inland, sparking territorial conflicts well west of the Atlantic even before Europeans set foot in the contested territories. The political disruptions caused by masses of refugees were compounded by disruptions to seasonal hunting and gathering cycles brought on by disease. The time and energy it took to weave nets, knap spear and arrow points, set traps, spear fish, and weave material was lost to war, illness, and death. Native technologies had already evolved that were well suited to the worlds of the Indians who invented them, yet what was wanting were specialists to make and use that technology. European knives were no better at cutting. European axes were no better at felling. In the chaos of the times, it became expedient to trade for them rather than to make them. The increased reliance on European trade goods in turn caused more geopolitical conflict.
In times of uph
eaval as in times of strife and instability, the region was defined by its prehistoric routes and cultures. Jacques Cartier, exploring the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the 1530s and early 1540s, did ship-side trading with Natives there, exchanging knives and kettles and the like for fur used in trim—unaware of the wealth waiting to be extracted from the Pays d’en Haut (Upper Country) in the form of beaver pelts. According to Cartier, the Indians he met “made frequent signs to us to come on shore, holding up to us some furs on sticks. . . . They bartered all they had to such an extent that all went back naked without anything on them; and they made signs to us that they would return on the morrow with more furs.” Basque fishermen—present since the 1490s—became deeply enmeshed in the beaver trade. Seasonal fishermen, operating on the Grand Banks as early as 1512, traded metal items for beaver furs, which would be sewn into robes to keep the sailors warm during their endeavors and then be sold back in France. It wasn’t long before beaver fur’s unique felting qualities dramatically increased European demand for it (the barbed strands clung to one another with extraordinary strength). This led to an increased focus on exploration into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and the returning reports of a vast continent loaded with furs and Indians eager to trade drove Europeans deeper still into the interior, with a predictable increase in conflict.
The Iroquois Confederacy maintained a stranglehold on travel into the interior via the Great Lakes waterways, which meant, in the middle to late sixteenth century, control over all the trade in the region. Unlike the loosely affiliated Algonquian tribes and nonaffiliated Iroquoian tribes such as the Huron, they had access to trade goods: metal traps, kettles, axes, blankets, guns, shot, powder, and knives. Such items conferred a decided military advantage, and between the end of the sixteenth century and the full blossoming of the fur trade, the Iroquois were engaged in endless wars of advantage with their tribal neighbors to the east. They also managed to negotiate punitive trade deals with the French along the Saint Lawrence and the English down the Hudson.
