American Institutions And Their Influence

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To drive away their game is to deprive them of the means of
existence, as effectually as if the fields of our agriculturists
were stricken with barrenness; and they are reduced, like
famished wolves, to prowl through the forsaken woods in quest of
prey. Their instinctive love of their country attaches them to
the soil which gave them birth,[Footnote:

"The Indians," says Messrs. Clarke and Cass in their report to
congress, p. 15, "are attached to their country by the same
feelings which bind us to ours; and, besides, there are certain
superstitious notions connected with the alienation of what the
Great Spirit gave to their ancestors, which operate strongly upon
the tribes who have made few or no cessions, but which are
gradually weakened as our intercourse with them is extended. 'We
will not sell the spot which contains the bones of our fathers,'
is almost always the first answer to a proposition for a sale."

] even after it has ceased to yield anything but misery and
death. At length they are compelled to acquiesce, and to depart:
they follow the traces of the elk, the buffalo, and the beaver,
and are guided by those wild animals in the choice of their
future country. Properly speaking, therefore, it is not the
Europeans who drive away the native inhabitants of America; it is
famine which compels them to recede; a happy distinction, which
had escaped the casuists of former times, and for which we are
indebted to modern discovery.

It is impossible to conceive the extent of the sufferings which
attend these forced emigrations. They are undertaken by a people
already exhausted and reduced; and the countries to which the
new-comers betake themselves are inhabited by other tribes which
receive them with jealous hostility. Hunger is in the rear; war
awaits them, and misery besets them on all sides. In the hope of
escaping from such a host of enemies, they separate, and each
individual endeavors to procure the means of supporting his
existence in solitude and secresy, living in the immensity of the
desert like an outcast in civilized society. The social tie,
which distress had long since weakened, is then dissolved; they
have lost their country, and their people soon deserts them;
their very families are obliterated; the names they bore in
common are forgotten, their language perishes, and all the traces
of their origin disappear. Their nation has ceased to exist,
except in the recollection of the antiquaries of America and a
few of the learned of Europe.

I should be sorry to have my reader suppose that I am coloring
the picture too highly: I saw with my own eyes several of the
cases of misery which I have been describing; and I was the
witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray.

At the end of the year 1831, while I was on the left bank of the
Mississippi, at a place named by Europeans Memphis, there arrived
a numerous band of Choctaws (or Chactas, as they are called by
the French in Louisiana). These savages had left their country,
and were endeavoring to gain the right bank of the Mississippi,
where they hoped to find an asylum which had been promised them
by the American government. It was then in the middle of winter,
and the cold was unusually severe; the snow had frozen hard upon
the ground, and the river was drifting huge masses of ice. The
Indians had their families with them; and they brought in their
train the wounded and the sick, with children newly born, and old
men upon the verge of death. They possessed neither tents nor
wagons, but only their arms and some provisions. I saw them
embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn
spectacle fade from my remembrance. No cry, no sob was heard
among the assembled crowd: all were silent. Their calamities
were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The
Indians had all stepped into the bark which was to carry them
across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these
animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the
shore, they set up a dismal howl, and plunging all together into
the icy waters of the Mississippi, they swam after the boat.

The ejectment of the Indians very often takes place at the
present day, in a regular, and, as it were, a legal manner. When
the European population begins to approach the limit of the
desert inhabited by a savage tribe, the government of the United
States usually despatches envoys to them, who assemble the
Indians in a large plain, and having first eaten and drunk with
them, accost them in the following manner: "What have you to do
in the land of your fathers? Before long you must dig up their
bones in order to live. In what respect is the country you
inhabit better than another? Are there no woods, marshes, or
prairies, except where you dwell? And can you live nowhere but
under your own sun? Beyond those mountains which you see at the
horizon, beyond the lake which bounds your territory on the west,
there lie vast countries where beasts of chase are found in great
abundance; sell your land to us, and go to live happily in those
solitudes." After holding this language, they spread before the
eyes of the Indians fire-arms, woollen garments, kegs of brandy,
glass necklaces, bracelets of tinsel, ear-rings, and
looking-glasses.[Footnote:

See in the legislative documents of congress (Doc. 117), the
narrative of what takes place on these occasions. This curious
passage is from the abovementioned report, made to congress by
Messrs. Clarke and Cass, in February, 1829. Mr. Cass is now
secretary of war.

"The Indians," says the report, "reach the treaty-ground poor,
and almost naked. Large quantities of goods are taken there by
the traders, and are seen and examined by the Indians. The women
and children become importunate to have their wants supplied, and
their influence is soon exerted to induce a sale. Their
improvidence is habitual and unconquerable. The gratification of
his immediate wants and desires is the ruling passion of an
Indian: the expectation of future advantages seldom produces much
effect. The experience of the past is lost, and the prospects of
the future disregarded. It would be utterly hopeless to demand a
cession of land unless the means were at hand of gratifying their
immediate wants; and when their condition and circumstances are
fairly considered, it ought not to surprise us that they are so
anxious to relieve themselves."

] If, when they have beheld all these riches, they still
hesitate, it is insinuated that they have not the means of
refusing their required consent, and that the government itself
will not long have the power of protecting them in their rights.
What are they to do? Half convinced and half compelled, they go
to inhabit new deserts, where the importunate whites will not let
them remain ten years in tranquillity. In this manner do the
Americans obtain at a very low price whole provinces, which the
richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase.[Footnote:

On the 19th of May, 1830, Mr. Edward Everett affirmed before the
house of representatives, that the Americans had already acquired
by _treaty_, to the east and west of the Mississippi,
230,000,000 of acres. In 1808, the Osages gave up 48,000,000
acres for an annual payment of 1,000 dollars. In 1818, the
Quapaws yielded up 29,000,000 acres for 4,000 dollars. They
reserved for themselves a territory of 1,000,000 acres for a
hunting-ground. A solemn oath was taken that it should be
respected: but before long it was invaded like the rest.
Mr. Bell, in his "Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs,"
February 24th, 1830, has these words: "To pay an Indian tribe
what their ancient hunting-grounds are worth to them, after the
game is fled or destroyed, as a mode of appropriating wild lands
claimed by Indians, has been found more convenient, and certainly
it is more agreeable to the forms of justice, as well as more
merciful, than to assert the possession of them by the sword.
Thus the practice of buying Indian titles is but the substitute
which humanity and expediency have imposed, in place of the
sword, in arriving at the actual enjoyment of property claimed by
the right of discovery, and sanctioned by the natural superiority
allowed to the claims of civilized communities over those of
savage tribes. Up to the present time, so invariable has been
the operation of certain causes, first in diminishing the value
of forest lands to the Indians, and secondly in disposing them to
sell readily, that the plan of buying their right of occupancy
has never threatened to retard, in any perceptible degree, the
prosperity of any of the states." (Legislative documents, 21st
congress, No. 227, p. 6.)

]

These are great evils, and it must be added that they appear to
me to be irremediable. I believe that the Indian nations of
North America are doomed to perish: and that whenever the
Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific
ocean, that race of men will be no more.[Footnote:

This seems, indeed, to be the opinion of almost all the American
statesmen. "Judging of the future by the past," says Mr. Cass,
"we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their
numbers, and their eventual extinction, unless our border should
become stationary, and they be removed beyond it, or unless some
radical change should take place in the principles of our
intercourse with them, which it is easier to hope for than to
expect."

] The Indians had only the two alternatives of war or
civilization; in other words, they must either have destroyed the
Europeans or become their equals.

At the first settlement of the colonies they might have found it
possible, by uniting their forces, to deliver themselves from the
small bodies of strangers who landed on their
continent.[Footnote:

Among other warlike enterprises, there was one of the Wampanoags,
and other confederate tribes, under Metacom in 1675, against the
colonists of New England; the English were also engaged in war in
Virginia in 1622.

] They several times attempted to do it, and were on the point
of succeeding; but the disproportion of their resources, at the
present day, when compared with those of the whites, is too great
to allow such an enterprise to be thought of. Nevertheless,
there do arise from time to time among the Indians men of
penetration, who foresee the final destiny which awaits the
native population, and who exert themselves to unite all the
tribes in common hostility to the Europeans; but their efforts
are unavailing. Those tribes which are in the neighborhood of
the whites are too much weakened to offer an effectual
resistance; while the others, giving way to that childish
carelessness of the morrow which characterizes savage life, wait
for the near approach of danger before they prepare to meet it:
some are unable, the others are unwilling to exert themselves.

It is easy to foresee that the Indians will never conform to
civilisation; or that it will be too late, whenever they may be
inclined to make the experiment.

Civilisation is the result of long social process which takes
place in the same spot, and is handed down from one generation to
another, each one profiting by the experience of the last. Of
all nations, those submit to civilisation with the most
difficulty, which habitually live by the chase. Pastoral tribes,
indeed, often change their place of abode; but they follow in
regular order in their migrations, and often return again to
their old stations, while the dwelling of the hunter varies with
that of the animals he pursues.

Several attempts have been made to diffuse knowledge among the
Indians, without controlling their wandering propensities; by the
Jesuits in Canada, and by the puritans in New England;[Footnote:

See the "Histoire de la Nouvelle France," by Charlevoix, and the
work entitled "Lettres Edifiantes."

] but none of these endeavors were crowned by any lasting
success. Civilisation began in the cabin, but it soon retired to
expire in the woods; the great error of these legislators of the
Indians was their not understanding, that in order to succeed in
civilizing a people, it is first necessary to fix it; which
cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil: the
Indians ought in the first place to have been accustomed to
agriculture. But not only are they destitute of this
indispensable preliminary to civilisation, they would even have
great difficulty in acquiring it. Men who have once abandoned
themselves to the restless and adventurous life of the hunter,
feel an insurmountable disgust for the constant and regular labor
which tillage requires. We see this proved in the bosom of our
own society; but it is far more visible among peoples whose
partiality for the chase is a part of their natural character.

Independently of this general difficulty, there is another, which
applies peculiarly to the Indians; they consider labor not merely
as an evil, but as a disgrace; so that their pride prevents them
from becoming civilized, as much as their indolence.[Footnote:

"In all the tribes," says Volney, in his "Tableau des Etats
Unis," p. 423, "there still exists a generation of old warriors,
who cannot forbear, when they see their countrymen using the hoe,
from exclaiming against the degradation of ancient manners, and
asserting that the savages owe their decline to these
innovations: adding, that they have only to return to their
primitive habits, in order to recover their power and their
glory."

]

There is no Indian so wretched as not to retain, under his hut of
bark, a lofty idea of his personal worth; he considers the cares
of industry and labor as degrading occupations, he compares the
husbandman to the ox which traces the furrow; and even in our
most ingenious handicraft, he can see nothing but the labor of
slaves. Not that he is devoid of admiration for the power and
intellectual greatness of the whites; but although the result of
our efforts surprises him, he contemns the means by which we
obtain it; and while he acknowledges our ascendency, he still
believes in his superiority. War and hunting are the only
pursuits which appear to him worthy to be the occupations of a
man.[Footnote:

The following description occurs in an official document: "Until
a young man has been engaged with an enemy, and has performed
some acts of valor, he gains no consideration, but is regarded
nearly as a woman. In their great war-dances all the warriors in
succession strike the post, as it is called, and recount their
exploits. On these occasions their auditory consists of the
kinsmen, friends, and comrades of the narrator. The profound
impression which his discourse produces on them is manifested by
the silent attention it receives, and by the loud shouts which
hail its termination. The young man who finds himself at such a
meeting without anything to recount, is very unhappy; and
instances have sometimes occurred of young warriors whose
passions had been thus inflamed, quitting the war-dance suddenly,
and going off alone to seek for trophies which they might
exhibit, and adventures which they might be allowed to relate."

] The Indian, in the dreary solitude of his woods, cherishes the
same ideas, the same opinions, as the noble of the middle ages in
his castle, and he only requires to become a conqueror to
complete the resemblance; thus, however strange it may seem, it
is in the forests of the New World, and not among the Europeans
who people its coasts, that the ancient prejudices of Europe are
still in existence.

More than once, in the course of this work, I have endeavored to
explain the prodigious influence which the social condition
appears to exercise upon the laws and the manners of men; and I
beg to add a few words on the same subject. When I perceive the
resemblance which exists between the political institutions of
our ancestors, the Germans, and of the wandering tribes of North
America: between the customs described by Tacitus, and those of
which I have sometimes been a witness, I cannot help thinking
that the same cause has brought about the same results in both
hemispheres; and that in the midst of the apparent diversity of
human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be
discovered, from which all the others are derived. In what we
usually call the German institutions, then, I am inclined only to
perceive barbarian habits; and the opinions of savages, in what
we style feudal principles.

However strongly the vices and prejudices of the North American
Indians may be opposed to their becoming agricultural and
civilized, necessity sometimes obliges them to it. Several of
the southern nations, and among them the Cherokees and the
Creeks,[Footnote:

These nations are now swallowed up in the states of Georgia,
Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. There were formerly in the
south four great nations (remnants of which still exist), the
Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Cherokees. The
remnants of these four nations amounted, in 1830, to about 75,000
individuals. It is computed that there are now remaining in the
territory occupied or claimed by the Anglo-American Union about
300,000 Indians. (See proceedings of the Indian board in the
city of New York.) The official documents supplied to congress
make the number amount to 313,130. The reader who is curious to
know the names and numerical strength of all the tribes which
inhabit the Anglo-American territory, should consult the
documents I refer to. (Legislative Documents, 28th congress,
No. 117, pp. 90-105.)

] were surrounded by Europeans, who had landed on the shores of
the Atlantic, and who, either descending the Ohio or proceeding
up the Mississippi, arrived simultaneously upon their borders.
These tribes have not been driven from place to place, like their
northern brethren; but they have been gradually enclosed within
narrow limits, like the game within the thicket before the
huntsmen plunge into the interior. The Indians, who were thus
placed between civilisation and death, found themselves obliged
to live by ignominious labor like the whites. They took to
agriculture, and without entirely forsaking their old habits or
manners, sacrificed only as much as was necessary to their
existence.

The Cherokees went further; they created a written language;
established a permanent form of government; and as everything
proceeds rapidly in the New World, before they had all of them
clothes, they set up a newspaper.[Footnote:

I brought back with me to France, one or two copies of this
singular publication.

]

The growth of European habits has been remarkably accelerated
among these Indians by the mixed race which has sprung
up.[Footnote:

See in the report of the committee on Indian affairs, 21st
congress, No. 227, p. 23, the reasons for the multiplication of
Indians of mixed blood among the Cherokees. The principal cause
dates from the war of independence. Many Anglo-Americans of
Georgia, having taken the side of England, were obliged to
retreat among the Indians where they married.

] Deriving intelligence from the father's side, without entirely
losing the savage customs of the mother, the half-blood forms the
natural link between civilisation and barbarism. Wherever this
race has multiplied, the savage state has become modified, and a
great change has taken place in the manners of the
people.[Footnote:

Unhappily the mixed race has been less numerous and less
influential in North America than in any other country. The
American continent was peopled by two great nations of Europe,
the French and the English. The former were not slow in
connecting themselves with the daughters of the natives; but
there was an unfortunate affinity between the Indian character
and their own: instead of giving the tastes and habits of
civilized life to the savages, the French too often grew
passionately fond of the state of wild freedom they found them
in. They became the most dangerous of the inhabitants of the
desert, and won the friendship of the Indian by exaggerating his
vices and his virtues. M. de Senonville, the governor of Canada,
wrote thus to Louis XIV., in 1685: "It has long been believed
that in order to civilize the savages we ought to draw them
nearer to us, but there is every reason to suppose we have been
mistaken. Those which have been brought into contact with us
have not become French, and the French who have lived among them
are changed into savages, affecting to live and dress like them."
(History of New France, by Charlevoix, vol. ii., p. 345). The
Englishman, on the contrary, continuing obstinately attached to
the customs and the most insignificant habits of his forefathers,
has remained in the midst of the American solitudes just what he
was in the bosom of European cities; he would not allow of any
communication with savages whom he despised, and avoided with
care the union of his race with theirs. Thus, while the French
exercised no salutary influence over the Indians, the English
have always remained alien from them.

]

The success of the Cherokees proves that the Indians are capable
of civilisation, but it does not prove that they will succeed in
it. The difficulty which the Indians find in submitting to
civilisation proceeds from the influence of a general cause,
which it is almost impossible for them to escape. An attentive
survey of history demonstrates that, in general, barbarous
nations have raised themselves to civilisation by degrees, and by
their own efforts. Whenever they derived knowledge from a
foreign people, they stood toward it in the relation of
conquerors, not of a conquered nation. When the conquered nation
is enlightened, and the conquerors are half savage, as in the
case of the invasion of Rome by the northern nations, or that of
China by the Moguls, the power which victory bestows upon the
barbarian is sufficient to keep up his importance among civilized
men, and permit him to rank as their equal, until he becomes
their rival: the one has might on his side, the other has
intelligence; the former admires the knowledge and the arts of
the conquered, the latter envies the power of the conquerors.
The barbarians at length admit civilized man into their palaces,
and he in turn opens his schools to the barbarians. But when the
side on which the physical force lies, also possesses an
intellectual preponderance, the conquered party seldom becomes
civilized; it retreats, or is destroyed. It may therefore be
said, in a general way, that savages go forth in arms to seek
knowledge, but that they do not receive it when it comes to them.

If the Indian tribes which now inhabit the heart of the continent
could summon up energy enough to attempt to civilize themselves,
they might possibly succeed. Superior already to the barbarous
nations which surround them, they would gradually gain strength
and experience; and when the Europeans should appear upon their
borders, they would be in a state, if not to maintain their
independence, at least to assert their right to the soil, and to
incorporate themselves with the conquerors. But it is the
misfortune of Indians to be brought into contact with a civilized
people, which is also (it may be owned) the most avaricious
nation on the globe, while they are still semi-barbarian: to find
despots in their instructers, and to receive knowledge from the
hand of oppression. Living in the freedom of the woods, the
North American Indian was destitute, but he had no feeling of
inferiority toward any one; as soon, however, as he desires to
penetrate into the social scale of the whites, he takes the
lowest rank in society, for he enters ignorant and poor within
the pale of science and wealth. After having led a life of
agitation, beset with evils and dangers, but at the same time
filled with proud emotions,[Footnote:

There is in the adventurous life of the hunter a certain
irresistible charm which seizes the heart of man, and carries him
away in spite of reason and experience. This is plainly shown by
the memoirs of Tanner. Tanner is a European who was carried
away at the age of six by the Indians, and has remained thirty
years with them in the woods. Nothing can be conceived more
appalling than the miseries which he describes. He tells us of
tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their
own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes
wandering at random amid the ice and snow and desolate solitudes
of Canada. Hunger and cold pursue them; every day their life is
in jeopardy. Among these men manners have lost their empire,
traditions are without power. They become more and more savage.
Tanner shared in all these miseries; he was aware of his European
origin; he was not kept away from the whites by force; on the
contrary, he came every year to trade with them, entered their
dwellings, and saw their enjoyments; he knew that whenever he
chose to return to civilized life, he was perfectly able to do
so--and he remained thirty years in the deserts. When he came to
civilized society, he declared that the rude existence which he
described had a secret charm for him which he was unable to
define: he returned to it again and again: at length he abandoned
it with poignant regret; and when he was at length fixed among
the whites, several of his children refused to share his tranquil
and easy situation. I saw Tanner myself at the lower end of Lake
Superior; he seemed to be more like a savage than a civilized
being. His book is written without either taste or order; but he
gives, even unconsciously, a lively picture of the prejudices,
the passions, vices, and, above all, of the destitution in which
he lived.