French and Indian Wars

“ To precipitate a conflict by striking the Indians unnecessarily would in the unprotected condition of the settlers have been a crime, while to let the Indians escape to carry on in unbroken force an Indian warfare would have been worse. ”

“ It is also a fact that most of the Indian wars grew, not from any desire of the Government to disturb the Indians in the territorial possessions guaranteed to them, but from the restless and unscrupulous greed of frontiersmen who pushed their settlements and ventures into the Indian country, provoked conflicts with the Indians and then called for the protection of the Government against the resisting and retaliating Indians, thus involving it in the hostilities which they themselves had begun. ”

“ In America the Indians had been employed as allies upon both sides, and thus encouraged in their hideous deeds of massacre and torture. Hence there had grown an ever-increasing bitterness between the French in Canada and the English colonists along the Atlantic coasts, and this finally led to the momentous French and Indian war, which, contrary to the course of the earlier contests, originated in America and spread thence to Europe. ”

“ Even the trade with the Indians living a thousand miles inland was changed in favour of the British and against the French, as all the guns and knives and beads and everything else that the white man offered to the Indian in exchange for his furs had to come across the sea, which was just like an enemy's country to every French ship, but just like her own to every British one. ”

“ It is a part of Canada's past which few French writers tell and all Canadians would fain blot out, but which the government records prove beyond dispute. Indian warfare is not a thing of grandeur at its best, but when it degenerates into the braining of children, the bayoneting of women, the mutilation of old men, it is a horror without parallel; and the amazing thing is that the white men, who painted themselves as Indians and helped to wage this war, were so sure they were doing God's work that they used to kneel and pray before beginning the butchery. ”

“ No one will be astonished that a war ensued which cost the government thirty million dollars, and carried conflagration and death to the border settlements. During the spring and summer of 1865, no less than eight thousand troops were withdrawn from the effective force engaged in suppressing the Rebellion, to meet this Indian war. The result of the year's campaign satisfied all reasonable men that war with Indians was useless and expensive. ”

“ We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them." Although it was the tendency of military control to provoke Indian wars, the army was near the truth in its notion that Indians and whites could not live together. ”

“ The assault was made in ground comparatively open—a tract of pine-woods, where the trees grew thin and straggling—so that the Indians had in reality no great advantage either from position or intrenchment. Neither has it been proved that they were greatly superior in numbers to the troops they destroyed—not more than two to one; and this proportion in most Indian wars has been considered by their white antagonists as only “fair odds.” ”

“ When we fight Indians, they fight too, and their fighting is apt to be, in proportion to their numbers, much more successful than ours. In the Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1868, there is an estimate of the expenditure of some late Indian wars, from which we learn that it has cost the United States Government on an average one million of dollars, and the lives of twenty-five white men to kill an Indian. ”

“ Such a force would drive all the Indians between the Yellowstone and the British line to their agencies, with little, if any, loss of life. If the humanitarians would end the war with the least possible shedding of blood, this is the way to do it. When such a display of force is made as makes resistance hopeless—and the Indian will be quick to see it—there will be an end of Indian wars and we may begin the work of civilization in earnest. ”

“ The Indian wars under the Government of the United States are stated to have numbered more than forty and to have cost the lives of about nineteen thousand white men, women and children, including about five thousand killed in individual encounters of which history takes no note and of thirty thousand Indians, including eighty-five hundred killed in personal encounters. ”

“ The men who were the strongest advocates of the scheme generally wanted the Indians’ property—the one main cause back of all Indian wars. From the warlike Apaches to the peaceful Nez Perces, all the tribes of the plains were hunted from place to place; then the government resorted to peace negotiations, but always with an army at hand to coerce. Once disarmed and helpless, they were to be taken under military guard to the Indian Territory. ”

“ The French and the English, bent upon stirring up antagonism to the growing young nation, had their agents persistently at work awakening Indian hostility, and, indeed, it is probable that had this not been the case, the rough and lawless character of the American pioneers, and their entire indifference to the rights of the Indians, whom they were bent on displacing, would have furnished sufficient cause for conflict. ”

“ The Indians were plyed with gifts and flattered by the French, so that, in the fierce struggle for the possession of America, the red warriors sided, for the most part, with those who held dominion over Canada and the Great Lakes. The English won the war, and thus the wilderness beyond the Allegheny mountains, over which France had claimed sovereignty, passed into the hands of her rival, who, with a force of but five or six hundred men, expected to keep it secure. ”

“ It is called the French and Indian War, because there were many Indians on the side of the French. There were some on the side of the English, also. Indians are very savage and cruel in their way of fighting, as you already know. I shall have to tell you one instance of their love of bloodshed. [114] One of the English forts, called Fort William Henry, which stood at the southern end of Lake George, had to surrender to the French, and its soldiers were obliged to march out and give up their guns. ”

“ It is evident that these very liberal rewards must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians, in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry against them. ”

“ In his efforts to conciliate the native tribes, he encroached on the territory of the active emissaries of the English, as competitors of native alliance, and thus the Indian became a shuttle in the loom of primitive politics between the French [Pg 425] and the English. The Indians were incited to lure the French into the interior by false representations, and straightway to massacre them. To question their statements, meant unfriendliness, to trust them, meant death. Abundant trouble was in store for the French governor in the immediate future. ”

“ Bargains have been broken and treaties violated, in almost every instance, first by the white man. The true history of almost every Indian war (so called) has been begun by the violence or provoked by the faithlessness of the white man. ”

“ Nor can the civil population be trusted to keep arms, much less to{37} manufacture them. Much fuss has been made over the Indians having been allowed to participate in the European War. The Indians have gone mad over the incident, as if that were the greatest boon that could be conferred on them. The truth is that the step was actuated by and taken purely in British interests. Without the Indian contingent Great Britain could not send a decent expeditionary force to France. The whole of the white army could not be removed from India. ”

“ Undoubtedly the Indians have had a great many provocations, but, so far as restraint through fear is concerned, they have been subjected to very little of this very necessary discipline. Large bands of armed Indians have been able to keep brave but small detachments of United States troops within small camps or forts, to isolate them and taunt them for days in succession, to steal cattle, murder settlers, desolate the country, all because they had contempt for an army which was so small that it never could oppose more than a handful to any Indian raid which might suddenly be made. ”

“ The land was already held by powerful Indian tribes and confederacies, who waged war after war, of the most ferocious and bloody character, against the men of the border, in the effort to avert their inevitable doom, or at least to stem for the time being the invasion of the swelling tide of white settlement. At the present time, when an Indian uprising is a matter chiefly of annoyance, and dangerous only to scattered, outlying settlers, it is difficult to realize the formidable nature of the savage Indian wars waged at the end of the last and the beginning of the present centuries. ”

“ White men—some of them not even citizens of the United States—in violation of law enter the Indian reservation, steal the Indians’ ponies, drive off their cattle, shoot down a few of the Indians for resisting them, or perhaps for the mere fun of the thing. The Indians, maddened by the wrongs inflicted upon them, go on the war-path. ”

“ On one side the white man went armed to the field or the prayer-meeting, shooting an Indian on sight as he would a panther; on the other, a foe whose wife did the chores and hoed the scattering crops while he made war and extermination his joy by night and his prayer and life-long purpose by day.
Finally, however, the victory came sluggishly to the brave and deserving. One thousand Indians were killed at one pop, and their wigwams were burned. ”

“ We have conquered them, on the field, not to usurp territory, but to place them in a condition to observe how much more their interests and permanent prosperity would be, and have ever been, promoted by the plough than the sword. And there has been a prompt recurrence, at every mutation from war to peace, punctually, to that fine sentiment embraced in the first article of the first treaty ever made between the American government and the Indian tribes, namely, that all offences and animosities "shall be mutually forgiven, and buried in deep oblivion, and never more be had in remembrance." ”

“ The fact is, however, that this condition of things is one unavoidably growing out of the clashing of adverse interests—the Indians being anxious to check, we to extend our dominion and power as a people; and the causes existing now, were in being nearly a century ago, and will, in all probability, continue until all vestige of Indian existence shall have passed utterly away. ”

“ They may settle about the reservation, and we may not be able to prevent their committing some wrong. If they should commit wrong on the Indians, we fear you would commit some wrong against them in retaliation. Then the white people and the Indians might have a great war. There are great numbers of white people, and we fear they would exterminate the Indian. This we wish to prevent. Our hearts are with the Indians, and, as law-makers, we wish to protect them. ”

“ The Western Indians have no hummocks or everglades to fight among, but they have their boundless prairies to weary an army in, and the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains to retreat to. Should a majority of those powerful nations coalesce in defence against one common enemy, it would be the worst Indian war—the most costly in blood and treasure that the national government has ever entered into. The coalition tribes could bring two hundred and fifty thousand warriors against any hostile force, and I know I am greatly within the limits of truth in assigning that number to them. ”

“ Uprisings and massacres among Indians in her Majesty's dominions are seldom, if ever, to be chronicled. Many of our Indian wars will remain a blot on the page of impartial history, superinduced, as they were, by wanton murder or the covet of lands held by them by sacred treaties, which should have been as sacredly inviolate. Followed by decimation of tribes by toleration of the whisky trade and the conveyance of loathsome disease. The climate of the island was much more pleasant than expected. ”

“ While we bear any cool premeditated acts of Indian hostility with that crouching base behaviour, such passive conduct will serve only to tempt the Indians to advance in their favourite science of blood, and commence a general war. ”

“ In the open plains the Indian raids were terrible enough, but the horrors of uncertainty and ignorance which enveloped the settlers in the forests might well cause the stoutest heart to quail when once it became known that the Indians had become their enemies, and that there was another enemy stirring up the strife, and bribing the fierce and greedy savages to carry desolation and death into the settlements of the English colonists. ”

“ Much the greatest loss, both to Indians and whites, was caused by this unending personal warfare. Every hunter, almost every settler, was always in imminent danger of Indian attack, and in return was ever ready, either alone or with one or two companions, to make excursions against the tribes for scalps and horses. ”