CONTINUING WITH THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER AND THE CLASH OF INDIAN CULTURE vs WHITE SETTLERS' CULTURE
First and foremost, Colonel Bouquet demanded the immediate return of all white prisoners, and any delay would be considered a declaration of war. During the next few weeks around 200 captives were brought in, more than half of them women and children and many too young to remember having lived otherwise. Some had forgotten their Christian names and recorded on ledgers with such descriptions as Redjacket, Bighead, Soremouth, and Sourplums. Dozens of white relatives of the missing had accompanied Bouquet's forces from Fort Pitt, and in addition to the many joyful reunions, there were also wrenching scenes of grief and confusion : young women married to Indian men now standing reluctantly before their former families ; children screaming as they were pulled from their Indian kin and delivered to people they didn't recognize and probably considered enemies.
The Indians seemed universally anguished to give up their family members, and when Bouquet's army finally decamped for Fort Pitt in early November, many trailed behind the column, hunting game for their loved ones and trying to delay the final goodbye as long as possible. One Mingo brave refused to leave the side of a young Virginia woman despite warnings that her former family would kill him on sight. "It must not be denied that there were even some grown persons who shewed an unwillingness to return," William Smith, a contemporary of Bouquet's, admitted about some white captives.
"The Shawanese were obliged to bind several of their prisoners . . . and some women, who had been delivered up, afterward found means to escape and run back to Indian towns."
The reluctance of Bouquet's captives to leave their adopted tribe raised awkward questions about the superiority of Western society. It was understood why young children would not want to return to their original families, and it made sense that renegades like the infamous Simon Girty would later seek refuge with the Indians and even fight alongside them. But as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, there were numerous settlers who were captured as adults and still seemed to prefer Indian society to their own. And what about the people who voluntarily joined the Indians ? What about men who walked off into the tree line and never came home ? The frontier was full of men who joined Indian tribes, married Indian women, and lived their lives completely outside civilization.
"Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become a European," a French emigre' named Hector de Crevecoeur lamented in 1782. "There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us."
Crevecoeur seemed to have understood that the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn't necessarily compete with. If he was right, that problem started almost as soon as Europeans touched American shores. As early as 1612, Spanish authorities noted in amazement that forty or fifty Virginians had married into Indian tribes, and that even English women were openly mingling with the natives. At that point, whites had been in Virginia had been in Virginia for only a few years, and many who joined the Indians would have been born and raised in England. These were not rough frontiersmen who were sneaking off to join the savages ; these were the sons and daughters of Europe.
"Notwithstanding the Indian women have all the fuel and bread to procure, and the cooking to perform, their task is probably not harder than that of white women," wrote a Seneca captive named Mary Jemison at the end of her long life. Jemison, who was taken from her family's farm on the Pennsylvania frontier at age fifteen, became so enamored of Seneca life that she once hid from a white search party that had come looking for her. "We had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased," she explained. "No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace. . . Their lives were a continual round of pleasures."
In an attempt to stem the flow of young people into the woods, Virginia and other colonies imposed severe penalties on anyone who took up with the Indians. The Puritan leaders of New England found it particularly galling that anyone would turn their back on Christian society : "People are ready to run wild into the woods again and to be as Heathenish as ever if you do not prevent it," the Puritan preacher Increase Mather complained in a tract called Discourse Concerning the Danger of Apostasy. Mather was an early administrator of Harvard who spent his life combating ---and criminalizing --- ant relaxation of the Puritan moral code. It was a futile battle. The nature of the frontier was that it kept expanding beyond the reach of church and state, and out on the fringes, people tended to do what they wanted.
The Indian manner was clearly suited to the wilderness, and it wasn't long before frontiersmen began to shed their European clothing and openly emulate people they often referred to as "savages." They dressed in buckskin and open-backed leggings and had muslin breechclouts strapped between their legs. Some even attended Sunday service that way, which so distracted the girls at one church that their minister accused them of not listening to his sermons. The men smoked tobacco and carried tomahawks in their belts and picked up Indian languages and customs. They learned to track and stalk game and move quickly and quietly in the woods, and they adopted what the Puritans dismissed as a "skulking way of war." They fought from concealment as individuals, in other words, rather than lining up like tin soldiers.
"The men and the dogs have a fine time, but the poor women have to suffer," one pioneer wife wrote to her sister about life on the frontier. She complained that her husband---a man named George ---refused to make their newborn son a plank cradle, and just gave her a hollowed-out log instead. The boy's only shirt was woven of nettle bark and his pillow was carved out of wood. When his mother pointed out that he was getting sores and rashes, George said that the hardships would just toughen him up for hunting later in life. "George has got himself a buckskin shirt and pants," this woman added. "He is gone hunting day and night."
It's easy for people in modern society to romanticize Indian life, and it might well have been easy for men liek George as well. That impulse should be guarded against. Virtually all of the Indian tribes waged war against their neighbors and practiced deeply sickening forms of torture. Prisoners who weren't tomahawked on the spot could expect to be disemboweled and tied to a tree with their own intestines or blistered to death over a slow fire or simply hacked to pieces nd fed alive to dogs. If there is any conceivable defense for such cruelty, it might be that in Europe at the time, the Spanish Inquisition was also busy serving up just as much barbarism on behalf of the Catholic Church. Infidels were regularly burned alive, broken on the rack, sawn in half lengthwise, or impaled slowly on wooden stakes from the anus to the mouth. The Protestant Reformation changed a lot about Christianity but not its capacity for cruelty, and early Puritan leaders in New England were also renowned for thir harsh justice. Cruelty, in other words, was very much the norm for that era, and the native tribes of North America were no exception.
On other levels, however, there seemed to be no competing with the appeal of the Indians. Hunting was obviously more varied and interesting than plowing fields. Sexual mores were more relaxed than in the early colonies [in the 1600s, colonial boys on Cape Cod were publicly whipped if they were caught talking to a girl they weren't related to ] . Indian clothing was more comfortable, Indian religion was less harsh, and Indian society was essentially classless and egalitarian. As the frontier marched across North America, from the Alleghenies to the Great Plains to the Rockies and then finally to the West Coast, successive generations of pioneers were subject to being captured and adopted into Indian tribes ----or simply ran off with them.
For all the temptations of native life, one of the most compelling might have been its fundamental egalitarianism. Personal property was usually limited to whatever could be transported by horse or on foot, so gross inequalities of wealth were difficult to accumulate. Successful hunters and warriors could support multiple wives, but unlike modern society, those ADVANTAGES were generally not passed on through the generations. Social status came through hunting and war, which all men had access to, and women had far more autonomy and sexual freedom----and bore fewer children --- than women in white society. "Here I have no master," an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the secretary of the French legation s saying about her life with the Indians. "I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone's saying anything about it, I work only for myself, I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities ?"
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