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“They Become Disgusted With our Manner of Life”
Some of us on Ricochet have been wondering how to teach people to prefer the liberty of free markets to the security of socialism. Others have been lecturing us about how capitalism has made life fantastically better for humans.
Each time one of these discussions comes up, I wish people here knew more about Indian captivity narratives — the true ones, that is. These stories have been popular in North America since the late 1600s, though not always been viewed as essential knowledge.
I learned of a new one today while working in the archives of the historical library in a small town in Texas. I’m following up on the three stagecoach owners who operated a line between Detroit and Chicago, and then all went to Texas following the 1832 Black Hawk War. It turns out that a descendant of one of the three, a woman who did a lot of research on her family history, was the granddaughter of a man who had spent his formative years as an Indian.
Keep in mind that to most Indians in North America, your DNA or blood lineage isn’t what made you Indian. Your biological parentage isn’t what made you Indian. We might say your upbringing is what made you Indian. That isn’t the way Indians would say it, and it doesn’t exactly cover all situations, but we can consider it close enough for present purposes.
In this case, the young boy had been captured at the age of two. There was no information about how he was brought back to his Anglo family as an almost-grown young man, but apparently it was not his own choice, because he tried at least once to swim across a river to escape back to his Indian family. He eventually adjusted, more or less, and raised a family. I learned, approximately, where he’s buried, and someday will try to go there by bicycle to visit his grave, if there is a marker for it.
It’s a sketchy story without the detail of some of the better-known stories in Texas, such as those of Herman Lehmann or Cynthia Ann Parker, whose stories have been told at book length. And there are many similar stories in the Great Lakes region, such as those of John Tanner, Jonathan Adler, and Frances Slocum. (Tanner’s book, by the way, is claimed to be the only one that is much liked by Native Americans.)
But these stories all have in common a captive’s reluctance to go back to Anglo society and a difficult readjustment, or in Slocum’s case, a successful refusal. Parker died unhappily in white society. Many of the captives who were forcibly repatriated to their original Anglo families attempted to escape back to their Indian families. Many of them who finally acquiesced to life in their Anglo families maintained a lifelong relationship with their Indian families, with visits taking place in both directions.
Benjamin Franklin famously remarked on this phenomenon, writing in the mid-18th century:
when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
Franklin also pointed out, correctly, that this was a one-way phenomenon. It never worked the other way around. Indian children never learned to enjoy life among the English or stay with them.
But I think he was very wrong about one thing. The Indian way of life was not carefree. It had less of a hierarchical regimentation than the American settlers had, and was less structured around the clock. (Indians even today usually start their public meetings and celebrations late, with somebody sure to make a joke about running on Indian time. I have learned to be relaxed about getting to such events on time — where non-Indians are welcome, as they often are). But in the 18th and 19th centuries it was a brutal, care-laden existence.
John Tanner’s book told in stark detail of the marginal existence of Indian life. Starvation,
especially in winter, was often one hunting failure away. There was great joy and pride when he was able, with much exertion and risk, to provide for his Indian family. He formed strong bonds with his adoptive Indian mother and siblings, who went through these tribulations with him. Later in life, after he went back to visit his English family, a brother wanted to join him in his return to the Indians. But John didn’t let him, knowing that someone who had not been brought up in that life would be unable to take it.
By the way, John Tanner finally went back to white society voluntarily (though unhappily). And so did Jonathan Adler, perhaps more happily. It seems they did so for health care. Then as now, it was a destroyer of freedom. These two men started to feel their age, and it seems they knew they would not live as long in Indian society. They had been captured when they were old enough to remember their Anglo life, too.
But if Ben Franklin was wrong about life as an Indian being free of care, what was the attraction?
My hypothesis is that you develop strong bonds with other people when you depend on each other for life and death. You can develop bonds with others just by working with them at the office or the food bank, but even more so in matters of basic existence.
The opportunity to experience these bonds is destroyed by modern life. There was still some remnant of it in earlier agricultural life, where the family was an economic unit. But there is less now when work and family are usually two separate things. And there is even less where there are left-wingers who try to keep people from making any consequential decisions that leave them depending on each other rather than on the welfare state.
People are torn between a life of rich personal relationships on one hand, and on the other the conveniences and ease that modern capitalism or socialism offers.
So back to the original topics: Yes, capitalism has made some things better, but it has not necessarily made life better. It’s important to realize that life doesn’t consist of GDP, life-saving drugs, and ever-cheaper smartphones. Those things are certainly desirable on the one hand, but don’t expect your moralizing on this topic to keep people from coming out with torches and pitchforks to overthrow the regime that created them. Try to find some balance.
And for inducing people to prefer free markets to welfare socialism? Help them to observe the joy of taking risks together with loved ones. This can only be done in a society where we can still make decisions and choices. But if we run to government to make uniform regulations each time families make choices we don’t like, we’re not setting much of an example.
[The photo is of my bicycling destination on Labor Day 1998, where I was learning about the first of a number of Indian captivity narratives.]
Published in Culture, General
I’m not sure that’s so. I think some of that is involved in the longing, but I’m not sure it is part of the experience. I’d say, it were a shame not to try to retrieve the genuine experiences at the origin of the things we know are important.
I do not believe that friendship makes sense unless you start from politics, but the tribes of savage have not politics. The assumptions about individualism typical of liberals; as well as the assumptions about one’s dignity in work or in citizenship; as well as others I might mention–they are not obviously part of the experience we’re considering here.
Concerning the apolitical life, I adduce two pieces of evidence which I believe are of great importance for our concern here. First, savages are very easily deceived; secondly, they have a very imperfect grasp of the difference between images & the objects they image, or what is to say the same, they do not understand the image-making power of soul properly.
It may be similar to the iroquois torture tree
Seems a fairly aggressive immigration policy.
Native Americans were more individualistic than European-Americans, but also more communitarian. In some cases, a bad actor was excluded from their society. To be excluded from such a society was pretty much a death sentence, because there was no possibility of living on your own. Self-reliance would not cut it; you had to rely on others.
Sometimes bad actors who couldn’t get along with their societies would join together to form a new group. (We might call it a tribe or sub-tribe, but they would not have.) These were sometimes the ones that initiated violent conflict with European-Americans, or responded to their provocations. But they weren’t just gangs of outlaws; they had to develop some social order within their new communities in order to survive.
Yesterday it was just as nice there as it looks. But there is a reason we chose to explore some of Texas in February rather than July.
The previous day I had been told by the people at the archives that a Texas longhorn was out somewhere along that road, and if I wanted to see one now was my chance. But I kept my nose to the grindstone at the archives that day. They even let me stay late, after the time when they usually boot the patrons out so they can work in their vaults, saying it wasn’t too often that someone came from Michigan to use their materials. First time I ever had that happen.
Yesterday morning I saw that there was a bull in one of the pastures not too far from this scene; maybe not all breeding is done with artificial insemination in Texas. But he was behind a barbed-wire fence. It was a flimsy fence, but good enough to keep him on the other side.
I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at here.
One thing about Indian societies’ willingness to take other people into their societies regardless of biological origins – and here I’m talking about the mechanisms of trade, which for them was more a matter of social relationship than of transaction. By being so accepting of people who had feet in both the Indian as well as the white societies — by being so non-racist, you could say — they made themselves vulnerable to some double-dealing by these people. There are many, many examples and variations on that theme. And some of it is controversial to this day.
Sorry if what I wrote this morning is kind of hurried and garbled. I need to head out on another ride. I need to go south, and there is a north component to today’s wind forecast, so today is the day to do it. And if I get there in time, maybe I can check out the county history archives, too.
Self-reliance is not an individualist thing. Self-reliance is a community thing. Nothing to do with communitarianism. That’s a scholar’s fantasy–as you point out about the made-up tribes. Freedom first mean being ruled by one’s own nation. That’s what self-reliance means, too. Later, politics is supposed to secure that; sort of like natural rights… This is why I said, individualistic assumptions depend on certain things–like philosophy & poetry.
That recalls the old question, whether justice is anything but what a gang of thieves need to live together…
I thought that looked like Texas. Where are you?
Absolutely fascinating post and comments, Reticulator. Thank you very much for the thoughtful replies, and for the book recommendations.
That photo was taken near La Grange. We’re now staying at Fredericksburg, which is known for its bicycling, but the subject I’m now researching died at Boerne. We should have stayed at Boerne instead of Fredericksburg. It’s cheaper and less touristy. I rode my bicycle from Fredericksburg to Boerne today and still had time for a couple of hours at the history archives in the county library.
At first the name I gave them drew a blank. They had no file on him. But the librarian on duty helped me work on it, and in a little while we learned that my guy was a step-grandfather to a couple of Indian captives. It seems you can’t turn around without stepping into another Indian captivity story.
This one was written up by one of the two captives in, The Boy Captives by Clinton L. Smith. I’m glad Professor Rahe told me about bookfinder.com, because it looks like that’s how I’m going to get the best price on a used copy.
The librarian also is putting me in touch with a couple of other local history people who may be able to help me research my subject. I’m hoping to get a couple of good riding destinations out of it.
As you can tell, we’re all fascinated by your research — really, this obviously struck a deep chord — and it would be wonderful, when you have the time, if you wrote more about it. I mean, obviously you will, sounds like you’re doing the research for an article or book, but if you feel like sharing anything you come across, any stories or anecdotes or just some draft material here, please do. I realized reading this thread how little I know about this part of American history; even something very remedial for people who know as little as I do would be wonderful.
It’s interesting how historians these days, including the good ones, refer to this as “ritual torture,” so as to make it sound not so bad, I guess. But I wonder if most things humans do aren’t “ritual.”
Thank you. I may take you up on that. Some of what I do is more suited to encyclopedia format. I envy the web site the Texas Historical Society has put together (The Handbook of Texas) except that for mine I would like to include my photos and put even more emphasis on places. But it has occurred to me that my current topic about Michigan people who went to Texas after the Black Hawk war might be suitable for an article or two in history publications. And I have a few other topics that might lend themselves to narrative form.
I think you need to explain this more, because I don’t think it’s the idea of self-reliance that most people have.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-reliance was very individualistic.
I’ve always thought the popular notion of self-reliance was expressed in the phrase about pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps.
I tend to ground my thinking in history and anthropology – about what people actually do to each other and how they live together – so am not always conversant with the more theoretical or abstract concepts that some people use to organize their thinking. There is a level of abstraction in all of our thinking, of course.
As a historical matter, people called themselves free when they were ruled by one of their own, not because they had bootstraps by which to pull themselves up–that’s a liberal fantasy. Indians were thought of as free, though lawless. Tocqueville famously said that the red American race is free, the white & black civilized.
I’m not going to work on it tonight, but I bet I could come up with multiple examples of both versions of “free” without working at it extremely hard.
I can come up with plenty of counterexamples of this, too, by European-Americans who imagined Indians had versions of law and politics analogous to their own, and tried to manipulate them through these imagined institutions.
And they were assuredly not free in the sense of being ruled by one of their own. Their “chiefs” didn’t rule. In fact, the term chief doesn’t exactly fit their society. The Algonquian speaking peoples had ogamek, who were family or band leaders. The extent of their leadership varied somewhat from one group to another. They were influential and important, but they had little or no authority to command obedience. Euro-Americans were always looking for leaders who did have that kind of authority, so they could corrupt those leaders and enter into bipartisan negotiations with them, much as Democrats do to Republicans. When they couldn’t find that type of leader, they tried to invent them. There is a term that applies: “medal chiefs.”
This morning I was in the Boerne TX public library, working on my next bicycling destination – a place on Cibolo Creek in Texas. Finally I figured out more or less where my subject’s step-grandsons had been captured by Commanche Indians, and figured out which public roads would take me as close to the place as I could get.
Then, some time this afternoon I saw that Cibolo Creek in Texas was in the biggest news of the day. Different Cibolo Creek, though.
I suspect it’s going to mess up further googling on the topic.
I meant to add that white settlers (and more so the generations that followed them) often imagined that their Indian neighbors had laws analogous to their own systems of laws.
Today I found an example that gives a little bit of credence to the idea that this could have happened. One of the returned captives told of a time while herding cattle, when he was greeted by one of his former Indian companions. The returned captive told how he silently shook his head at his old companion, because he didn’t want his fellow cowboys to know that he had lived with Indians.
The brother to this captive – one who had been literate and then regained his English literacy after coming back to white society – wrote about how he repeatedly tried to escape when he was being taken back to his Anglo family. And how one of his other captive companions did succeed in escaping back to his Indian family – permanently.
So I’ve read these last comments–I like a contrarian streak rather more than the next guy–but this is nothing to the point. You threaten to turn into the kind of guy who says, no, people didn’t think the world was flat, & then turns around to say, no, people, didn’t think the world was not flat either. I suppose there is a kind of freedom there–there is always a tendency to rebel against thinking & the evil common sense that leads to the law of contradiction that is the guide of reason…
If some people have thought this & others that, then all people are the same & all thinking is the same for your purposes. That will not do.
As for the more serious objection about the form of rule in pre-political savagery, there is much to learn there, I believe, but nothing will be learned by a learned inability to see things as they are. It is no objection against my claim–it is the very proof of my claim!–to say that Indians were more family than nation, & therefore had more of family rule than tribe rule. But tribe is nothing but family. & this kind of rule has been known to political science since its inception: Man, king, & god are related in this way already in Aristotle’s Politics, in the first book. I am unsure anyone has improved on his understanding, & his quotes suggest he learned from Homer what ‘one’s own’ means.
Tribe = family at larger or smaller level is something I would not disagree with.
However, even where political organization is tribal, there are some systems in which there is a high degree of central authority, and some where there is not. To say that freedom is a matter of being ruled by your own does not comport with many common and useful meanings of the term “free.”
I should mention that the seminary that trains many of the pastors of the church body of which I am a member has (or had) a department of systematic theology. I would be a real pain to the people in that program, and vice versa. I would get a long a lot better with unsystematic theology, or as it is more commonly called, historical theology. I embrace the contradictions.
There is no embracing contradictions. You cannot have your cake & eat it, too.
The law of contradiction guides human reasoning; not taking it seriously is literally not reasoning.
Do you know the joke with the rabbi who has to arbitrate a dispute? He tells the one guy, you’re right; the other–you’re right, too; when a third adduces, they can’t both be right!, he answers, & you, too, are right.
That is true.
Now, for my part, I claim that tribes are not political associations. It’s perfectly possible for human associations to live without politics, although it’s not a happy thing…
Societies based on kinship, such as the “tribes” of North American Indians, commonly do have political organization as well, some more than others. I understand that the discipline of political anthropology concerns itself with this.
In the early-mid 90s I became irritated by claims that the Iroquois confederation was influential in the development of the U.S. Constitution. When my son’s high school history teacher was peddling this nonsense, I complained about it at parent-teacher conferences. He said his study of the issue convinced him that it was true. That was a lie, though I let the matter drop for the time, as it was far from the only nonsense taught in school. If he had bothered to study it he would have known it was nonsense. The notion betrays an ignorance of a) the U.S. Constitution and b) Iroquois political organization.
Out of exasperation with people who were peddling this nonsense, I had read some of the ethno-history about the Iroquois confederation. I saw that there was much to learn from the Iroquois political organization, partly in how their system of moieties kept the confederation from degenerating into kin-based factions. It had no influence on the U.S. Constitution, but theirs was a political system worth knowing about.
I’m with you on the practical matters–the Iroquois jazz. But as for the theoretical stuff, you’re leaving me scratching my head. If you’re living a political world that’s so theoretical that kids are taught about politics–they might not see much, but they learn about it in school–then I guess it makes sense to look at all sorts of organizations or associations & spot political arrangements.
But that seems to me to be assuming what you’re supposed to prove. If you do not assume in advance that this is politics & that’s politics & everything is politics–then you’d have to prove that the life of this or that tribe really is political. What makes it so? Especially, is it possible to have politics among nomads–without cities?