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Quote of the Day: We Were Becoming Like Them … All Talkers and No Workers
For my first QotD, I’m going to post a long one. This is Sauk warrior Black Hawk’s surrender speech, given in 1832 after the last of his warriors were defeated at the Bad Axe River in what is now Wisconsin. This defeat marked the end of the Black Hawk War that had been fought across the Illinois territory, and largely ended effective armed Indian resistance in the Great Lakes. He is memorialized in numerous ways in Illinois and Wisconsin, in brands, plaques, statues and place names, even lending his name and likeness to a somewhat famous Chicago hockey team.
I haven’t found a satisfactory resource online about the War, but I will mention briefly that it was fought (as one might guess) over government resettlement plans. Black Hawk did not acknowledge the authority of the Sauk negotiators to sell off a swath of land to the United States in the 1804 Treaty of St. Louis, and took his supporters on the warpath in 1832. He surrendered at Prairie du Chien in August of that year.
~*~
War leader Black Hawk of the Sauk people
You have taken me prisoner with all my warriors. I am much grieved, for I expected, if I did not defeat you, to hold out much longer, and give you more trouble before I surrendered. I tried hard to bring you into ambush, but your last general understands Indian fighting. The first one was not so wise. When I saw that I could not beat you by Indian fighting, I determined to rush on you, and fight you face to face. I fought hard. But your guns were well aimed. The bullets flew like birds in the air, and whizzed by our ears like the wind through the trees in the winter. My warriors fell around me; it began to look dismal. I saw my evil day at hand. The sun rose dim on us in the morning, and at night it sunk in a dark cloud, and looked like a ball of fire. That was the last sun that shone on Black Hawk. His heart is dead, and no longer beats quick in his bosom. He is now a prisoner to the white men; they will do with him as they wish. But he can stand torture, and is not afraid of death. He is no coward. Black Hawk is an Indian.
He has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came, year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it. The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. But the Indians are not deceitful. The white men speak bad of the Indian, and look at him spitefully. But the Indian does not tell lies; Indians do not steal.
An Indian who is as bad as the white men, could not live in our nation; he would be put to death, and eat [sic] up by the wolves. The white men are bad school-masters; they carry false looks, and deal in false actions; they smile in the face of the poor Indian to cheat him; they shake them by the hand to gain their confidence, to make them drunk, to deceive them, and ruin our wives. We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterers, lazy drones, all talkers, and no workers.
We looked up to the Great Spirit. We went to our great father. We were encouraged. His great council gave us fair words and big promises, but we got no satisfaction. Things were growing worse. There were no deer in the forest. The oppossum and beaver were fled; the springs were drying up, and our squaws and papooses without victuals to keep them from starving; we called a great council and built a large fire. The spirit of our fathers arose and spoke to us to avenge our wrongs or die…. We set up the war-whoop, and dug up the tomahawk; our knives were ready, and the heart of Black Hawk swelled high in his bosom when he led his warriors to battle. He is satisfied. He will go to the world of spirits contented. He has done his duty. His father will meet him there, and commend him.
The steamboat Warrior at Bad Axe
Black Hawk is a true Indian, and disdains to cry like a woman. He feels for his wife, his children and friends. But he does not care for himself. He cares for his nation and the Indians. They will suffer. He laments their fate. The white men do not scalp the head; but they do worse – they poison the heart, it is not pure with them. His countrymen will not be scalped, but they will, in a few years, become like the white men, so that you can’t trust them, and there must be, as in the white settlements, nearly as many officers as men, to take care of them and keep them in order.
Published in Group WritingFarewell, my nation. Black Hawk tried to save you, and avenge your wrongs. He drank the blood of some of the whites. He has been taken prisoner, and his plans are stopped. He can do no more. He is near his end. His sun is setting, and he will rise no more. Farewell to Black Hawk.
Now you’ve gone and done it. That bit about the Iroquois constitution comes from people from don’t know much at all about 1) our constitution and 2) the Iroquois confederation.
Thank you for this wonderful essay featuring the words of Black Hawk. I still remember how divided I felt as a child reading about this war, and knowing that one of my heroes, Abe Lincoln, fought on the side of the frontier settlements and the settlers, while another one of my heroes, Black Hawk, attempted to protect and enshrine his society and that way of life.
I am not sure the division has healed at all. I have often mused on the concept that in some remote galaxy, a civilization like ours landed on a New World and was able to settle down peacefully and cooperatively with the Native peoples.
During the Eighteen Teens, society in Washington DC, including the WH presided over by Dolly Madison, would hold balls and parties where the guests of honor were various Indian maidens and young warriors who would travel south from New England to attend the festivities. Often however the young people would end up dying of the diseases such close contact with white people exposed them to. A neighbor of mine had several portfolios of drawings done of these beautiful and handsome individuals, who were not only the talk of the town, but also sought out by the best artists of the day for portrait sessions. They did not survive, but their noble and dignified faces and features lived on through the drawings and paintings.
Might makes right?
The Boone relation (a cousin) was probably involved in the Northwest Indian war in Ohio, around the 1786 – 1790 period. He settled in a town along the Ohio that Daniel has laid out, and might have been on Logan’s Raid in 1786. The other ancestor, from a family that married into the Boones in the next generation, might have been involved in that period, but is documented as serving in an Ohio company in the War of 1812 on the frontier. We don’t know if he ever was in battle, but that was the Tecumseh / Tenskwatawa period. (Documentation of who served where and when is pretty thin in that period, a lot of it was irregular warfare and militia companies were raised ad hoc for retaliation or attempts to recover prisoners. Other than the 1812 service, we’re taking these as ‘likely but not proven’.)
Ironically, one of my other family lines adopted a Shawnee girl, a foundling along the road from Ohio to Indiana, here’s the story.
Native Americans are about the most photogenic/paintagenic people in the world.
A few places where I’ve had trouble with Eckert are:
One. His description of the start of the Black Hawk war at Stillman’s Run. The actual descriptions are more confused and inconsistent than the neat story he tells of drunken soldiers firing on a peace delegation sent by Black Hawk. I suppose it’s as good as any other neat narrative interpretation, though.
Two. His story of the relationship between Black Hawk and Keokuk is one that very well fits my picture of the relationship between Newt Gingrich and the sniveling Republican Establishment, but it might not be not fair to Keokuk. At least not according to some scholars.
Three. His picture of the relationship between Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh does not give Tenskwatawa the credit he deserves. But a lot of older histories have that problem. European Americans could understand Tecumseh, because he was doing what they would have done in his shoes. They could not understand Tenskwatawa and the importance of his message of spiritual renewal, so just wrote him off as the self-serving incompetent who messed up Tecumseh’s grand strategy. That’s the version that Eckert adopted in full.
Four. He treats as true the story of Tecumseh’s romance with Rebecca Gallaway. There is no evidence for it, and when it comes to treatment of the women in his life, Tecumseh was definitely not a woke romantic who used Shick razors.
Five. He treats as true the notion that Blue Jacket was a white captive who was raised to become a chief. The Hogeland book I mentioned is not a character study, but gives a good analysis of the conflicted relationship between Little Turtle (a Miami leader) and Blue Jacket before and during George Washington’s Indian wars.
Who mentioned might? “Greater” does not equal “mightier.”
There are a lot of War of 1812 Ohio militia rosters online, thanks at least in part to the Ohio Historical Society. I’ve spent a lot of time with them, though not recently, and didn’t always find the people I was looking for.
The Michigan militia rosters for the 1832 Black Hawk war have been compiled, but it appears that the company commander for one of the towns near me didn’t turn in his paperwork, so we have to go by the stories told in the community for lists of who served. I presume that also meant that none of those men was eligible for land warrants years later when Congress passed legislation awarding them.
That makes me wonder, were the local militia soldiers in the War of 1812 eligible for land warrants if they were never called into regular service? Recently I was studying a section of an Indian cession boundary in northern Illinois in which most of the land nearby was purchased with War of 1812 land warrants. But these were land warrants that were bought up by speculators who bought the parcels at the land office and later sold them to other settlers. But the original holder of the land warrant is listed in the online database. It’s a place that should always be checked when tracking down War of 1812 soldiers, but if you’ve already done an ancestry.com search, you would have found those (assuming you allowed for creative misspellings).
But sometimes those who overtake others do so because they produce more babies and wealth than those who were overtaken. They weren’t necessarily greater, unless one equates domination with greatness (which all people tend to do).
And sometimes the overtaken invite the overtakers in.
The Ohio militia rosters are where I found our guy. He had a very distinctive name, which helps a lot, even though – as you say – it was creatively mangled at times. He served from August, 1813 to February, 1814. The captain of his company was said to have ‘served with Harrison’, so evidently that militia unit was attached to the regulars, rather than strictly home guard. That time period includes the Battle of the Thames, but there is no record of his unit being there, and most of the militia units present were from Kentucky, so it’s more likely they were used as garrison for one of the forts. He later moved his family to Indiana, but we have no record of that being warrant land.
“Greater” could also mean “fatter”, in which case our Leftist cousins have handily won game, set and match.
Would an alternative (tongue in cheek) post title diminish the good discussion? I hope not:
Too many chiefs, not enough Indians
I’ve found that aphorism to be quite useful and accurate at times. I also think it captures some small dimension of what Blackhawk was referring to in the OP’s quote. On top of it all, it seems to capture something constant about the human condition. Which culture, civilization, era, or society couldn’t relate to it?
Wouldn’t the average conservative be a bit fat while the leftists are either obese poor people or skinny rich and whites and Asians? Are you sure that leftists are on average fatter than conservatives?
Well, it’s clever certainly; but I find that it doesn’t fit the tone of his speech and might come off a bit flippant. Also the change might give the impression that Black Hawk was a Chief, which he wasn’t. I agree with you though, and taking this conversation in that direction sounds very interesting.
No. All conservatives are built like Adonis and have jaws made of granite.
We could start by pointing out that Indian chiefs were not really chiefs in the sense that they were boss. Well, it varies somewhat from one group to another. Among the Algonquian language groups, as you go from north to south (where agriculture provided a larger portion of the food supply and hunting a lesser portion) the chiefs tended to have more authority, so were more like the Europeans’ conception of a chief. But for the most part, although they were influential, they couldn’t command.
This was all terribly inconvenient for their conquerors, who wanted to establish relationships with a few influential chiefs, make deals with them to give up their land (using bribes or more subtle forms of co-option) and that would settle things. In fact, during one phase of the conquest they picked some leaders they thought they could work with and gave them silver medals (which had traditionally been one of the more visible presents given to chiefs, which helped increase their status within the community). But these weren’t the native peoples’ designated leaders for such important matters, and are often referred to by the derogatory term “medal chiefs.”
But whether through such clumsy methods or others, the U.S. was constantly trying to identify (and establish) chiefs that they could deal with. Those in charge of Indian affairs hated a system with too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It was too messy to conquer such an egalitarian society. They had a much better chance of controlling their relationship with Indians that way than if they had to deal with a multitude of family leaders who wouldn’t all agree together.
This was part of the problem in dealing with Black Hawk. The United States had worked things out with leaders like Keokuk, by which the Sauk would cede their land on the east side of the Mississippi. Keokuk knew what he was up against, and went along with it. Black Hawk, although not a chief, had a large following that wouldn’t submit to that authority.
The U.S. had similar problems in dealing with the Amish on subjects such as conscientious objector status or social security, because there is no organization that can speak for all of the Amish communities. Although the authority of bishops within a community is strong, they have no authority to speak for other congregations. But as I have read, they developed some sort of quasi-organization for the purpose of negotiating with the U.S. government on these issues, but it didn’t become any kind of centralized authority or serve much of a purpose once the issues were settled.
We see a related phenomenon in dealing with U.S. businesses. Have you ever wondered why your leftnik friends tend to sneer at small businesses? I’m not sure they understand, either, but it’s hard for the government or the ruling class to exert any level of control over them. Much better to herd all health care providers, grocers, and other businesses into a few large organizations where they can be more easily monitored and controlled. It’s very difficult to get thousands of small coffee shops to become properly woke, but if the business is dominated by a few Starbucks, you can accomplish a lot by giving the treatment to a few influential leaders.
Of course, this centralization and the scaling-up needed to accomplish it is also the key to a lot of our prosperity. Stalin and most libertarians understand its importance.
@thereticulator You have hit the core of why I have little patience with the “poor innocent Indians versus the evil capitalist war mongers” narrative. Identifying who had authority to do what in which negotiations was a nightmare on both sides, though the U.S. got better at it as time went on. Heck, both sides had completely different cultural interpretations of things as basic as family and authority.
In this case the government thought it had a legitimate treaty agreement on the one hand, and if we assume good faith, a hostile band of warriors on the other. The start of this war is a mess, and a tragedy all around; it’s in our nature to pick sides and root for our team but my intention in posting this without a bunch of editorial commentary was to see where a conversation on the topic would go. It’s interesting that some interpret it as a sad end to a noble cause, some as the inevitable consequence of a technologically and culturally superior culture over it’s “lessor”, and some dive into the history of it and look for modern parallels. I’m pretty happy with that.
I like the way you set it up. It is possible to believe several things at the same time:
Indian culture was doomed the moment the Americas were discovered. In particular the diseases brought by Europeans were enough to ensure Indians would not remain dominant in the aftermath of European immigration.
For the tribes that refused to adapt their way of life was doomed. There is no way any country would let Comanches roam the Great Plains raiding and maurading in order to sustain their accustomed lives. They would have to adapt to us.
For the tribes which did try to adapt their cultures (like the Cherokee, Chippewa etc) most were treated shabbily despite these efforts.
And when you can’t believe several things at the same time, you can switch back and forth.
That’s what I do. When I study these historical interactions from the point of the Native people, I’m on their side, thinking about what they should have done differently to succeed, concentrating on how they were done wrong.
And then I switch to studying the European invaders, and I’m on their side, thinking about all of the difficult work they had to do and the conflicts they had to resolve in order to establish their civilization.
In my roadside history travels, I’ve ended up getting in touch with people with heritages of both sides, and have great empathy for both, sometimes even when they re-invent their own histories for the sake of a modern, woke narrative, though sometimes not then.
I can sometimes even empathize with the Hamiltonians in the Federalist/Republican conflicts, but that’s taking this practice to extremes.
This is so true. Progressives would like 50 large companies to run everything in the U.S. and then it will be easier for them to direct the 50 companies.
The truth is the country operates on a collective basis. The difference is that for Progressives it is collective decision making directed by them, while for non-Progressives it is the collective direction determined by millions of independent, and undirected, decisions.
You haven’t seen me.
Why didn’t the Indians have diseases they were immune to, but the Europeans weren’t?
Yes we have. You left your keys next to the sink.
There is some evidence that syphilis was exactly that.
I’m no expert on this, but since that hasn’t stopped me before, I’ll give it a shot. The one disease I am aware of that existed in the Americas but not Europe (though there is still argument over this) was syphillis. When it is first identified in Europe in the later 1490s it is incredibly virulent, much more so than today. On the whole however, Europeans basically lived in a petri dish of disease exposed to whatever popped up on their continent as well as Asia and Africa.
Diseases like smallpox and childhood diseases like measles and mumps did not exist in the Americas, where Indians had been isolated from the rest of the world for 10-15,000 years, perhaps because there was a restricted gene pool constituting the original migration from Asia. So when the Europeans arrived there was no acquired immunity against these diseases. The problem was compounded because of the restricted gene pool from which the Indians came – blood biochemistry was unusually homogeneous. That helps in restricting problem genes (before 1492 it appears many diseases with genetic components like asthma and schizophrenia did not exist in the Americas) but is a problem with contagious diseases because immune systems have a more limited number of protective cells. The same biochemistry existed with native Siberians, from whom Indians descended, and perhaps 75% of native Siberians died from smallpox after being exposed to the first Russian explorers in the region.
What is now the United States was relatively sparsely populated by Indians in 1492. Perhaps 95% of the Indian population of the Americas lived south of the Rio Grande. Perhaps 90% were dead by the early 17th century before the Jamestown and Plymouth settlements.