How the West Was Really Won

Thirty years ago, in a time of national soul-searching as Americans suffered through a bloody war in Asia and assassinations and civil strife at home, Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” unleashed a torrent of guilt over the sins of the country’s domestic conquests. A generation later, amid prosperity at home and a pax Americana abroad, introspection about the victims of our own empire building is largely a forsaken endeavor. More than a century removed from the last battle of the so-called Indian Wars, Americans seem to have lost sight again of the decades when cruelty, benevolence and misunderstanding mixed as white settlers pushed across the continent. Forgotten too are the origins of the policies that now govern U.S. relations with the tribes, the rights and responsibilities of both the conqueror and the conquered and the human figures--brave, farsighted, cruel, foolish or venal--who shaped our shared past. The defining image of Native Americans today is not their history of dispossession or even the defiance of modern-day Indian activists such as Russell Means; it is the image of the Mashantucket Pequot’s Foxwoods Casino, raking in millions of dollars daily from gamblers in New England or of tiny California tribes spending more than $80 million on a voter initiative to perpetuate their gaming halls.

To their credit, the authors of “ ‘Exterminate Them’,” “The Earth Shall Weep” and “Crazy Horse” have sought to re-excavate this history, and each volume--one general history, one collection of original sources and one biography--makes a distinct contribution. Yet with the exception of Larry McMurtry’s exquisite short biography of the great Sioux war leader Crazy Horse, these works are significantly flawed. Though McMurtry wisely lets a tragic and still meaningful story speak for itself, James Wilson and editors Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer insist on imposing on their materials a shrill attack on all of Western culture, abandoning nuance and historical perspective in favor of the kind of stereotyping against whites that they decry when the objects are Indians.

Trafzer and Hyer, history professors in California, have subtitled their work “Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape and Enslavement of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush, 1848-68.” This is a misnomer on two levels. First, the primary source material that the editors have compiled consists almost exclusively of newspaper articles published between 1850 and1854, the years immediately after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of selections comes from only two years, 1851 and 1853, and consequently provides only a very narrow window into Indian-white relations in California. Second, roughly one-quarter of the book is occupied by the editors’ introduction, a diatribe that does a serious injustice to the rich and complicated story that emerges after reading the original news accounts the editors have selected.

The editors’ political approach to their material is captured in the book’s foreword (written by a Native American scholar named Edward Castillo), which claims that “the period from 1850 to 1868 was essentially a twisted Darwinian laboratory showcasing the triumph of brute force aided by a pathogenic and technological assault on a native people unparalleled in Western hemispheric history.” In the same vein, the editors describe these two decades as “truly a holocaust” and depict as blatantly racist virtually every non-Indian action they discuss. Indeed, the editors are so bent on demonizing whites that they resort to nonsensical claims, such as suggesting that “whites did not consider California Indians human, referring to them as ‘Diggers,’ a pejorative term related to the better-known term, ‘Nigger.’ ” Actually, the term “Digger Indian” was unrelated to the N-word and referred to the fact that some indigenous California tribes subsisted on root vegetables dug from the ground.

Fortunately, readers of “ ‘Exterminate Them’ ” can skip the introduction and assess the newspaper accounts for themselves, and they will find a story far more interesting than a stark morality play of good versus evil. The newspapers certainly confirm that white miners and settlers flooding into the region committed many acts of wanton and indiscriminate slaughter, that soldiers sometimes raped Indian girls and that all too many whites entertained and acted upon what can only be described as genocidal intentions. Readers will also learn that the white immigrants were often seized with a terror of their own slaughter caused by instances of mass killing by Indians (such as a January 1851 report from Maricopa County of 72 settlers slaughtered) and that some whites--including the authors of many of the accounts contained in “ ‘Exterminate Them’ “--deeply lamented the “oppression” visited upon the Indians and blamed themselves when Indians retaliated.

As the documents attest, the wide range of white attitudes toward Indians, from pure dehumanization to romantic paternalism, was reflected in California’s laws. For example, one California statute levied a substantial fine on whites who abused Indian minors under their care, protected Indians against involuntary servitude and provided for judicial supervision whenever whites contracted for Indian labor. Yet this same statute explicitly decreed that no white person could be convicted of a crime based on the testimony of an Indian.

In his very readable general history of Indian-white relations, James Wilson wisely captures this ambivalence in white attitudes. As emerges clearly in James Wilson’s narrative, during the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans were deeply divided between those who viewed Indians as subhuman subjects for annihilation and those like Thomas Jefferson who, from either religious or Enlightenment principles, sought to save the continent’s “savages” by isolating them into geographically distinct reservations where they could be “civilized” into Christian yeoman farmers. Progressing tribe by tribe--the Iroquois confederacy, the Cherokee, the Pueblo Indians, the Navaho, the Yakima and Sioux--Wilson describes the progression of Indian-white relations from a largely symbiotic relationship marked by political alliances and vibrant trade to inevitable conflict as the tendrils of white settlement invaded one tribal homeland after another. Each history follows a familiar path: European diseases decimate the tribal population; the U. S. government makes and remakes treaties with the tribe, breaking promises seriatim; the tribes inevitably resist white encroachment and eventually are defeated, though rarely before the Army commits at least one brutal massacre; over time, Congress drastically reduces the tribal land base; and in a supposed act of kindness, white philanthropists attempt through education and forced assimilation to destroy tribal cultures in order to save what would otherwise become a “vanishing race.” Not surprisingly, these experiences have left modern Indian communities with a devastating legacy of poverty, poor health, crime, alcoholism and other social ills.

In recounting this history, Wilson includes many Indian voices--defiant, betrayed, frustrated, resilient--that reveal what it felt like to be on the receiving end of countless lies and of an often brutal regime of cultural subordination. These eyewitness accounts, often missing from the standard work in the field, heighten the emotional punch of an intrinsically powerful narrative.

Wilson, unlike many authors in the field, spends considerable time on the 20th century, when the U.S. government belatedly abandoned its ill-conceived attempts to assimilate Indians into the American mainstream and adopted a policy of tribal self-governance and self-determination. As Wilson recounts, in the 1930s, 100 years after Chief Justice John Marshall described Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations,” the Roosevelt administration allowed and encouraged tribes to adopt democratic institutions and exercise significant powers of self-government over their lands and people. Today, as Wilson points out, the main battleground of Indian policy, be it over gambling, education, taxation or jurisdiction of tribal courts, has changed. No longer does the government wonder whether tribes should be separate and distinct governmental entities; instead, it considers how tribes should be assisted in exercising their sovereign powers for their own too often destitute and dispirited members.

Answering this question is fraught with difficulty. Tribal leaders are frequently caught between a cultural environmentalism and the need to develop reservation resources such as oil or coal, between a cultural anti-materialism and the lure of casino-based profits or between the need to maintain and restore native culture and the desire to provide Indian children with the skills to prosper within American society.

Unfortunately, in evaluating these trade-offs, Wilson abandons his usually balanced presentation, dividing the world into the bad guys--Europeans devoted to Social Darwinism and the tyrannous “idea of a single, monolithic truth”--and the good guys--Indians devoted to peaceful coexistence and the “circle” of life. Here, in critiquing Western scientific thought (which he describes as “rooted in Christian civilization”) and in embracing a fairly radical strand of fundamentalism in modern American Indian culture and politics, Wilson loses his way.

One needn’t be a serious scholar of the centuries-old tension between Christianity and scientific thought or the postmodernist inclination toward relativism to realize that Wilson’s description of Western attitudes is as unsupportable as the “vile miscreant” or “noble savage” stereotypes Europeans foisted on this continent’s native peoples. It does not minimize the perfidy and malice of America’s subjugation of American Indians to recognize that the tribes frequently disregarded Wilson’s quaint notions of peaceful coexistence and waged war among themselves according to the basic principle of “might makes right,” while the United States tried, albeit ambivalently and imperfectly, through treaties, reparations and other measures, to observe a higher standard of conduct in its relations with the tribes.

These are more than philosophical points. Wilson casts a jaundiced eye on almost every attempt at tribal economic development and on democratically elected tribal governments, which he believes are betrayals of “traditional” Indian values and cultures. But cultural adaptation to historical conditions is not a betrayal; it is a necessary mediation between past and future, one that thriving cultures have accomplished from time immemorial (and one that liberals, such as Wilson, ordinarily applaud). For modern tribal leaders struggling to rescue the past while building a future, it is a disservice to bind them, as Wilson would, to a cultural heritage conceived for a world that, for better or worse, has vanished.

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Larry McMurtry, with subtlety and elegant prose, recognizes exactly this point. In quick brush strokes, he paints the life of Crazy Horse, the Sioux warrior whose generalship closed down the Bozeman Trail and brought Custer to his reckoning at the Little Big Horn. In the process, McMurtry tells us how little we know about a tribe that left no written record and how much we imagine we know, thanks to historians who have turned myth into presumed reality: “When Stephen Ambrose says that 40,000 arrows were shot during the 20 or 30 minutes that it took the Sioux and Cheyenne to kill all the soldiers in the Fetterman massacre, I feel that what I’m getting is a trope, not a fact. Who would have been counting arrows on that cold day in Wyoming in 1866?”

McMurtry not only tells us of Crazy Horse’s unconquerable devotion to the free life of a Plains Indian and to the land over which he roamed, he also reveals what it meant (and still means) to be a leader, as Crazy Horse understood when, in 1877, after a desperate winter of starvation, he brought his 900-member band back to the Great Sioux Reservation, which had been set up by the government to contain the tribe:

“Crazy Horse was not tamable, not a man of politics. He could only assist his people as a warrior and hunter--a bureaucrat he was not. Had there not been those 900 people looking to him for help, he might have elected to do what Geronimo did for so long: take a few warriors and a few women and stay out. . . . But it was true that these 900 people depended on him, so he brought them in and sat down, for the first time, in council with the white man.”

There is simple beauty in that act of courage (which led to his assassination), all the more because it comes unadorned by exaggeration or overemphasis. That is history, both poetic and relevant, at its best.*