Britain 0, Spain 0, Anopheles 4,000

Spain's loss of Gibraltar in 1704 eventually proved permanent, but the Spanish Crown took many decades to acquiesce in the cession. The rocky promontory beckoned to glory-seeking Spanish officers and revanchist monarchs, who made multiple attempts to recover the Rock in the eighteenth century. One of these helped trigger one of the more obscure conflicts of the era, the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727-1729. 

Despite its chronological subtitle, the fighting in this war lasted only a few months. A Spanish army of 18,000 mounted a desultory siege of Gibraltar, pausing its bombardment daily for siesta, a practice their British counterparts eagerly adopted. (They were as likely to spend the time drinking and copulating as sleeping.) Royal Navy ships provided effective covering fire for the defenders until Spain lifted its siege. Across the Atlantic, Britain's navy used the war to justify an offensive of its own, against the city of Portobello on the Isthmus of Panama. This had less amusing consequences. Admiral Francis Hosier's attacks on the port ran afoul of the Caribbean's deadliest resident, the mosquito Aedes aegypti, and 4,000 sailors (and the admiral) succumbed to yellow fever. To the north, one of Britain's North American colonies conducted a more successful raid against the Spanish province of Florida. Militia from South Carolina, assisted by Chickasaw warriors, attacked and dispersed the Yamasee Indians who had taken refuge near Saint Augustine after the Yamasee War (1715-16). White Carolinians didn't quite settle their scores with the Yamasees, but the raid doubtless pleased colonial governor Arthur Middleton.

The war of 1727-29 thus spread to three continents, and cost several thousand men (and a few women) their lives. It ended with a treaty that made no concessions of rights or territory, and both the war and its participants faded almost immediately into obscurity. Kings and princes usually promise those who fight for them honor and immortal glory. They lie.

*

Sources: James Falkner, Fire over the Rock (Pen and Sword, 2009), 8-10; John McNeill, Mosquito Empires (Cambridge UP, 2010), 1-2; Edward Cashin, Guardians of the Valley (University of South Carolina, 2009), 15.

First Peoples in Revolution

Age of Revolutions has just finished (more or less) a series on Native Americans in the era of the American Revolution. The authors in the series wrote of efforts by the Iroquois, one of the groups most devastated by the Revolutionary War, to mitigate conflict between their own Six Nations. They studied the Chickasaws’ successful balancing of their alliance with Britain (and the vital supplies it brought) with their desire to stay out of another damaging war. They noted how the Odawas used Britain's growing demand for their military services to leverage greater material concessions from the Crown. They described how traditional masculinity, the desire to defend hunting grounds and display martial valor, drew some Cherokee men into the conflict, and how some Cherokee leaders sought to cool the tempers of warriors from the Chickamauga faction. One looked at eastern Native Americans’ efforts to mitigate the destruction of the war by shifting to a new, diversified commercial economy. One, Andrew Frank, found the Revolution a non-event from the perspective of nations like the early Seminoles.

Most of the series’ writers agree, I think, that Native Americans did not view the American Revolution as a positive good. Why would they? The rebel colonists wanted freedoms that either endangered or did not apply to American Indians: the freedom to acquire more (indigenous) land, and freedom from arbitrary, non-consensual taxation Some First Peoples did share the rebels’ distaste for the British army, the intrusive force that radicalized rural New Englanders, white Carolinians, and others as the war progressed. Few, however, trusted the Patriots enough to join force with them against that army. Those few who did generally lived “behind the frontier” in New England reserve communities, or in districts like the Catawba homeland, a capsule of southern Indians surrounded by white backcountry settlers. Indians in these regions shared at least some interests with their white neighbors. Some First Peoples also supported the rebels because they believed the alliance would bring them political advantages, or because they had personal connections to colonists that preceded the Revolution (e.g. the Oneidas). The great majority of Native Americans, however, either supported George III or stayed out of the Revolutionary War altogether.

In general, in a global context, revolutionaries don't seem to make much effort to appeal to indigenous peoples. If one is trying to overthrow a state, it makes sense to focus one's recruitment efforts on the state's constituents, on those who have to pay its taxes and obey its laws, and who also have some stake in the political community. Indigenes, who usually live independently of state authority or (all too often) live in subjugation at its margins, don't make optimal targets for revolutionary persuasion. I don't believe the First French Republic made an outreach to the Guaranis of Guyana,* for instance, nor the Bolsheviks to indigenous Siberians (at least not during the Russian Revolution), nor Mao's communists to the Miao of southwestern China. Indeed, indigenous peoples often provide fighting men to counter-revolutionary forces, as did the Senecas and Creeks in the American Revolutionary War, the Mapuches (whom my friend and colleague Pilar Herr studies) in the Chilean independence war, and the Hmong in the Second Indochina War. Incumbent regimes enjoy more familiarity with the divide-and-conquer tactics, like the use of "ethnic soldiers,"** essential to most kinds of imperial rule. Indigenous peoples, for their part, quite rightly view radical social change as more of a threat than an opportunity, particularly if Europeans introduced that change. Regrettably, their experiences after the Age of Revolution would only ratify what they had already learned.


* The First Republic's agents in the United States did try to recruit Creek and Cherokee warriors for a planned campaign against Saint Augustine, but no-one replied to their appeal. (Robert Alderson, Jr., This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions [South Carolina, 2008], 142-43, 160-61.)

** To borrow a term from Neil Whitehead. See his "Carib Ethnic Soldiering in Venezuela, the Guianas, and Antilles," Ethnohistory 37 (1990): 357-85.

Cattle, cotton, and capitalism in Indian country

Last summer the redoubtable editors of the Age of Revolutions weblog asked Your Humble Narrator to contribute a post on Native American history. I am pleased to report that my essay, "The Economic Revolution in Indian Country," is now live on the AoR site. It is part of a series that includes contributions from my friends and colleagues Karim Tiro, Kathleen DuVal, and Andrew Frank.

Had I written the piece five or seven years ago, when I first started contemplating Native American economic history, I probably would not have included my George Colbert quote, which came from my later research on the Chickasaws. I also would not have qualified my paragraph on cotton cultivation with the phrase "not found east of the Rio Grande"; I hadn't yet internalized the Pueblo Indians' pre-Columbian domestication of cotton and production of cotton cloth. It's sometimes hard for someone trained in the East, or even in the Midwest (Kentucky counts as Midwest), to recall that western Indians have a very rich history of their own prior to the nineteenth century.

The editors estimate that one can read my blog post in 11 minutes, but I suspect it will also inspire at least 66 seconds of historical musing. I always try to give 110 percent.


(The image above, "Benjamin Hawkins and the Creeks," is from the Greenville County (SC) Museum of Art, and is in the public domain.)

The Perduvian Network

In Winnipeg last week, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, I had the privilege of participating in a panel* in honor of Theda Perdue, one of my graduate mentors. Here are the brief comments I offered on Theda and her leadership abilities:

My thanks to Rose Stremlau for inviting me to join this distinguished panel, to my fellow panelists for their narratives, to Theda Perdue for her friendship, guidance, and inspiration, and to the First Nations of western Canada for allowing us to hold this session in their homeland.

I’ve been thinking about leadership lately, and why some leaders have such a great record of success. My current research project is a history of the Chickasaw nation, whose survival in the eighteenth century depended in large part on the acumen of their chiefs and captains. Historians have described Chickasaw leaders in this era as divided into factions, depending on whether they sought the favor of the Spanish or the Americans. On closer inspection, it appears that men like George Colbert and Ugulaycabe sought instead to advance the collective fortunes of their entire nation, and to do so not by allying with one empire or another but by forming the most extensive possible networks of trade and alliance. Piomingo, to take the best example, spent his political career making friends with most of the Chickasaws’ distant connections: with the Cherokees (he had spent his youth with them), with the new commonwealth of Virginia, with George Washington and his cronies in Philadelphia, with James Robertson and his fellow settler-speculators in Nashville, with the officers of the American army at Cincinnati, and even, through his associates the Colberts, with the Spanish. Piomingo was no stooge of empire, no pursuer of self-aggrandizement. He simply saw that success for his people depended on reaching out to outsiders, making them friends and allies, and persuading them that the fortunes of one group rose or fell with the others in the network.

The themes of friendship, alliance, mutual aid, and networking necessarily bring me to Theda Perdue. I first encountered Professor Perdue when I applied to the graduate program at the University of Kentucky. She very kindly wrote me a letter of welcome and encouragement. Noting her interest in the senior-thesis chapter I had enclosed with my application, Theda went on the sing the praises of U.K.’s faculty and, especially, its graduate students, “whom I think you will find challenging, professional, and ambitious as well as congenial and supportive.” But even if I did not come to Lexington, Dr. Perdue said I should consider her a friend and mentor. “If you would like me or Mike Green to take a look at your…work on Native Americans with a view towards publishing an article or presenting a professional paper, please let us know. Our role as teachers does not end at the university boundary or state line, and we are happy to help you in any way we can.” A close friend of mine asked when I read her this letter, twenty-three years later, “Who in the academic world does something that fantastic?” Obviously, someone exceptional, someone more interested in supporting scholarship and teaching, and in building the ethnohistorical nation, than in self-aggrandizement.

In any event, when I began my studies at Kentucky I became a student of Lance Banning, an intellectual and political historian of the early American republic, and undertook a dissertation on the Federalists’ policy toward First Nations. These subjects lay outside of Theda’s area of interest, and yet she and Michael Green still treated me as well as any of their own students, pushing me to make connections with other beginning scholars and to present my work at national conferences. As I began my own career I began to see that this kind of network-building and encouragement were not activities Dr. Perdue confined to her discussions with graduate students. She combined her two professional domains, the interdisciplinary study of Native North America and the study of the American South, not only in her staggeringly prolific scholarship but in her leadership of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Southern Historical Association, and of course in the series on Southeastern Native Americans she co-edited for Nebraska with Michael Green. She encouraged Native Americanist scholars to build relationships with presses normally known for Southern or for political history, in an effort to bring entities like UNC Press or Virginia into our scholarly network.

And she sought, either directly or through her former students, to make friends and shape agendas in some of the most conventional, even reactionary associations. In conversation with me some years ago about the Liberty Fund, a quasi-libertarian foundation that hosts scholarly study groups in luxury resorts, Theda characterized the organization as a far-right think tank (essentially true), and in the same breath asked me to make sure she and Mike were invited to their next conference. I maintain she was less interested in the Liberty Fund’s promise of good food and wine than in the possibility of making contacts – including prominent law professors and judges – who would benefit her students, colleagues, and professional associates. Concurrently, Theda has maintained an indirect relationship with the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. SHEAR’s membership includes some deeply reactionary men, and its annual meetings always fall at the wrong time of year for anyone engaged in serious research. However, Theda’s students, the “southeastern Mafia” as it were, have turned the Society into an organization far more amenable to Native American studies, and one of them, Craig Friend, is currently the SHEAR president. Theda’s influence, like Piomingo’s, extends into groups that may sometimes seem antithetical to our enterprise. They will not remain so for long. The Perduvian network has proven more extensive and persistent than the Piomingan, and has grown in pursuit of goals at least as laudable. And unlike Piomingo, Theda built her community entirely without the use of artillery. Well, so far as I know.

* "Scholar, Mentor, Advocate, Friend: A Celebration of Theda Perdue," 14 October 2017.

Flush Times in Mississippi (and Terre Haute)

Your humble narrator spent much of the past month preparing and giving research presentations to several regional audiences: to students and faculty at the University of Mississippi, to the attendees of the Chickasaw Days celebration in Holly Springs, MS; and to the invitees of Indiana State University's Center for Global Engagement in Terre Haute. The three talks concerned, respectively, the Chickasaw Indians' perception of coinage and currency, the adoption of commercial agriculture by the same nation in the early nineteenth century, and the history and culture of the Great Lakes Indians from the Mississippian era (had to work Mississippi in there somewhere!) to the Relocation program of the mid-twentieth century.

The currency talk, which Robbie Ethridge kindly invited me to give, observed that the Chickasaws first acquired coinage, diplomatic medals, and silver jewelry at more or less the same time (between ca. 1765 and 1790). I argued that they probably saw these three novelties as commensurable objects, as diplomatic tokens and prestige symbols. Chickasaw men and women knew how Europeans used money, and were glad to acquire it, but they appear to have either hoarded it or only to have exchanged it for other "prestige goods" until the 1820s.

My address to the Chickasaw Days festival, "Stock and Trade," discussed the nation's similarly conservative approach to stock-raising and cotton cultivation, activities they adapted to their own gendered division of labor and desire not to abandon other traditional enterprises (like hunting and maize horticulture). I adapted the talk from a similar address I gave at the Ittafama Ithana conference on Chickasaw History last February, an address that I assumed most history enthusiasts in northern Mississippi had missed.* Most, but not all: some of the Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe, ten of whom performed in Holly Springs, had been in my audience in Oklahoma.

I had formed the idea that Holly Springs was just a wide spot in the road. Actually, it is a fairly large courthouse town with several museums - including the birthplace of famed anti-lynching activist Ida Wells - and at least one restaurant serving first-rate fried pickles. It is a majority-black community, and the Chickasaw Days event drew a predominantly white crowd. Perhaps the region's Native American history doesn't appeal as much to an African-American audience. The nineteenth-century Chickasaws were slave-owners, after all, and later made a strenuous effort to exclude their freedmen from citizenship. Perhaps the town's black families were preoccupied with the huge homecoming-day parade which took place around the main square the same day as the festival, and in which many African-American children and teenagers were featured participants. I rather hope the latter interpretation is the more accurate one.


* My conference talk has since been reprinted in the Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture, Spring 2017 issue.

Power Shopping

 

Anticipating an official inquiry into the mounting expenses of Chickasaw removal, which despite that nation's small size would eventually exceed one million dollars, federal agent A.M. Upshaw sought to deflect blame from himself and his contractors. In an 1838 letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Carey Harris, Upshaw argued that his cost overruns originated with the demands of the Chickasaws, whom the Treaty of Pontotoc (1832) authorized to pay for and supervise their own emigration. Chickasaw leaders wanted to assemble emigrants at Memphis and take them to Indian Territory by water, which obliged Upshaw both to hire steamboats and pay demurrage fees while they awaited their passengers. Then, after a steamboat accident killed 300 Creek emigrants and alarmed their Chickasaw counterparts, many of the latter decided to move by land, a slower and more expensive process.

Overland travel proved costly because, Upshaw noted, the Chickasaws brought a huge quantity of baggage. Many families brought at least one wagonload (half a ton or more), some took three or four fully loaded wagons, and one had eight of them. The first few emigrant parties also brought 7,000 horses and ponies, packed high with luggage, “and [Indians] can pack more on a horse than any other people I ever saw.” Individual heads of household spent up to $1,000 on merchandise before Removal. "In fact, sir” (Upshaw wrote) “I saw two women purchase seven hundred dollars' worth of goods in the course of two hours.” This was the modern equivalent of somewhere between $4,000 and $8,500 per hour.

This might sound like prudent, if frantic, preparation for an arduous journey, except that little of what the Chickasaws bought was food. They planned to draw government rations during their emigration, or hunt for their meals en route. According to another official, the Chickasaws had instead loaded their horses and wagons with “many heavy articles of comfort as well as convenience.” None of the Removal agents recorded Chickasaw men and women's precise purchases, but based on the goods they bought at their trading factory two decades earlier, and based on the records of an Alabama merchant who traded with Chickasaw customers in the late '30s, Your Humble Narrator suspects their Removal inventory included plaid and calico cloth, finished clothing, hardware, ammunition, furniture, and scarce consumables like coffee, sugar, and whiskey.

The money for this spree almost certainly came from the sale of the Chickasaws' land reserves, which federal commissioners and Chickasaw leaders had recently allotted to each adult member of the nation. Under the treaties of Pontotoc and Washington (1834), each man and woman received one square mile of land in the old Chickasaw nation; each head of household received three additional square-mile tracts, or four if he owned slaves; and bonus sections went to a dozen or so national leaders. The treaties authorized the emigrants to sell their reserves on the open market, at a minimum price of $800 per square mile. Despite price-fixing efforts by white land speculators, who formed semi-monopolistic land companies, many sellers cleared more than the minimum price for their land; some, generally biracial Chickasaws with large improvements, sold their reserves for several thousand dollars. The proceeds went to buy wagons, horses – though the Chickasaws already had large herds of them before Removal – the aforementioned “articles of comfort [and] convenience,” and, more opprobriously, African-American slaves, several hundred of whom accompanied the first emigrants westward.

In one sense, Removal presented the Chickasaws with a terrible loss: their homes and their familiar country, with all the memories and collective history embedded in its features.* In another sense, the Chickasaws did not so much lose their land as transmute it, under duress to be sure, into different forms: slave laborers, transport, a surplus of the manufactured goods on which they had come to rely, and, from the remaining portion of their old homeland that the U.S. government sold, funds to purchase a new homeland in the west and sustain the emigrants for their first few years there.

One final point: the Chickasaws' heavy pre-Removal investment in consumer goods, hardware, livestock, and slaves certainly helps explain their initial decision to settle among the Choctaws in southeastern Oklahoma rather than on their national reserve in the south-central part of that territory. The new Chickasaw national domain fronted the Texas borderlands and Comancheria, and the Indian inhabitants of both regions periodically plundered their neighbors' horses, cattle, and possessions, and captured (or offered refuge to) runaway slaves. Moving to that domain would put the Chickasaws' property, whose cost had been so high, at risk. In 1841, the U.S. Army established a post at Fort Washita to guard the Chickasaw-Texas frontier, and within a couple of years many of the Chickasaws were moving to their new homeland to establish farms and rebuild their old lives.

**

1 Aug. 1838, Upshaw to Harris, Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, NARA Microfilm M-234, Reel 143: 692-94; J.A. Phillips to Harris, 4 May 1838, ibid, 143: 614; List of Goods Wanted for the Indian Trade for the Years 1816-17, Miscellaneous Accounts of the Chickasaw Bluffs Factory, Records of the Office of Indian Trade (National Archives Records Group 75, Washington, DC), Entry 39, Folder 5; John Allen to Thomas McKenney, 7 Feb. 1830, Letters Received, M-234, 136: 17-18; Account Book of William Otey, Folder 64, Wyche-Otey Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013), 39-44; Dan G. [last name illegible] to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 12 Dec. 1841, ibid, 144: 193-194; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1838, 510-511; Arrell Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman, OK, 1971).

* Not to mention the five hundred men and women who lost their lives to a smallpox outbreak in Arkansas as they moved to Indian Territory in 1838.

Above image of Tishomingo from https://www.chickasaw.tv/historic-figures/video/chickasaws-signatories-to-the-choctaw-removal-treaty/list/chief-tishomingo

Chickasaw Country

Oklahoma, the eventual homeland of more than a dozen Indian nations expelled from the eastern United States, has formed a part of Your Humble Narrator's mental landscape since he first became interested in Native American history, over 25 years ago. Not until earlier this month, however, did I visit the Sooner State for the first time. I've always assumed Oklahoma resembled the opening scenes in The Wizard of Oz: a featureless grassland under a flat and boundless sky. Driving to the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, I discovered the inaccuracy of my preconceptions. The territory of the Chickasaw Nation actually overlaps the Cross Timbers country, a rolling, sandy-soiled prairie criss-crossed by rivers and crowned with oak and pine forests. The region is prone to periodic extremes of weather: hard winters, drought, and floods, such as those that partially inundated the district just before my visit. The soil is fertile but not very suitable for demanding crops like cotton, the Chickasaws' chief cash crop in the nineteenth century. This probably helps explain why most Chickasaw emigrants initially settled in the richer bottom lands on the district's eastern edge. However, Chickasaw country is no wasteland, and it has sustained ample herds of livestock, one of the Chickasaws' other sources of wealth, since the mid-nineteenth century. (It still does. Driving south and east from Norman, my partner and I saw hundreds of cattle, horses, goats, even some bison.)

As Jace Weaver observed in Episode 3 of We Shall Remain, Removal was hugely traumatic, but the southern Indians did not have to contend with the shock of relocating to a purely alien landscape. Their new homeland bore enough similarities to the old that the survivors could adapt and, eventually, even prosper.*

* We shouldn't attribute this to the wisdom of the U.S. War Department. The Chickasaws sent a surveying party to their prospective reserve in the late 1820s, and carefully negotiated the boundaries of their new territory with its initial owners, the Choctaws.

The Hostage Situation

Those familiar with U.S. Indian policy know that few elements of it have generated as much controversy as education. Until recently, schools for Native Americans were almost exclusively run by whites, who sought to turn Indian children into Anglo children. Boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School, with their uniforms and short haircuts, their military-style drill and ban on Native languages, sought, in the words of Carlisle's founder, to “kill the Indian and save the man" - the normative man being, in this case, a white one. Earlier missionary-run academies had similar goals, though they pursued them without the same level of military discipline. Only a few Indian nations, like the Cherokees, maintained control over their own educational system prior to the late twentieth century.

The early years of American Indian educational policy have received less attention from scholars, though Margaret Szasz has written thoughtful monographs on colonial Indian education, Bernard Sheehan and William McLoughlin have noted the obvious cultural imperialism in early nineteenth-century “civilization” policy, and Christina Snyder is completing what will surely be an exciting and thought-provoking study of Richard Johnson's Choctaw Academy. Here I want to add just a small observation on the earliest years of U.S. Indian schooling, more specifically the era of the American Revolution and the quarter-century following it: even before it began paying missionaries to set up Indian schools, the federal government had been placing Native American leaders' sons with white families who took charge of their education. During the Revolutionary War Congress paid Indian agent George Morgan to board and train the sons of prominent Delaware chief White Eyes, and in the early 1790s Secretary of War Henry Knox placed about twenty Iroquois, Creek, and Cherokee children with Pennsylvanian Quaker families, who agreed to train the boys as farmers and the girls in home economics. While I have not been able to determine if all of these children came from prominent families, at least a few of them, including the nephews of Creek "Beloved Man" Alexander McGillivray, did. Knox's successors continued the practice into the early nineteenth century, when Secretary Henry Dearborn, for instance, took charge of educating the sons of Chickasaw magnates William and George Colbert.

I want to suggest here that this policy grew not out of cultural imperialism (though there was some of that), nor benevolence, but rather out of an old imperial custom: taking the children of conquered peoples' leaders as hostages. Education allowed empires to impress their customs and values on those who would eventually grow up to govern subordinate nations, and it also gave them an excuse to hold children whose vulnerability would deter their parents from rebelling. Twenty-seven hundred years ago, the Assyrians took “aristocratic children” from conquered provinces to Ninevah for schooling, and the Romans and Byzantines educated elite youths, like Herod Agrippa (well known to fans of I, Claudius) and the Gothic princeling Theodoric*, in their capitals. I suspect medieval courts followed the Roman example, and when the English began colonizing Ireland in earnest, they on at least one occasion (1615) took hostages from the children of northern Irish landowners and brought them to England for indoctrination. The American Revolutionaries recognized the political value of the practice, and when the United States' demands for adult hostages from the Great Lakes Indians (1784-86) generated hostility, officials like Henry Knox switched to a subtler approach. The War Department never acknowledged it was essentially holding chiefs' children as hostages, but a Spanish observer in New York City suggested Knox was doing something of the kind when he took custody of Alexander McGillivray's nephews.

By the early nineteenth century missionaries were beginning to establish schools in Indian communities – at Spring Place in the Cherokee nation, for example – and the War Department provided these schools with subsidies, at first sporadically and then to the amount of $10,000 a year under the Civilization Act (1819). Prominent Native American parents supported these schools because they taught some skills, like textile-making and English literacy, that they considered valuable. They also gave them more control over their children, whom they could more easily bring home than if they had moved to Pennsylvania. I also suspect many had come to recognize the implicit danger in allowing federal officials to take their children away, however willingly, for education and training, though some allowed their older children to attend boarding schools like Choctaw Academy and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' school in Cornwall, Connecticut. If the War Department no longer placed Indian children with white families in the east, it was because officials recognized the United States' growing power lessened the need for hostage taking, and because they now primarily valued the cultural-imperialist aspect of education. The militarized boarding-school era lay several decades in the future, but one could by the 1820s begin to perceive its outlines.     

Sources: On Assyrian, Byzantine, and English education of hostages, see Simo Parpola, “Assyria's Expansion in the Eighth and Seventh Centuries and Its Long-Term Repercussion in the West,” in William Dever and Seymour Gitlin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past (Eisenbrauns, 2003), 99-111, esp. 101-102**; Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders (Oxford UP, 2014), 471-475 of 9215 (Kindle); Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford, 2014), p. 163. I discuss Knox's placement of Indian children with Quaker families in Red Gentlemen and White Savages (Virginia, 2008), pp. 122-123, 178. For the War Department's education of the Colbert brothers' children see Henry Dearborn to William Claiborne, 6 Dec. 1802, and Dearborn to George Colbert of 24 Sept. 1805 and 17 Sept. 1807, all in War Department, Letters Sent, Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Natl. Archives Microfilm M-15), 1: 297, 2:110-111, and 2:307. Rowena McClinton has translated and published two volumes of diaries on the Moravian mission and school at Spring Place: The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees (Nebraska, 2007).

* Theodoric's case also suggests one of the dangers of educating potential enemies: they might acquire skills that make them a potent threat in the future. As an adult Theodoric returned to Constantinople with an army and threatened the city's aqueducts, whose importance he had learned during his “internship.” The emperor became so eager to get rid of him that the Byzantines cleared the way for Theodoric to invade Italy and establish his kingdom there. (Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome, 985 of 9215.)

** My thanks to Corinna Nichols for this source.

Exploiting the Chickasaw Working Class

Many of my readers know that the wheels of academic writing and publishing grind slowly, but they can grind exceedingly fine. I began work on my book on the U.S. Indian factories, “Engines of Diplomacy” (now under contract with University of North Carolina Press) in the spring of 2004, and am just now completing one of the last (I hope) sets of revisions to the manuscript. One advantage of such a long period of research, writing, and revision is that an author can replace earlier, shallower analyses with much more mature insights before the book goes to press.

To take one example that has just come to hand: in a section on the trading factory at Chickasaw Bluffs (modern Memphis), I decided to use the post's price records to estimate the approximate compensation of an early-nineteenth-century Chickasaw hunter, measured in dollars and in merchandise. I determined that a skilled hunter could make between $25 and $50 per season if he caught between 50 and 100 deer, a realistic estimate according to Kathryn Braund's Deerskins and Duffels (Nebraska, 1993). Perhaps he might make a bit more if he also caught smaller animals like raccoons, whose furs made good hats. I then calculated what this could buy at C.B. Factory: 25-50 pounds of gunpowder (with about 10 shots per pound), 50-100 yards (a few bolts) of muslin or calico cloth, 50-100 tin quart cups, or a couple of hundred small broaches.

This seemed impressive to me when I first wrote this particular chapter in 2005, but I realize now that these were the entire returns of 3-4 months' labor for a hunter and additional work by his female relatives – Indian women accompanied hunting parties to feed their kinsmen and dress their furs and skins. To put it another way, Chickasaws earned no more than half a dollar a day from the federal trading factory for their labor as hunters and skin processors. And factory merchandise prices, while lower than those offered by private competitors, still equaled 150 percent or more of the prices charged by vendors in Philadelphia, which reduced hunters' wages still further. Small wonder that Chickasaws, like Indians elsewhere in North America, racked up large trading debts. My acknowledgment of the inequities of Indians' compensation, which derived from recent years' reflection on economic inequality in modern America (courtesy of David Graeber and Occupy), allowed me to replace this vague and spineless phrase from my original draft:

“As was commonly the case in the fur trade, the Chickasaws' demand for goods outstripped their ability to pay for merchandise in kind”

with what I consider a more nuanced, and accurate one:

“As returns from hunters' labor remained low, the Chickasaws' demand for trade goods outstripped their ability to pay”

and then discuss that nation's rising debts to both the federal factory and private traders. In my first draft of this chapter I assumed Chickasaws' indebtedness just sort of happened, and implied that their own profligacy may have been to blame. Now I see that it came from the systematic underpayment of workers in an extractive industry. Granted, other scholars, like Claudio Saunt, made this point over a decade ago, but sometimes it takes a little thought and a little engagement with the real world to catch up with better minds.

(Above images, of an unshaved deerskin and HBC-style point blankets, are from Wikimedia Commons, the latter courtesy of the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, NE.)

Remembering Mike Green

I met Michael Green (1941-2013) for the first time in August 1994, when I enrolled as a student in his graduate seminar in Native American history. I had just started school at the University of Kentucky, and Mike initially struck me as kind of a forbidding person, but his pleasant, gravelly voice and stock of amusing anecdotes and homey locutions (e.g. "rich as Croesus," "if the good lord is willin' and the creeks don't rise," "you pays your money and you takes your choice") soon set me at my ease. Indeed, when I began teaching a few years later I tried to adopt Mike's demeanor and mannerisms in class, which proved impossible for a beaky easterner like myself. Professor Green's seminar also helped set me on the path that led to my dissertation and first book: at the end of the term I wrote a review essay on Iroquois historiography, which nicely dovetailed with a discovery I had just made in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's Age of Federalism (1993), namely that the paranoid and vindictive Federalist Timothy Pickering had in his early career been a respected commissioner to the Six Nations. This led me to a seminar paper on Pickering's relationship with the Iroquois, and ultimately to a dissertation on the cultural background of Federalist Indian policy.

A couple of years later Mike agreed to join my graduate committee, and when in January 1997 we met to discuss my qualifying exams he decided the time had come to turn this somewhat limited early-republic scholar into an ethnohistorian.  "Which of the books on my seminar's reading list have you read?" Mike asked.  I admitted I had read about a dozen of them. "Okay, read the rest," he replied, "and write a one or two-page summary of each one of them for me."  That meant reading and summarizing about fifty books in ten weeks. If I neglected to protest, it was probably due to the overconfidence of youth. Mike, I suspect, thought I would find the next ten weeks intellectually exhilarating rather than exhausting, and so they were. I have since taught several independent graduate readings courses in this manner, and a least a few of the students I've put through the ordeal, such as Craig Hammond and C.J. Lepley, thrived on it.

Mike had already provided me with the germ of my second book, an analytical history of the U.S. government's Indian factory system, which I learned about while writing a research essay for Prof. Green on Thomas McKenney and the 1819 Civilization Act. The paper did not itself lead to an independent publication, but it did make me realize that the factory system had generated a large quantity of records and very little scholarship. When I completed the first draft of my first book in 2004, Mike encouraged me to undertake a book-length study of the factories, and when we subsequently met at conferences he asked me for updates and helped me through a difficult impasse I reached in one chapter. When I finally finished the manuscript of the factories book in September 2011 Mike was generous enough to read the whole thing - all 450 pages or so - and write a couple of pages of comments and advice. All of this ensured I would not only finish the book but make it presentable for publication. "The Engines of Diplomacy," which is currently under contract with a university press, is in many ways Mike's book.

It was a long-standing joke among Mike's students that when someone asked him what subject they should research, he always replied "the Chickasaws." I must have heard this joke at some point during graduate school, for when I was finishing "Engines of Diplomacy" and considering topics for my next monograph, I felt drawn to the economic and cultural history of the Chickasaws, on whom I wished to write a book similar to James Carson's Searching for the Bright Path (1999). Again, Mike played a big role in shaping this book project because he was one of the informal leaders of an NEH Summer Seminar I was privileged to attend in 2011. Directed by Theda Perdue and Malinda Maynor Lowery, the seminar was one of the high points of my intellectual life: a month of readings, seminar meetings, lunchtime discussions, field trips to Native American communities in the Carolinas, and research in UNC / Chapel Hill's outstanding libraries. Mike and Theda both provided direction to our discussions, offered advice on seminar participants' research, and hosted weekly pool parties that helped us get through a hot summer. I had the pleasure, too, of accompanying Mike on a day-long book-buying expedition to several used bookstores in Chapel Hill and Raleigh; we got a chance to chat about our days at Kentucky and about reading recommendations.  (One of these days I'll need to sit down and read the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'Brien.)

Mike attended the first paper I presented on my Chickasaw research, at the 2011 Ethnohistory conference in Pasadena, and encouraged me to follow up my investigation of the Chickasaws' so-called "military economy," which became the subject of a paper I presented in Helsinki and of a chapter I wrote for a festschrift in Mike and Theda's honor. By then Mike's health was failing, but we corresponded as late as last summer, exchanging our impressions of Finland. I had a chance to tell Mike that I had recently traveled to Spain with my petite amie Susan, and that I had found his and Theda's North American Indians book very useful in class.

I suppose it is natural for graduate students to look for intellectual parents among teir professors, and I was fortunate enough to find two intellectual father figures in my formative years, namely Lance Banning (my dissertation director) and Mike Green. Now both of them are gone, and it remains for me and other survivors to figure out how to deal with the loss.  Probably the best thing to do is to follow a modified version of the Marques de Pombal's famous advice: "Honor the dead and feed the living."

Mike was not a religious man and I doubt he believed in a future state of rewards and punishments, but it is incontrovertibly true that everyone gets at least one real afterlife, living on in the memories and dreams of those who knew them in life. Mike was a scholar and a university professor, which means that he will live on in the memories and minds and research of his hundreds of students, and in the narrative voice of the seven books he authored. If my own case is any indication, Mike supplied the living, in his own lifetime, with an intellectual and personal feast. Those of us who knew him will surely honor his memory and carry on his legacy.

Gallant Trousers, or the Lack Thereof

In her recent article on the Chickasaw-Creek war of the 1790s ("How the Chickasaws Saved the Cumberland Settlement," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 68 [2009]: 2-20) , Wendy St. Jean noted the close military alliance that grew up between that nation and their white neighbors in the Cumberland settlements (Nashville and environs), which extended to Nashvillians' sending militia and artillery to help defend Chickasaw towns from Creek attack. The alliance had an emotional component, as well: at a July 4th dinner in Nashville, one of the toasts was to "our gallant sans-culotte allies of the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations" (p. 13). The toast was a nice play on words: it referred to the breech cloths and leggings that Chickasaw warriors wore in lieu of knee-breeches (or trousers), and also to western white settlers' sympathies for the more radical and ill-clad elements of the French Revolutionary movement, sympathies which some frontiersmen (in Kentucky and western Pennsylvania) expressed by forming Democratic-Republican societies to support the French Republic. One tends to think of the French Revolution as an Atlantic phenomenon, so I was pleasantly surprised to see pro-Revolutionary sentiments expressed in such remote settlements - and used to refer to people who (in the case of the Chickasaws) were fairly staunch opponents of France for most of the eighteenth century.