Читать книгу The Last American Frontier - Frederic L. Paxson - Страница 6

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A lengthening frontier made more difficult the maintenance of friendly relations between the two races involved in the struggle for the continent. It increased the area of danger by its extension, while its advance inland pushed the Indian tribes away from their old home lands, concentrating their numbers along its margin and thereby aggravating their situation. Colonial negotiations for lands as they were needed had been relatively easy, since the Indians and whites were nearly enough equal in strength to have a mutual respect for their agreements and a fear of violation. But the white population doubled itself every twenty-five years, while the Indians close enough to resist were never more than 300,000, and have remained near that figure or under it until to-day. The stronger race could afford to indulge the contempt that its superior civilization engendered, while its individual members along the line of contact became less orderly and governable as the years advanced. An increasing willingness to override on the part of the white governments and an increasing personal hatred and contempt on the part of individual pioneers, account easily for the danger to life along the frontier. The savage, at his best, was not responsive to the motives of civilization; at his worst, his injuries, real or imaginary—and too often they were real—made him the most dangerous of all the wild beasts that harassed the advancing frontier. The problem of his treatment vexed all the colonial governments and endured after the Revolution and the Constitution. It first approached a systematic policy in the years of Monroe and Adams and Jackson, but never attained form and shape until the ideal which it represented had been outlawed by the march of civilization into the West.

The conflict between the Indian tribes and the whites could not have ended in any other way than that which has come to pass. A handful of savages, knowing little of agriculture or manufacture or trade among themselves, having no conception of private ownership of land, possessing social ideals and standards of life based upon the chase, could not and should not have remained unaltered at the expense of a higher form of life. The farmer must always have right of way against the hunter, and the trader against the pilferer, and law against self-help and private war. In the end, by whatever route, the Indian must have given up his hunting grounds and contented himself with progress into civilized life. The route was not one which he could ever have determined for himself. The stronger race had to determine it for him. Under ideal conditions it might have been determined without loss of life and health, without promoting a bitter race hostility that invited extinction for the inferior race, without prostituting national honor or corrupting individual moral standards. The Indians needed maintenance, education, discipline, and guardianship until the older ones should have died and the younger accepted the new order, and all these might conceivably have been provided. But democratic government has never developed a powerful and centralized authority competent to administer a task such as this, with its incidents of checking trade, punishing citizens, and maintaining rigorously a standard of conduct not acceptable to those upon whom it is to be enforced.

The acts by which the United States formulated and carried out its responsibilities towards the Indian tribes were far from the ideal. In theory the disposition of the government was generally benevolent, but the scheme was badly conceived, while human frailty among officers of the law and citizens as well rendered execution short of such ideal as there was.

For thirty years the government under the Constitution had no Indian policy. In these years it acquired the habit of dealing with the tribes as independent—"domestic dependent nations," Justice Marshall later called them—by means of formal treaties. Europe thought of chiefs as kings and tribes as nations. The practice of making treaties was based on this delusion. After a century of practice it was finally learned that nomadic savages have no idea of sovereign government or legal obligation, and that the assumption of the existence of such knowledge can lead only to misconception and disappointment.

As the frontier moved down the Ohio, individual wars were fought and individual treaties were made as occasion offered. At times the tribes yielded readily to white occupation; occasionally they struggled bitterly to save their lands; but the result was always the same. The right bank of the river, long known as the Indian Shore, was contested in a series of wars lasting nearly until 1800, and became available for white colonization only after John Jay had, through his treaty of 1794, removed the British encouragement to the Indians, and General Wayne had administered to them a decisive defeat. Isolated attacks were frequent, but Tecumseh's war of 1811 was the next serious conflict, while, after General Harrison brought this war to an end at Tippecanoe, there was comparative peace along the northwest frontier until the time of Black Hawk and his uprising of 1832.

The left bank of the river was opened with less formal resistance, admitting Kentucky and Tennessee before the Indian Shore was a safe habitation for whites. South of Tennessee lay the great southern confederacies, somewhat out of the line of early western progress, and hence not plunged into struggles until the War of 1812 was over. But as Wayne and Harrison had opened the Northwest, so Jackson cleared the way for white advance into Alabama and Mississippi. By 1821 new states touched the Mississippi River along its whole course between New Orleans and the lead mines of upper Illinois.

In the advance of the frontier to the bend of the Missouri some of the tribes were pushed back, while others were passed and swallowed up by the invading population. Experience showed that the two races could not well live in adjacent lands. The conditions which made for Indian welfare could not be kept up in the neighborhood of white settlements, for the more lawless of the whites were ever ready, through illicit trade, deceit, and worse, to provoke the most dangerous excesses of the savage. The Indian was demoralized, the white became steadily more intolerant.

Although the ingenious Jefferson had anticipated him in the idea, the first positive policy which looked toward giving to the Indian a permanent home and the sort of guardianship which he needed until he could become reconciled to civilized life was the suggestion of President Monroe. At the end of his presidency, Georgia was angrily demanding the removal of the Cherokee from her limits, and was ready to violate law and the Constitution in her desire to accomplish her end. Monroe was prepared to meet the demand. He submitted to Congress, on January 27, 1825, a report from Calhoun, then Secretary of War, upon the numbers of the tribes, the area of their lands, and the area of available destinations for them. He recommended that as rapidly as agreements could be made with them they be removed to country lying westward and northwestward—to the further limits of the Louisiana Purchase, which lay beyond the line of the western frontier.

Already, when this message was sent to Congress, individual steps had been taken in the direction which it pointed out. A few tribes had agreed to cross the Mississippi, and had been allotted lands in Missouri and Arkansas. But Missouri, just admitted, and Arkansas, now opening up, were no more hospitable to Indian wards than Georgia and Ohio had been. The Indian frontier must be at some point still farther west, towards the vast plains overrun by the Osage1 and Kansa tribes, the Pawnee and the Sioux. There had been few dealings with the Indians beyond the Mississippi before Monroe advanced his policy. Lieutenant Pike had visited the head of the Mississippi in 1805 and had treated with the Sioux for a reserve at St. Paul. Subsequent agreements farther south brought the Osage tribes within the treaty arrangements. The year 1825 saw the notable treaties which prepared the way for peace among the western tribes, and the reception by these tribes of the eastern nations.