Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging(4)
The reluctance of Bouquet’s captives to leave their adopted tribe raised awkward questions about the supposed 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 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 European,” a French émigré named Hector de Crèvecoeur lamented in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.”
Crèvecoeur 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 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,” an early Puritan named 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—any 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 like 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 and fed alive to the 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 of things about Christianity but not its capacity for cruelty, and early Puritan leaders in New England were also renowned for their harsh justice. Cruelty, in other words, was very much the norm for that era, and the native tribes of North America were no exception.