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History See other History Articles Title: "The Merciless Indian Savages" A fresh perspective on how the West was won —and from whom. reviewed by Steven Schwamenfeld The American Indian has always had champions among whites. Their voices have generally been loudest in areas furthest removed from Indians in their natural state – perhaps not surprisingly since traditional Indian life involved almost perpetual warfare. Thus, as America's political frontiers moved West, Easterners came to see Indians not as, in George Washington's words, “beasts of prey” with an insatiable appetite for bloodshed, but as victims of the white man's greed and brutality. With the disappearance of the frontier all Americans could take this view, and in the last 30 years book after book has promoted guilt over the fate of the Indian and regretted our nation's very existence. Thomas Goodrich has boldly attempted to redress this imbalance with Scalp Dance, a historical narrative largely drawn from first-hand accounts by soldiers and settlers who faced the Indian menace on the Great Plains. For Americans reared on tales of Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, a better understanding of Indian warfare casts these famous massacres in an entirely different light. Hereditary Enemies Col. William Collins commanded men who faced the Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux. Of these tribes, he wrote: “War with somebody . . . is the natural state of an Indian people. Every tribe has some hereditary enemies with whom it is always at war . . . . It is by war that they obtain wealth, position and influence with the tribe.” What modern accounts of the “noble” Indian warrior commonly leave out is his manner of making war, and it is the eye-witness and contemporary records that both enrich Mr. Goodrich's book and make it sometimes painful to read. Military historian John Keegan has written that “there is a cruelty in the warfare of some pre-Columbian peoples of North and Central America that has no parallel elsewhere in the world,” but it would seem that this barbarity continued well into the 19th century. Col. Henry Carrington wrote: “The great real fact is, that these Indians take alive when possible, and slowly torture.” Enemy dead who could not be tortured were horribly mutilated. This is how Col. Carrington describes the battlefield where, on December 21, 1866, 80 American troops were annihilated by a combined force of Sioux and Cheyenne under Chief Red Cloud: A few of the soldiers had managed to kill themselves before being captured. Many – probably most – were taken alive and tortured to death. This was the potential fate of every soldier on the Plains, and it is hardly surprising that it was standard practice to “save the last bullet for yourself.” The aftermath of the Little Bighorn massacre was entirely typical. Private Jacob Adams wrote: Most of the bodies were naked, and many had been elaborately savaged. Isaiah Dorman, an interpreter, and the only black in Custer's party, was treated with particular contempt. A witness wrote: Major Marcus Reno, who had ridden with Custer, wrote of a scene he found in the Indian village near the battleground: Whites who observed Indians at their grisly work described them as expert butchers of human meat. A drummer named James Lockwood wrote of the deaths of two soldiers outside Julesburg, Colorado: “In less time than it takes to read this, they were stripped of their clothing, mutilated in a manner which would emasculate them, if alive, and their scalps torn from their heads.” Far more gratifying than mutilating the dead was torturing the living. This was the ultimate aim of Indian warfare and was considered a religious act. Col. Richard Dodge left this by no means exceptional account of the fate of one captive: It is worth noting that Indians did not single out whites for cruelty; they treated them just as they did other Indians. Mr. Goodrich quotes a Crow chief explaining to General George Crook his hatred for the Sioux: As this passage indicates, Indians did not restrict their slaughter to combatants; many white homesteaders were killed without regard to sex or age. Capt. Henry Palmer left this terrible account of the aftermath of a raid: Mr. Goodrich devotes an entire chapter to women's narratives of captivity. Its title is “A Fate Worse Than Death,” and he does not use this antique expression ironically. A captive in an Indian camp was fair game for any kind of degradation: Of two white women rescued by the 7th Cavalry in 1869 it was recorded: “At first they had been sold back and forth among the bucks for fifteen ponies each, but their last owners had only paid two.” One victim “appeared to be 50 years old, although she was less than 25.” She had not only been repeatedly raped but had received constant beatings from jealous squaws. Indians delighted in trophy-taking, and prized some trophies over others. Catherine German wrote of the death of her sister: Contemporary accounts show that the lot of an Indian woman was not much better than that of a white captive. Lieutenant James Steele wrote: “She is beaten, abused, reviled, driven like any other beast of burden . . . . She is bought and sold; wife, mother, and pack animal, joined in one hideous and hopeless whole.” War correspondent DeBenneville Keim reported: “The relations between the sexes is the same in nearly all cases – that is, they [the women] are the servants or slaves . . . . All labor performed in an Indian village fall[s] to the lot of the women.” Elizabeth Burt, an army officer's wife, recorded her impressions of domestic life among Indians: Mrs. Burt believed she was allowed to walk about in Indian camps because “women are such inferior creatures in the estimation of an Indian that . . . I engrossed little of their attention.” Cheyenne Autumn Mr. Goodrich concludes his book with an account of the attempt by Chief Dull Knife's Cheyenne to escape from their Kansas reservation and return to their traditional hunting grounds. Historians usually treat this as an epic of aboriginal bravery against all odds. It inspired the adulatory film Cheyenne Autumn. Mr. Goodrich gives all due credit to the Cheyenne as warriors, but he presents the breakout as what it was: a killing spree. Dull Knife's braves launched a reign of terror over Kansas from which no white American – man, woman, soldier, or civilian – was safe. Despite such frank accounts of Indian behavior, Mr. Goodrich's book is by no means uncritical of whites, whose atrocities he also chronicles. Whites who lived in closest contact with Indians were those who hated them most, and some repaid barbarity in the same coin. A settler named George Porter, who had seen his entire family murdered (and all its female members raped beforehand), went on a one-man vendetta in which he is reported to have killed 108 Indians. Men like Porter occasionally fought in uniform as volunteer soldiers. Mr. Goodrich actually begins his book with what is generally regarded as the worst case of white brutality in the Indian Wars: the attack on the camp at Sand Creek, Colorado. Here, in the winter of 1864, Col. John Chivington led the Union volunteers of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry against the Cheyenne and Arapaho of Chief Black Kettle. These Indians had been granted a voucher of safety by a regular army officer, and Chivington caught them completely unprepared. His men killed women and children as well as men. Unlike other historians, Mr. Goodrich puts this massacre in context. Chivington's volunteers knew that during the summer white civilians in the area – men, women, and children – had been slaughtered by Indians. Some of the volunteers were probably related to the victims, and their battle cry was “Remember the murdered women and children!” Regular troops who conducted the bulk of the Indian campaigns were generally far less brutal than Chivington's men because they had a less personal stake in the fighting. Morale Problems This said, the army that fought the Indians was not America's finest. During the Civil War over two million men served in the federal armies, and in May, 1865, one million men were wearing Union blue. But by the next year this force had shrunk to a peace-time strength of 55,000 men, 20,000 of whom were occupying the South. It was a meager force that guarded American lives and property as settlers and railroads moved west. The post-Civil War army also suffered from severe morale problems. The officer corps had been purged of its Southern patrician bedrock, and recruits were often beggars and recent immigrants. Many soldiers tried to survive their “hitch” by avoiding battle. Desertion was an almost debilitating problem, and sometimes it was only the cruelty of the enemy that inspired great efforts from the men. One officer from Gen. Patrick Connor's 1865 campaign recalled: Given the kind of enemy they proved to be, it is surprising there were not more massacres of Indians. Mr. Goodrich's book captures the insoluble essence of the problem. No matter how militarily impressive, the traditional Indian way of life was incompatible with civilization. It was a way of life that held plunder and killing as the highest virtues. Its passing should elicit few tears. A poor Kansas farmer named John Fergusson expressed in his homely way the determination that finally drove the Indian from the prairies: It is the perspective of the people who built the United States that has been withheld from us by the purveyors of popular culture. Scalp Dance reminds us of the nobility of America's settlers and of our debt to their memory.
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
Liberal airhead: "Yay for multiculturalism!" Realist: "Traditionally, when two cultures try to share the same land, the result has been genocide."
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