3

INDIAN-WHITE RELATIONS IN
NORTH AMERICA: 1607–1851
Now your soul has faded away.
It has become blue.
When darkness comes your spirit shall grow less
And dwindle away
Never to reappear. Listen!
A Cherokee Song

ORIGINS OF AMERICAN NATIVE PEOPLES

Anthropologists estimate that the Indian population of America north
of Mexico at the time of Columbus’s voyages was about eighteen
million, though there is some disagreement on that number. The first
humans set foot on the North American continent somewhere around
20,000 B.C. They came from Asia looking for food and animals to
hunt. Within a thousand years the people coming into the New World
had killed off most of the large-animal population of North America.
Before the coming of Homo sapiens, the area that is now the United
States and Canada was home to sloths as big as cows, woolly
mammoths bigger than elephants, camels, and other large animals.
Scientists cannot be certain whether the extinction of these animal
populations resulted from over-hunting or if other factors were
involved. Perhaps the migrants from Asia brought diseases with them
that spread to the animals, or, more likely, the humans brought dogs
and rats with them and they spread deadly viruses and bacteria to the
New World species. Scientists believe that the human migrants to North
America eventually killed off more than seventy animal species.
26 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

What happened to the animals would later happen to the many of the
native peoples of North America; they too would die out, but over a
much shorter period of time. There is no disagreement among experts
that the Indian population declined rapidly after 1607, when the first
English colonists settled in Jamestown, and reached its lowest point
three hundred years later, in 1915, when only about 400,000 Indians
were still alive in all of North America. What accounted for that
decrease during a time when the population of the rest of the United
States and Canada climbed to more than 100 million?
The key reasons for the decline in North America, as in South
America, were diseases brought by outsiders, such as smallpox,
influenza, and whooping cough. To these deaths from bacteria and
viruses must be added war and the desire of many Europeans to destroy
the entire Indian way of life, because they believed it was immoral,
savage, and ungodly. Was this genocide? Genocide refers to the
deliberate killing of an entire race of people simply because they are
member of that race, as the crime was defined by the United Nations
after World War II. There are many examples of mass killings in the
history of Indian-white relations. The case of the Beothuk, explained
below, is only one of many tales of the destruction of an entire
community of people. There may have been as many as five hundred
separate cultures in what is now the United States in 1492, but
according to the 1990 census fewer than two hundred of them remain.
While some Indian peoples survived, including the Catawba and the
Cherokee, they did so only by sacrificing much of their traditional way
of life. Table 3.1 shows the tremendous decline of the Indian population
after the coming of Columbus.

TABLE 3.1
NATIVE AMERICAN POPULATION OF THE UNITED
STATES*
1500 18,000,000
1890 248,253
1920 244,467
1950 343,410
1988 1,688,000
*Source: Bureau of Census: Historical Statistics of the United States, 1988.
 Indian-White Relations in North America: 1607-1851
27
EXTERMINATION
An example of what happened to many Native peoples after contact
with the English is that of the Beothuk, a now extinct tribe that lived in
small settlements along the coast of Newfoundland. From the English
point of view, the Beothuk lived in very primitive circumstances and
were savages. The Beothuk population was small, never more than five
hundred, and no Englishman seemed concerned with saving such an
obscure people. What, after all, could the English learn from these
miserable-looking inhabitants of a rocky, usually bitterly cold part of
the New World? Their villages consisted of three or four wigwams—
cone-shaped dwellings made of sticks and birch bark, with a hole in the
top to let out smoke. There were no great cities or palaces! To keep
warm in the winter the Beothuk slept in trenches dug in the floor
around a central fireplace that was also used for cooking. The men
fished for salmon and hunted seals, birds, and caribou while the women
and children gathered eggs, roots, and berries. The meat and fish were
frozen or smoked for winter consumption.
Beothuk customs are known from reports made by early missionaries,
who wanted to learn the native language in order to provide the Indians
with a Bible translated into their language. The Beothuk, like most
North American Indians, had no written language. What is known from
missionary reports is this: the Beothuk had twenty-four-hour wedding
ceremonies with much dancing and feasting. Adult males had to
undergo purification ceremonies in dome-shaped sweat lodges before
they got married. Inside the skin-covered lodges were hot rocks and
water that created steam. Young men entered for a few seconds and
then ran out and jumped into a snow bank. This act was believed to
cleanse their bodies of evil. The Beothuk dressed in caribou-skin robes,
with leggings, mittens, and fur hats in the winter. The women sewed
together birch and spruce bark for dishes, buckets, and cooking pots.
The tribe buried its dead in caves above ground accompanied by
weapons and tools and small, carved, wooden figures representing a
god or goddess. Little else is known about Beothuk philosophy or
religious practices.
English sailors made contact with the Beothuk in about 1625, calling
them red men because they covered their body hair with a reddish
powder made from plants that repelled insects. By the early 1700s
French fur trappers from Labrador, hunting for beaver, began trading
with the Beothuk. Hat makers in Paris demanded huge quantities of
these furs because they resisted water and wind. At first white trappers
bought skins from the Indians along the coast. But as demand grew the
beaver population declined, and the trappers headed inland, making
28 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

contracts for furs with other Indian tribes along the way. The Beothuk
began to compete for the trade with the more numerous Micmac
(Mi’kmaq, as they preferred) Indians, living in what is now Nova
Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
Soon coastal Indians found themselves in a fight for control of the fur
trade. This competition led to “beaver wars” between the Beothuk and
their inland neighbors. The death rate in these wars was very high.
Within a century, the Beothuk were almost extinct, dying as a result of
the wars and epidemic diseases—smallpox, influenza, chicken pox—
brought by Europeans. Many also died from starvation, with salmon
and deer disappearing from the Atlantic coast due to over-hunting by
white-skinned settlers. A few miserable survivors escaped to Labrador,
where they were absorbed into the Montagnais (mountaineers) people.
The Beothuk were one of the first Native American tribes to disappear.
Nothing remained of their culture. Table 3.2 lists other cultures that
were totally destroyed. Was it genocide—the “deliberate killing” of an
entire people? Or was it just an inevitable result of intercultural contact,
with new diseases brought unintentionally into a vulnerable, isolated
population?

TABLE 3.2
TRIBES EXTERMINATED: NORTH AMERICA 1530–1763

TRIBE REGION YEAR BY

LAST WHOM/WHAT
MEMBER
DIED
Calusa Florida 1530 Spanish/War
Massasoit New England 1633 Smallpox
Pequot New England 1638 English/War
Narragansett Rhode Island 1676 English/War
Powhatan Virginia 1705 English/War
Chitimacha Louisiana 1717 French/War
Natchez Mississippi 1731 French/War
Beothuk Newfoundland 1735 English/Disease
Susquehannock New York 1763 English/Disease

AN EARLY SOLUTION TO CULTURAL EXTERMINATION:

RESERVATIONS
Did all Indians have to die? Did their cultures have to disappear? Was
it a case of a technologically superior people conquering a primitive
 Indian-White Relations in North America: 1607-1851
29
band of savages? New England Puritans tried to save some parts of
tribal culture by confining Indians to a reservation on which European
Americans could not live. Indians could live on these lands set aside
from white settlements only if they converted to the white man’s
religion. So only certain kinds of natives were considered worth saving.
These were the “Praying Indians,” those natives who, because they
had converted to Christianity, were allowed to maintain their language,
their eating customs, and other non-religious traditions.
To protect Indians from exploitation, white settlement was prohibited
on the reserves. This experiment lasted only a brief time, however,
because the reservation land was taken from the Indians whenever it
proved valuable to white farmers. Then the native population was
simply driven farther west into the “wilderness.” Most of the Indians in
New England had disappeared by 1676, either killed by war and
disease, or forced off their land to new territory in the interior.

DISSENTING IN NEW ENGLAND

Race was not the most important factor in New England’s policy
toward Indians. The Puritans were acting according to their religious
principles, which they considered the key to life. If anyone refused to
accept or obey church doctrines, they would be driven out of the
commonwealth—this was true for whites as well as Indians.
Unbelievers and “troublemakers” such as Roger Williams and Anne
Hutchinson, who challenged the authority of church leaders, were sent
into exile by Puritan judges. Sometimes believing in the wrong
religion led to death. Two members of the Society of Friends (Quakers)
were hung by angry mobs simply because they entered the
Massachusetts Bay Colony.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE CATAWBA

One other colony adopted the reservation system. South Carolina
established a reserve in 1763 for the Catawbas, who received title to
fifteen square miles of land (144,000 acres) from King George III. In
South Carolina, the reservation idea—separating whites and Indians by
geography in order to save Indian culture—had somewhat better results
than it did in New England, depending on what is meant by save.
Indeed, the 1763 reservation continues to be occupied today by about
six hundred members of the Catawba tribe. Their culture and language,
however, have almost totally disappeared.
The first Catawba settled in what is now South Carolina about a
thousand years ago. Their first contact with Europeans came in the
1550s, when Spanish explorers, coming up from Florida, marched
30 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

through the area looking for gold and slaves. The Spanish never came
back after that first trip. English colonists arrived about one hundred
years later, and their way of life reduced the Indian population in the
region by 90 percent (from five thousand to five hundred) between
1650 and 1760. The English brought guns, iron tools, and an intense
desire for land, all of which helped destroy Catawba culture.
In the late 1750s a smallpox epidemic killed two-thirds of the
remaining Catawba. White settlers, immune to the worst effects of the
disease, simply took over the land owned by dying Indians. Fearing the
total loss of their property, Catawba leaders went to London and talked
with King George III. To prevent further violence in his colony and to
maintain the loyalty of his Indian subjects, the king gave them 144,000
acres along the Catawba River. In return, the Indians agreed to live with
their white neighbors as peacefully as possible.
The compromise worked for a while, mainly because the Indians had
some goods and services the whites wanted. Catawba women made and
sold traditional pottery highly praised by English customers; Catawba
men helped catch runaway slaves and return them to their owners. They
also sold deerskins to the local farmers. The Catawba sometimes rented
parcels of reservation land to plantation owners so that they could grow
more tobacco or indigo. Relations between whites and Indians
improved so much that during the American War for Independence
(1775–1783), the Catawbas supported the American cause against the
British. This gave the Indians a reputation for loyalty and friendship.
So, in gratitude, when the war ended the South Carolina government
allowed the Catawba to keep what remained of their reservation.
After a brief experiment in self-government, Catawba leaders sold the
reservation to the state in 1840. In exchange they were promised new
territory somewhere in western South Carolina as well as some cash—
but they received nothing, as the legislature refused to appropriate
funds for the purchase. Instead the state simply let whites take the
Indian land without payment. The Catawba were homeless for the next
decade, until the state returned 640 acres of their old reservation to
them. Shortly thereafter a new force entered Catawba life with the
arrival of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (Mormons). Within a matter of months, many Catawba had
converted to this faith and built a giant tabernacle. Native Americans
played a major role in Mormon theology; officially they were one of
the lost tribes of Israel and descendants of the chosen children of God.
Conversion to Mormonism did not resolve Indians’ problems with other
whites in the area. The church’s belief in polygamy (that a husband
could have more than one wife) was considered as unchristian to white
 Indian-White Relations in North America: 1607-1851
31
South Carolinians as the “pagan” traditions of the Indians. Whites saw
the Mormon Church and the new converts as children of the Devil,
which gave them further reason to avoid contact with these neighbors.
The fear that kept the communities isolated from each other helped the
small band of Indians retain some of their traditions, especially pottery
making and beadwork, and survive into the twenty-first century.

INDIANS IN THE NEW NATION

Unlike the Catawba, most Indians supported the British during the
American Revolution. George III’s government had promised them a
huge Indian Reserve—free from whites—between the Appalachian
Mountains and the Mississippi River when the war was over. The
Americans seemed to want to send the Indians west, but without the
promise of any land. After independence, however, the government of
George Washington adopted a policy of treating each Indian tribe, no
matter how small, as a sovereign nation, with all the rights of other
nation-states, including England and Russia.
The policy proved difficult and expensive to pursue. There were more
than two hundred Indian peoples living east of the Mississippi River
and some of them had fewer than five hundred members. Thus,
ambassadors had to be exchanged and treaties drawn with “nations”
that had fewer citizens than many of the smallest counties and towns in
the new nation.
Under this policy representatives of the United States government
and Native American nations negotiated more than 370 sovereign
treaties between 1781 and 1871, which were ratified by the Senate as
the Constitution demanded. But negotiating with each Indian people
separately created some major problems. Key was that the State
Department acted as if it had more important questions to deal with
than handling affairs with tiny and obscure Indian nations. So war or
displacement usually decided the Indian question, as the white
population expanded further and further toward the Mississippi River.

INDIAN REMOVAL
Congress was aware of the inattention the Indian question was
receiving. In 1824 it created the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
within the War Department to replace the State Department in handling
Native American relations. The bureau’s work was interrupted by the
election of President Andrew Jackson in 1828. A longtime hater of
Indians (he had killed several during his military career), he demanded
passage of the Indian Removal Act. Congress approved the bill in
1830. It was designed to move all eastern tribes to territory west of the
32 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Mississippi River. Indians were given three options: They could trade
their land in the East for land in the West; they could give up
membership in their tribes and become Americanized; or they could
fight.

INDIAN WARS IN THE 1830S

Three major wars broke out in the 1830s as Native Americans fought
to remain in their homelands east of the Mississippi. In 1832 Sauk and
Fox Indians in northern Illinois, led by Chief Black Hawk, refused to
move west to their new homeland in Iowa. The United States Army and
state militias in Illinois were called out by President Jackson to enforce
the law. The resulting Black Hawk War (1832–1833) ended when
hundreds of Indians, many of them women and children, were
slaughtered at the Battle of the Bad Axe River, south of La Crosse,
Wisconsin. Many of the victims had their heads smashed by
militiamen’s rifle butts. Fewer than 150 of the 1,000 Indians survived.
Black Hawk escaped and went to live with the Winnebago Indians, but
they turned him over to the Army and he was imprisoned in Virginia.
The remaining Indians were driven to Iowa. Twenty years later they
were removed again, this time to Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma),
where many descendents of the Sauk and Fox continue to live.

THE SEMINOLE WARS

The Seminoles in Florida fought a seven-year war (1835–1842)
against the United States. Hostilities broke out when Chief Osceola
(1800?–1839) and his followers refused to sign a removal treaty. Rather
than move west the Seminoles retreated into the Everglades and fought
against forty thousand U.S. troops. When the war ended nearly four
thousand Seminoles and fifteen hundred U.S. soldiers had been killed,
but several hundred Indians remained in the swamps. Some thirty-eight
hundred Seminoles agreed to emigrate to Oklahoma. The United States
removed its troops from Florida and did not pursue the Seminoles who
had disappeared into the swamps.
In 1845 Florida became a state, and ten years later the governor
launched the next Seminole War (1855–1858) to hunt down and kill or
remove the four hundred or so Seminoles remaining in the Everglades.
After several bitter battles the United States government settled the war
by giving the Indians some money to join the rest of their tribe in
Oklahoma. Still, a small band stayed in the swamps and made peace
only in 1934. The Seminole Wars were the only Indian wars lost by the
United States.
 Indian-White Relations in North America: 1607-1851
33
THE TRAIL OF TEARS
One of the bloodiest wars of removal took place in northern Georgia,
where the Cherokee fought bitterly for their homeland. At first the tribe
tried to work within the system. It protested the constitutionality of the
Removal Act all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which
decided Worcester v. Georgia (1832) in the Indians’ favor. Chief Justice
John Marshall held that Indian nations had the constitutional right to
remain independent nations within the United States and could not be
removed without their consent. President Jackson refused to enforce the
decision, however, and ordered the army to drive the Cherokee to the
West. Jackson’s failure to uphold the Supreme Court’s judgment had a
profound impact on Cherokee history, leading to the bloody “Trail of
Tears.” The U.S. Army drove the Indians out of their homes during the
winter and forced them on a nine-hundred-mile march to eastern
Oklahoma. Perhaps two thousand Indians died on the trail.

CHEROKEE CULTURE
The Cherokee were part of the Five Civilized Tribes, as whites
called them. They probably got this designation because a few of their
customs and beliefs seemed close to those of the Americans. They had
a constitution and a political system based on a “town” government,
which gave most power to local authorities. The Cherokee nation
contained dozens of independently governed towns, and the “nation”
was held together by language and religious values. A town consisted
of all the people who prayed together to one of many Cherokee gods.
No central organization existed beyond this local government, at least
before the 1760s. Each town had a council that made decisions
concerning relations with other Cherokee towns and neighboring
Indians. Council members decided important questions, including
where to plant crops, when to go to war, and when to repair religious
buildings. They also established tax systems.
The Cherokee concept of “law and order” was very different from the
European model. In disputes over property or personal injury, families
and clans (groups of families living in the same village) settled matters
themselves rather than going to a police officer. Even in cases of
murder, families—not government agents—administered justice.
Murder usually led to “blood revenge,” which gave the victim’s family
the right to kill the murderer.
The entire adult male population of a town, sometimes numbering in
the hundreds, attended council meetings, but only two groups
controlled the proceedings. These were the religious leaders (shaman)
and the “beloved men,” elderly males renowned for their wisdom.
34 The Changing Nature of Racial and Ethnic Conflict

Deliberation was calm and orderly, and the council was required to
reach a unanimous decision before any action could be taken. Debates
often lasted for days as the elders tried to persuade councilmen to
support their view. If consensus proved impossible, the group leading
the opposition was expected to withdraw from the meeting. They would
not be bound by the decision made by the council majority, but if they
refused to accept the verdict they would be expelled from the village.
By the 1760s several towns had organized a larger tribal council to
unify the Cherokee people in their battle against white expansion. Each
village sent a delegation of “headmen” to these council meetings. As
usual, any town could withdraw from the council if it disagreed with
the majority decision. With this custom of secession, unified resistance
by the Indians was impossible. One Cherokee leader, Sequoia (1760–
1843), recognized the problem. To mold Indian unity he invented an
alphabet in 1820 and used it to publish a newspaper advocating
government by majority decision, with no provision for withdrawal.
The minority would have to abide by the majority decision whether
they liked it or not. Sequoia helped draft the tribe’s constitution, which
was modeled after the United States Constitution of 1787.
Voters ratified Sequoia’s proposal and the Cherokee became the first
Native Americans to be ruled by a written constitution. The new
framework created a General Council that controlled all public lands
and property and conducted relations with the United States. Cherokee
territory was divided into eight districts, with elected representatives
from each district making up the General Council. A “principal chief,”
chosen by the Council, acted as executive and could veto Council
actions. The Council passed laws concerning road building, budgets,
and tax laws, and it also acted as a criminal court, handing out
punishment for horse stealing, murder, and other crimes. Council
members appointed judges to hear minor disputes and abolished the
tradition of blood revenge. Thus the traditional framework of village
government was replaced by a more centralized administration.
In their new homes in the West, the Cherokee and other displaced
tribes faced hostility from the Indians native to the region: the Osages,
Pawnees, Dakotas, Apaches, and others (called Indios barbaros, by the
Spanish). But the newcomers endured and some flourished. In
Oklahoma, the Cherokees established farms, plantations, schools, and
slavery. They governed themselves until the end of the Civil War, when
Congress mandated major changes in Indian policy. The Indian
Removal Act was very successful in achieving its goal. By the end of
the 1830s more than 95 percent of the Native Americans who had lived
east of the Mississippi River no longer lived there.