Flashback, May 1841: Emigrants Push Out on Oregon Trail

With the May 1841 departure from Independence, Mo., of a combined party of about 70 settlers—one half eventually branching off for California, the other towards the Pacific Northwest territory that gave this major thoroughfare its name—the Oregon Trail began a tide of migration that helped transform America into a transcontinental colossus from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

Much about this epic journey remains a matter of dispute, starting with its size, with historians offering emigrant estimates in the 1840s to the 1869 completion of the Transcontinental Railroad ranging from 50,000 to hundreds of thousands.

That vast overland migration was the result of “Oregon Fever,” a yearning to strike out for a new life in the West. It was fanned by a near-messianic belief that new lands could allow America to become, to use Thomas Jefferson’s coinage, “an empire of liberty.” “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free,” Henry David Thoreau would write.

This willingness to break loose from their old economic and political constraints led the emigrants to undertake an arduous 2,100-mile journey from the jumping-off points (e.g., Independence and St. Joseph, Mo.) to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. They took the main fur-trapping route to the Rockies, the Platte River Road, which was renamed the Oregon Trail in the 1840s.

The two main destinations for the overlanders were California and Oregon. Starting out on May 18, the California group, led by John Bidwell and John Burleson, linked up with Oregon-bound emigrants, spearheaded by Jesuit priests and mountain man Thomas “Broken Hand” Fitzpatrick.

The combined party split off at Soda Springs, Idaho, with Fitzpatrick guiding his contingent towards the Willamette Valley. By the time they reached Fort Hall in present-day Idaho, the emigrants had covered two-thirds the distance to their destination but only half the time. Ahead, beyond the Snake River, lay the Blue Mountains, which they could only scale with the help of ropes, pulleys and winches.

Despite these dangers, in the years before the California gold rush, Oregon tended to be preferred by these first travelers, driven powerfully by “sedulous advertising by missionaries, military explorers, traders, merchants, sailors, trappers, propagandists, and such publicists as Hall Kelley,” according to Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision, 1846. “[Senator Thomas Hart] Benton, [Senator Lewis] Linn, and their fellow expansionists had its history, geography, and statistics by heart — if attractively colored by their private fantasies. [President James Knox] Polk need only send to the Library of Congress for any information he might want.”

Tossed into the mix was good old-fashioned American exaggeration. In one stump speech cited by Robert F. Hine and John M. Faragher in The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), Peter H. Burnett delivered a recruiting pitch by no means untypical: “Gentlemen, they do say, that out in Oregon the pigs are running about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry.”

 Time, which might be expected to provide some critical historical perspective, has not markedly diminished this mixture of solid information and myth. Some aspects of the Oregon Trail continue to misconstrued, while others deserve to be better known:

*Indian attacks were not as common as believed. Though Indian attacks, even ones resulting in fatalities, did occur, more emigrants died in shooting accidents or wagon crashes.

*Overall, an estimated one-tenth of emigrants died on the overland passage. Common causes of disease on the trail were typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery (all products of poor sanitation), along with food poisoning, tick-generated "mountain fever" and death in childbirth, according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

*Federal land policy facilitated Native American displacement and lack of racial diversity in the territory. Although an initial 1842 plan by Senator Linn to encourage mass migration failed, it later formed the basis of the Donation Land Law of 1850. The egalitarian chief provision of the legislation—encouraging claims by citizens over the age of 18 to parcels in the territory—came with provisions excluding Native Americans, blacks, Hawaiians, and Asians from this land bounty. Moreover, Native Americans already on the land for thousands of years were forced to resettle through negotiated treaties or executive agreements with the United States.

* Oxen and mules, not horses, were the preferred beasts of burden. Although oxen and mules had their advocates, most travelers, despite the impression left by Hollywood westerns, found out soon enough that horses were at distinct disadvantages on the long trip. Their comparative swiftness could not compensate for what their use entailed: more feed, lighter loads, and susceptibility to injury and theft.

*The movement of settlers left environmental damage in its wake. Emigrants overgrazed grass tribes needed for their horses, depleted wild game, destroyed staple camas meadows, fouled drinking water, cleared trees and cliffs, carved passages through mountain ranges, and left still-visible ruts from the wagon trains. (See, for example, this 2016 Jennifer Billock article from Smithsonian and this Sarah Gilman piece from High Country News.)

The overland movement along the Oregon Trail has so etched itself into the American cultural consciousness (including in the accompanying image, the painting The Oregon Trail by Albert Bierstadt), that it is easy to lose sight of its even wider impact on the nation.

Years ago, a high school social studies teacher I knew impressed on students, when they were responding to essay questions about an event or movement, to consider factors centered around the acronym SPERM: social, political, economic, religious, and military. It’s not a bad way to think about all that followed when the impact of the Oregon Trail. So let’s consider each letter in turn:

*(S)ocial: The Oregon Trail and the larger movement west fostered among the emigrants a risk-taking, entrepreneurial energy that remains central to America’s wealth and power, but also a restlessness and rootlessness that led to what midcentury journalist and social critic Vance Packard called “a nation of strangers.” The distance back home was so vast and the dangers so numerous that emigrants could not simply go home if a farm or a marriage failed.

*(P)olitical: The two main parties of the time, the Democrats and Whigs, were initially divided about pushing on to Oregon. Democrats were more gung-ho while Whigs were somewhat fearful of the tensions this was creating with the other principal claimant to the territory, Great Britain. Polk’s campaign slogan, “54-40 or Fight” (a reference to 54 degrees, 40 minutes, the northern border that would effectively exclude Britain), demonstrated this jingoism. Fortunately, upon becoming President, he sensibly agreed, in the Oregon Treaty of 1846, to a border at the 49^th parallel (thus forestalling the possibility that the U.S. would go to war not just against Mexico to the south, but Britain, with all its naval power). Once admitted to the Union in 1859, Oregon provided a bulwark against the expansion of slavery.

*(E)conomic: The nation was still wobbly from the Panic of 1837 as the Oregon Trail migration began. “Oregon Fever” helped kick-start the economy, spur the social mobility of the emigrants, and provide a safety valve for tensions on the East Coast arising from a massive influx of Irish and German emigrants later in the decade. With much of the prime agricultural land already claimed by this time, more and more people were pouring into cities for further opportunity. Anti-immigrant sentiment in the antebellum period began to mount, but it might have reached unimaginable heights without the land in Oregon and out West to relieve the pressure.

*(R)eligious: Religious movements were crucial to fanning settler interest in the Western lands. The Belgian Jesuit missionary, Fr. Jean-Pierre de Smet, contributed his geographic and ethnographic expertise to subsequent waves of travelers. The Protestant missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman generated huge publicity by becoming the first white couple to cross the Rockies in a covered wagon, then helped drum up interest in pursuing the last 500-mile leg of the overland journey along the Snake River.

*(M)ilitary: The need to protect the lives of the emigrants and to provide for their material needs led the federal government to establish several outposts along the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s: Forts Kearny, Laramie, Caspar, Bridger, Hall, Boise, and Vancouver. In the years between the Mexican War and the Civil War, these outposts gave many Army veterans their only opportunity to stay active and rise in the ranks. The experience, even if not exactly comparable to what they had faced and would face East of the Mississippi when the Union was threatened, enabled them to command troops.

Other years would see greater movement towards the Pacific Northwest, including 1843 and 1846. But 1841 was when it all began in earnest. America would never be the same.

Quote of the Day (Poet Alex Posey, on the Feverish July Air)

“The air without has taken fever;

Fast I feel the beating of its pulse.

The leaves are twisted on the maple,

In the corn the autumn's premature;

The weary butterfly hangs waiting

For a breath to waft him thither at

The touch, but falls, like truth unheeded,

into dust-blown grass and hollyhocks.”— Creek Indian poet Alexander L. Posey (1873-1908), “July,” reprinted in The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey (1910)

I came across these verses in as random a manner as possible.

When I picked up the Library of America anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, literally the first page I opened contained the poem “July.” Right away, it appealed to me for several reasons:

*It was appropriate for this month;

*I could post this just as my area of the country, the Northeast, was about to embark on another heat wave; 

*The word “fever” in the first line struck me as a metaphor—not just for the hazy, hot and humid weather we get so much so much around here this time of year, but also for this overheated moment in America now with these three simultaneous crises: COVID-19, the recession, and the mass protests over racism and police brutality.

*But the American Poetry volume tipped me off to something more. In fact, Alex Posey—a poet I had never encountered before—deserves more attention now than he’s received in the century following the early death that tragically shortened his career.

Poet, journalist and political satirist, Posey aimed for a difficult balancing act: the integration of his concerns as a Creek Indian in Oklahoma with a traditional western education he received at the Bacone Indian University in Muskogee.

In the same month that the Supreme Court decided, in McGirt v. Oklahoma, that half of Oklahoma lies within a Native American reservation, Posey’s attempt to achieve recognition illustrates the dilemma of what aspects of tradition to draw upon in writing.  (It may have been especially difficult for Posey, the biracial son of a white man raised among the Native Americans and a Creek Indian mother.)

Posey died at age 34 in a boating accident, leaving a slender but promising body of work.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of John Quincy Adams, ‘Old Man Eloquent’)

July 11, 1767—John Quincy Adams, who like his father saw a lifetime of devotion to the young American republic culminate in a single, unhappy term as President, was born in in Braintree, Mass.

Adams may have left the most extraordinary ongoing glimpse into the achievement—as well as the physical and psychological health—of any President in the form of the diary he kept faithfully, beginning in 1779 at age twelve and continuing until his death almost 70 years later.

Anxiety, both about his own failures and those of his country, was expressed in splenetic rants that he wrote (or, in his late 70s, dictated, after a minor stroke) at the end of the day. Few people provoked him more than his successor in the White House, Andrew Jackson.

As his father did when he left Washington before the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson in 1801, Adams did not stick around to see the swearing-in of the man who defeated him in his re-election bid. Unlike his father, who reconciled with his old friend in retirement, Adams did not make peace with Jackson.

He could not draw on a reservoir of years of respect, affection and shared intellectual interests for Jackson, as John Adams could with Jefferson. Having endured four years of abuse from Jackson’s surrogates over accusations of a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay in the House of Representatives that won him the Presidency despite losing the popular vote, Adams then lost a re-election campaign barely rivaled for rancor in Presidential history.

Out of office, Adams stewed whenever Jackson won additional acclaim or honors. He refused to attend the ceremony in which his beloved Harvard bestowed an honorary degree on this “barbarian and savage who could scarcely spell his own name.” Jackson, he fumed, was so “ravenous of notoriety that he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory,” to the point that the President even permitted talk of his “constant diarrhea.”

Was Adams a sore loser? Sure. But much of his anger stemmed from genuine concern over the direction of the country set by Jackson and his followers.

During Adams’ post-Presidential years as a Congressman—the only former White House occupant to serve in the House of Representatives—he lent his prestige, as the son--and, therefore, one of the last link--to the leaders of the American Revolution, to opposing, sometimes single-handedly, “the Gag Rule,” a brazen attempt by Jacksonian Democrats to abridge freedom of petition by tabling any memorial touching in any way on slavery. Later, he opposed the admission of Texas to the Union and the Mexican-American War, deriding them as attempts to augment the power of the slave states.

Less well-known was his deep, lasting anger over Jackson’s treatment of Native Americans. Jackson had not only pushed the Cherokee tribe to leave their ancestral territory for new land west of the Mississippi, but had even defied a Supreme Court decision handed down by the revered John Marshall that he must honor the tribe’s rights. 

The climax for Adams may have come on June 30, 1841, in a morning visit from the Cherokee Chief John Ross and two others in his delegation. Adams, having refused appointment to chair the House Committee on Indian Affair, believed that this service would have resulted in “total impotence to render any useful service.” He could not help feeling alarmed at what he saw coming to pass, as he confided in his diary:

“The policy, from Washington to myself, of all the Presidents of the United States had been justice and kindness to the Indian tribes—to civilize and preserve them. With the Creeks and Cherokees it had been eminently successful. Its success was their misfortune. The States within whose borders their settlements were took the alarm, broke down all the treaties which had pledged the faith of the nation. Georgia extended her jurisdiction over them, took possession of their lands, houses, cattle, furniture, negroes, and drove them out from their own dwellings. All the Southern States supported Georgia in this utter prostration of faith and justice; and Andrew Jackson, by the simultaneous operation of fraudulent treaties and brutal force, consummated the work. The Florida War is one of the fruits of this policy, the conduct of which exhibits one (un)interrupted scene of the most profligate corruption. All resistance against this abomination is vain. It is among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement—but as His own time and by His own means.”

The pre-Jackson policy of the American government should not be treated as a nirvana. It smacked of paternalism, of the need to “civilize and preserve” the tribes. The first six American Presidents believed in an expansionist America where whites enjoyed priority.

But Adams believed that abrogation of treaty obligations represented a dangerous, irreversible step, out of keeping both with our adherence to law and to respecting the rights of other nations. United States Indian policy, Adams confided in his diary on another occasion, amounted to a “sickening mass of putrefaction.”

The President responsible for this “putrefaction” preached a militant form of nationalism that has made him a favorite of Steve Bannon, adviser to our current President. Consider that when weighing if this is the kind of “populism” desirable for America.

As he rose, again and again, in opposition to the depredations of Jacksonian Democrats, Adams was given a nickname: “Old Man Eloquent.” His diary reveals in full the intellectual commitment and moral passion—along with the frequent bouts of depression—that animated his commitment to serving the United States.

This Day in Western History (Sam Houston Becomes Cherokee Citizen)

October 21, 1829—Sam Houston—former Indian fighter, ex-governor of Tennessee, Presidential hopeful turned object of controversy and scandal—began the wilderness years of his public life by choosing to become a member of the Cherokee Nation.

Houston’s decision came at the age of 36, only one year older than Dante was when the poet described, in The Inferno, finding himself “within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” It followed the mysterious breakup of the soldier-politician's first marriage, and, in many ways, is the least documented period of his life.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to say that Houston joined the Cherokee only because he had hit a personal nadir. That would deny the bonds of respect and affection—not to mention the deep affinity—he felt for the Native-American nation since his teens. After all, the tribe had already taken him in—welcomed him—once before, when he felt most lost.

In 1809, Houston’s family was making a success of their move from Virginia to eastern Tennessee, but 15-year-old Sam—not unlike another towering figure on the national scene, Abraham Lincoln—was bored by chores. Unlike the future railsplitter, Houston lit out for Cherokee territory.

Taken in by Chief Oo-loo-te-ka ("He-Puts-the-Drum-Away"), the lanky teen was given the name Co-lon-neh, i.e. "Raven." He stayed with the Cherokee for another year and a half before returning to white civilization as a schoolteacher.

Andrew Jackson, Houston’s commander during the War of 1812, sensed possibilities in his protégé, and especially found useful his knowledge of Cherokee ways, enough so that “Old Hickory” helped land him a position as agent for the tribe. Houston’s rise through Tennessee politics followed, climaxing in becoming elected governor in 1827. If Jackson could make the White House, there seemed no reason why that path didn’t lay open to Houston, too.

In January 1829, Houston married 18-year-old Eliza Allen, a daughter in a prominent Tennessee family. By the spring, however, the couple had separated. Neither husband nor wife ever commented specifically on what drove them apart. Plenty of rumors swirled, however, including the following:

* Eliza was repulsed by Houston’s drunkenness;

* Eliza was in love with another man;

* Eliza was involuntarily repulsed by a seeping wound in Houston’s upper thigh, incurred 15 years before from an arrow at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. (This last rumor, the most interesting—and tragic—of the group, might, alas, be only an urban legend. A physician who examined Houston later claimed that the thigh wound had long since healed. What hadn’t healed was a shoulder wound, which had to be dressed nearly daily.)

The resulting hullabaloo led to Houston resigning from his office and heading out to Arkansas, where his old friend Chief Oo-loo-te-ka had relocated to be beyond the reach of white men. While visiting, Houston fell ill from malaria, then was treated with Indian medicine. In a real sense, then, he felt he was being healed physically as well as mentally.

It has been said that during this period, Houston’s alcoholism was so rampant that he was known among his adopted people as “big drunk” (he stood, according to various accounts, anywhere from six-foot-two to six-foot-six). Again, however, some perspective is in order.

The ex-politician was not doing nothing this whole time. Instead, he served as an ambassador for the Cherokee to whites. This might have been more important than ever to the tribe, since Jackson was now in the White House and making momentous decisions about members of the tribe still east of the Mississippi.

Those who didn’t know Houston in his teen years were now astonished to find him in Washington in Indian dress (such as the miniature accompanying this post), advocating for the Cherokee and denouncing corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “I am aware that in presenting myself as the advocate of the Indians and their rights, I shall stand very much alone,” he observed.

Moreover, he took as a wife Tiana Rogers, whose half-brother, Captain John, eventually succeeded Oo-loo-te-ka as chief. (Will Rogers, the beloved humorist, was Tiana’s nephew, three generations removed.)

What brought Houston back irrevocably to white civilization was what drove him away in the first place: controversy. In 1832, enraged by allegations of fraud by Congressman William Stanberry of Ohio, Houston got into a fight with him on Pennsylvania Avenue. Actually, it became more like a DC rumble, with Houston beating Stanbery with his hickory walking cane and the congressman retaliating by pointing his pistol at the chest of his big adversary. Luckily for Houston, Stanbery misfired.

Houston was arrested and tried before Congress for the attack. His defense lawyer, Francis Scott Key (yes, the “Star-Spangled Banner” composer), pleaded eloquently, as did Houston himself, but it was no use. The House voted him guilty and ordered him to pay a $500 fine.

Houston refused and, not wanting to have to deal with this issue anymore, decided to light out for another territory: Texas. There, a new life, San Jacinto—and his eventual destiny—awaited.

This Day in Presidential History (Washington Seeks Treaty Advice; Senate Punts)

August 22, 1789—For the second time in less than a month, the U.S. Senate managed to tick off George Washington. This time, however, the Father of His Country, barely able to contain his anger, set a precedent in how future Presidents would abide by the treaty provision of the Constitution.

As the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, Washington took with the utmost seriousness the document negotiated so painstakingly in Philadelphia. On this particular occasion, the clause about “advice and consent” came into play.

Washington was struggling with one of the most vexing problems of the young republic, one that would bedevil the United States for more than a century (and, some would argue, to this day): how to treat Native Americans.

The Treaty of Paris in 1783 had unleashed a trans-Appalachian wave of white settlers into lands occupied by Native-Americans—just as, ironically, the conclusion of the French and Indian War had encouraged American colonists to migrate west.

Washington approached the problem with a mixture of hard-headed realism and moral fervor.

He knew that a restless Native-American population within American territory or just outside its borders could serve as an ally of a hostile power—as had happened in the American Revolution, when he had felt compelled to order General John Sullivan to lead a detachment into upstate New York to eliminate Britain’s Indian confederates as a fighting force.

At the same time, Washington—along with the two other principal aides involved with Indian policy, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson—believed, as historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote in American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, that “Indian removal was incompatible with the republican values they cherished."

Washington studied that treaty clause again. It was rather terse, but clearly some form of early participation by the Senate was envisioned.

It indicated that the President had “Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.'' Maybe even a council of advisors from the group might be warranted. Such a group would help the President secure a treaty with southern Indians, as well as the backing of Congress for the venture.

So Washington strode into the Senate chamber, with the hefty Knox puffing behind and ready to offer technical details on the negotiations with the Creek Indians.

Though Washington sat in the presiding officer’s chair while Vice President John Adams read his message, that six-foot-two-inch frame—several inches larger than the average male size of the day—filled the room anyway. Maybe that impression was furthered because the image-conscious President came in carrying his sword—a not-so-subtle reminder that momentous matters of war and peace were at stake.

(The President, a theater buff, sure knew how to milk a moment--he had advertised his availability to lead the army early in the war by wearing his officer's uniform from the Virginia militia, and as the war concluded he had put out a potential officers' mutiny caused by congressional foot-dragging on pay by taking out his spots, noting that he was aging and losing his sight in the service of his country, reducing just about everyone assembled to helpless blubbering.)

I say the Senators were sweating bullets in that August heat because a) Washington, for all his undoubted greatness, had a well-deserved reputation for hauteur; and b) they knew that one of them had managed to get under his skin a few weeks before.

Just over two weeks previously, a Senator from Georgia had invoked the concept of senatorial courtesy for the first time, helping to reject the President’s appointment for a naval post in Savannah because it hadn’t been cleared with him first--and he resented the fellow. Washington had replied with characteristic iciness (“Permit me to submit to your consideration whether on occasions where the propriety of Nominations appear questionable to you, it would not be expedient to communicate that circumstance to me, and thereby avail yourselves of the information which led me to make them, and which I would with pleasure lay before you").

This time, the advice Washington sought related to seven questions. Considerate fellow that he was, he didn’t design them as open-ended questions (“What do you think about…?”) or even as those multiple-choice monstrosities that have given agita to several generations of SAT takers. No, these questions only required a yes or no. Nothing hard.

Finally, Adams finished reading. “Do you advise and consent?” he asked.

The 26 freshman Senators at the time sat in absolute silence. At last, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania—who, as financier of the American Revolution, had grown used to General Washington’s frequent (usually futile) requests for aid—whispered to home-state colleague William Maclay, according to the latter’s journal: “We will see who will venture to break silence first."

Maybe the Senators thought the President was going to use that sword on them. In any case, whether the items Adams read didn’t sink in or they decided to revert to old habits, the self-styled “world’s greatest deliberative body” indicated that it needed more time.

In short, it did what it would always do so reflexively over the next two centuries: it referred the matter to a committee.

Now the President acted in a way that evoked what some of those present might have recalled at the Constitutional Convention, when the President announced that someone had been careless about leaving notes around—i.e., exposing the delegates to leaks— or what just about all of them must have heard about from the Battle of Monmouth, when the Continental Army’s commander in chief had turned on his dilatory subordinate, Gen. Charles Lee, and, reliable reports indicated, "turned the air blue" with his language.

The President, Maclay observed in his journal, “started up in a violent fret. ‘This defeats every purpose of my coming here,’ were the first words that he said.”

As the first President, Washington became famous for establishing wise precedents. Would that the same could be said for Congress. The Senators began offering one contradictory motion after another.

Years later, Vice-President Adams’ son John Quincy Adams—himself appointed to the diplomatic service by Washington, before succeeding him and his father in the Oval Office—pondered the result in his diary:

When Washington left the Senate chamber he said he would be damned if he ever went there again. And ever since that time treaties have been negotiated by the executive before submitting them to the consideration of the Senate.

This Day in Presidential History (Washington, JQ Adams Meet Chickasaws at Philly White House)

July 11, 1794—As he celebrated his birthday, 27-year-old John Quincy Adams did not carry on like a party animal, the way people before and after him were wont to do. Instead, the future President of the United States received an impromptu lesson on how to conduct oneself in office from the current occupant, George Washington.

This date was not a special hinge moment in American history, if you want to know the truth. But more days than not are like that in the Presidency.

That’s not to say, though, that nothing much was going on. For students in American history, this day holds its own kind of interest, from these standpoints:

* Relations with Native Americans. The noontime meeting at the President’s House in Philadelphia between Washington and members of the Chickasaw tribe represented an important attempt by a longtime Indian fighter to resolve a problem that would plague virtually every Chief Executive for the next century—how to balance Indian rights and white encroachment.

* A study in Washington’s character. His actions on this day showed how “The Father of His Country”—a man who, it is generally believed, was sterile—had an eye for talented young men whom he could mentor. They also displayed why he was so careful to manage his appearance.

* The education of John Quincy Adams on requirements of higher office. The young man’s father, John Adams, had prepared him, with Puritan relentlessness, for the intellectual demands of public life. But Washington’s Vice President was not in a position where he could school him in how to act with self-discipline in affairs of high state. Washington was, and did.

* The paradoxes of cross-cultural goodwill and misunderstanding. Washington wanted to do everything he could to maintain peace with the Indians—who he knew, from service in the French and Indian War as well as in the American Revolution, inevitably became pawns in the conflicts among old European and new American powers. But a key symbolic moment at the meeting—the kind that Washington, with his passion for theater, normally executed flawlessly—turned out to be an occasion for head-scratching.

Back in 1755, Washington received an important lesson in asymmetrical warfare when he saw the perfectly trained British troops under the command of Gen. Edward Braddock ambushed on the Monongahela River by the French and their Indian allies. In 1779, now commander-in-chief of American forces in the revolution, he ordered one-quarter of his entire undermanned army, under John Sullivan and James Clinton, to carry out the largest military campaign ever mounted against native North Americans—specifically, Iroquois who either actively sided with the British, or were even neutral in the conflict.

But as the ultimate realist of the revolution, Washington believed in neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. If the new nation was to prosper, its people had to live in security with the estimated 75,000 Native Americans living on the other side of the Alleghenies—including the approximately 20,000 warriors among them. To this end, he hoped to make peace with the Indians.

In some ways, Washington had more room to maneuver here than there was on another delicate issue involving non-whites: slavery. The President and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, settled on a policy that treated the Indians as members of foreign nations, subject to treaties that would be maintained by the force of federal policy over the states.

The Chickasaws sought American help to ward off attacks made against them by the Creek Indians. The President was prepared to help any country that helped Americans, so he invited important Chickasaw dignitaries to meet with him in the President’s temporary mansion in the nation’s temporary capital of Philadelphia.

The President felt the effort to secure Chickasaw help was so necessary that he ignored a balky balk—as noted by biographer James Thomas Flexner, “the first injury he had in his long and dangerous career ever suffered.” He knew from past experience that Native Americans scorned lame warriors. So he determined to grit his false teeth and sit up straight.

Just as he was grateful to the Chickasaw for any peacemaking efforts, he also felt grateful to the young John Quincy Adams for supporting the administration at a time when it was being heavily attacked by the Democratic-Republicans. During the Revolution, Washington had learned how to spot and promote younger, able men such as Nathaniel Greene and Alexander Hamilton.

Sensing another such man, and knowing both his familiarity with Holland and fluency in the Dutch language (both of which the young man had learned while traveling with his diplomat father in the revolution), Washington appointed Adams minister to the Netherlands. He invited his new appointee first to dine, then to the welcoming ceremony for the Chickasaw the next day.

If you’re a young man, you’d think, your mind might run riot with booze and women. JQA wasn’t buying that—he’d leave those practices to brothers Charles and Thomas Bolyston Adams, both of whom would lead blighted lives because of their addictions.

So young Adams showed up for the luncheon. We owe to his diary (which he maintained assiduously for much of his long career, about as much as he maintained his penchants for morning walks and skinny-dipping in the Potomac) most of what we know about this event—including the consternation caused among the Chickasaw when the President passed along a peace pipe:

“These Indians appeared to be quite unused to it, and from their manner of going through it, looked as if they were submitting to a process in compliance with our custom.”

What was going on? Chickasaw tribal historian Richard Green has an excellent account of the event that outlines the clashing perspectives of the two would-be allies.

The Chickasaw, like most Native Americans, used clay or stone hand-held peace pipes. Washington must have really wanted to impress his visitors, because this one was of "East Indian" (Adams’ words) origin, made of leather and was 12 to 15 feet in length. Heck, they could practically have a hernia just trying to lift the thing!

You can imagine how the Chickasaw felt. Adams noted that their expressions reflected “novelty,” “frivolity,” a sense of the “ridiculous.”

The Americans mirrored the astonishment felt by their visitors, but on a different matter. Washington and Adams were facing a truly motley crew—a mix of full- and mixed-blood tribe members, some dressed in "coarse jackets and trowsers, and some in the uniform of the United States." (The visitors undoubtedly wanted to demonstrate loyalty to their hosts.) Some wore shirts, others none.

Washington made a brief speech with some specific offers thrown in to cement the friendship between the Americans and the Chickasaw:

* Arranging for accommodations in New York City if they wanted to continue their journey;

* Educating younger tribe members; and

* Defraying expenses “on a liberal scale” if they linked arms with the Americans against Spanish or British interlopers in the Northwest.

And, in a custom that continues to this day, Washington had gifts for his visitors: either $600 or $1,000 (that's $12,000 to $20,000 in today's money) to their chief, Piomingo; clothing and boots for everyone; and presents for families and for persons named by Piomingo but who were not present.

But this was the best: Each Chickasaw received $30 to use for purchases in Philadelphia stores. (Too bad Wanamakers wasn’t around then!)

The Chickasaw wanted something a bit more from the Americans—actual language spelling out treaty obligations. The President was happy to oblige. If only subsequent events were a match for his good intentions…

Earlier in his administration, Washington had to overcome attempts from within his own Cabinet, from Thomas Jefferson—reflecting trans-Allegheny frontiersmen—warning against launching land-fraud allegations against whites encroaching on Native-American land. The Georgia legislature sold 15 million acres to brazen speculators calling themselves the Yazoo Co. Unrest flared in the Northwest, with Washington eventually forced to send Gen. Anthony Wayne out to quell the tribes, which he did at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Washington groaned at what Indians could expect at the hands of his unscrupulous fellow countrymen: “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese wall will restrain Land jobbers and the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian country.” After his death, matters would grow far worse, when Jefferson would double the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, gaining an area filled with even more Native Americans, and Andrew Jackson would push the Cherokee west of the Mississippi.

One happy outgrowth of these days in Philadelphia, however, was Washington’s growing confidence in his new diplomat. When John Adams succeeded him three years later, Washington was pretty careful about not interfering with his successor, but he gave some advice that must have made Adams senior proud.

Don’t be afraid of charges of nepotism, Washington told John Adams: his son would “prove himself to be the ablest of all in the Diplomatic Corps.” And so it turned out to be, as John Quincy Adams was launched on a career that would make him America’s greatest Secretary of State—though not, unfortunately, a great President.

This Day in Canadian History (The British Ally With Tecumseh)

July 11, 1808—At Fort Amherstburg, the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, Francis Gore, reached out to one thousand Indian warriors and one hundred of their chiefs—careful not to launch them on the warpath against Americans, mind you, but urging them to stay “on your guard against any attempt that may be made by any enemy whatever to disturb the peace of your Country.”

Gore expected to see Tenskwatawa (The Prophet), a Shawnee who had sought to unite Indians—and thereby provoke American distrust and anger—by insisting that tribal land was held in common and therefore could not be sold to whites piecemeal, without the consent of all Indians. A short, ugly man whose life had been turned around by a mystical vision in which the “Master of Life” had urged him to lay aside the ways of the white man (e.g., alcohol, guns, iron cookware, and glass beads), The Prophet would have been a handful all by himself.

Instead, Gore met The Prophet’s older brother, Tecumseh, whose translated name, “Shooting Star,” gives only the most cursory idea of his actual—and potentially even greater—influence on the future shape of North America.

I came upon the Gore-Tecumseh meeting in The Invasion of Canada, 1812-1813, by Pierre Berton, the late Canadian journalist-historian whose books ought to be better known in the U.S.—especially for anyone who wants to understand our neighbors to the north.

The comparatively little I knew about the formidable Indian chief was gleaned from the outdoor spectacle Tecumseh!, which I saw about 20 years ago in Chillicothe, Ohio, with my oldest brother and my sister-in-law. After all this time, however, the details of his life had gotten a bit fuzzy. Berton’s narrative represented an excellent refresher course on his life, as well as on the War of 1812, a war with as much military and administrative mismanagement as any in American history.

Gore knew practically nil about Tecumseh, but after the meeting wrote that he found him to be “a very shrewd intelligent man.” And well Gore might think so, since, among all the chiefs gathered to listen to the white man, only Tecumseh was prepared to go to war with the Anglos to the south. He’d been doing so for the past quarter-century, as a matter of fact.

A good thing Tecumseh only had another five years to live—few Native-Americans (few Anglo-Americans, for that matter) combined tactical brilliance in battle with such a grand yet sensible overall strategic vision. It was his life’s mission to forge a confederation of Indians—a successor organization to Pontiac’s—that would oppose the whites from Upper Canada down to Florida and, if possible, win back their ancestral homelands.

As Gore assessed the situation in his province, he knew he would need the help of Tecumseh and his brother—sooner rather than later. In Upper Canada three out of five settlers were transplanted Americans. These weren’t ideologically driven emigrants, such as, say, Vietnam-era draft resisters—they tended to be economically motivated. Their allegiance was uncertain at best, downright suspect at worst. The British in Canada would need every one of Tecumseh’s highly motivated Indian allies not just in battle but to help bolster the thinly populated forts.

Lt. Gov. Gore was going all out to prepare for the worst. In the last year, in the wake of the U.S. outcry over the impressments of 6,000 men from American ships, he fully expected hostilities to break out soon. Over the next two years, he accomplished the following:

* he checked to make sure the Indians had enough rations
* he secured authority for militia units to serve outside their province in the event of war or insurrection
* he arranged for them to receive adequate provisions

Contrast Gore with what the Americans were doing south of their border—especially President Thomas Jefferson:

* Not wanting war, he signed the ruinous Embargo Act, which called for ceasing trade with any European power that interfered with American ships. It ruined American shipping without bringing either France or Britain to heel.
* Believing that small was beautiful, he embarked on a massive program of gunboat building instead of the larger, Federalist-backed vessels such as the U.S.S. Constitution. It was fine in theory, except that even in their own native, smaller waters, the firepower of the gunboats was no match against a frigate. (Irony of ironies: Jefferson did not believe adding slightly to the national debt, but very much did so when it came to his own affairs).
* Even when war came, in August 1812 (nearly four years after he left office), Jefferson wrote friend William Duane that that capturing Quebec would be “a mere matter of marching” for the Americans. This ignored the disastrous Richard Montgomery-Benedict Arnold assault on the city during the Revolution, not to mention what would happen when that small-is-beautiful militia force that Jefferson loved wouldn’t fight on foreign soil.

Most of all, Jefferson was unaware of how his own land policies were alienating the tribes. A secret message he sent Congress in 1803 called for more trading houses among the Indians, “leading them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, and civilization.” Note the condescension.

More hard-headed than Jefferson, Tecumseh was reluctant to trust the assurances of any white man—even one such as Gore. The Indian was ready to attack the Americans, Gore wrote to his superior, Sir James Craig, but only if “their father the king should be in earnest and appear in sufficient force they would hold fast by him.”

Tecumseh’s caution was understandable: the British had closed the gates on their Indian allies at Fort Miami after Anthony Wayne defeated them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Indian warrior’s worst fears would come true five years after his encounter with Gore at the Battle of the Thames, when British soldiers fled the battlefield, leaving Tecumseh and his braves to fight on alone.

They say Tecumseh died from an American bullet; I say it was from a heart broken by the realization that shiftless allies had doomed his dream of a confederation once again.

On the other hand, the British ended up much the better for their encounter with the chieftain. The presence of so many intimidating Indian warriors early in the conflict did much to ensure that Upper Canada would remain relatively quiescent until British forces--toghether with their distrustful allies--could decide the fate of the province on the battlefield. The American dream of annexing Canada was ended. Luckily, the British made enough mistakes later in the way to ensure that the young American republic would not be dismembered--until we almost did it to ourselves nearly 50 years later.

This Day in Native American History

February 21, 1828—The first newspaper in a Native American language, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published in New Echota, Georgia. The publication, which remains in existence today, was part of a wider movement among the five Southern or “Civilized” Tribes (Cherokees, Choctaws, Chicasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) toward white cultural patterns, including raising large cash crops on plantations and modeling their tribal government after the federal system.

The Phoenix used an 86-character Cherokee alphabet called the “Talking Leaves,” created by the Native American linguist Sequoyah and rapidly adopted because of its ease of use. The paper’s editor was twentysomething (accounts differ as to exact birthdate), Moravian-educated Gallegina (Buck) Oowatie, who took the name Elias Boudinot in tribute to the writer-poet-statesman who served as President of the United States under the Articles of Confederation.

Boudinot’s tragedy epitomized the larger tragedy of white-Native American relations during the 19th century. In 1829, he and friend John Ridge advocated the death penalty for any Indian giving away Cherokee land. Only three years later, however, worried about the threats posed by white encroachment, Boudinot reluctantly came to believe that relocation was the only reasonable alternative to tribal extermination. The decision opened a breach with Cherokee leader John Ross, who forced his resignation from the Phoenix.

In December 1835, 20 members of the “Treaty Party” met in Boudinot’s home and signed the Treaty of New Echota, relocating the tribe to Cherokee Nation (now Oklahoma). On June 22, 1839, Boudinot was working on a translation of the Bible with Ridge and Ridge’s father when fellow Cherokees decided to impose the penalty Boudinot had advocated a decade earlier for ceding tribal land. Taken completely by surprise, the three were stabbed and tomahawked by members of the John Ross faction.

More than two decades after Boudinot’s death, his brother, Stand Watie, became a brigadier general in the Confederate Army—the only Native-American to become a general in either the Confederate or Union Armies during the Civil War.