Gun Ownership in Colonial Virginia

While rereading A True Relation (1608) by John Smith, a statement about most guns being packed away caught my eye. I noticed the statement because it provides corroborating evidence for an assertion that I read on the Jamestown Rediscovery website.

On 22 April 1607, according to Smith,* He, Captain Christopher Newport, and twenty others set out upriver to explore and gather food for the nascent colony. While they were away, the fort at Jamestown on which construction had barely begun, was attacked by about 400 Indians. The English colonists were fortunate in their ability to repel the attacks because most of the guns were still packed away in shipping containers. The exceptions were those possessed by "gentlemen". Smith noted, "...their Armes beeing then in drievats and few ready but certain Gentlemen of their own" (35).

The Jamestown Rediscovery website mentions restrictions on ownership and access to firearms in the England of James I.

There had been no major military battles in England since the war against Spain that ended in 1603; so, at the time of Jamestown’s settlement there was a shortage of arms and armor in England for the Virginia Company to supply to its colony. The English government strictly controlled all the military equipment, which was stored in city armories or private households of the rural gentry.
"Arms and Armor," Jamestown Rediscovery (accessed 15 August 2017).

For centuries leading up to this time, men in England had a duty to be trained in the use of arms for service in the militia, as well as for service in the defense of themselves and their neighbors. But, ownership of weapons was not yet articulated as a right. Moreover, there were restrictions, especially on concealable weapons--crossbows and firearms less than a yard in length. Additional restrictions were put into place early in the reign of James I (1603-1625).

In To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (1994), Joyce Lee Malcolm traces how the duty to bear arms became a right as articulated in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. She suggests that gun ownership among the common people, as well as by the gentry, was widespread in rural England, and most of England was rural. But, she also notes that James I restricted firearm, crossbows, and hunting dogs through a series game acts in 1604, 1605, and 1609.

These acts altered the property qualification needed to hunt far more materially than any act in the preceding two centuries; made it illegal for unqualified persons to keep coursing dogs, sell game, use guns, crossbows, or other devices to take game; and brought some poaching cases before the kingdom's highest courts.
Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms, 13.

The needs for self defense and for hunting certainly differed in colonial Virginia than in the home country. Although perhaps difficult, the colonists were supplied with firearms. But, it appears that when they first arrived, guns were not individual possessions for the majority. Smith was a soldier and had pistols. Others were armed as needed, such as when on guard duty. Gentlemen possessed their own arms and these were all that were readily available during the first Indian attack.

As the settlement at Jamestown grew and expanded along the James River, those with farms certainly had firearms. That was not inconsistent with the practice in England where land owners ordinarily possessed firearms and other weapons for hunting and for self-defense. Slowly, during the fifteen years from 1607-1622, the English also began to instruct their Indian neighbors in the use of these weapons.

This training was negotiated. The English wished to offer religious training to the Natives. Opechancanough, chief of the Powhatans, agreed to this religious training on the stipulation that firearms training came as part of the package. In 1622, Opechancanough led his people to slaughter one-quarter of the English colonists, most of them in their own homes with their own weapons.

Over the course of the rest of the century, ownership of firearms expanded. As ownership expanded, the duty of Englishmen to be prepared for service in the militia also developed into a right to own and use firearms. It was a long process, and one that is not well-documented.


*21 May 1607, according to Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor of Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907) 33. My source for Smith's True Relation is this book, 27-71, digitized at American Journeys.

Standing Rock Protest

Police and Military Attack Oceti Sakowin Treaty Camp from Unicorn Riot on Vimeo.

Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day

Spokane City Council votes in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day: SPOKANE, Wash. - The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of renaming Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day. More than 100 people showed up to Monday's meeting to testify about the decisio...

Chelan County Museum: Cashmere, Washington

A roadside billboard alerted me to the phenomenal archaeology collection at the Chelan County Museum in Cashmere, Washington.* The fishing and hunting implements dating back thousands of years in central Washington certainly warrant the $5.50 admission fee.

Ancient Indian artifacts, however, are not the only treasures on display. The museum has some fine displays of nineteenth and twentieth century Plateau Native artifacts, and a small amount of Coastal as well. Of particular note is a large display of traditional Indian medicines. This display lists plants, their medical uses, and displays dried specimens of each.

The museum also has a strong display of late-nineteenth century pioneer life. The pioneer village contains more than a dozen original structures that were moved to and reassembled on the museum grounds. There is a mission house and a saloon, a post office, print shop, jail, blacksmith shop, and several homes. Some variability in construction techniques and materials are evident, and helpful explanations in each building guide the untrained eye. There is on display a waterwheel that was used to pull water for irrigation from the Wenatchee River a short distance from the location of the museum. Cashmere sits in the heart of the nation's premier apple growing region. It is the home of the highly addictive Aplets and Cotlets.

The natural history museum includes a terrific collection of rocks that seems better than the one that I recall from my university's Geology Department. If I wanted to refresh my memory for identifying the many rocks I learned to identify three decades ago, an hour or two in the Chelan County Museum would do the trick. There are also plenty of stuffed birds and critters in the natural history section, including a bear.

Of particular interest to those who concern themselves with political memorabilia, and highlighted in the verbal overview given me when I paid and signed the guest book, is a collection of campaign buttons. I was saddened a bit to see one that I wore in 1980: "Reagan Bush The Time is Now." I suppose youthful errors are forgivable, even when the consequences endure for decades afterward. The collection has buttons going back to a couple dated 1908 for William Taft and for William Jennings Bryan. There were several for Theodore Roosevelt, whether 1904 or 1912 was not clear. There were quite a few for Woodrow Wilson from 1912, and some undated. At least one button had the name William McKinley, and there were several others with matching mug shots. Those could have been from 1896 or 1900. Some of those for Bryan may have dated to 1896. There are more than a dozen for Barry Goldwater from 1964. One was a bright gold button with the single word Goldwater. Another was white and pictured a glass of water with the term H2O. There was a card that appeared to have a button from each state for Nixon Ford 1972 (I did not count to see whether any were missing). Democrats are represented, too. There were several clever campaign slogans evident in the Lyndon Baines Johnson buttons.

The museum is a two and one-half hour drive from my home in Spokane. It is well worth the price of gas and expenditure of time to warrant a second trip.


*The official name of the museum seems to be Cashmere Museum and Pioneer Village. It was created by the Chelan County Historical Society, and the name Chelan County Museum appears on some websites and signs.

Patriotic Logic (or Lack Thereof)

When I am reading, I frequently go back and reread a passage. Most often I have missed something due to inattention or interruption, as when my wife whispers sweet nothings in my ear. Many times I go back because I find it difficult to understand a text. With some writers--William Faulkner, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Proust,--expectations of comprehension begin with the second reading. Occasionally, rereading a passage is necessary because I have some expertise in the subject, but the authors that I am reading most clearly do not. This last was my experience this morning while reading A Patriot's History of the United States (2004).

Several alternative policies had been attempted by the United States government in its dealings with the Indians. One emphasized the "nationhood" of the tribe, and sought to conduct foreign policy with the Indian tribes the way the United States would deal with a European power. Another, more frequent, process involved exchanging treaty promises and goods for Indian land in an attempt to keep the races separate.
Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot's History, 207

How are treaties an alternative to dealing with Indian nations in ways comparable to dealing with foreign powers? Perhaps the authors of A Patriot's History imagine some distinction here that they fail to explain, but it defies logic. Quite simply, they offer incomprehensible nonsense to confuse the fundamental relationship between Indian tribes and the United States. Consider, for example, President Reagan's recognition of a government-to-government relationship between the U.S. and Indian tribes (for some reason the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library links to the text on the Environmental Protection Agency's website). The four-page policy statement begins:

On January 24, 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued an American Indian policy statement which reaffirmed the government-to-government relationship of Indian tribes with the United States.
http://www.epa.gov/tp/pdf/president-reagan83.pdf

Schweikart and Allen feel a need to put the word nationhood in quotes to generate some distance from what they fail to understand. Their favorite President's policy, however, explicitly states, "President Reagan’s policy supports: ... Specific acknowledgment of the governmental status of Indian tribes."

These days many of Reagan's most ideologically committed followers call themselves Constitutionalists. As they gain power, we can hope that they have read the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.
U.S. Constitution, Article VI (emphasis added)

Does the supremacy clause apply to treaties with American Indian nations?

The U.S. Supreme Court thinks so. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which A Patriot's History mentions on the next page, the U.S. Supreme Court found actions of the state of Georgia "repugnant to the Constitution" because these actions violated treaties with the Cherokee and laws of Congress. In discussing the first treaty the United States made with an Indian nation: the treaty with the Delawares, 1778, the Court noted, "[t]his treaty, in its language, and in its provisions, is formed, as near as may be, on the model of treaties between the Crowned heads of Europe" (31 U.S. 515, at 550). That Indian tribes had become dependent upon the U.S., does not diminish their sovereignty:

The very fact of repeated treaties with them recognizes it, and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is that a weaker power does not surrender its independence -- its right to self-government -- by associating with a stronger and taking its protection. A weak State, in order to provide for its safety, may place itself under the protection of one more powerful without stripping itself of the right of government and ceasing to be a State.
Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515, at 560-561

A Patriot's History offers a view at odds with the Constitution, with the Supreme Court's interpretation of our Supreme Law, and even with the formal declaration of Indian policy by the patron saint of the Conservative Revolution. Schweikart and Allen seem quite alone in their reading of history.

Neolithic Revolution and American Indians

In Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1999 [1980]), we read:

On their own, the Indians were engaged in the great agricultural revolution that other peoples in Asia, Europe, Africa were going through about the same time. (18)

Zinn proceeds to observe the contrast between the "egalitarian communes" of hunter-gatherers with the development of "divisions of labor among men and women," the rise of priests and chiefs, and other aspects of the cultures of settled populations of agriculturalists. Although he hints of an underside of the development of agriculture, his focus notes the achievements of civilization in the Americas prior to the European invasion.

He dwells less upon the differences between "nomadic hunters" and agricultural peoples in the Americas than upon describing social relations among the Haudenosaunee (he uses the term League of the Iroquois). Zinn describes property values and gender relations in such as way as to support a generalization.

So, Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. (21)

Zinn mentions in passing the Moundbuilder Culture, but omits discussion of their religion--some form of sun worship,--and neglects elaboration of its hierarchical arrangements aside from the passing phrase, "more surplus to feed chiefs and priests" (18-19).



Just as he faults Samuel Eliot Morison, Zinn opens himself to criticism. He observes that Morison's Christopher Columbus, Mariner (1954) mentions genocide as a consequence of policies initiated by Columbus, but then moves on to emphasize positive achievements. Zinn opines:

To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it's not that important--it should weigh very little in our final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world. (8)

As Morison quickly brushed past the issue of genocide, Zinn brushes past the hierarchical arrangements and theocratic states that emerged along the trail of corn in order to romanticize the American Indian past.


Pandora's Seed

Spencer Wells does not romanticize Neolithic peoples in Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (2010). Wells presents data from a 1984 study of skeletal remains in the eastern Mediterranean by J. Lawrence Angel that demonstrates substantive indices of health decrease--pelvic inlet depth, average stature, and median life span--during the Mesolithic (9000-8000 BCE), Early Neolithic (7000-5000 BCE), and Late Neolithic (5000-3000 BCE). Wells notes similar patterns in the Americas, "the data shows that the transition to an agricultural lifestyle made people less healthy" (24).

How can we explain the massive increase in human population and the dominance of agriculture, which has pretty much completely replaced hunting and gathering in every inhabited corner of the world, when it didn't improve people's lives? (24)

It would seem that hunter-gatherers had an evolutionary advantage, yet agriculturalists prevailed. How was this victory achieved?

Although Wells poses this question, his focus concerns more centrally the long-term consequences of the Neolithic upon modern society, including the impact of a carbohydrate based diet upon general health and even how such changes so long ago contribute to global climate change. Along the way, however, he discusses the work of William H. McNeill (Plagues and Peoples [1976]) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel [1997]). These works address how peoples from Europe prevailed over peoples in the Americas. Although the Neolithic Revolution transformed the Fertile Crescent, MesoAmerica, and southern China approximately the same time, the revolution in the Americas was principally plant oriented, while elsewhere domestication of animals proceeded apace. From these animals came the diseases that devastated the Indians when Europeans arrived.


People's versus Patriot's

Although Zinn skirts past the unpleasant side of the Neolithic Revolution in the Americas to advance his excoriation of the heroes of conquest, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen take a different tact. A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) draws upon other studies that document deleterious effects of the Neolithic Revolution to argue for an insignificant demographic impact of the European invasion. There is no need to repeat here all that I have written concerning the claims of Schweikart and Allen and how they distort the science they cite. I address elements of their fantastic edifice in "Larry Schweikart's Claim" (looking at his History News Network plug for the book), "Footnote to Larry Schweikart's Claim" (examining his source, The Backbone of History, and how he distorts its findings), and "Death in Jamestown" (investigating A Patriot's most outlandish claim). "Origins of Malaria" adds some solid science to the refutation of Schweikart's claim that malaria originates in America.

I note in "Origins":

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

As a working hypothesis, I am prepared to put forth the claim that Zinn's history distorts through conscious and open bias that romanticizes Indians, while Schweikart and Allen distort either through abysmal scholarship or through flagrant dishonesty.

Indian Names: Nez Perce

Tribal names, as the names Native, Native American, Indian, American Indian, Native American Indian, are inventions more often than not. Some of these inventions stem from simple confusion, as when Captain James Cook heard the Nuu-chah-nulth offering instructions on where to anchor his ship, he heard "Nootka" and gave them that name. Some names are corruptions of what their enemies call them, as is the case with Sioux. Some names remain shrouded in the mists of time.

Already by 1835, the reasons for calling the Salish people in Montana, Flathead, and for calling the Ni-Mii-Puu, Nez Perce, had been forgotten. At least Samuel Parker could not discern the reasons during his travels.

I was disappointed to see nothing peculiar in the shape of the Flathead Indians, to give them their name. Who gave them this name, or for what reason, is not known. Some suppose it was given them in derision for not flattening their heads, as the Chenooks and some other nations do, near the shores of the Pacific. It may be so, but how will those, who indulge this imagination, account for the Nez Perces being so called, since they do not pierce their noses. That those names are given by white men, without any known reason, is evident from the fact, that they do not call each other by the names which signify either flat head or pierced nose.
Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838), 76.

Many years ago, when I was a graduate student, my friend Otis Halfmoon told a class that I was teaching that the name Nez Perce probably stems from the Ni-Mii-Puu sign language term for themselves in which they pointed from right to left across their face to indicate that they had crossed over between those mountains. He speculated that someone thought they were piercing their noses with the gesture, adding that he is glad they did not think it was an act of cleaning their noses.

Stereotypes

Frederich Engels, co-author with Karl Marx of the core texts outlining the prospects of communism, offers one stereotype of American Indians:

Everything runs smoothly without soldiers, gendarmes, or police, without nobles, kings, governors, prefects or judges; without prisons, without trials. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole body of those concerned. . . . The household is run communistically by a number of families; the land is tribal property, only the small gardens being temporarily assigned to the households -- still, not a bit of our extensive and complicated machinery of administration is required. . . . There are no poor and needy. The communistic household and the gens know their responsibility toward the aged, the sick and the disabled in war. All are free and equal -- including the women.
Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family (1884)

Chief Justice John Marshal of the United States Supreme Court, writing a half century earlier, offered a more negative assessment:

But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness.
Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823)

Both men were wrong.

Getting it Right

Still working on an article that no one will ever read for an encyclopedia that no one will ever buy, I just came across a few marvelous articles on the Blackfeet Nation's newly designed website. Last week, the site had a modest welcome page and no links. Today, the site seems almost complete.

The writing about Blackfeet history is fresh, fervent, and perhaps well-described as Blackfeet Nationalist. Under "Our History," the site offers an article, "We Come From Right Here." I had to read this as quickly as possible because I've long known that the Piegan Blackfeet insist they have been in Montana 10,000 years, while most books state they were migrating southwest fresh from the Canadian Prairies about the time they fell into a fight with Lewis and Clark on the explorers' return from Oregon in 1806. Some of the history books put the Blackfeet in Montana a century or two before that.

But scholars write books and give lectures and huff and puff about times in which they never lived, worlds into which they never stepped foot, and languages they can never hear spoken by the ancients they study. As an example of how little is really known about Indians in the pre-Columbian period, experts can’t even agree if the population of the Americas was 8 million or 112 million. If they know so little that they can’t get within an order of magnitude of each other, why bother guessing about anything else?
"We Come From Right Here"

The link may change, and the text, too. The site is still under construction. Readers of this blog may know what I think of these population figures. If not, click the "depopulation" link below and read away.

Errors of Fact

I'm not blogging much of late because I'm struggling to finish an overdue encyclopedia article that compresses all of Montana Indian history into sixty or so double-spaced typewritten pages. Along the way, I'm reading and rereading every book in my library that bears on the subject, probing the depths of the web, and working JSTOR for all it's worth.


The Error

This morning's coffee goes down with a few pages of light reading in The Lance and the Shield: the Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993) by Robert M. Utley. It seems fair to say that no one knows more about the military history of the nineteenth century Western frontier than Utley. Indeed, the Western History Association's award for the best book each year concerned with the military history of the frontier is called the Robert M. Utley Book Award.

Imagine my dismay, then, when I read the following sentence:

In the summer of 1866 the army built three posts along the Bozeman Trail: Forts Reno, Phil Kearny, and C.F. Smith.
Utley, The Lance and the Shield, 71

In 1865, the U.S. Army sent General Patrick Edward Connor’s Powder River Expedition into northeast Wyoming and southeast Montana with hopes of pacifying the Indians who resented travel through their hunting lands. The expedition established Fort Connor in August 1865 (renamed Fort Reno in November 1865) on the upper Powder River in Wyoming, and then left the region.

Connor split his forces into an ambitious three-pronged assault to converge on the Powder River. His orders to his subordinates stated, “You will not receive overtures of peace or submission from Indians but will attack and kill every male Indian over twelve years of age.”* General John Pope, upon learning of these orders, insisted that steps to countermand them be put immediately into action. The Army did not need more bad press of the sort generated in the wake of the brutal Sand Creek Massacre in southeast Colorado. Nevertheless, the expedition continued with Connor’s orders intact.

No friendly Indians were encountered during the campaign, and there were few significant engagements with hostiles. One band of Arapahos was attacked on the Tongue River, losing their winter food stores, clothing, and most of their horses. Several bands of Lakota—Hunkpapas, Blackfeet, Miniconjou, and Sans Arc—harassed Connor’s two eastern columns marching together up the Powder River. The soldiers were well armed and two thousand strong, but were on the verge of starvation, and suffering from the drought. A summer storm brought sudden cold and wet conditions, killing most of the Army’s mules. Further upriver, Oglala led by Red Cloud and Cheyenne led by Little Wolf continued the attacks.

The Army’s efforts seemed to embolden, rather than pacify the Sioux (mostly Lakota), Cheyenne, and Arapaho that had been wresting the area from the Crow, and attacking immigrants. Fort Reno became the first of three forts along the Bozeman Trail that aggravated the Lakota and Cheyenne.

The following summer, troops under the command of Col. Henry B. Carrington built Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming and Fort C.F. Smith on the Bighorn River in Montana.

If Utley can make such an error, anyone can. Of course, some writers make more errors than others. This sentence stands out in Utley's work because it is rare.

*H. D. Hampton, “The Powder River Expedition 1865,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 14 (Autumn 1964): 8-9.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

Thanks to Pam Wilson, curator of "Indigenous Cinema and Visual Language(s): Why Should We Be Teaching These Films?" at In Media Res, I learned this morning that a terrific film is available through the Internet Archive.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is an Alanis Obomsawin documentary film about a confrontation between Mohawks and the Canadian government in 1990. The confrontation resulted from plans to build a housing development and expand a golf course on Mohawk land, but the roots go back to Jacques Cartier's claim of this land for France in 1535.

The trailer is on YouTube.



When this film was available for some viewings in 1993-1994 on my campus, conversations about Native issues put sovereignty at the center.

Pioneers, Laborers, Slaves

In the comments to yesterday's post, Doghouse Riley posed a question about President Obama's rhetoric in his Inaugural Address and campaign stump speeches. This portion of the Inaugural Speech is the one in question.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things—some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.
President Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

Doghouse asks whether Obama with his Ivy League education could possibly miss the problematic nature of these comments.

Perhaps I should discuss how this version of American history manifests itself in Howard Zinn, who sides with the Indians displaced by these settlers and their plows, but also sides with those toiling in sweatshops, and sides with the African slaves that endured the lash of the whip. Zinn's alliances in A People's History of the United States offer one benchmark for comparison. Doghouse is also pressing me to ask how the story in the ultra-conservative A Patriot's History of the United States supports or contests Obama's appeal to our national character.

Obama is a slick politician, and that almost assures us that he will take liberties with the history he should know. Does his account reveal that he is banking on our collective ignorance? Useful history comforts the afflicted, but it also afflicts the comforted.

In Obama's defense, I might point out the rhetorical pattern of his repetition of the "for us" and its long tradition. Its roots are found at least in part in the soil of African American forms of religious expression. In his effort to yoke together the "pioneers" with factory workers and slaves, he may be deviating from the pattern of his predecessors in the White House. His effort to put these disparate groups in front of the same cart goes against another pattern of historical memory.

I'm thinking, for example, of the anti-union statement from 1888 of Arthur Denny, one of the founders of Seattle:

The object of all who came to Oregon in early times was to avail themselves of the privilege of a donation claim, and my opinion to-day is that every man and woman fully earned and merited all they got, but we have a small class of very small people here now who have no good word for the old settler that so bravely met every danger and privation, and by hard toil acquired, and careful economy, saved the means to make them comfortable during the decline of life. These, however, are degenerate scrubs, too cowardly to face the same dangers that our pioneer men and women did, and too lazy to perform an honest day’s work if it would procure them a homestead in paradise. They would want the day reduced to eight hours and board thrown in.
Arthur A. Denny, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound ([1888] 1965), 13.

For Denny and his peers, there is a clear and unmistakable difference in character between the conservative pioneers that built Seattle and the laborers they now employ, especially when they manifest tendencies towards Socialism.


The Laws of Western Settlement

The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 was designed by Congress to encourage farmers to settle in Oregon--at that time all the lands now included in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and part of western Montana. The Act

... granted to every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included, above the age of eighteen years, being a citizen of the United States, ... and who shall have resided upon and cultivated the same for four consecutive years, ... one half section, or three hundred and twenty acres of land, if a single man, and if a married man, ... one section, or six hundred and forty acres, one half to himself and the other half to his wife, ...
Donation Land Claim Act

The major form of cultivation practiced by the first settlers on that portion of Puget Sound that became Seattle was the nurturing of further immigration so the value of their lands would rise, and rise they did. These hardy pioneers knew how to practice land speculation within the letter of the law, and they grew rich as a consequence.

The Donation Land Claim Act made federal law provisions (modified slightly) of the Organic Act drafted at Champoeg (now under the waters of the Willamette River) in 1843. This Organic Act was the beginnings of regional self-government. Among the flurry of legislation passed by the Republican Congress in the early years of the Civil War, the Homestead Act of 1862 extended this scheme to the Great Plains, and also applied to the Pacific Northwest. The Homestead Act went hand in glove with the Pacific Railway Act and the Morrill Act (authorizing land grant universities in western states) to enable yeoman farmers spreading across the continent. In 1887, Congress extended this yeoman farmer idea to the original inhabitants of western states in General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Severalty Act. It was a Homestead Act for Indians that had among its chief effects the reduction of American Indian land holdings on reservations from 150 million acres to 47 million acres.

Importing Theory: Europeans and Indians

In her classic bestseller, Patterns in Culture (1946 [1934]), Ruth Benedict draws upon Greek myth to construct two categories of cultural practice. She states,

Like most of the American Indians, except those of the Southwest puebloes, the tribes of the Northwest Coast were Dionysian. In their religious ceremonies the final thing they strove for was ecstasy. The chief dancer, at least at the high point of his performance, should lose normal control of himself and be rapt into another state of existence. He should froth at the mouth, tremble violently and abnormally, do deeds which would be terrible in a normal state. (158)

In her chapter on the Pueblos, which she calls Apollonian, Benedict explains that these contrasting approaches to "the value of human existence" were "named and described by [Frederich] Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy" (79).

She summarizes Nietzsche's analysis,

The desire of the Dionysian, in personal experience or in ritual, is to press through it toward a certain psychological state, to achieve excess. The closest anaology to the emotions he seeks is drunkenness, and he values the illuminations of frenzy. With [William] Blake, he believes "the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The Apollonian distrusts all this, and has often little idea of the nature of such experiences. He finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He "knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense." He keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, does not meddle with disruptive psychological states. (79)

This scheme for analyzing the rituals and spiritual practices of American indigenes, and perhaps also their secular practices, might suggest interesting research questions. But it might also get in the way of perception. This scheme may well filter out all observations that undermine the effort to apply an alien theory of existence to cultural study.

Benedict's expression of these categories has always provoked frustration--indeed I experience a passionate, negative emotional response, even thinking of tossing the book towards the garbage--each time I encounter them. Although I've been reading Patterns in Culture since the late 1980s, I cannot state with any assurance that I've read the whole book.

My resistance to Benedict's categories for analysis of North American tribal cultures stems from the sense that it is an inappropriate importation of alien culture theory, rather than the effort to discover and articulate indigenous theory. It violates a cardinal principle of the historian, and of the anthropologist, that peoples must be understood first on their own terms. Then, and only then, can we make comparisons to other peoples.

Benedict's scheme causes me to think of one of the clearest and most insightful statements I have heard from Russell Means: "Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity" (Means, "The Same Old Song," 33).* In this essay, Means makes his case against Marxism.

Revolutionary Marxism, as with industrial society in other forms, seeks to "rationalize" all people in relation to industry, maximum industry, maximum production. It is a meterialist doctrine which despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us "precapitalists" and "primitive". Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. (26)

Means argues that Marxism is steeped in European industrial values, and its revolutionary vision is rooted in an understanding of the needs of Europe. For an Oglala Lakota patriot, as Means describes himself, the importation of Marxist revoltionary theory does not offer relief from the destruction of Native lands by American industrial capitalism. Marxism wishes only to change the ownership of the industry, not embrace a more spiritual way of being.

Whether the theory stems from Nietzsche's analysis of Greek myth, or the economic analysis of capitalism by Marx an Engels, it represents the importation of alien ways of thinking. It produces bias that might interfere with perception.

*Russell Means, "The Same Old Song," in Marxism and Native Americans, edited by Ward Churchill, 19-33 (Boston: South End Press, 1983).

Education for Virtue

My evening history class ends at 10:00pm. After the short drive home, I need to read for a few minutes before I can fall asleep. Last night, I read from Plato's Laws. In this ancient text (perhaps 350 B.C.), Plato discusses the nature of virtue and the purpose of education.

Virtue is this general concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love. Call this "education," and I, at any rate, think you would be giving it its proper name.
Plato, Laws, 653b-c

This passage immediately reminded me of a text that I had planned to review in preparation for my upcoming lecture next week regarding the development of Indian boarding schools in the late-nineteenth century. The language in Plato appears to be reflected in a speech given by Thomas Jefferson Morgan when he was Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1889-1893). Morgan's speech is called "Plea for the Papoose"; he attempts to imagine the needs and interests of Native American Indian babies, and to speak for them.

Early in "Plea for the Papoose," Morgan speaks out against the racial ideology of his day with a statement that all children have the same possibilities for personal growth, limited only by culture, not some inherent racial defect (as some argued).

All human babies inherit human natures, and the development of these inherent powers is a matter of culture, subject to the conditions of environment. The pretty, innocent papoose has in itself the potency of a painted savage, prowling like a beast of prey, or the possibilities of a sweet and gentle womanhood or a noble and useful manhood.
Morgan, "Plea for the Papoose," in Americanizing the American Indians, edited by Francis Paul Prucha, 242.

Planning "Rescue"

Later in the speech, Morgan presents a plan for rescuing Indian children from what he portrays as the debilitating effects of Indian culture. Some critics have used the term legally sanctioned kidnapping to describe the policies that he advocated—the development of federal Indian boarding schools was a central component. In this section, his language echoes Plato's Laws.

If they grow up on Indian reservations removed from civilization, without advantages of any kind, surrounded by barbarians, trained from childhood to love the unlovely and to rejoice in the unclean; associating all their highest ideals of manhood and womanhood with fathers who are degraded and mothers who are debased, their ideas of human life will, of necessity, be deformed, their characters be warped, and their lives distorted. They can no more avoid this than the leopard can change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin. The only possible way in which they can be saved from the awful doom that hangs over them is for the strong arm of the Nation to reach out, take them in their infancy and place them in its fostering schools; surrounding them with an atmosphere of civilization, maturing them in all that is good, and developing them into men and women instead of allowing them to grow up as barbarians and savages.
Morgan, in Prucha, 243.

From our vantage point more than a century later, it is easy to judge Morgan's language as racist. Such judgment, however, anticipates questions regarding how commonsense notions in our day will be judged by our descendants a century from now. Some of those that did not share Morgan's views believed that Indian children were incapable of education. He stood against these contemporaries as an advocate for Indian equality. He was part of a group of Christian reformers who sought to render United States laws and policies more humanizing than they had been.


Full citations
Plato. The Laws. Translated by Trevor J. Saunders. London: Penguin Books, 1970.
Prucha, Francis Paul, editor. Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the "Friends of the Indian" 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978 [1973].

Tribal Names

Do all the people named the Sioux call themselves Lakota? Does an accent mark belong on Nez Perce? Are the Chippewa related to the Ojibwa (or Ojibwe)? Is Blackfeet plural for Blackfoot?

Each name has a history. Historians should favor the names in the primary sources from which they work, and those preferred by the tribe today. They also should learn and relate the histories of these names.

A few years ago, the Wikipedia entry for Nez Perce claimed that Nez Percé was favored by most scholars. “Ignorant scholars!” I said this phrase to myself, as I changed the article only to see it change back the next day. Back and forth the name went, until it finally stabilized after some discussion. (Also see more on historians and Wikipedia.)

For most of the twentieth century, the Yakama Nation employed the spelling Yakima—also the name of a city in Washington state—but officially changed the spelling to Yakama, which conforms to the spelling employed by Isaac I. Stevens in the treaty that some of them signed in 1855. This treaty was a principle cause of the war mentioned in passing, “stronger tribes such as the Yakimas and their allies put up a stiffer fight” (emphasis added), in James Donovan, A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West (2008), 17. This spelling error, as I’m calling it, is not fatal to Donovan’s book, but it offers a subtle clue to a weakness in his research. If he skews toward error minor points regarding tribes far from Little Bighorn, he might do something similar for those that killed Custer. Donovan’s work on Custer’s last battle might prove more authoritative in narrating the side of those that lost the battle than of the motives and actions of the victors, and of the terrible consequences they suffered.

Two pages later, Donovan is back on the Plains among the Lakota Sioux, where he tells us, “Sioux being a bastardized French word that they despised” (19). He does not explain that Sioux is shortened from Nadouessioux, which comes from an Ojibwa word for adders (snakes) and connotes enemy. Lakota, on the other hand, means ally or friend, as does Dakota and Nakota. The Seven Council Fires that comprise the Sioux Nation (as they appear in many U.S. government documents) speak three dialects of a common language. Slight differences in pronunciation account for the variable first consonant in Lakota/Dakota/Nakota. There is no need to add the word Sioux after Lakota, as Donovan does consistently, nor is such usage inherently wrong. Combined with other nuances, such usage merely heightens my attentiveness to other possible errors of fact or interpretation.

A Terrible Glory was thoroughly researched and is well written. My quibbles with a few points of Donovan’s book have not yet led me to disagreement with Robert M. Utley’s assessment that the work is “exemplary” (from a blurb on the back of the dust jacket).

Patriot’s History

On the other hand, A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen employ the term Lakota Sioux in a manner that shatters confidence in their authority.

Farther north the mighty Lakota Sioux also resisted white incursions. Their struggle began in 1862-63 in Minnesota, a theater of the war that ended when U.S. Army General John Pope achieved victory and hanged 38 Sioux warriors as punishment.
Schweikart and Allen, 408.

Colonel Henry Sibley led the troops and usually gets credit for this victory. Yet, the authors of A Patriot’s History are not completely wrong in mentioning Pope, who was Sibley’s superior officer and had charge of the Military Department of the Northwest. Their account of the Indian side of this conflict is another matter.

The Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Santee are Dakota not Lakota. There was no Lakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862. Moreover, their struggles between accommodation and resistance did not begin with Little Crow’s uprising in 1862, but before the Treaties of 1837 and 1858. The resistance that led to war, and that led to the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, resulted from many factors. Some of the leading elements in the failures of the policy of accommodation stemmed from U.S. failures to deliver on promises made in these treaties, capriciousness by Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith, and massive influx of non-Indian settlers.

Gary Clayton Anderson’s Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (1986) offers detailed analysis.

… one might wonder why Little Crow agreed to join the war effort. He had always been an accommodationist, and had consistently used his persuasive abilities to prevent violence. … Little Crow undoubtedly concluded that by joining the soldiers, he would be reinstated in his position as speaker for the Mdewakanton tribe. … His decision to join a doomed war effort certainly contradicted his past behavior, but it did not run counter to the traditional obligation of a Sioux warrior to his community and people—that of giving his life when such a sacrifice became necessary for the benefit of the whole.
Anderson, Little Crow, 133-34.

Mdewakanton leader Little Crow was a patriot.

Notebook Artifact: Summer 1995

Written in a spiral notebook 28 June 1995, Fort Loudon Lake, Tennessee.

What we call history and what we call the novel are more recent than what we call the Columbian encounter. When Natives embrace writing and written genres, we cannot affirm that what they embrace is wholly Western because these forms emerged in a world deeply infused with economies and ideologies formed in contact with multiple non-European worlds. (Even the Renaissance and subsequent Reformation owe much to the deepening interchange between Christian and Muslim words that characterized the late-Middle Ages.) However, we might examine how “history” and the “novel” were formed as Western constructs during an imperial age, and how they must be reformed in our own and future ages. While American Indians were always present as the Other in history and the novel as we have received them, they now speak as agents who employ and transform these genres. Still, the Natives of today do no share the same world as their ancestors any more than Europeans and Americans share the same world as Europeans of the sixteenth century. Still yet, there is enough continuity with the past in present-day native communities that many writing as Natives offer perspectives that must be distinguished from the perspectives of European Americans.

American Indian fiction and American Indian history are deeply European American discourses. These discourses must be transformed by Natives, as well as by non-Natives writing about Natives, in order to more accurately render the worlds of the indigenes of North America—past and present. One location of transformation may be the construct that distinguishes “history” from “fiction”.

This is not to say that we must lose our ability to distinguish what is true or accurate from what is not. Rather, truth must be seen from other points-of-view. Truth may be situational, rather than empirical. It may be experiential, rather than objective.

I am not advocating that we abandon the practice of history, especially not ethnohistory and the new Indian history. I am advocating that the truth-claims of these genres of writing do not necessarily have priority over the truth-claims of fiction. In fact, certain so-called novels by contemporary American Indian writers, if not more truthful and more accurate than what we call history, at least offer necessary truths that cannot be accommodated within the constrictions of history as it is currently understood. It is possible, therefore, that some of the best work in American Indian history in our day is packaged as fiction, and is thus too much ignored by historians.

Literary critics, on the other hand, who often believe they already understand these truths of fiction, too easily posit themselves as more enlightened than historians. Yet, without the groundings in material realities and the ability to step back from their subject matter that are second nature to the historian, they are equally restricted by their conventions of analysis. Despite a strong movement toward several forms of interdisciplinary multiculturalism in literary studies, the offerings of historians have been too much ignored. In taking fiction seriously as history, it is imperative that we remember the conventions of history as they have been received.

There remains a crucial difference between the food obtained by such human constructs as the atlatl, bow and arrow, gun, and slaughterhouse, and the food consumed by Peter Pan and the Lost Boys in one of their imaginary meals. Too often, in extolling the truth-value of fiction, it is easy to forget the difference between the death of the Jim Loney of fiction and the many real persons who have died similar deaths.

Death in Jamestown

Fyndeinge of fyve hundrethe men we had onely Lefte aboutt sixty, The reste beinge either sterved throwe famin or Cutt of by the salvages.
George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon”

In early 1610, sixty English colonists remained from the previous year’s population of five hundred. After two years, the colony at Jamestown had not yet established itself as a viable settlement. Approximately 90% of the colonists to Virginia had died—killed by Indians, starved, fallen to disease—or run away and disappeared into the wilds of America. Conditions were so grim that the surviving remnant prepared four boats and set out to return to England. Some considered burning the small fort where they had suffered, but were persuaded that it might yet be occupied by others who would follow them. As they sailed downriver, they met Lord De La Ware’s ship loaded with supplies and more than three hundred additional colonists. They returned to Jamestown.

The colonists would continue to die. Each ship that arrived in Virginia brought more colonists and most died within two years. Of the many thousands who arrived year after year, perhaps 900 occupied Jamestown and the surrounding area in 1620 (Gately, 73). So many colonists died that an investigation by the Royal Council in 1624—the year that John Smith published his Generall Historie—asked, “What has become of the five thousand missing subjects of His Majesty?” (Morison, 54).

John Smith described the conditions in 1607. Food consisted of meager rations from the common store.

… halfe a pinte of Wheat, and as much Barly boiled with water for a man a day, and this having fryed some six and twenty weekes in the ships hold, contained as many wormes as graines
Smith, “Description,”

Hunger was aggravated by thirst. The colonists were reduced to drinking water from the river.

… when they [Captain Newport and the ships] departed, there remained neither Taverne, Beere-house, nor place of reliefe but the common kettell. … our drinke was water.
Smith, “Description”

George Percy noted the abysmal conditions of the water.

… our drinke cold water taken out of the River, which was at a floud verie salt, at a low tide full of slime and filth, which was the destruction of many of our men.
Percy, “Observations”

Earlier in this paragraph, Percy gives us the earliest diagnosis of the maladies that would continue to devastate the Virginia colony for more than a decade.

Our men were destroyed with cruell diseases as Swellings, Flixes, Burning Fevers, and by warres, and some departed suddenly, but for the most part they died of meere famine.
Percy, “Observations”

Flixes seems most likely a reference to dysentery, but what caused the fevers?


Malaria?

In A Patriot’s History of the United States, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen clearly identify one of the principal causes of death.

Disease also decimated the colony. Jamestown settlers were leveled by New World diseases for which they had no resistance. Malaria, in particular, proved a dreaded killer, and malnutrition lowered the immunity of the colonists.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 17.

The identification of malaria as a principal malady killing the settlers is neither surprising nor original. The textbook I read in my first college course in early American history also identified malaria, which the authors linked to the poor choice of location for the settlement.

The town was located on marshy ground where mosquitoes flourished during the summer, and a hundred of the first settlers died from malaria.
Weinstein and Wilson, Freedom and Crisis, 63.

An article in The Pilgrim Newsletter published in recognition of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown continues this common assertion, “Malaria and other mosquito born illnesses were rampant in the colony” (Stacy, 17). School children at Jamestown Elementary School in Virginia incorporated this idea into a Rap song written as part of a school project.

Although the identification of malaria as a killer of colonists is not uncommon, Schweikart and Allen's add a new twist with their assertion that it was a “New World disease” against which the English lacked immunities. In contrast to this original idea, a statement from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reflects the current state of knowledge concerning malaria in the New World.

Plasmodium vivax stowed away with the English going to Jamestown, while P. falciparum rode along with slaves from Africa.
“Background History on Malaria”

P. vivax thrived in northern Europe for centuries, but it killed very few. P. falciparum is far more deadly. Indeed, it is one of the world's leading killers even today. If the English colonists succumbed to malaria, it came with them. But they were unlikely to succumb until a more virulent strain was brought in with imported servants from Africa. The first of these arrived in 1619 by which time the English population at Jamestown was growing and reasonably healthy.


If not Malaria?

The common assertion that malaria killed the Jamestown settlers rests on a weak foundation. In Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (2001), Margaret Humpheys suggests that the English colonists might have brought malaria with them. The strain of malaria they brought—P. vivax—was less virulent than that likely brought sometime after 1619 from Africa—P. falciparum. Humphreys earned a medical degree from Harvard as well as her Ph.D. in the history of science. Her qualifications for assessing the epidemiology of colonial Virginia would seem more than adequate. It thus comes as no surprise that her book is thorough and well argued, and offers only tentative conclusions in recognition of the absence of the sort of medical data required to make a definitive diagnosis.

Humphreys leaves Schweikart and Allen’s novel allegation in shambles: there is no credible reason to believe that malaria was a New World disease. She also offers good reasons to doubt their commonplace assertion that malaria was the cause of the fevers about which Percy and Smith wrote.

The Jamestown settlers came from England, including parts of England where vivax malaria was common. They certainly could have brought it with them. But one would not expect such a nonvirgin population, however malnourished, to experience a major outbreak of vivax malaria with that level of mortality.
Humphreys, Malaria, 24.

Humpreys suggests that the level of mortality is more consistent with typhoid fever than malaria. Typhoid fever had been put forth as an explanation in the work of Wyndham Blanton in the first half of the twentieth century and by Carville Earle in the second half of the century. Earle notes that the parasites Salmonella typhi and Endamoeba histolytica were present in the “slime and filth” that Percy observed in the water.

Ironically, most of them died needlessly, for on at least two occasions, Virginians understood the nexus between site and mortality, and they eliminated that link through the preventative medicine of settlement dispersal only to have their costly insights overturned by company agents freshly arrived in Virginia.
Earle, “Pioneers of Providence,” 482.

Of course, settlement dispersal rendered the colonists more vulnerable to Indian attack. It was bad enough that the English were economically dependent upon the Natives for many of their provisions, whether through trade or abundant theft. The Indians frequently found cause for hostilities—Percy mentions for example an accidental shooting of a Native when a “pistoll suddenly fyered and shotte the salvage” (Nicholls). Moreover, archaeological excavations and “tree-ring analysis of cypress trees” suggest that the Natives were already suffering scarcity of crops due to a severe drought during the years 1606-1612 (Sheler). The additional burden of feeding the helpless English during hard times did not bode well for peaceful relations.


Plausible Deniability

Schweikart and Allen’s statement that malaria killed the Virginia colonists could be true, but more than likely it is false. Their original claim would merit consideration if they offered some evidence in support. The most convincing scholarship available when they were writing their book suggests an alternate hypothesis that seems more likely. They ignore Humpreys' text. Perhaps the belief that malaria killed the colonists should go the way of Smith’s alleged rescue at the hands of an eleven year old Indian child—a useful myth that is probably false but cannot be proven false beyond all doubts.

Their identification of malaria as a New World disease, on the other hand, is absurd. Even so, they do not state unequivocally that it was. The transition from “New World diseases” to “[m]alaria, in particular” in the next sentence certainly implies that malaria was a New World disease, but they do not list it among those “diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe” several pages earlier (Stripes). The relationship between the two sentences could be a misleading non sequitur conferring plausible deniability. It could be clever politics; it could be incompetent editing.


Citations

“Background Information on Malaria.” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. http://www.jhsph.edu/Malaria/Malaria_Background.html. Accessed 4 February 2008.

Earle, Carville. “Pioneers of Providence: The Anglo-American Experience, 1492-1792.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992), 478-499.

Gately, Iain. Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Humpheys, Margaret. Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The Oxford History of the American People. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Nicholls, Mark. “George Percy's ‘Trewe Relacyon’: A Primary Source for the Jamestown Settlement.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography 113, no. 3 (2005), 212-275.

Percy, George. “Observations gathered out of a Discourse of the Plantation of the Southerne Colonie in Virginia by the English, 1606.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1685-1690.

Schweikart, Larry. “Why It’s Time for A Patriot’s History of the United States.” History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/9536.html. 31 January 2005.

Schweikart, Larry, and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror, updated ed. New York: Sentinal, 2007.

Sheler, Jeffrey L. “Rethinking Jamestown.” Smithsonian 35 (October 2005), 48-54.

Stacy, Ann Hooper. “Jamestowne 1607 in Celebration of its 400th Anniversary.” The Pilgrim Newsletter 91, no. 2 (2007), 16-19.

Stripes, James. “Larry Schweikart’s Claim.” Patriots and Peoples. http://historynotebook.blogspot.com/2008/01/larry-schweikarts-claim.html. 30 January 2008.

Smith, John. “The Description of Virginia by Captaine John Smith.” In Purchas his Pilgrimes, vol. 4 (1625), 1691-1704.

Weinstein, Allen, and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History 2nd ed. New York, Random House, 1978.

Footnote to Larry Schweikart’s Claim

Tuberculosis

In A Patriot's History, Schweikart and Allen’s claim that “[t]uberculosis existed in Central and North America” (8) appears slightly inaccurate in light of research published after their text. It is not clear, however, that their claim contradicts “research from the hard sciences” available to them, even though support for their claim remains elusive.

An excellent summary of the medical science regarding the presence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian America appeared in Philip A. Mackowiak, Vera Tiesler Blos, Manuel Aguilar, and Jane E. Buikstra, “On the Origin of American Tuberculosis,” Clinical Infectious Diseases (15 August 2005), 515-18.

The article asserts, “it is now firmly established that tuberculosis existed in the New World before the arrival of Columbus” (516), but the origins, spread, and cause (M. tuberculosis or M. bovis) remain unknown. Moreover, conclusive evidence of tuberculosis in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica “has yet to be found” (516).


Richard H. Steckel and the Backbone of History

In his article for History News Network, “Why It's Time for a Patriot's History of the United States,” Larry Schweikart claims: “[we] note that considerable new research in the hard sciences and medicine shows that some diseases thought to be ‘transmitted’ from Europe likely were already here.”

Economist Richard H. Steckel coordinated the work of a large group of scholars that resulted in several publications, including two texts cited by Schweikart and Allen. As noted yesterday, I have not yet been able to access these books. However, several summaries of the work suggest that Schweikart and Allen correctly formulate a central generalization of this work, but then grossly distort the specifics. They correctly quote the work of this group as suggesting that the health of indigenous Americans was on a “downward trajectory” before Europeans arrived. On the other hand, errors range from semantic inaccuracies to substantive misrepresentations.

Schweikart and Allen note a study of “12,500 skeletons from sixty-five sites” (8). Steckel’s summary differs:

The combined data sets include 12,520 skeletons from 218 archeological sites representing populations who lived in the Western Hemisphere from about 4,000 B.C. to the early 20th century. For purposes of the present analysis, the samples were combined into 65 groups based on their chronological and ecological similarity.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 270.

Steckel and his coauthors highlight complexities in their generalization that there was a general decline of health in the Americas.

The average values for the health index ranged from 64.0 for Native Central Americans to 78.1 for Native North Americans from the Eastern Woodlands. As measured by the index, the examples of very good health in the 65 samples were for coastal Brazil, coastal Ecuador, and coastal Georgia, while the worst health was found at Hawikku, New Mexico, and among plantation slaves of South Carolina. Some of the best and worst health conditions were found in pre-Columbian Native American communities.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 149.

Much of the decline in health appears to have stemmed from “improvements” in agriculture and the consequent growth of urban areas. Those very features of indigenous American life that Schweikart and Allen labor to conceal are the source of the decline they trumpet.

Groups living in paramount towns or urban settings had a health index nearly 15 points (two standard deviations) below that expressed for mobile hunter-gatherers and others not living in large permanent communities. Clearly, there is something about living in a large community that is deleterious to health. … these larger communities are fueled by an agricultural economy. Diet was also closely related to the change in the health index, with performance being lower under the triad of corn, beans and squash compared to the more diverse diet of hunter-gatherer groups.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 272.

One of the key findings to emerge from the study is the downward trajectory of health prior to the arrival of Europeans. Historians, economists, and other social scientists have long celebrated the contributions of technological change for improvements in the human condition. However, our research underscores the importance of distinguishing between material and health aspects of the quality of life.
Steckel, et al, “Variation in Health,” 274.

Because indigenous Americans were civilized, their health was in decline. Hunter-gatherers were generally healthier. Indeed, nineteenth-century equestrian nomads were so healthy that they distort the general data on the improvement in health of Native Americans following colonization.

The transition to agriculture has been widely considered a benchmark development for humanity, laying the groundwork for “civilization” and all of its elements, such as democracy, learning, art, literature, and architecture. From this perspective, humans underwent a transition from a way of life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” to one brimming with leisure and excess. The findings from the Western Hemisphere project argue that, in fact, the reverse was closer to reality. This is not to say that life went from rosy and healthy to bleak and unhealthy. That is not the case. There is a misperception by much of the public—at least the American public—that prehistoric Native Americans were the original ecologists, whose impact on the environment was minimal. Moreover, it is commonly believed that few diseases existed before the arrival of colonizing Europeans, who carried with them a suite of infectious pathogens that wiped out many native peoples. In fact, pre-Columbian people show plenty of evidence of disease. Some were among the healthiest in the study, whereas others were among those with the greatest burden of disease.
Steckel, et al, “Skeletal Health,” 152.

Steckel and company are clear that America was not a disease-free paradise, but they do not support the counter myth that American indigenes were on the whole “fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest” (Chief Justice John Marshall, Johnson v. McIntosh [1823]). Schweikart and Allen do not quote Marshall, but they distort the process of disease transmission when, after acknowledgment that European introduced microbes “generated a much higher level of infection,” they state, “warring Indian tribes spread the diseases among one another when they attacked enemy tribes and carried off infected prisoners” (17).


Full Citations

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Variation in Health in the Western Hemisphere: 4000 B.C. to the Present.” In M. Schultz, et al., eds., Homounsere Herkunft und Zukunft: 4. Kongress der Gesellschaft für Anthropologie (GfA)Proceedings (Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, 2001), 270-75.

Expanded as

Richard H. Steckel, Jerome C. Rose, Clark Spencer Larsen, and Phillip L. Walker, “Skeletal Health in the Western Hemisphere From 4000 B.C. to the Present,” Evolutionary Anthropology 11 (2002), 142-155.

The True Story of Pocahontas

Smith and Pocahontas

In 1624 Captain John Smith published an account that he was rescued by Pocahontas from a death planned by her father, Wahunsonacock—the Powhatan Chief. The alleged rescue occurred when Smith was a prisoner of the Powhatans in the winter of 1607-1608, and Smith first mentioned it in a letter to Queen Anne in 1616. Smith's story has been embraced and accepted, contextualized, and disputed.

The Queene of Appamatuck was appointed to bring him water to wash his hands, and another brought him a bunch of feathers, in stead of a Towell to dry them: having feasted him after their best barbarous manner they could, a long consultation was held, but the conclusion was, two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him, dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death: whereat the Emperour was contented he should live to make him hatchets, and her bells, beads, and copper; for they thought him as well of all occupations as themselves.
Smith, Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Electronic Edition
Text also available at Eyewitness to History

The story was generally accepted until challenged in the mid-nineteenth century by Charles Deane and Henry Adams; this challenge appeared most prominently in the North American Review, January 1867. More recently, the Powhatan Renape Nation has challenged “The Pocahontas Myth” and its revision in the 1995 Disney film.

Others have accepted the story, but accuse Smith of misunderstanding the nature of a formal ritual in which Pocahontas played a role prescribed for her. This ritual view is advocated by some scholars, such as Michael J. Puglisi, “Capt. John Smith, Pocahontas and a Clash of Cultures: A Case for the Ethnohistorical Perspective,” The History Teacher (November 1991), 97-103. This view was mentioned by David Silverman in December 2006 in an interview for the NOVA program “Pocahontas Revealed.”

Others have suggested plagiarism: Smith’s account bears a strong similarity to an alleged 1528 rescue of Juan Ortiz by Ulele, daughter of the Ucita chief Hirrihugua, a perspective mentioned in Pocahontas film critiques in the New York Times. I have propagated this view in my classrooms, in an article concerned with Russell Means as an actorvist, and previously in Patriots and Peoples.

Others have defended the credibility of Smith’s story, especially J.A. Leo Lemay in Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (1992). A Stanford graduate student in engineering posted a summary of this book, which was also reviewed favorably in The William and Mary Quarterly (October 1995) by Robert S. Tilton. Tilton notes that Lemay fails to address Helen C. Rountree’s argument that “that a young girl would not have had the power to stop an execution and that we have too little knowledge of Powhatan adoption rituals to make a strong case for this popular interpretation of Smith's narrative” (Tilton, 715). Tilton’s Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (1994) examines how stories about Pocahontas have been reframed to fit a variety of agendas.

Oral History

In The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History (2007), Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” dispute Smith’s account from the perspective of oral history. They cite Smith’s statement in A True Relation (1608) of “Weramocomoco … assuring mee his friendship, and my libertie within foure days” (American Journeys Collection, 48).

Why would the Powhatan want to kill a person they were initiating to be a werowance? By Smith’s own admission, Wahunsenaca gave Smith his word that Smith would be released in four days. Smith’s fears were either a figment of his own imagination or an embellishment to dramatize his narrative.
Custalow and Daniel, True Story of Pocahontas, 19.

Children would not have been present in such a ritual conducted by quiakros (priests), they argue. Once Smith was initiated as a werowance, the entire English colony was considered part of the Powhatan society and subordinate to Chief Powhatan Wahunsenaca. The English, of course, quickly came to view the Powhatans as subordinate to their rule, although it would be several years before they were able to survive in the nascent colony.

There are many fresh perspectives and surprising revelations in The True Story of Pocahontas that challenge conventional understanding of colonial Virginia. The authors assert that John Rolfe, the second husband of Pocahontas, likely was not the biological father of Pocahontas’s son Thomas Rolfe. They speculate that Thomas Dale probably was the biological father, and that he raped Pocahontas. They observe inconsistencies in the long-standing belief that Pocahontas died of tuberculosis, offering a plausible scenario in which she was poisoned at the onset of a return journey to Virginia.

In The True Story of Pocahontas, the young Indian girl is presented as a symbol of peace, riding on the front of canoes visiting the English at Jamestown so the English would understand that the Indians had come without hostile intent. Her marriage to John Rolfe aided him and the colony because it motivated the quiakros to share their knowledge of the curing of tobacco with the aspiring planter. Rolfe had planted West Indian tobacco, which was milder (and thus more suitable for recreational smoking) than the native Virginia tobacco, but it was not yet good enough to compete with Spanish leaf. Learning from the Powhatans how to cure and process his tobacco improved the quality. The economic success of his tobacco assured the continuation of the colony’s financial backing, and thus its success. Pocahontas saved the colony, but not the way Smith describes.

Historians traditionally favor written documents as evidence and may have difficulty accepting many parts of the narrative in The True Story of Pocahontas. The authority of the oral stories presented rests in the claim that following the war of 1644-1646, the Mattaponi concealed Powhatan quiakros from the English. Among the Mattaponi, the sacred history was maintained for nearly four centuries. The Mattaponi was one of six principles tribes forming the Powhatan nation.

Note regarding spelling: The name Wahunsenaca / Wahunsonacock is also spelled Wahunsenacawh. I make the effort to preserve the spelling employed in each source in my discussion of that source. John Smith used Wahunsonacock; Custalow and Daniel spell Chief Powhatan’s name Wahunsenaca. The name Powhatan also is used in many historical sources and studies, including by Smith, as the name of Pocahontas's father. It is better understood as a title than as a proper name.

Pristine Wilderness?

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Lots of books on history are written by journalists these days. Most are well-written and more accessible to the general reader than the output of historians published by university presses. These journalists’s histories frequently reveal startling new ideas that have roamed the halls of academia for decades. They offer old news to professional historians. Such is the case with Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005). The back cover offers a promise regarding the contents inside. My references are to paperbound Vintage edition (2006), which contains an additional Afterword not in the hardbound first edition.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. … Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand.
1491, paperbound back cover

Compare a statement from a scholarly article by William M. Deneven that is cited in 1491.

In the ensuing forty years, scholarship has shown that Indian populations in the Americas were substantial, that the forests had indeed been altered, that landscape change was commonplace. This message, however, seems not to have reached the public through texts, essays, or talks by both academics and popularizers who have a responsibility to know better.
Deneven, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Sept. 1992), 369.

The forty years Deneven refers to stems from his observations of the striking unity of perspective between John Bakeless, The Eyes of Discovery (1950) and Kirkpatrick Sale, Conquest of Paradise (1990). Mann mentions that the special issue of Annals of the Association of American Geographers in which Deneven’s article appeared was one of the volumes he depended upon (411), and acknowledges “some of the ‘new revelations’ chronicled in 1491 occurred fifty years ago” (379). Denevan's views also are at least partly in accord with those of Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: they share the view that Indians changed the land, although they might disagree on the numbers of Indians.

Mann's book is written well. The prose is smooth and the story carries it along. Although the text does not uncover new knowledge, it helps orchestrate and popularize ideas that more Americans should know.

It should come as no surprise that I've already cited Mann twice on technology and once on disease. Expect to see this text mentioned again.