appeal at the Council of Drummond Island in 1816: “The Master of Life has given us lands for the support of our men, women, and children. He has given us fish, deer, buffalo, and every kind of birds and animals for our use. . . . When the Master of Life, or Great Spirit, put us on this land, it was for the purpose of enjoying the use of the animals and fishes, but certain it was never intended that we should sell it or any part thereof which gives us wood, grass and everything.”
He got his answer the following year when President James Monroe wrote: “The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life . . . and must yield to it.”
There was a continent to be redeemed from the wilderness, and the Indians’ way of life had to be sacrificed. Thus the policy of forced removal was established, and the Five Civilized Tribes were sent, with scant civility and, in the end, scant humanity, on a thousand-mile “trail of tears” to Oklahoma.
In its latter stages the land war moved into its cruelest phase in California, the Southwest, and the Upper Great Plains. Most of the California Indians were neither as warlike nor as land-conscious as the Eastern tribes. But even this did not spare them, and the most pitiless chapters of the struggle were written by frustrated gold-seekers who organized vigilante raids, killed helpless natives, and subsequently collected from the government for their deeds of slaughter.
After the Civil War the “clear the redskins out” policy approached its dramatic climax. The mounted Indians of the Upper Great Plains and the Apaches of the Southwest were fierce warriors who would not be cornered. It took regiments of trained cavalrymen over twenty years to drive them from their sacred hills and hunting grounds. Outarmed and outmanned, these warriors made fierce counterattacks, and our American pride was dealt a grim blow when the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was interrupted by the news of the Custer massacre. The undeclared racial war did not end until the final tragic chapters were written in the Pyrrhic victory of Sitting Bull at the Little Bighorn, and in the last stands of Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, and Geronimo.
With the final triumphs of the cavalry, and the uneasy settlement of tribes on reservations, the old slogans gradually disappeared, and the new conscience expressed itself in the saying, “It’s cheaper to feed ’em than to fight ’em.”
The 1887 Allotment Act, which broke up parts of some reservations and gave individual title to some Indians, Luther stripped away Indian rights by forcing unprepared tribesmen to deal with unscrupulous land swindlers.
With the passage of time and the steady attrition of old ideas and beliefs, we are at last, hopefully, entering a final phase of the Indian saga. The present generation of Indians accepts the system their fathers could not comprehend. The national government strives to provide the Indian people with adequate health and education programs and to aid them in developing the potential of their human and natural resources. As a singular gesture of atonement, which no civilized country has ever matched, the Congress has established a tribunal, the Indians Claims Commission, through which tribes may be compensated for losses suffered when their lands were forcibly taken from them.
After long years of peace, we now have an opportunity to measure the influence of the Indians and their culture on the American way of life. They have left with us much more than the magic of place names that identify our rivers and forests and cities and mountains. They have made a contribution to our agriculture and to a better understanding of how to live in harmony with the land.
It is ironical that today the conservation movement finds its eh turning back to ancient Indian land ideas, to the Indian understanding that we are not outside of nature, but of it. From this wisdom we can learn how to conserve the best parts of our continent.
In recent decades we have slowly come back to some of the truths that the Indians knew from the beginning: that unborn generations have a claim on the land equal to our own; that men need to learn from nature, to keep an ear to the earth, and to replenish their spirits in frequent contacts with animals and wild land. And most important of all, we are recovering a sense of reverence for the land.
But the settlers found the Indians’ continent too natural and too wild. Though within a generation that wildness would begin to convert some of their sons, and though reverence for the natural world and its forces would eventually sound in much of our literature, finding its prophets in Thoreau and Muir, those first Europeans, even while looking upon the New World with wonder and hope, were determined to subjugate it.
Thomas Jefferson
The land was ours before we were the lands.
—ROBERT FROST
On November 11, 1620, after sixty-six days on the stormy North Atlantic, a small ship hove to off the shores of Cape Cod. It is one of the lasting ironies of American history that the shores that were to be a symbol of hope for countless immigrants aroused deep forebodings in those who first came to stay. Nathaniel Morton, the keeper of the records for the Plymouth Colony, observed the face of the land and the faces of the seventy-three men and twenty-nine women aboard, and made this grim notation:
Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? And what multitudes of them there were, they knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward objects; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wilde and savage hew.
Somehow the entire first phase of New World colonization was summed up in this gloomy entry. As the Mayflower drew toward shore, probably all but the hardiest of its passengers were overwhelmed by fear of the wilderness that faced them. The colonists were ill equipped to pioneer. Civilization had robbed them of the primitive arts of their ancestors, and at best they brought with them the limited skills of city artisans and small farmers. Few knew the rudiments of fishing, of using native plants for food, of hunting wild animals, or of building homes in the wilderness. The indispensable colonists were those who knew how to farm, could catch Indian lore or Indian language on the run, and had the knack of making peace with the natives.
Yet frightened and ill prepared as they were, the colonists brought with them three things which would assure their predominance and ultimately change the face of the continent. First, they brought a new technology. One evening the sun going down over the Appalachians set on an age of polished stone; the next morning it rose on an age of iron. From the moment that the settlers won a foothold and set up their first forge, the sweep of American history was certain: the Indians would be subjugated; so, too, would be the land. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock they did not even have a saw, but they brought to the American continent Iron Age skills that spelled doom for the Indian way of fife. Once the blacksmiths and gunsmiths set up shop, once the horses and oxen arrived, the ax and gun and wheel would assert their supremacy.
Second, the colonists brought with them a cast of mind that made them want to remake the New World. The Indians could plan only from moon to moon, from season to season, and accepted the world the way they found it, but the newcomers believed they held their destiny in their hands and they planned accordingly. The Pilgrims were men of the Renaissance. Their forebears had developed trial-and-error experimenting into primitive science, and had nurtured the inventor’s gift. They knew how to organize as well, and by harnessing work animals to plow and wheel, they could reap where the Indian could not and could sell their surplus in
