The American West

by Robert V Hine

  In the negotiations that followed, the representatives of twelve Indian nations, led by Little Turtle, ceded a huge territory encompassing most of present-day Ohio, much of Indiana, and other enclaves in the Northwest, including the town of Detroit and the tiny village of Chicago. The rising threat of the French Revolution further dissuaded the British from investing funds and soldiers to influence the West. They withdrew from American soil. The next year the United States settled its boundary dispute with Spain, which agreed to grant Americans free navigation of the Mississippi River with the right to deposit goods at the port of New Orleans.

  . . .

  Many Indian groups suffered under American rule. Military defeats, lost land and sovereignty, poor hunting and weak trade, alcoholism, and disease pushed societies into desperate corners. At rock bottom, some found salvation in spiritual revitalization. It happened first among the Iroquois. Before the Revolution, the British had estimated Iroquois strength at about ten thousand, but by 1800, as a result of the bloody warfare of the intervening years, their numbers had fallen to four thousand. Their homeland invaded, their hunting territories gone, and their economy in shambles, many Iroquois numbed themselves with rum and brandy. “It appears to me,” one Iroquois testified, “that the great Spirit is determined on our destruction.”21

  The Iroquois predicament earned them a plague of enthusiastic Quakers. Preaching a message of Christian love, the Society of Friends set up schools and offered employment, and many Indians came under their influence. Opinions differed about the Friends. The Seneca chief Cornplanter came to appreciate their compassion and their message. “We are determined to try to learn your ways,” he declared to one Quaker missionary. But Red Jacket, leader of the traditionalists among the Seneca, opposed them. “You say that you are sent to instruct us how to worship the Great Spirit,” he told a missionary, but “we also have a religion, which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed to us, their children. We worship in that way.” The Iroquois did not need the Quakers to tell them to love a higher power and one another.22

  The split connoted by Red Jacket’s traditionalism and Cornplanter’s progressivism reverberates in many Indian communities to this day. But human beings, historic or otherwise, rarely fit neatly into philosophical camps. Take Handsome Lake, a distinguished war leader of the Six Nations during the Revolution. Post-revolutionary America dealt harshly with Handsome Lake. In defeat, he despaired and he drank. During an epic binge in 1799, he fell into a coma. His family thought that he would die for sure, but he recovered and began preaching a glorious message of renewal. He inspired hundreds of followers, and within a generation the teachings of Handsome Lake became a rallying point for people throughout the Six Nations. Urging a return to the ancient rites and rituals, Handsome Lake preached traditionalism. But he also advocated progressive reforms like asking men to forsake hunting for farming.

  Seneca chief Red Jacket, wearing the peace medallion presented by President George Washington. From Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836–44).

  Handsome Lake’s followers emulated their American neighbors in many things, but they gathered in traditional longhouses for their services. The Longhouse Religion, as it came to be called, combined Iroquois spirituality with the values of Quaker Christianity: temperance, nonviolence, frugality, and an emphasis on personal good and evil. The Bible resided alongside traditional Iroquois oral stories and teachings within the longhouses. The Longhouse Religion did not lessen the material and political poverty of living as a colonized people in the United States of America, but it did give some Iroquois a sense of cultural self-determination and respect.

  . . .

  Following the Battle of Fallen Timbers, many Ohio Indians exercised their self-determination by leaving for American-free spaces across the Mississippi River. Those who remained accommodated themselves to the onslaught of land-grabbers as best they could. Still, they found living with the Americans difficult. Like the Iroquois, they confronted poverty and alcoholism. Here, too, an Indian prophet arose to point the way to a revitalized future. He was a Shawnee and, like Handsome Lake, a drunk. In 1805 he collapsed and fell into a trance his family mistook for death. But he awoke and told them that the Master of Life had sent him back from the dead to lead the Indians to redemption. He took the name Tenskwatawa, meaning “the Open Door.” The Americans called him the Shawnee Prophet.

  Tenskwatawa reproached Indians for abandoning traditional values and mores. He condemned alcohol—“the white man’s poison.” He told his followers, in stark, racialized language, to reject “white” clothing, tools, and weapons and return to old-school styles and technologies. He demonstrated a keen understanding of the dangers of economic dependency. The emphasis on the rejection of colonial ways marked the divergence between Tenskwatawa’s teachings and the Longhouse Religion, yet even the Shawnee Prophet’s traditionalist message contained Christian flourishes. Sounding very much like a frontier preacher, he promised a glorious afterlife to all his loyal followers and a hell of fire and brimstone to those “bad Indians” who rejected his call. In 1806 he used his knowledge of a forthcoming full eclipse to answer Governor William Henry Harrison’s challenge to display his spiritual power by causing “the sun to stand still.” Turning day to night, he converted hundreds with his trick that tweaked the governor. Tenskwatawa’s faction lived in a new, multitribal Indian community called Prophetstown, near Tippecanoe on the Wabash River.23

  Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet. From James Otto Lewis, The Aboriginal Port-Folio . . . (Philadelphia, 1835–36). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Little Turtle, of all people, opposed Tenskwatawa. The onetime bane of the American military had come to believe in accommodation. American officials supported Indians seeking peaceful coexistence, but the escalating demands of white farmers and speculators for more land undercut whatever goodwill Indians and whites harbored. William Henry Harrison, new governor of the Northwest Territory, pressed accommodationist chiefs like Little Turtle to sign away another three million acres, tainting progressives in many Indian eyes and increasing Tenskwatawa’s appeal.

  Joining the prophet at Tippecanoe was his brother Tecumseh, a traditionalist Shawnee chief who adopted his sibling’s religious vision and used it to fight progressives and expand the reach of Indian resistance outside the Ohio country. A brilliant orator and racial tragedian, Tecumseh melded Indian grievances into a piercing indictment of white colonization. “Where are the Pequot?” he asked. “Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before a summer sun.” Tecumseh worked to rebuild the Ohio confederation, and he traveled among the tribes of the South with his message of racial unity in the coming Armageddon. “Let the white race perish!” he thundered before an assembly of Creeks. “They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they must be driven!—aye, back to the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings—destroy their stock—slay their wives and children, that the very breed may perish. War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!”24

  Death of Tecumseh. From Henry Trumbull, History of the Indian Wars (Boston, 1846).

  Strong words. But what truly frightened the Americans was the prospect of Great Britain using a pan-Indian uprising in the West to destabilize the young Republic. When Tecumseh and the Prophetstown delegation came to Harrison’s headquarters at Vincennes in 1810 and proclaimed their intention to keep federal surveyors off the lands recently ceded by treaty, the governor moved to stamp out a conspiracy that reached far beyond the Wabash. In the fall of 1811, Harrison attacked Prophetstown while Tecumseh was organizing in the South. The Battle of Tippecanoe did not defeat traditionalists, but it began war in earnest. Echoing Tecumseh, Harrison asked, “What other course is left for us to pursue but
to make a war of extirpation on them?”25

  The Indiana racial apocalypse quickly got subsumed by a larger struggle between the United States and Great Britain. The War of 1812 was ostensibly fought over maritime rights. But the congressional War Hawks rode the conflict inland in the hopes of carrying away British real estate. Their Canadian campaign, however, was a fiasco. Instead of grabbing Quebec, the Americans lost Detroit and watched the Canadians burn and sack Buffalo, New York. By 1814 the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic coast, and British troops invaded Washington, D.C. Satisfied with a public trouncing, the British agreed to settle the conflict without consolidating their gains. Conquering American territory was easier than governing it, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s militaristic France loomed as the larger threat.

  Great Britain and the United States may have ended the War of 1812 with a collective sigh of “meh,” but for the Indians of the Northwest, the conflict was decisive. Supplied by the British, Tecumseh and his traditionalist allies fought the Americans northeast of Detroit in 1813. The Battle of the Thames broke the Indian army and killed Tecumseh. Bullets poked holes in Tenskwatawa’s predictions of Indian invincibility. He survived the war and lived into the 1820s, but few people—Indian or otherwise—considered him a prophet after Tecumseh fell.

  . . .

  The Cherokees provide a final example of the revitalization movements that swept through the Indian nations of the trans-Appalachian West during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Revolution devastated the Cherokees. As with the Iroquois, the conflict took on the aspect of a civil war, with the people divided and fighting one another. The Americans invaded and burned Cherokee towns. Hundreds died.

  In the aftermath, men of mixed ancestry such as Major Ridge and John Ross, the sons of native mothers and American traders, claimed the leadership of the nation. They supported the Washington administration’s Indian “civilization” program. They sought to transform their tribe into a modern nation along the lines of the American states. Their region was undergoing a profound transformation. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793, enabling the easy separation of the seeds from the plant fiber, resulted in a tremendous boom in cotton production. Planters were driving their slaves west, clearing forests and opening new fields. Many Cherokees had taken up farming and slavery, and the new leadership promoted cotton production.

  These progressive ideas, however, ran afoul of traditional Cherokee values. Enthusiastic capitalists, the Cherokees with plantations and stores violated the traditional ethics of sharing. Old-school leaders had gathered political influence through the distribution of wealth. The new chiefs practiced real capitalism, accumulating wealth and power for themselves. During the War of 1812, when Tecumseh riled up Cherokee traditionalists with his message of racial unity and revitalization, prophets arose echoing the language of Tenskwatawa. Among the Cherokees, a visionary named Tsali preached to the people to “get the white men out of the country and go back to your former ways.” The acquisitive accommodations of the mixed-blood leadership disturbed him: “Destroy the cattle, destroy the spinning wheels and looms, throw away your plows, and everything used by the Americans.”26

  A large faction of Tecumseh’s supporters among the Creek Nation, known as the Red Sticks, went to war against the Americans during the War of 1812. In one bloody incident they attacked and killed most of the five hundred men, women, and children held up in Fort Mims on the Tombigbee River. In retaliation, Andrew Jackson, commander of the Tennessee militia, led an army of two thousand against the Creek militants. Hundreds of progressive Cherokees marched with Jackson, upending the racial unity preached by Tecumseh. In March 1814, at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in what is today central Alabama, Jackson’s combined force defeated the Red Sticks, killing more than eight hundred, marking this as the worst defeat of an Indian people in the nation’s history. In the aftermath, Jackson forced the Creeks to cede twenty-three million acres, which over the next twenty years would become prime cotton land for slave masters, men such as Jackson himself.

  The slaughter at Horseshoe Bend disgusted traditionalist Cherokees. Many left the southern Appalachians and moved west across the Mississippi to the Arkansas River valley. The progressive leadership exploited the exodus to bolster its nationalist credentials. True Cherokees, they pronounced, stayed and adapted to keep their homes. “I scorn this movement of a few men to unsettle the nation, and trifle with our attachment to the land of our forefathers,” declared head chief Major Ridge to a large assembly of his people. Ridge and his progressives won the battle for Cherokee hearts and minds.27

  The Cherokees took the early Indian policy of the United States at its word and transformed themselves into prime examples of so-called civilized Indians. With assurances of federal protection of their homeland and sovereignty, the Cherokees listened to their agents and missionaries. They adopted the American economic system and modeled their government on the institutions of the United States. The nation built a new capital at Echota, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, elected a representative assembly, and codified their laws. Missionaries opened schools; the leading men of the nation learned to read and write English.

  The flower of the Cherokee renaissance was the invention by a man named Sequoyah (his English name was George Guess) of a written phonetic system for spoken Cherokee—the first writing system invented by a North American Indian. Sequoyah was a traditionalist who had removed to the Arkansas River and was seeking a way to communicate with family and friends back home in the Cherokee Nation. His syllabary proved easy to learn, and it immediately caught on. Within a few years, a majority of Cherokees both in the West and in the nation had learned to read and write using Sequoyah’s system. Literacy among the Cherokee outpaced their American neighbors. The nation set up its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Sequoyan. All these words and activities were sparked by one man’s attempt to send a few words back home to friends and family.

  Sequoyah with his Cherokee syllabary. From Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836–44).

  Some optimists, like the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, Elias Boudinot, saw the Cherokees moving from the degraded margins to the dignified center of human existence. “There is,” he reported in a speech to a white audience, “in Indian history, something very melancholy. We have seen everywhere the poor aborigines melt away before the approach of the white population.” But the Cherokees, he intoned, would write a new chapter: “I can view my native country, rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth.” Arrayed in the trappings of civilization—capitalism, print, democracy—the Cherokees’ passage looked assured to Boudinot. He ended his speech with a rhetorical question: “I ask you shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth? Must they perish? Let humanity answer.” Boudinot thought that he knew what the answer would be.28

  FURTHER READING

  Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996)

  Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (1995)

  Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (1986)

  David A. Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Land in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (2010)

  R. David Edmunds, The Shawnee Prophet (1983)

  Patrick Griffin, Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (2008)

  William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986)

  James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (2000)

  Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (1987)

  Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
(2003)

  Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (2009) John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life (1997)

  5

  Finding Purchase

  Daniel Boone exited life two months shy of his eighty-sixth birthday in 1820. In the years before his death, many admirers beat a path to his door—if they could find it. John Filson’s romanticized 1783 biography tied Boone’s name forever to Kentucky, but in 1799 the legendary hunter had left the state in frustration, and fans had to trek farther west to his new home in Missouri. When the old man saw visitors approaching, he would “take his cane and walk off to avoid them,” one of his sons recalled, “but if cornered he would sit and talk with them.” Boone was ambivalent about his fame. He appreciated the respect Filson’s heroic portrayal brought him, and he offered the author nothing but praise. “All true! Every word true!” he exclaimed after a visitor read a portion aloud. “Not a lie in it.” But that didn’t mean that Boone was happy with everything near the end of his days.1

  Filson christened Boone an American original, a “natural man” of the wilderness. But he was no naïf. He had blundered into too many legal tangles, suffered too many business setbacks, and witnessed too many bloodlettings. Following the Revolution, he took up surveying, opened a general store, and planned to settle his children and grandchildren nearby. “But alas!” he lamented, “it was then that my misery began.” As recompense for patriotic service to the country, “I thought I was entitled to a home for my family,” but “another man bought the land over my head.” Forced into court, he lost both his land and his business. Disappointed and downhearted, “I determined to quit my native land,” Boone said. He relocated his family to Spanish Missouri, where authorities granted them a generous estate. But “my misfortune did not end,” he continued, for when the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase, in came the speculators and the lawyers, and eventually his Spanish grant was also declared null and void. “I have lived to learn,” Boone concluded with a weary sigh, that progress “is nothing more than improved ways to overreach your neighbor.”2