Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Indian slaughter you seldom hear about.

You don't hear Obammie apologizing to the Native Americans though do we ? He apologizes to the trayvon martins of the world and bows to arab a$$hole !

I don't know if I'd use the term "oftentimes"... I've been digging around on the subject of "indian" treatment of whites in their raiding during the 17th thru the 19th centuries for a while now, and it's pretty hard to make hard and fast generalizations. There was a lot of variation from tribe to tribe in terms of how they would treat white captives vs enemy tribal captives.

There's been a lot of discussion here on the 'Fire about the near-extermination of the Indians on the plains in the 19th century, but in terms of sheer numbers of people (whites and Indians), the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries make the plains wars pale by comparison. And the ritual cruelty of the woodlands Indians, particularly the Huron and Iroquois (at least as much as was ever written down) makes the Comanche and Apache practices of torture of whites look pretty mild at times.

You have to put the cruelties of both whites and Indians from the 1600's through the 1900's into historical context before you make any judgements, and looking back from today's America and applying current morality to those events is simply ridiculous.

North America's Indians were thinly populated stone age hunter-gatherers only a few of whom were even beginning to transition to agriculture, and even then to a very limited extent. Survival of each tribe/band depended on having enough functional hunters/workers to gather and process food, build shelters, etc. Their economy was founded on two principles: having enough game to hunt, kill and eat; and 2)having enough people in the tribe/band/village to exploit the resource. But productive life expectancy was low. Mortality (particularly of infants) was high, birth rates tended to be low due to periodic scarcity of game, and risk of life-threatening trauma was high in the primitive hunting lifestyle.

There were only two ways Indian bands could increase their economic power: 1)have more babies and grow them up into functional adults, or 2)steal people from other bands and make them slaves. This was the real reason behind the Indians' warfare traditions, pure and simple. (And the origin for our European warlike nature as well, truth be told.) Prior to the advent of fossil fuels and the development of engines to exploit the energy therein, slavery has been the means by which all human societies have generated wealth since prehistoric times.

But what kinds of people did you steal, if you were an Indian in 1573, or 1843? Stealing adult men from another group made no sense. They would fight, or escape, and would certainly refuse to work. If you spared their lives in battle, they would go home and breed more babies for their own tribe, which increased their competitive pressure on the animals both of your tribs hunted for survival. So you killed the adult men; or if you had time, tortured them for entertainment, since Netflix didn't deliver to your area. The adult women were hardly any more useful. Killing them was almost as common as with adult males, but raping them had a lot of entertainment value for the hard-working warriors on the road, and after the release of energy expended in sex, killing them seemed like a lot of work, so the raped women were sometimes allowed to live. (Anthropologists note that the ubiquity of rape of women in warfare had the effect of widening the gene pool, reducing risks of inbreeding that existed in small isolated tribes/bands.) Babies were worse than useless, as energy had to be expended to nurture them, energy and human resources that were better spent elsewhere, so babies were routinely killed. But children were a prize. They didn't cost much to feed and clothe, and they were young enough that they could be assimilated into the tribe over a few years. Their economic potential to become productive members of the tribe was worth taking them in itself, but they you also got the added bonus of their reproductive potential, adding to the tribe's population and multiplying manpower.

So from an economic and political viewpoint, the way Indians treated invading white families made perfect sense to them. To whites, it was an abomination. But whites intuitively understood the underlying motivation, because our 17th and 18th century ancestors would have remembered via both oral and written histories the cruelties of our own race in Europe during the wars of the Reformation and Counterreformation. Skim a few chapters of Fox's Book of Martyrs if you care to verify this. And they knew that survival in such warfare required Old Testament values (an eye for an eye, etc), not turning the other cheek.

So the whites reacted to the Indian tradition of warfare ("atrocities") in kind, and in keeping with their own recent violent history, and their current violent nature. Remember, during the period we're discussing public hanging of criminals was a very common event, and corporal punishments were just as common. Flogging (even to the point of death) was common in civil and military court judgments. Death was just as commonplace an event among whites as it was among Indians, whether from disease or trauma, so they didn't have today's modern horror of death... it was a fact of life. They dealt with it on a regular basis.

I just don't see how folks in 2013 can get all wound up about how things transpired on the plains 140 or 150 years ago. That was a different place and time, and none of us today have any responsibility for how it transpired. And we for damn sure can't sit in judgment on the Indians or the whites, because if we were suddenly time-transported back to those days and had to survive, we likely wouldn't do much different or we'd end up dead.

Excellent post Doc.

I think you might want to review the definition of genocide, and perhaps review some of the more thoughtful histories of the 19th century before you sling that word/concept around. Stephen Ambrose's Custer and Crazy Horse gives an excellent treatment of the politics of the time (Indian and white) and argues convincingly that genocide was never the policy of the American government.

The conquest of North America by whites of European ancestry was motivated far more by economics than ideology. And if you were to sketch a political map of North America every 20 years or so from 1400 onward, you would see that the Indian tribes practiced similar economic and political hegemony against each other continuously, so it's not like they all lived in some kind of peaceful paradise here prior to Columbus.

The Dakotas were driven out of the woodlands in Wisconsin and Minnesota by bigger, stronger tribes (Cree and Ojibway, IIRC) and managed to carve out a thriving lifestyle on the Plains. They in turn drove the Crows and Shoshones off the plains and into the mountains, and lived in a state of continous warfare with them in the foothills until the late 19th century.

The Comanche were an insignificant tribe prior to getting their hands on wild ex-Spanish horses and becoming an equestrian nation, which multiplied their economic power manifold, which in turn allowed them to drive the Apaches off the south plains and into the mountains to the west, drive the Kiowa and other smaller tribes off the plains and into the woodlands to the east and south, and establish their thriving nation thereby.

Genocide was not the goal nor the motivation in any of these cases. Economic superiority was the goal, and warfare was the means of achieving it. It has ever been thus with human societies.

Thanks, Ak.

Indeed. My research is not as in-depth as yours but what I've read jives exactly with what you posted.

They leave out all the facts and context when they teach it in gradeschool. White man comes and kills indiscriminently, Indians were peaceful, mean and not fair... they might as well not teach it at all.

I'm reading Empire of the Summer Moon right now illustrating the rise and fall of the Comanches, pretty fascinating. Warfare is quite the common theme throughout history.

You generalize a whole lot Heap Big Medicine Man



IIRC most of the calories of the Eastern Tribes came from cultivated corn, beans and squash, to the point they could be starved out merely by destroying these harvests. Apparently more true as you went further south. De Soto reported pre-epidemic population densities about five times greater than there were when our own Frontiers arrives 150-200 years later, population densities so great as to preclude wild game as a major calorie source.

Also, while we focus upon violent episodes we tend to overlook entirely the ongoing daily process of cultural exchange that started almost immediately, such that by the time of the F&I War most Eastern Tribes lived on a rough technological parity with the Euros along the Frontier. During those years for example a British Expedition was shot to pieces by skilled Cherokee riflemen, hardly folks living in the stone age. How their Cherokee great-grandfathers lived had no more relevance to the 1760's present they were living in than it would today.

This is a common thread through many of the Indian Wars....

Early 1700's King Phillip's War, the first really big bloodletting, was started largely over hogs and competition in that trade. 1870's, while popular history focuses on nearly irrelevant skirmishes like Adobe Walls, those "stone age" Comanches were trading tens of thousands of cattle every year to the Army in New Mexico



Varied with geography: Rape apparently was almost unknown in the East.

Mystical reasons for this are commonly given but seems just as likely that a) being as women generally outnumbered men and little premium was put on virginity the Indians weren't especially hard-up for female companionship and b) they didn't all find White women to be especially attractive, after all they smelt funny, wore strange and dirty clothing, and worse of all, didn't pluck their eyebrows off like normal folks did.

As for the rest of it, one can say that much of Indian warfare was based on innate human nature, the outcomes with respect to plunder, murder, enslaving and/or adoption hardly different from the incessant clan warfare in much of Europe and/or that of the Vikings.

From a biological perspective, if modern humans really do go back 100,000 years, for at least the first 90,000 years of that we were ALL hunter/gatherers, and our innate behavior patterns wired accordingly.

So one no more "thinks" about who it would be logical to kill or enslave or whatever any more than most guys "think" about treating attractive young women differently than they do other people . Its just hardwired in our brains is all.

JMHO,

Birdwatcher

Follow that with "Comanche Empire", gives a much more three-dimensional image of the Comanches in those years, the premier livestock traders of perhaps any time and place.

Birdwatcher

They acquired the skills to use weapons bought or stolen from the whites, but I'm not aware of the tribes mining and refining iron and making steel.

Stone age is very apropos.

I liken it to laws against littering, or speeding.

We have those laws, but without outside enforcement, these laws get broken all the time, except not usually by the people in favor of those laws.

Clearly, those who signed or agreed to treaties on both sides in good faith weren't inclined to break those treaties, other folks on both sides were, and there was no enforcement body in place to stop them from doing so.

JMHO,
Birdwatcher

There were smiths; White, Indian and mixed-blood among them early on, and there were sawn timbers, stone chimneys and split rail fencing enclosing crops and surrounding orchards by the 1750's.

As for the hard labor of mining ores etc... most Frontier Whites didn't/couldn't do that either. People acquire these things by what manner is easiest, by the mid 18th Century Eastern tribes like the Delawares and Cherokees were moving TONS of European trade goods each year into the interior in return for hundreds of thousands of deer hides ("bucks"), so much so that just as the Wampagnoags back in New England had shifted to a hog-based economy, so profgound changes occurred in Delaware and Cherokee societies around the labor required to process those hides.

Birdwatcher

Treaties were often signed by so called "chiefs" that had no authority to sign or represent any other Indians.

What white men call chiefs is way different than the reality of a chief was back then. A Chief was someone that many of the Indians of a tribe might respect and seek council from, but no Indian was tied to that council, and could what he choose to do and was not bound by anything.

Tribes and entire nations of Indians doesn't convert well to white thinking either...

If you live in a small town, and the mayor of the town 30 miles away decides it's wise to give their houses to the government, how would you feel if the government said that included everyone in your town too?

Besides that, all the debate in the world won't roll back a minute of what's already happened long ago, by people in a different world than this is now.

If we are going to be debating the past mistakes, and wish them away, and Monday Morning Quarterback.... I think we should never have brought slaves from Africa.

How different would things be now?

As is always true, every era produces exceptions. Exceptional leaders who can shovel out the bullCapp and speak clear eyed truth.

Here are the words of a man of those times, an Indian fighter with clear eyes:

Jis to think of that dog Chivington and his dirty hounds, up thar at Sand Creek.
His men shot down squaws, and blew the brains out of little innocent children.
You call sich soldiers Christians, do ye? And Indians savages?
What der yer 'spose our heavenly father, who made both them and us, thinks of these things?

I tell you what, I don't like a hostile red skin any more than you do. I've fought 'em, hard as any man.

But I never yet drew a bead on a squaw or papoose, and I despise the man who would.

I've seen as much of 'em as any man livin', and I can't help but pity 'em, right or wrong. They once owned all this country yes, plains and mountains, buffalo and everything.
But now they own next door to nuthin, and will soon be gone."
Kit Carson

Me, either, and for the same reasons...a sentiment oft expressed by current day indians.

Exactly. Thank you for making my point. The indians did NOT mine, smelt, or forge any of their own iron or steel. They got what they had through trade. Their culture while some of them quite advanced in other ways, was that of the stone age when it comes to tools/weapons except for what they acquired from the Europeans.

I didn't say I don't generalize. I said it's HARD TO generalize.




I'm sceptical about the dependence of the eastern tribes on agriculture, moreso since my recent re-reading of Guns, Germs, and Steel. Jared Diamond argues convincingly that the inferior quality of the crops available to native Americans (in terms of protein content, primarily) when compared to the cereal grains of Eurasia meant that these populations were highly dependent on having sources of animal protein in their diet, which meant hunting and fishing. Large population centers might find game scarce nearby, but travelling and trading would have addressed that. Diamond also disputes De Soto's population claims, based on archaeological research.





I don't use the term "stone age" lightly, nor in a pejorative sense. Yes, Indians obtained iron implements by trade with white Americans, but until they assimilated into white society to a larger extent they were incapable of crafting metals themselves, so technologically they were still Neolithic peoples.

The transition from Neolithic technology into Iron Age technology occurred incredibly rapidly for native North Americans; whereas it took 10,000+ years in Eurasia, it took less than 25 years on the central and northern plains, as they were able to adopt European technology as almost a turn-key process. At the Fetterman Fight in 1866, the Dakota and Cheyenne warriors had no guns and used stone arrowheads; their arms and technology were truly Neolithic, truly Stone Age. Even their tactics were extensions of the tactics they had used for centuries. At the Little Bighorn 10 years later, at least 1/3 of the Indian warriors had guns (some sources argue more) and almost all had steel knives and many utilized metal arrowheads, and they effectively utilized tactics they had learned from observation of the U.S. Army. They weren't manufacturing Iron Age technology, but they were sure utilizing it! And by 1886, native American blacksmiths and other tradesmen/artisans were not uncommon on the northern plains, particularly in settlements in Canada that I'm aware of.




I agree absolutely. There is no reasoning involved; they did as they had "always" done, i.e., as far back as their oral history/tradition could recollect.

When I explicated the "value" of certain age groups and populations in terms of their value to native hunter-gatherer economies, I was not implying that they reasoned this out... it was just the way they did it, they way they had "always" done. But the economic and biologic sense of it is pretty much irrefutable.

Our ancestors of all races going back 100,000 years or more have all "always" done as much, for the same reasons. Civilization has removed the economic necessity for most of these behaviors, so they are largely extinguished. But the fact that such behaviors almost immediately spring back into practice when the veneer of civilization wears thin tells us that we aren't all that far removed from our Stone Age ancestors.

Have a look at the Yahi tribe and the story of "Ishi". Accounts state that the Indian hunters preferred "other" methods of killing the kids because rifles messed them up so bad.

In 1865 the government paid out over 1 million dollars in Indian bounties.

But keep buying oil, times be good in Oklahoma.

If you paid Orkin to rid your house of termites, you wouldn't tell them to just kill the older male termites.

It was over 100 years ago and life was different then and we don't understand it. It should be nothing more than history without blame...

History without blame is what we got now.

�what difference does it make�