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If you ever have the opportunity, go to Cherokee, NC. and learn about the tribe. Those of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, in the Cherokee, NC. area their ancesters fled to the mountains versus being rounded up and relocated to the West when gold was dicovered in N.GA. There's also places in SE.TN. & N.GA. that has a lot of history on the Cherokees.

Some of your Western Tribes, along the WA. & OR. Coast and Columbia River were traders with the British and lived a prosperous life also.

"Lo,the poor Indian".

"Lo",that mythical creature dreamed up by eastern journalists is still very much alive and kicking here on the 'fire,Boggy.You are wasting your time.

Mike, the Dove Creek fight was certainly an "atypical" Indian fight, if you only look at the fights with Comanches (cavalry fights), since it was more of an "infantry" fight. Thanks for the link.

One of the things Gwynne's book described so poignantly was the fact that even after the invention and implementation of large-caliber revolvers and highly mobile tactics in Texas Ranger forays against their Comanche light cavalry opponents, the lessons were repeatedly forgotten and every ten years or so Texas militias ventured out again against Indian foes with cumbersome weapons, unsuitable mounts for plains operations, and utilizing Napoleonic tactics, which inevitably gave all the advantages to the Indians and resulted in catastrophe for the whites. Only after getting their noses bloodied severely did the whites "rediscover" the lessons of earlier generations of Rangers. Talk about an example of ignorance of history and being doomed to repeat it!

When you speak of Rogers' Rangers, are you referring to Robert Rogers and his feats of arms in upstate New York and New Hampshire in the French & Indian Wars? I just picked up an interesting history of Rogers last week (War on the Run), and it's truly fascinating. FWIW, the idea of building a bivouac fire in a hole in wintertime and sleeping with one's feet in the hole to keep them thawed during the night was described by Rogers, but I expect you already knew that. The concept makes a lot of sense to me... first, you can cook/warm food and water/tea (essential for subzero weather survival during a weeks-long expedition) while keeping the light signature of your camp low, but perhaps equally important, you can dry out wet moccasins and socks every night.

Sorry, I disagree with you on that supposition.

First, they didn't have to "carve out a large territory". They had it already. The Iroquois confederacy, for example, trapped and hunted and farmed a vast territory which encompassed most of modern day New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and parts of Wisconsin, as well as southern Quebec and Ontario. And they lost this vast holding over the span of less than a hundred years.

Second, the British were rarely allies of the eastern tribes, and never allies of the Iroquois confederacy, nor the more westerly tribes such as the Sauk, Fox, Chippewa, and Ojibway. The French, on the other hand, worked hand in hand with these tribes and were staunch allies. Hence, the "French and Indian War". But although the French were allies of the Indians, they weren't really interested in doing anything more than getting rich off them by means of the fur trade. They didn't particularly care to "civilize" the Indians beyond what was needed to encourage trade. The French Jesuit missionaries did much to spread Christianity to these tribes, but you would hardly be able to call that a civilizing influence. The British colonies, by way of contrast, were land-hungry and never particularly interested in anything the Indians had other than their lands. The northeastern Indian tribes had the misfortune of not having the mindset or experience to recognize the threat to their survival until it was too late.

But the third and most compelling reason the Indians could not have pushed the Europeans back into the sea was that there weren't enough Indians to start with to do so, and once European diseases such as smallpox, measles, and diphtheria spread among them, their populations dwindled mightily. Birth rates could not keep up with mortality, and further populations losses due to war were the eastern tribes' death knell. It's well-documented that the Iroquois' traditional torture-and-murder of all captives significantly changed during this time period, and captives became seen as having value if incorporated into the tribes to try to increase their supply of breeding women and men who could wage war. Moreover, by the mid-1700's Scots-Irish immigration was really picking up steam, and the ratio of white immigration to Indian birth rate was likely close to 100:1. The net result was that between 1650 and 1750 the population balance in eastern North America reversed, with whites becoming the overwhelmingly dominant demographic.

Immigration and disease doomed the eastern tribes' hegemony over the eastern woodlands. War was only the final straw.

When did I say anything like that? No one, not even the Indians, ever thought that was a possibility.

No, what I was talking about was a large Northwest Indian territory maintained by treaty and force of arms much like the one demanded by the British as a condition for the end of the War of 1812. Had the British remained more constant, or not have suffered a couple of setbacks in the last months of the war, it very likely could have been a reality.

Once that happened, white settlement may have been diverted around that territory to other more easily taken areas.

And certainly, the British were the allies of the eastern Indians against the Americans.

Hi Bob, hi Birdwatcher, hi ET,

Thank you make me known about this book, brought it from amazon, a must read for all people interested in history of the frontier.
Will order the other titles you gave me.
Cheers
Dom

okie mentioned "The Last Captive". The lives of Herman Lehmann. Captured by Apaches and later traded to the Comanche. A good read by A.C. Greene.

well, I can attest that your fowler is hell on water bottles....for Comanch, give me an AR...or a Ma Deuce, please.

It seems the early settlers of Texas missed the benevolent indians...you know, the one's who passed out turkeys and daughters. History has been changed via PC again.

that's just because the Texians were mean to them. The Comanch were all sweetness and light until those mean old Texians spoiled them.

I mean, just ask the Spaniards...or the Mexicans....or the Apaches.

What happened to the winner writing history? Crap...Walt Disney is about as good as the rest.

history has actually been pretty kind to ol' Quanah, if not to the rest of his tribe.

Comanche life was just one really long outdoor anatomy class. Butchering meat was a daily chore like going to the grocery store, you know, women work.

Making the gene pool a little deeper is never a bad thing. The rest of his tribe? Animals. Savages that needed putting down.

I see your point. Yes, a large reservation might have been established following the war of 1812, but I strongly suspect it would've had no more success than other reservations and treaties established elsewhere in North America. Remember, the Canadians (who were "British" 100 years longer than the "Americans" were British) didn't do much better than the USA when it came to settling "the Indian question".



You're speaking of the Revolutionary War? The War of 1812? I'm not sure you can characterize the utilization of irregular Indian warriors in either of those conflicts in the same context as the French did in the F&I Wars, when they were true allies of the French, but I'll concede the British did a good job of capitalizing on the relationships previously established by the French.

reading this i kind of think of the southern part of arizona and mexico

Nous somme tous des Sauvages!

BN

Les conneries.

I'm twenty chapters in.

Hard to know really, tho' one could draw a lot of analogies between the Caddo Confederation and the famous Eastern Tribes, this true of almost any agriculutural Texas group. Even tbe infamously cannibalistic Tonkawa might have eaten less people than the Mohawks did in their day.

Even though we know it is so, it is still hard to wrap one's mind around the impact and scale of the epidemics. From an estimated TWENTY MILLION deaths in Central America alone in the sixty years after Cortez, to the piles of bones encountered by the Pilgrims ("like a new Golgotha") up in Massachusetts.

Subsequent to the Florida-to-Tennessee De Soto Expedition in the Sixteenth Century it has been estmated that Native populations of entire Southeast at the time of our own Frontier 200 years later were still only about 20% of what they had been when De Soto arrived. The Cherokees and the Creeks both assembled themselves as identifiable Tribal entities from the remnants of the first epidemics, neither being present as "tribes" at first contact.

Add to that the exponential nature of the American population increase: That hypothetical 70 year-old Texas Delaware woman in 1820 could indeed have been born 1,400 miles away on the Delaware, just 80 miles as the crow flies from Manhattan. Most all 1,400 miles between there and Texas being occupied by White folk in that seventy year period.

HER hypothetical 70 year-old grandmother back on the Delaware (who would have been born in 1680) would have had the frontier move back about a mere 150 miles or so in her own lifetime.

Hard to say WHAT the Texas tribes would have been like compared to the Eastern, by that time they were decimated by a further 70-80 years of diseases and faced with a regular steamroller of White settlement.

Earlier in history, when the Frontier was more static, there was a huge amount of peaceful cultural exchange occurring between wars. Hence by the mid-18th Century the aforementioned Eastern tribes were living in wooden cabins, sometimes of sawn lumber, with actual glass in the windows and stone chimneys. Their tools, farming implements and weaponry too were about on a par with the White side of the Frontier.

All this as a result of decades of peaceable exchange and some degree of intermarriage.

This process resulting by the 1820's in such famously literate and organized Tribes as the Cherokees (between bouts of White baby tossing when Houston weren't around I mean). The most remarkable result of this process though I am aware of is a written pact of solidarity between the Onieda Indians of New York State and their Palatine German neighbors.

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/nyh/89.2/preston.html

The outcome of THAT relationship being the Oneida's actually splitting from their own League of the Iroquois and siding with their Colonial neighbors during the Rev War, largely on account of their by then 60-year bond of friendship with the Palatines.

By the 1830's however, the Frontier was moving at breakneck speed, an abrupt avalanch of settlement, crushing everthing in its path. And a bewildering array of tribal remants getting flattened here in Texas. In 1837 the Indian Affairs Commission of the fledgling Texas Republic identified the following Indian tribes as residing within East and Central Texas...

Abadache, Alabama, Anadarko, Ayish, Biloxi, Caddo, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Comanche, Coushatta, Delaware, Huawani, Ioni, Karankawa, Kichai, Kickapoo, Lipan, Menomini, Muscogee, Nacodoche, Pawnee, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Towash and Waco.

Good luck in weeding out the natives.

As for what is was like to be an Indian in East Texas in those years, the Sabine strip was long a famously lawless place, and with hordes of White folks on top of everything else moving in constantly, anything could and did happen, most of it awful.

Fer example what REALLY set off the Caddos was the killing of their prominent head man Canoma, who, while retrieving stolen horses for one Texas settlement, was tied to a tree and shot by the Ranging Company from another Texas settlement, one of these Rangers cutting a razor strap from the skin on his back.

No more surreal really that what came out of Parker's Fort. At least three expeditions by mounted Ranging Companies from that place, which at one time housed SEVENTY-SIX inhabitants. Reading up on these expeditions one gets the distinct impression the Ranging Companies basically shot whoever they ran into (see "Savage Frontier: Volume 1 1835-1837" 2002). Pretty uch exactly as they would do in Mexico during that war.

Ordered at one point NOT to attack the Wacos, the Parker's Fort crew did attack at least one bunch and capture a Waco mother and child. That night the despairing mother killed her infant then stabbed herself. In the morning the Rangers, finding her still alive, cut her head off with a butcher knife. (Relevant to point out here that accounts have Wacos along with those Comanches that plundered Parker's Fort the following year).

Most surreal of all, one of the Ranging Company operating out of the Fort claimed he had a smallpox sample, so they captured a guy from some unidentified tribe, injected him as best they could, and let him go.

Like other putative or otherwise actually documented efforts towards that end along our Frontier, it is hard to tell if it took hold. Indians were dying so fast from diseases anyway it would be hard to beat Mother Nature on that score.

Anyhoo... funny how Fehrenbach and Gwynne both skip that part.

Birdwatcher