The American West

by Robert V Hine

  Iroquois warriors return from war with scalps and a captive. French drawing, c. 1666. From Edmund B. O’Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York (Albany, 1853–87).

  Many Huron captives were baptized, and they introduced Christianity into the Five Nations. Though ferocious raiders, the Iroquois could not absorb captives through force. To keep their adoptees happy, they eventually invited the Jesuits into their homeland to minister to the Christian Hurons, thus giving the missionaries access to them. Just as the chaos brought on by trade, violence, and illness opened the ears of the Hurons to the preaching of the Jesuits, so the Iroquois listened for personal solace or spiritual advantage, and many converted to Catholicism. The Mohawks, living on the Hudson River, closest to European traders, embraced the new faith the most. By the 1660s strong factions of pro-French Christians had formed in all the towns of the Five Nations.

  Christianity disrupted Iroquois life. Many converts rejected traditional ceremonies, saying that they no longer believed in them. “The black gowns had turned his head,” the traditionalists said about the converted Onondaga leader Daniel Garokontié. “He had abandoned the customs of the country, [and] had also ceased to have any affection for it.” As the level of domestic strife rose, many Christian Iroquois moved north, settling near the French, where the Jesuits created special villages for them. Kateri Tekakwitha, a young Mohawk convert, fled her village in 1677 and settled in Kahnawake, a Christian Iroquois town near Montreal. An intense believer, Tekakwitha beat and starved her body so aggressively that the Jesuits declared her a wonder. She died young, at the age of twenty-four, and the priests adopted her as a martyr to the cause of New World gospel-spreading. In 2012 the Catholic Church officially elevated Tekakwitha to sainthood.31

  Iroquois saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Painting by Father Claude Chauchetière, c. 1696. Wikimedia Commons.

  The Haudenosaunee responded to the cultural crisis of colonization by strengthening their alliance with the Europeans. In the 1660s the English captured Manhattan from the Dutch without firing a shot, and New Netherlands became New York. But the English hoped to preserve the colony’s old trading and diplomatic ties with the Five Nations. Traditionalists among the Iroquois warmed to the English, seeing them as a counter to the growing power of the Francophiles and Catholics within their own communities. The lackluster missionary zeal of the English they thought an advantage. When the Mohawks smashed Metacomet’s army, the Iroquois cemented their new partnership.

  In negotiations conducted at Albany in 1677, the Five Nations and the colony of New York created an alliance known as the Covenant Chain. The Haudenosaunee carefully walked a path between the competing French and English, asserting their autonomy when the European authorities overstepped their bounds. The Onondaga leader Otreouti (“Big Mouth”) put it well in a speech to the English in 1683: “You say we are subjects to the King of England and Duke of York, but we say, we are Brethren. We must take care of ourselves.” Haudenosaunee self-determination, military prowess, and diplomatic gymnastics defined the nature of colonization in the Northeast as much as any move by European nations. They were a great power jostling among great powers.32

  Europeans communicated their high self-regard in published tracts and pamphlets, declaring themselves the rightful heirs to North America due to their correct beliefs and civilized magnificence. But the Iroquois could talk trash, too. They had their own perspective on the history of colonialism. “You think that the Axe-Makers are the eldest in the country and the greatest in possession,” declared the Onondaga orator Sadekanaktie in the 1690s. “Yes, all the Axe-Makers think the same. But no! Oh no! We Iroquois are the first, and we are the eldest and greatest. These parts and countries were inhabited and trod upon by the Iroquois before there were any Axe-Makers.”33

  FURTHER READING

  James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985)

  Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (2003)

  William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)

  W. J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier, 1534–1760, rev. ed. (1986)

  Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998)

  Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (2015)

  Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992)

  Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2014)

  Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (1982)

  Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004)

  3

  The Struggle of Empires

  Hacked and hewn by America’s original do-it-yourself crowd, log cabins oozed gumption along with buckets of sap. The ultimate starter homes, they stood for hopeful beginnings. Log cabins sheltered working people, regular folks who dreamed of an opening in the forest canopy to grow crops and kids. Yet, even as they came to epitomize homespun Americana, log cabins didn’t sprout naturally like mushrooms wherever frontier types roamed. They were actually an invasive architectural species imported from Scandinavia. Finns and Swedes brought the housing style with them from the boreal forests of northern Europe. The dirt-floored, overlapping log constructions with mud-stuffed cracks warmed them after days spent hunting fur-bearing mammals and slashing and burning woodlands. In 1638 a few of them carried the mental plans for these units to the shores of North America where they staffed the short-lived colony on the mid-Atlantic coast known as New Sweden.

  The log cabins took off while New Sweden stumbled. First, in 1655, the Dutch attacked and took the colony. Then, in 1664, the English captured it. In the grand schemes of seventeenth-century colonization, the settlements in the Delaware valley were a sideshow. But in the shadows of the region’s great forests, a new culture took root. Just as ranch homes would embody the style and sensibility of post–World War II suburban America, so log cabins announced a way of life. New Sweden’s loose organization and confused authority gave people room to experiment. Local autonomy promoted a fusion between settlers and natives, an Algonquian-speaking people who called themselves Lenni-Lenapes but were known by settlers as the Delawares, named for the river that coursed through their homeland. Delaware women raised gardens of corn, beans, and squash, while men hunted for furs, hides, and meat. This gender division of labor mirrored the one practiced by Swedish and Finnish settlers. In the hardscrabble environment of northern Europe, Scandinavian women had been accustomed to practicing forms of shifting cultivation, and they immediately understood Indian horticulture. Colonial women of the Delaware valley quickly adopted the crops of Indian women, while Indian women welcomed European metal hoes, as well as pigs and chickens.

  An early depiction of a log cabin. From Georges-Henri-Victor Collot, A Journey in North America (Paris, 1826). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Scandinavian men took to hunting in America just as quickly. Unlike French and English settlers, the Finns and Swedes had backgrounds in killing large mammals for subsistence. Class distinctions regulated hunting in France and England. Royalty and the aristocracy reserved the right to chase and slaughter prize game animals—foxes, stags, and bears—for their sporting pleasure. Lower-class hunters poached rabbits and deer on the sly for fun and protein. Few lords and fewer of the impoverished immigrated to North America; the French and English colonists therefore learned to hunt slowly as they became acquainted with firearms and New World animals. But Scandinavian men hit the ground running after American fauna. They mimicked their Algonquian neighbors’ calls, camouflage, and decoys, and they embraced the Indians’ surrounds and fire-hunting methods. The Algonquians in turn adopted steel knives, guns, an
d linen hunting shirts, much more comfortable in wet weather than buckskin.

  Dutch colonists and Algonquian Indians in New Sweden. From Thomas Campanius Holm, Kort beskrifning om provincien Nya Swerige [uit] America . . . (Stockholm, 1702). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  The Scandinavians cooked their venison steaks over fires built in log cabin stone hearths. The homes anchored the composite culture of mobile hunting and swidden—or slash-and-burn—agriculture that spread with both settlers and natives as they moved up the coastal river valleys and across the Appalachians. With a few tools and a little training, several men could raise a rough log structure in a day, a solid house in a week. Indians immediately saw the potential. They traded for metal tools, then chopped, notched, and chinked their own cabins, probably doing as much as the colonists to spread the practice of building in wood across the frontiers of North America. Descriptions of the Indian towns of Pennsylvania and later Ohio frequently remarked on their resemblance to the settlements of settlers—with the difference being that Indians tended to cluster their cabins rather than scatter them across the countryside, and they often built a large, impressive, log council house in the center of their towns.

  The Delaware valley was what geographers call a “cultural hearth,” a launching pad for a unique woodland material way of life combining traits from both Indian and European worlds. Indians and colonists even created a lingua franca—a frontier pidgin based in Algonquian but combined with elements of Swedish and eventually English—that allowed them to communicate. In many details, the lifeways of the Indians and colonists came to resemble one another. Mirrors were scarce on the margins, but Indian and European hunters and farmers could look at each other and see a spitting image. Their likeness bespoke a promise of frontier amalgamation rare in the annals of European colonization.1

  . . .

  William Penn, founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, is remembered for his fair dealings with native people. He came from a prominent English family, his father an admiral and counselor to the king. The religious fervor of the Protestant reformation, however, carried Penn from the centers of power to the fringes of his society. As a young man he converted to the radical sect known as the Society of Friends (ridiculed by outsiders as the Quakers for their religious enthusiasm), and he convinced his father to help him secure a grant of land in North America that could serve as a religious haven for the members. A religious nonconformist, Penn traveled to the geographic outskirts to establish a colony known for peace and toleration. Taking advantage of the tradition of peaceful relations between native Delaware people and Scandinavian settlers, Penn announced that he would not permit colonization to begin until he had negotiated the right to settle and purchased the land.

  In 1682, during his first few months in America, Penn met with a council of Delawares he described as made up of “all the old and wise men of the nation” at the village of Shackamaxon near Philadelphia. Warriors from the assembled villages watched from the sidelines, their leaders consulting with them regularly in order to reach consensus. The treaty that Penn and the chiefs signed was commemorated in a Great Treaty Wampum Belt, which the Delawares presented to Penn, an artifact that symbolizes the best hopes of the American frontier experience. In it, a figure wearing a Quaker hat—Penn himself, perhaps—clasps the hand of an Indian said to be Chief Tammany, a Delaware leader who, like Penn, was renowned for his benevolence and independent thinking. Over time, North Americans turned Tammany into a cross-cultural hero. He appeared in popular stories and legends among Indians and colonists, and by the time of the Revolution his name was emblematic of the American spirit of independence. Tammany Hall, the Democratic political society of New York City, was named in his honor.2

  “Penn’s Treaty with the Indians.” Engraving of a painting by Benjamin West, 1775. Library of Congress.

  The painter Benjamin West’s famous depiction of the negotiations focuses on Penn beneath a spreading elm, presenting a very English version of the treaty to the Indians. Firmly planted in the colonial perspective, the painting veers toward smug fantasy rather than lived ambiguity. But Penn did approach the treaty with goodly intentions. He considered his negotiating partners human beings with rights and feelings. He did his best to protect them from unscrupulous traders and the destructive alcohol trade. As long as Penn lived, there was no frontier warfare in Pennsylvania. Indeed, during his lifetime a number of Indian groups resettled in the Quaker colony.

  . . .

  The peace and accommodation of early Pennsylvania fostered the development of the distinctive backcountry culture that changed both colonists and Indians. But after Penn’s death, as his descendants began to pursue an aggressive policy of landed expansion at the expense of native homelands, relations between natives and settlers soured. Instead of marveling at the similarities that united them, natives and settlers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the British colonies spent much of the eighteenth century shedding each other’s blood. Each group began to see the other as fundamentally different, members of separate and unequal races. And they committed outrageous acts of brutality to prove it. Log cabins thus carry a serious historical burden. They represent both hope and despair, upward mobility and base degradation. They represent both cultural fusion and racial division. They stand for the uneasiness of America’s frontiers as diverse people came to know, love, and hate one another through colonization.

  The principal cause of the violence was the explosive growth of English settler colonialism. In their outward thrust, Europeans created colonial outposts of varying sorts. The French paddled down the Mississippi, building a watery, canoe-based trading empire stretching from Quebec to New Orleans. The Russians extended their fur-hunting colonial ventures across the Bering Sea down the northern Pacific coast. The Spanish pushed their mission system north from Mexico into Texas and California. All these colonial ventures employed violent means and provoked violent responses. But the greatest conflict took place on the frontiers of the English colonies, where settler families by the thousands came to stay, seizing the land from indigenous people by treaty or warfare, forcing their communities to the periphery or encapsulating them in small reserved homelands.

  Demography—the science of counting people—resembles molecular biology in that many of the processes and changes under study occur beyond everyday perception. Few may take notice as populations accumulate, decline, age, and turn over. Such was not the case in British North America during the eighteenth century. So many people moved in and so many people reproduced that demographic change drew eyes and comments like a fireball in the night. “Our People must at least be doubled every 20 years,” Benjamin Franklin guessed. (With no census at that time, observers were forced to guess.) He was only slightly off his calculation, the doubling occurring every quarter-century. The 250,000 settlers of the English colonies in 1700 had exploded to more than 1.3 million fifty years later. The British colonial population amazed the grand master of modern head counters, the English economist Thomas Malthus. The settler society of North America, he wrote, was experiencing “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history.”3

  What caused the boom? Fertility rates in the colonies considerably outpaced those in the home country. English colonial women commonly bore seven or more children, and birth rates in what English speakers called “the backcountry” made coastal families look modest. Rebecca Bryan Boone, wife of the frontier hero Daniel Boone, for example, bore ten children, and in the couple’s old age they were surrounded by sixty-eight grandchildren. Relatively low mortality boosted the effects of high fertility. Blessed with good soil and the productivity of Indian agricultural techniques, settlers did not experience famines in North America. True, colonial cities were notoriously unhealthy places, and some rural areas—notably the lowland South—were plagued by malaria and other tropical diseases. But for most colonists, North American disease environments proved remarkably benign. Death rates were 15 or 20 percent lower
than in Europe, and relatively low levels of infant mortality meant that an extraordinarily large number of people survived to reproductive age.

  Immigration added even more reproducing bodies. In New York, Pennsylvania, and backcountry Virginia, settlers from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere pressed into river valleys and mountain hollows, chopping and burning the forest and planting hills of Indian corn in the clearings. William Penn began recruiting European settlers for his colony as early as the 1680s, and by the second decade of the eighteenth century, thousands of Germans were streaming from the Rhineland due to depressed farm conditions, religious wars, and New World advertisements. Many were Pietists, pacifists, and excellent farmers. They sought fertile land in the interior, first along the Mohawk valley in New York, where they knocked heads with speculators, then in Pennsylvania, where they flourished. To the immemorial confusion of schoolchildren and tourists who expect to find an enormous population of clog-wearing, tulip-growing dike-builders in rural Pennsylvania, some of these Germans, such as the Mennonites and Amish, came to be known as the Pennsylvania Dutch because of the language they spoke—Deutsch.

  Bewildering in their own fashion, the Scots-Irish poured into the western areas about the same time. They had been transplanted from Scotland to northern Ireland around Ulster, and their struggles with the local Catholics rewarded their aggressive tendencies. They applied these to their English landlords as well, so it is not surprising that they got as far away as they could from the seaboard colonists when they arrived in America. On the geographic margins, the Scots-Irish cultivated a reputation as fighters, hunters, and marksmen.