The American West Read online

  James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (2002)

  Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972)

  Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico (1991)

  Miguel León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (1962; rev. ed., 1992)

  Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (2009)

  Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2013)

  Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (1990)

  Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533–1960 (1962)

  Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (1998)

  David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992)

  2

  Contest of Cultures

  The first visit went smoothly, at least in the opinion of those whose recollections survived. In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano, a gentleman of Florence sailing for the French, reconnoitered the Atlantic coast from Florida in the south to Cape Breton Island in the north. Curious locals paddled out to his ship anchored in a fine harbor at 30 degrees latitude. The greeters looked as fetching as their bay, an inlet that over time would acquire their name—Narragansett. “These are the most handsome people,” wrote Verrazzano, “of bronze color, some inclining to white, others to tawny color; the profile sharp, the hair long and black and they give great attention to its care; the eyes are black and alert, and their bearing is sweet and gentle, much in the manner of the olden days.” The Narragansetts conjured visions of Eden. With their gorgeous grins and winning shipside manners, they seemed refugees from a lost paradise.1

  Verrazzano’s mood shifted the farther north he drifted. Along the coast of Maine, the crew of the Dauphine encountered natives of a different sort. Instead of canoeing out to welcome the ship, the Micmacs kept their distance. They fired arrows at a shore landing party and then signaled their desire to trade for knives, fishhooks, and edged metal. Their wary acquisitiveness marked them as troublesome “mala gente” to Verrazzano, who preferred his Indians smiling and pristine.

  Transatlantic commerce and violence had already reached these Indian people. Even before Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean, cod-fishing ships from ports in England, France, Spain, and Portugal were plying the abundant waters of the Grand Banks. The crews met and traded with natives along the coast. They opened a market for European goods; they exchanged bodily fluids and the diseases contained therein; and they laughed, dickered, and squabbled. By the time Verrazzano arrived, the Micmacs had devised strategies to receive foreign technologies while rejecting the proximity of actual foreigners. Far from timeless savages, noble or otherwise, the Micmacs were experienced traders and diplomats. They set the terms for contact. They were more accustomed to the New World than Verrazzano.

  Native people of the Northeast. From Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages du sieur de Champlain . . . (Paris, 1613). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Verrazzano’s two encounters underscore key features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonization in North America. First, the meetings illustrated the diversity of native and European peoples and how this diversity shaped their experiences with one another. North America subverted monolithic identities, eroded grand theories, and disrupted entrenched patterns. The fact of multiplicity places a burden on students of this period to absorb a crazy quilt of names, relationships, and storylines. Details ruled early modern North America.

  A second key point involves timing. Different groups met each other at different times and under different circumstances. This may seem obvious, but timing tipped power relations and shaped colonial attitudes. For example, Indians living farther from the coast had more time to figure out how to best take advantage of European trade goods and political alliances. Contagious diseases swamped some coastal groups, decimating populations before they could react. But even this pattern had exceptions. The Narragansetts, for instance, avoided the epidemics that would level some of their New England neighbors. They emerged as a political force in the region despite their early encounters with explorers and their seaside living quarters.

  Timing also affected the colonial projects of European nations. Latecomers to the scramble for wealth and territories, the English came to North America uncertain of their prowess as colonizers. They stole maps from the French and modeled their early efforts on the conquistadores, all the while dismissing their Christian rivals as unscrupulous barbarians. Yet, even though they borrowed and copied, because they arrived late, the English hit the ground with a novel and idiosyncratic set of troopers. Religious and economic upheaval prompted middling families and unemployed workers to journey to New England and Virginia, where they became farmers and indentured servants. Land, not trade, motivated many of these colonists, and unlike the Spanish and French, most English refused to intermarry (or even interact) with Native Americans.

  Timing and diversity carved the frontiers of North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Groups disembarked and disappeared; they grew powerful and lost everything; they mingled genes and built fences. Seen from the fringes, the era was a model of inconsistency.

  . . .

  Ten years after the Micmacs and Verrazzano met—while Cabeza de Vaca wandered among the tribes of the Gulf coast—the Indians of the Saint Lawrence valley marveled at two amazing ships sailing up their river. Jacques Cartier commanded the vessels. He represented a king, Francis I of France, itching to compete with imperial Spain. Cartier entered the river (today’s Saint Lawrence) hoping to find a spectacular exit. He sought a Northwest Passage to India, a continental through-way that would finally complete Columbus’s vision and give France claims to lands “where it is said that he should find great quantities of gold.” When he asked the natives the name of the country through which he passed, they answered with a word that sounded like “Canada” to him. Who knows what they actually meant.2

  When Cartier landed upriver, at least a thousand Indians escorted him down a well-worn road to the village of Hochelaga, through what Cartier described as “land cultivated and beautiful, large fields full of the corn of the country.” The town was “circular and enclosed by timbers,” he wrote, with “galleries with ladders to mount to them, where stones are kept for protection and defense.” The fortifications, a costly investment in labor and material resources, symbolized the prominence of warfare in the villagers’ lives. These people, who spoke a language known as Iroquoian, fought wars of retribution with rival groups in the Northeast, most of whom spoke in a different tongue—Algonquian. These long-held animosities would expand and intensify in the colonial period. Extreme violence, including scalping and torture, happened on American frontiers, but these acts and the wars that inspired them were older than the frontiers.3

  “Some fifty houses” composed Hochelaga, Cartier observed, each “fifty or more paces long and twelve to fifteen wide, made of timbers and covered, roof and sides, by large pieces of bark and rind of trees.” These were the famous longhouses. “Inside,” Cartier continued, “are a number of rooms and chambers and in the center of the house is a large room or space upon the ground, where they make their fire and live together, the men thereafter retiring with their wives to private rooms.” Like the Pueblos, these people traced their ancestry through their mothers. A communal clan, headed by a clan mother, inhabited a longhouse. When they married, men left the longhouses of their mothers to reside in the longhouses of their wives.4

  A fortified native town under attack by Europeans. From Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale . . . (Paris, 1632). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University.

  Women controlled domestic and village space. The women “are much respected,” a French priest wrote some years later. “The Elders decided no important affair without their advice.” Men took charge of the realm outside the village and the longhouse. They hunted, fought wars, traded, and engaged in diplomacy. Men brought meat back for their sisters and mothers, not their wives, and the most important male figures in the lives of children were maternal uncles, not fathers. Most chiefs were men, but their succession, wrote another missionary, “is continued though the women, so that at the death of a chief, it is not his own, but his sister’s son who succeeds him, or, in default of which, his nearest relation in the female line.”5

  Gender differences fascinated Cartier and the European chroniclers who followed him. Like the Europeans, native groups transformed biological sexual differences into social and cultural gender identities and roles. The designations male and female leaked into the realms of politics and property. They even marked the land as forest (male) and clearing (female). Europeans elaborated on sex differences as well, but they spun biology into culture differently. Men, for example, worked and owned agricultural plots back home. Gender, therefore, provided a common ground and a point of departure for Indians and colonists, which explains why authors wrote so much about marriage, sex, childbirth, and the gender division of labor, as well as a small number of transgender natives who combined gender roles.

  The residents of Hochelaga greet Jacques Cartier and his men. From Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Terzo volume delle nauigationi et viaggi . . . (Venice, 1556). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Profit tantalized explorers even more. Like sex, trade brought humans together on the frontiers even as material exchanges revealed cultural gaps and misunderstandings. Cartier provided a detailed description of the Indians’ enthusiasm for trading. “The savages showed marvelous great pleasure in possessing and obtaining iron wares and other commodities,” he noted. Indians quickly perceived the many jobs—from mundane tasks like butchering and hide scraping to ceremonial uses like diplomatic gifts and burial tokens—that European manufactures might perform. Equally observant, Cartier spotted the pieces of Indian wardrobe he desired. “They make their clothes,” he wrote, “of the pelts of otter, marten, lynx, deer, stag, and others.” In Europe only nobles and priests had the right to wear ermine, sable, and other luxurious furs, but the demand for other pelts for winter wear was strong. The growing population had stripped Europe of fur-bearing animals; even the immense supply of mammals in Russia and Scandinavia was growing thin.6

  In the absence of silver and gold, furs paid for the French conquest of a huge swath of North America. “They do not value worldly goods,” wrote Cartier, “being unacquainted with such.” In exchange for items he considered mere gewgaws and trinkets, the Indians handed over valuable furs, including beaver pelts, which the Europeans prized most. Beaver could be processed into a waterproof material for coats and hats. To seal out the weather and reach the acme of fashion, however, the long outer layer of guard hairs had to be removed. The best pelts for trade, it turned out, were the ones Indians had worn for a season or two. The guard hairs fell off with use, leaving a smooth pelt. The humans exchanged soiled garments for trivial commodities, each side puzzling over the other’s foolishness.7

  Was this fair trade? It depends. Most exchanges satisfied both parties, otherwise the trade in furs and skins would never have become the primary interaction between natives and colonists throughout North America. Indians proved shrewd bargainers and tough consumers. They demanded quality and acquired items that fit their definitions of need. They traded for labor-saving technology and weapons but also for ceremonial possessions that helped them broker diplomatic alliances. They interpreted the trade as a form of gift-giving that established mutual responsibilities. Trade signified peace; its cessation meant war. Europeans understood these transactions differently, and they tried to get the Indians to see the trade as a form of buying and selling with limited interpersonal ramifications. In their ideal economy, after paying and receiving a fair price, both sides walked away happy and unencumbered. The fur trade inspired constant negotiations over prices and meanings. As Europeans grew in numbers and power, they forced natives to adopt their assumptions, and many Indian customers lost their independence as debt and overhunting crushed their options. But economic ruin took a long time and was by no means a universal experience. Trade was a blessing and a curse depending on when and where you looked.

  . . .

  The fur trade sent ripples of change through the northeast woodlands and beyond. Exchanges on seashores and riverbanks altered far away bodies and economies as goods and germs flowed along native travel and trade routes. After a winter stopover in the bitterly cold Iroquois village of Stadacona, Cartier sailed back to France in 1536. Cartier had found impressive natives with attractive houses and slick, vintage furs, but he couldn’t locate a passage through the continent, and the lustrous rocks he packed into his ships’ holds turned out to be iron pyrite—gold for fools, not kings. The French wouldn’t return to the Saint Lawrence River to stay until Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608.

  But in the meantime trade continued and grew, especially at the annual summer trade fair at the village of Tadoussac, near the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. In the Northeast, Indians and Europeans sailing under many banners fashioned a colonial history that minimized the significance of actual colonies. The fur trade cemented political alliances, interpersonal relationships, and cultural practices distinctive from those that characterized the Spanish Indian frontiers of northern New Spain, for they were based on commerce rather than conquest. These, too, were colonial relationships, of course, and ultimately there would be negative consequences for Indian peoples. Epidemic European diseases radiated out from places like Tadoussac and ravaged the villages of families who never spied the hairy strangers from across the ocean. As the value of furs increased, intense and deadly rivalries broke out among tribes over access to hunting territories. In the tumult of disease and warfare, the communities of Stadacona, Hochelaga, and numerous smaller villages disappeared, and the Saint Lawrence became a no human’s land for Indians, creating the space for European settlements.

  The French sent more traders to the Northeast than any other European nation, and at the turn of the seventeenth century they hatched a plan to stymie their competition. Samuel de Champlain, who had traveled to the Caribbean and visited Mexico, commanded a colonizing expedition funded by the crown and private investors. He established the outpost of Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy in 1605, and over the next three years he organized men and materials for a push up the Saint Lawrence. Located at the site of the defunct village of Stadacona, Quebec announced Champlain’s and France’s intention to make North America yield power and profit on a Spanish scale. Quebec would be their Mexico City, though the ruined village site seemed more ghost town than imperial launching pad.

  The colony Champlain governed for twenty-five years until his death in 1635 did indeed turn out differently than New Spain. From the start, Champlain depended on good relations with Indian tribes, and he relied on the tradition of commercial relations that had developed between natives and Europeans during the sixteenth century. Instead of attacking a Moctezuma-like headman, which didn’t exist in the Northeast anyway, he quickly forged an alliance with the Huron Confederacy, a nation of several affiliated Iroquoian-speaking tribes that lived north of Lake Ontario. The Hurons enjoyed a material abundance of fish and maize, and they controlled the access to the rich hunting grounds of the northern lakes. They were prime allies, but by siding with them, the French made enemies as well as friends. The Hurons were traditional adversaries of the Haudenosaunee (hoe-dee-no-show-nee), a league of five nations (the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas), more familiarly known as the Iroquois Confederacy. According to their oral history, the league was created in the fifteenth century, before the arrival of the f
irst Europeans, to end violent conflict among the five tribes. Peace at home, however, encouraged war abroad. The Haudenosaunee cemented their cohesion by attacking outsiders, especially their northern neighbors, the Hurons. Now Champlain sealed his alliance with the Hurons by joining them in a raid on the Five Nations. Like the Spanish with the Tlaxcalans, the French found native partners to help install their empire. But Champlain was no Cortés. To stay on good terms with their allies and keep the furs coming, the French bowed to native customs and priorities far more than the Spanish ever did.

  The French needed Indians to acquire the beaver and otter pelts that financed their colonial venture. Champlain understood the necessity of native hunters and trappers and therefore sent his agents and traders in canoes to negotiate with Indians and live in their villages. These emissaries learned Indian languages and customs. They often dressed like natives, and some of them married Indian women. These personal connections kept the furs flowing to Quebec and to Montreal, built upriver in 1642 at the site of Hochelaga.

  Samuel de Champlain joins the Hurons in an attack on the Mohawks. From Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages de la Novvelle France occidentale . . . (Paris, 1632). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Along the Saint Lawrence, the French installed a version of a European feudal society. Cardinal Richelieu, prime minister of King Louis XIII, devised a scheme, given royal sanction in 1628, granting a “Company of One Hundred Associates”—young nobles, army officers, and merchants—immense privileges in exchange for overseeing the plantation of farms and churches. The company agreed to transport at least four thousand settlers and an appropriate number of priests, all of whom the company had to support. In return, the king gave the company a monopoly over the fur trade and all commercial activities, except fishing and mining. The company could distribute land to lords, or seigneurs, which it did in large swaths along the Saint Lawrence. Rivers ran through everything in New France. The liquid highways brought furs from the interior and connected colonists to one another and their home country. Seigneurs paid special attention to rivers when they divided up their manors. Farms stretched back from river frontages like ribbons, for everyone needed access to the flow of water and goods. Usually fewer than eight hundred feet wide, these properties would run back ten times that length. The riverbank farmers, the habitants, owed their seigneurs homage and dues.