and prairies was the very essence of life.
The depth of this feeling is reflected in the Navajos, who scorned the rich Oklahoma prairie country offered them by the government, and chose to live in their own arid and rugged deserts. It is reflected also in the Cherokees who, in the space of one generation, changed their whole way of fife, established schools and libraries, produced an alphabet, planned a constitution and a legislature, and went to work in their own mills and blacksmith shops—all with the purpose of becoming so civilized that the whites would allow them to stay on their own lands and not ship them west to the Territories.
To the Indian, the homeland was the center of the universe. No member of a civilized people ever spoke of his native land with more pride than is apparent in the speech of the Crow Chief, Arapooish: “The Crow country,” he said, “is exactly in the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heat scorches the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowbanks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep.
“In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down into the plains and hunt the buffalo, or trap beaver in the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms along the rivers; there you will find buffalo meat for yourselves, and cottonwood bark for your horses; or you may winter in the Wind River Valley where there is salt weed in abundance.
“The Crow country is exactly in the right place. Everything good is to be found there. There is no country like the Crow country.”
Here is affection for the land, but no notion of private ownership. The idea that land could be bought and sold was an alien concept to the Indians of America. They clung possessively to certain chattels, but lands were nearly always held in common. An individual might have the use of a farm plot, but at his death it reverted back to the community.
The confrontation of Indians and whites had in it the seeds of hopeless misunderstanding from the start. The two cultures had produced irreconcilable concepts of landownership, and once the first white man set foot on American soil, the drama unfolded with all the certain sweep of a Greek tragedy.
Englishmen, especially, coveted land. It was something to be owned outright. Had not the English King given the charter deeds? The sixteenth-century Spaniard, by contrast, was not primarily interested in seizing land: the soldier wanted personal plunder; the priest came with his seeds and livestock to save Indian souls.
To the joint-stock companies of Virginia, intent on commercial profits, and to the colonizing Pilgrims, exclusive possession was the be-all and end-all of landownership. But the Indian’s “title,” based on the idea that he belonged to the land and was its son, was a charter to use—to use in common with his clan or fellow tribesmen, and not to use up. Neither white nor Indian fully grasped the concept of the other. The Indian wanted to live not just in the world, but with it; the white man, who thought in terms of estates and baronies, wanted land he alone could cultivate and use.
In the beginning, friendship and co-operation with the Indians were essential if the colonists were to gain a foothold in America, for the white man was badly outnumbered. To be unneighborly was to risk violence, and respect for Indian rights was the better part of wisdom. The upright conduct of the first colonists in Massachusetts and Virginia drew generous response from powerful chiefs who helped the settlements survive.
Live and let live was the inevitable opening keynote, for muskets could neither cut trees nor keep the peace. In the meeting of alien worlds both Indians and whites had something to learn from each other, and if the newcomers borrowed the idea of a feast of thanksgiving from a harvest celebration of neighboring Indians, so much the better.
But the first phase ended quickly, and as stockades were completed and new colonists swelled the ranks of the invaders, conciliation became superfluous. As one historian put it, “The Indians were pressed remorselessly when their friendship became of less value than their land.” In Virginia, the Indians watched with consternation and alarm as the white men planted tobacco, used up the soil, and every few years moved on to clear new fields. The planters took the Indians’ land, first by cajolery and trade, then by force. So swiftly did events move that, within forty years of the founding of Jamestown, the mighty Powhatans were landless and in beggary at the edge of their former homes. Elsewhere the details were different, but white expansion followed the same general pattern.
The barrier of misunderstanding that arose when advancing whites encountered Indians was too high for either people to scale. Some weak and venal chiefs bargained away the rights of their people, but for most tribes the sale of large tracts to the settlers was not a solution to their problems, for they had no land to sell. The warrior chief, Tecumseh, stated the Indian philosophy of nearly all tribes with his reply to the demands of white buyers: “Sell the country? . . . Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?”
To the Indian mind, even after two centuries of acquaintance with the whites, land belonged collectively to the people who used it. The notion of private ownership of land, of land as a commodity to be bought and sold, was still alien to their thinking, and tribe after tribe resisted the idea to the death. Land belonged, they said again and again—in the hills of New York, in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies, and in the Ohio Valley—to their ancestors whose bones were buried in it, to the present generation which used it, and to their children who would inherit it. “The land we live on, our fathers received from God,” said the Iroquois Cornplanter to George Washington in 1790, “and they transmitted it to us, for our children, and we cannot part with it. . . . Where is the land on which our children and their children after them are to lie down?”
Had the Indians lacked leaders of integrity, or been less emotionally tied to their hills and valleys, a compromise might have been arranged, but life and land were so intertwined in the Indian scheme of existence that retreat meant surrender of self—and that was unthinkable.
Before the moments of climax came, weaker tribes in all parts of the country made peace, and some of the stronger ones delayed the inevitable by selling parts of their domain. There were fierce chiefs, too, who would not bargain; men repeating the defiance of Canasatego who, representing the Six Nations in Philadelphia in 1742, spoke with contempt of the money and goods acquired in exchange for land. They were gone in a day or an hour, he said, but land was “everlasting.”
Yet to many another red man, the new goods had an irresistible allure. Contact with the higher technology of Europeans began to make most of what the Indians had known obsolete, and created needs which they could satisfy only by making increased demands upon the bank of the earth. Once seen, a musket became essential to an Indian warrior; and once an Indian woman had used a steel needle or a woven blanket, she could never again be satisfied with a bone awl or a skin robe. The white man was the only source of the new essentials, and the only way to get them was by trade for things the white man wanted—meat, beaver—and later and farther west, pemmican and buffalo robes. So the Indian, too, became a raider of the American earth, and at the same time was himself raided for his lands by the superior technology and increasingly superior numbers of the white man.
The settlers’ demand for new territory was insatiable, and what money could not buy, muskets, deceit, and official ruthlessness could win. Worse, as the bloody thrust and counterthrust went on, hatreds deepened and demagogues argued for a “final” solution of the Indian problem. They coined a slogan that became the byword of the American frontier: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
In the westward push, new land became the key to progress, and Indian policy was guided solely by economic expediency. A spokesman for the Ottawa, Sioux, Iowa, Winnebago, and other
