An account of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated Eastern Indians to the Okalahoma Territory over the Trail of Tears, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs which was given control over their lives.
An account of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated Eastern Indians to the Okalahoma Territory over the Trail of Tears, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs which was given control over their lives.
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Overview
An account of Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated Eastern Indians to the Okalahoma Territory over the Trail of Tears, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs which was given control over their lives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429934275 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Series: | Hill and Wang Critical Issues |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 143 |
| File size: | 284 KB |
About the Author
Anthony F.C. Wallace is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of many books, including Rockdale, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1978. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Read an Excerpt
The Long, Bitter Trail
Andrew Jackson and the Indians
By Anthony F.C. Wallace
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 1993 Anthony F. C. WallaceAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3427-5
CHAPTER 1
THE CHANGING WORLDS OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS
LIKE the Europeans, the Native Americans lived in rapidly changing societies. Their ancestors had entered North America from Siberia in several streams of migration, beginning tens of thousands of years ago and ending well before the arrival of Europeans. As they spread southward, finally reaching the southern tip of South America, they adapted to the different zones of climate and vegetation, and developed — as did other peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Pacific Islands — increasingly distinct cultures and languages. Some of them, particularly in the region from what is now northern Mexico south to Peru, pursued a long course of cultural evolution parallel to that followed by the great civilizations of other continents, first developing agriculture (probably a female innovation), then creating dams, irrigation, and metallurgy, city-states, and eventually (certainly no later than A.D. 1000), highly organized empires (dominated by men). By the time Europeans first "discovered" the Americas, in the years from A.D. 1000 to 1500, advanced urban civilizations had existed for centuries in Mexico, Central America, and the Andean slopes, with irrigation agriculture, metallurgy, systems of writing and numerical calculation, centralized political power, elaborate religious beliefs and ceremonies, and far-flung trade networks. Of particular concern to us is the fact that the Mesoamerican city-states, by wars of conquest and by trade, had spread agricultural practices and some aspects of their political traditions far and wide, long before the arrival of Columbus.
Among those who benefited from the diffusion of agricultural practices, centuries before Columbus, were the people who lived east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River valley. This vast land of temperate climate, extensive forests, and fertile meadows and prairies was inhabited by well over a million Native Americans. Although they were divided into dozens of tribes, each with its own unique language (although all these languages belonged to fewer than a dozen language groups), they all shared one basic feature: a subsistence economy based on the deliberate growing of corn and other vegetables in carefully tended gardens, supplemented by hunting and gathering. The Southern tribes, and particularly the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and the Creeks, with whom we shall be mostly concerned (along with a later offshoot of the Creeks known as the Seminoles), living between the Ohio River and the Gulf of Mexico, had larger, more urbanized populations, with more elaborate ceremonies and more impressive architecture, than the Northern horticulturists. But all were different in basic subsistence pattern from the peoples to the north of the Great Lakes, where the growing season was too short for corn, and to the far west of the Mississippi, where the high plains and cold mountains were also unfriendly to the Eastern style of horticulture. These Northern and Western tribes (with the exception of the Mexicanized Pueblo Indians of the Southwest) were therefore completely dependent on hunting and gathering for their food.
The eastern half of the United States was, in aboriginal times, almost entirely covered by forests. In what are now the states of Florida and Louisiana and the coastal and piedmont areas of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, the trees were evergreens. To the north grew mixed broadleaf deciduous and evergreen species. East of the Mississippi, in what is now Illinois, prairieintruded, an eastern extension of the sea of grass that spread over much of the land west of the big river. Within this great forested region, however, along the edges of rivers and lakes, lay numerous grassy meadows. For hundreds of years before Columbus, Native Americans had built their villages in these natural clearings, raised corn and other vegetables, and hunted, fished, and gathered wild fruits, nuts, and maple syrup in the forests nearby, and to the north, especially in swamps around the Great Lakes, wild rice. Maize ("Indian corn") was the staple food throughout the region, except for some coastal areas and southern Florida, where seafood was predominant in the diet, and on the prairies, where the hunting of large herd animals like the buffalo assumed more importance.
The basic social and subsistence unit throughout the Eastern woodlands was the village. Each village was composed of a number of large communal houses, each occupied by a number of families, usually linked by matrilineal kinship. This meant that the women and their children belonged to a unilineal descent group, or clan (in technical jargon, a "sib"); the husbands were in a sense peripheral, being members of other clans. These clans were usually named after animal species important to the economy, such as the beaver or the deer, or symbolic of such virtues as speed, courage, or cunning, such as the wolf or the eagle, but there was no belief that the members of a clan were descended from their totem. The population of such villages ranged from a few hundred to a few thousand. The women cultivated garden plots in the meadows around or among the houses, working together clan by clan to plant, weed, and harvest the "Three Sisters" (corn, squash, and beans), and tobacco, which was smoked ceremonially. The women also managed the household, preserving, preparing, and cooking food, making pottery and baskets and clothing. The men helped to clear the fields, to raise and repair the houses; and they helped to provide food by hunting, trapping, and fishing. The prime hunting season was in the fall, after the corn had beenharvested and the Green Corn ceremony, a thanksgiving ritual found everywhere in the Eastern woodlands, had been performed.
And everywhere, too, the men made war, in a never-ending cycle of revenge, or blood feud, between villages and tribes.
Although the basic subsistence technology of the Northeastern and Southeastern Indians was largely shared, there were significant differences between the two regions. One of these was in population. Various authorities have offered wildly disparate numbers, but a reasonable estimate of the Native American population of the Southeast — an area of about 350,000 square miles — at the time of first contact with Europeans is 1 million. After disease, war, and removal had taken their toll, the original population had been reduced by over 90 percent, to roughly 75,000. The original population of the Northeastern horticultural area, by most estimates, was considerably lower, and it was distributed over a much larger area. Part of the Northern region, the lower Ohio Valley, was for reasons that are obscure (perhaps it was the result of unrelenting warfare) almost uninhabited. There were pockets of dense population along the New England coast, where fishing groups might have local population densities as high as four persons per square mile, exceeding the average density of three per square mile in the Southeast.
A second major difference between the Southern and the Northern tribes had to do with the participation of men in the agricultural enterprise. In the North, men left the tending of the gardens entirely to the women, and these relatively small gardens produced little surplus beyond the needs of each village. Among the tribes of the Southeast, however, the men labored in large communal fields, raising corn and other vegetables, producing a surplus that was stored in communal granaries to be traded or eaten in time of need.
The third major difference between the Southern and Northern tribes was the more complex level of political organization in the South. The Native Americans of the Southeast were the heirs of a highly advanced pre-Columbian civilization, named by archaeologists the "Mississippian Tradition," which was ultimately related to the high cultures of Mexico and Central America. The variety of corn (Eastern flint) that they grew originated among the Maya of Guatemala; the Mississippian religious symbolism echoed Aztec motifs, presumably brought north by traders from the Valley of Mexico. And like the Maya and the Aztecs, the Middle Mississippians built large pyramidal ceremonial mounds, some as high as 100 feet. A major Middle Mississippian central area, with pyramid, plaza, residences, and a perimeter defended by palisades and moats, might have as many as forty thousand residents. All this implies a strong, centralized administrative authority. At its apex, about A.D. 1200, the Mississippian Tradition produced what anthropologist Charles Hudson, a specialist on the Southeastern Indians, has called, perhaps too enthusiastically, "the highest cultural achievement ... in all of North America."
By the time Europeans arrived in numbers in the sixteenth century (perhaps after European diseases like smallpox and measles had already been introduced by occasional previous visitors), the Native Americans of the Southeast were no longer building temple mounds. But there remained a highly structured political unit, the chiefdom, and maybe even some nascent city-states. In these chiefdoms there was a clearly defined ranking system, based not so much on wealth as on heredity, age, and accomplishment. Symbols of rank included tattoos, special names or titles, prominent seating in the council house. In the colonial period, leaders of these quasi-states apparently did not have the authority of the high chiefs of earlier times, but enough of their power survived to enable Southern chiefdoms to mobilize thousands of men in military assaults against early European invaders.
Large towns, with palisaded fort, council house, regular streets, and a central plaza or court for playing the sacred ball game, were still being built well into the colonial period, and a tribe might also have a national ceremonial center located on the site of an ancient ceremonial mound. Related families still occupied traditional quarter-acre compounds, with winter and summer houses and outbuildings for storage of food, peltries and furs, and equipment. The Chickasaw winter house, to give an example, was circular, about twenty-five feet in diameter, thatch-roofed, the walls constructed of wattle and daub, whitewashed inside and out. The summer house was a lighter structure of two rectangular rooms connected by a porch, also thatch-roofed, with walls of latticework designed to let air circulate. The compound also contained a menstrual hut. The women worked small garden plots near the family compound, and also contributed labor to large, communal cornfields, whose produce was stored in the village warehouse. The men also worked in the communal gardens.
In the Northeast, by contrast, villages were truly autonomous, in the sense that no higher political authority could compel different villages to cooperate in anything at all. Within the village, which was usually a cluster of large communal dwellings housing clan-related families, there was a council of mature men who deliberated on matters of concern, often in a town meeting where all the men and women could attend, listen, and voice opinion through designated orators. If a consensus was reached, the council could make recommendations on a variety of matters, such as relations with other villages or tribes, a decision to move the village to a new site when the fertility of the cornfields was exhausted, the route to be taken in the winter hunt, the dispatching of ambassadors, attendance at an intervillage "tribal" conclave, or making peace with a group with whom a blood feud had escalated into chronic war.
But these chiefs' recommendations were more advisory than binding. There was rarely a chief who had paramount authority (despite the European conviction that there must be a "king" with whom to do business). The "tribe" was really no more than a group of villages that shared hunting grounds and spoke a common language different from that of adjacent tribes. Thetribe thus was rarely an integrated administrative unit and might have no regular council of its own. Tribes speaking related languages often recognized each other as members of an intertribal confederacy, but given the amorphous nature of the tribe itself, these confederacies usually had more sentimental than political unity.
In the Northeast, the pinnacle of political integration appears to have been reached by the Iroquois, whose Five Nations (the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas) had shortly before contact with Europeans consolidated their ethnic confederacy into something approaching a federal union of tribes, with a central council of chiefs nominated by women to represent the constituent clans of each tribe. The initial impetus to this union was the recognition of a need to abort blood feuds among the member tribes by persuading aggrieved parties to accept wergild as compensation for their loss in lieu of taking revenge by retaliatory killing. This theme was celebrated in the central ritual of the League of the Iroquois, the Condolence Ceremony, performed on the occasion of the death of a chief. The movement to institute the revitalization of the confederacy was led by a visionary prophet named Hiawatha (whose name was later misappropriated by Longfellow to denominate a legendary Ojibwa hero). Later, however, the league became a vehicle for coordinating Iroquois dealings, military, diplomatic, and economic, with both neighboring tribes and the encroaching Europeans. As a result of the effort by British colonists to use them to influence nearby tribal groups, the Iroquois, who numbered only about fifteen thousand souls, attracted an enormous amount of official attention, eclipsing the relatively meager colonial annals of the far more numerous Southeastern Indians.
From the earliest meetings between coastal Indians and Europeans, there were exchanges of Native American products — foodstuffs and skins and furs — for European manufactured goods. In time, by the middle of the seventeenth century, this barter grew into an extremely important economic relationshipthat was then called the "Indian trade" and is now usually referred to as the "fur trade."
The economic importance of the fur trade to the Europeans was immense. The European population was expanding, and skins and furs from America, particularly beaver pelts and deer skins, were highly valued, because local European supplies were running short. Beaver fur was especially prized because it made a superior felt, then in vogue as a material for hats. But furs of other small animals — squirrel, fox, lynx, martin, otter — were also wanted. From the tribes of the Southeast, which did not produce furs of the highest quality, the traders took vast quantities of deer hides. Deerskin in Europe was fashioned into gloves and other articles of leather and was widely used for making the vellum necessary for the bindings of books. The interest of other European manufacturers, however, was equally intense, for merchants who traded with the Indians were a huge new market for iron and steel goods, woolen cloth, clay pipes, glassware, and wampum, and for items of personal decoration, such as glass beads and face paint. For example, the quantities of trade goods imported for sale to the Choctaws in 1750 included more than 5,000 yards of woolen cloth, 1,700 blankets, 2,500 shirts, 150 muskets, 4,000 pounds of gunpowder, 300 pieces of scarlet ribbon, and 43,000 knives. About the same time, the Cherokees were trading some 25,000 deer skins annually.
The Native Americans in the East had made no use of metal in pre-Columbian times, except for copper, hammered into ornaments out of nuggets found in the Great Lakes region. Steel knives, hatchets ("tomahawks"), traps, files, scissors, and other hand tools were quickly taken up to replace less durable, tedious-to-make tools of stone, bone, and wood. Copper pots, pans, and kettles, of course, did not break as easily as native pottery. Woven cloth could be easily tailored into native-style garments. And despite the technical advantages of the bow and arrow for hunting and even warfare, until repeating cartridge-firing rifles became available in the second half of the nineteenth-century, the men wanted muskets. Loud, slow to reload, and no more accurate than the bow, they nevertheless were a mark of prestige.
Up to a point, the effect of incorporating these European-made goods was merely one of substituting one item for another, to be used for traditional purposes in an unchanged pattern of culture. Steel axes did the same jobs as stone axes but more efficiently. But a more subtle warping of cultures was soon happening. In order to get sufficient skins and furs to exchange for the newly necessary trade goods, the Indians had to hunt more. Intensive hunting for skins and furs, far beyond what was needed for food and traditional uses of skin, sinew, and bone, inevitably tended to deplete the game. Hunters were forced to forage farther afield, to stay away longer from the home village, perhaps to trespass on other people's hunting grounds, thus inviting violent retaliation. Peltries became, in effect, the equivalent of a cash crop with which to buy indispensable hardware and dry goods.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Long, Bitter Trail by Anthony F.C. Wallace. Copyright © 1993 Anthony F. C. Wallace. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Table of Contents,Title Page,
PREFACE,
INTRODUCTION - THE HUNGER FOR INDIAN LAND IN ANDREW JACKSON'S AMERICA,
(1) - THE CHANGING WORLDS OF THE NATIVE AMERICANS,
(2) - THE CONFLICT OVER FEDERAL INDIAN POLICY,
(3) - THE REMOVAL ACT,
(4) - THE TRAIL OF TEARS,
BOOKS BY ANTHONY F. C. WALLACE,
AFTERMATH - THE LONG SHADOW OF THE REMOVAL POLICY,
APPENDIX A - EXCERPT FROM JACKSON'S MESSAGE TO CONGRESS DECEMBER 8, 1829,
APPENDIX B - THE TEXT OF THE REMOVAL ACT,
A NOTE ON SOURCES,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,