Debt: The First 5,000 Years: A Review, of Sorts

In an earlier post on Hope for the 99 Percent (or words to that effect), I argued that today's workers need to focus on accumulating wealth and improving their educations, and not expect any assistance from the state, except in the form of minimal social-insurance payouts. What I did not say, because I hadn't thought to say it at the time, is that it is rather difficult for modern workers to accumulate wealth because they are usually heavily in debt, and difficult for them to educate themselves without accumulating additional debt. Indebtedness, it would seem, is one of the principal factors keeping the 99 Percent down and ensuring that wealth continues to flow upward to our oligarchs. That debt would appear inescapable, unless we make some effort to restructure it (at much lower interest rates) or abolish it. To do so, I think we first need to ask how legitimate modern private debt actually is. Perhaps the best place to start answering this question is David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I read last year and will now endeavor to review.

The long blog entry that follows is my summary of Graeber's powerful, but rather convoluted, argument. In a future blog post, I will provide some analysis of the book and of Graeber's suggestions for how we can move forward from our current socio-economic mess.

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Graeber, as an anthropologist, avoids approaching the problem of debt with the assumptions of an economist. In the early chapters of his book, he notes that modern debt involves a double fiction: the idea that people who contract a debt are autonomous equals, implying that people who cannot pay their debts brought their problems on themselves, and the idea that a creditor has a feudal right of dominion over a debtor until the debt, plus interest, is paid. Debt also depends on the ability of creditors and debtors to enumerate their obligations precisely, using monetary values; this in turn depends on the invention of money. The double-fiction of equality and absolute dominion, however, could not apply to pre-modern (or “heroic”) societies, like the Celts or the African Lele. These societies were usually hierarchical, and they could readily conceive of social obligations between dependents and lords; indeed, a lord's or patriarch's honor stemmed from his control of the bodies and labor of others. However, they did not accept that lords had absolute control over their dependents: they could not readily sell their bondsmen, female relatives, or children. Heroic societies understood the concept of a medium of exchange, and of placing a monetary value (measured in oxen or precious metals) on people and their labor, but in practice they only allowed elites to exchange people or their labor for other people, and only to strengthen existing human relationships or pay blood debts. 

States interfered with these arrangements when they introduced currency and open markets, which, Graeber provocatively argues, were largely a byproduct of the creation of professional armies in the so-called “Axial Age” (800 BCE – 600 CE). A state could most efficiently supply its armies by taxing its subjects, then stipulating that they had to pay the tax with money, which they could obtain by selling goods or services. Money usually took the form of precious metals because they were portable and easy to steal – Alexander's armies, for example, looted the equivalent of $285 billion from the temples and palaces of Persia. Once currency, taxes, and markets came into being, however, it became possible to convert labor and social obligations into goods and money; it thus became possible for even non-elite persons to buy human beings, either as slaves or debt-peons. (Debt peonage, a modern reader might argue, was voluntary, but in fact people were usually driven to it by hunger, misfortune, or taxes.) Elites found this threatening to their honor, one of the reasons, Graeber unhappily observes, that Greek aristocrats began confining women to the home (to demonstrate that their bodies still belonged to their husbands). Peasants, of course, found this more personally threatening, and would periodically revolt or flee. Early states proved less interested in preserving the honor of elites than in preventing rebellion or defection by debt-ridden peasants. Some did so through periodic debt amnesties, a practice that preceded the Axial Age: the Sumerians, who invented interest-bearing debts, also invented the concept of debt forgiveness; Egyptian monarchs also used debt amnesties, and in fact a piece of one of their second-century stele announcing a general debt amnesty became the Rosetta Stone. Other states, like the Roman Republic and the ksatriya republics of early India, avoided peasant revolts by recruiting peasants into their armies, paying them sufficient wages to avoid indebtedness, and relying on war captives for labor. The latter solution, we should note, merely externalized the problem, and perpetuated the connection between debt, violence, and enslavement.

The Axial Age also gave rise to several religions which opposed usury or offered indebted peasants an otherworldly escape from debt. These religions became pervasive and influential in the Middle Ages (600-1400). Chinese Buddhists argued that the most important debts were those owed to one's parents and to the universe itself, and that these were only payable through temple donations, but also that such donations would permanently cancel existential debt. Muslims, while they honored trade and enabled it through sophisticated credit arrangements, forbade usury and were skeptical of the value of physical money. Medieval Christians were both anti-debt and anti-trade, but they did develop the idea of the merchant adventurer, who was willing to use bravery and violence to open new markets.

In the early modern era (ca. 1450-1971), Europeans' drive to conquer the world was financed by the aforementioned merchant adventurers, whose primary economic pursuits were bullion (most of which they exported to China and India), weapons, slaves, and drugs (coffee, sugar, tobacco, opium). Theologians and scholars came to accept usury, with Protestants leading the way and Catholics following a short distance behind. By the 1700s Europeans argued that humans were motivated primarily by interest, which is etymologically related to the concept that “money [must] never cease to grow.” European states had also come to harness this concept of interest by creating national debts, which yielded regular dividends for the state's wealthy creditors, and national banks, whose notes could circulate as money – an important consideration in an era when elites had come to distrust fiat money and private credit, but could not always obtain the gold and silver they did trust.  From these sources. Graeber argues, came modern capitalism, an ideological structure placing morality, money, and state power at the service of the idea that economic output must always grow, no matter the cost. And “it is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor” (Ch. 11). European capitalists' incessant need for labor drove the African slave trade, the enserfment of Eastern European peasants, and colonial regimes' use of taxes to draw commoners into debt peonage. Debt and interest forced capitalists to create an economy that would always grow, and in turn they forced free persons into debt or bondage to provide the labor necessary to realize that vision. Only at the very end of the period, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did European states and capitalists begin to create a limited wage-labor economy wherein workers could accumulate enough money to imagine themselves free of debt.

By the mid-twentieth century, though, the only thing that backed state currency was state debt, which in turn was backed by the state's war-making power. The United States' current economic power is based on its dollar's position as the world's reserve currency; on the inability of countries holding dollars to exchange them for gold; on the ability of the U.S. to project deadly force anywhere in the world; and in the use of dollars to purchase oil. (I highly doubt, incidentally, Graeber's assertion that Saddam Hussein's switch to the Euro to denominate oil sales was a cause of Operation Iraqi Freedom; George W. Bush and his advisers weren't that calculating. Well, maybe Dick Cheney was, and screw him.) Meanwhile, the idea that workers could accumulate enough money and assets to propel themselves into the middle class, never a widespread one beyond a few industrialized countries, was abandoned in the 1980s, as conservative governments smashed labor unions, adopted tight-money monetary policies, and allied themselves with evangelical Christians who endorsed their policies as divinely-inspired. Workers were now offered the opportunity to enrich themselves through speculation (401ks, for instance) and debt (mortgages, credit cards, student loans, microcredit), but that opportunity vanished, probably for good, in 2008, leaving behind only the idea that there were no alternatives to capitalism, that individual debt was a sin, and that a person's worth could be measured in commodities. There is nothing natural, however, about this grim state of affairs; it is instead the product of centuries of violence, which ripped normal human obligations from their social context and transformed them into arithmetical equations of debt and interest.

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Coming soon: Graeber's concluding remarks and my own thoughts.

(Images above are of the cover of Graeber's book, the Rosetta Stone, and an eighteenth-century ceramic painting of European trading factories at Canton, from the collection of San Jose State University.)

Habetis Papam

The election of a new pope, regardless of what the Holy Spirit might think, is a world-historical event. It is a relatively rare occurrence: there have only really been four popes in this blogger's lifetime (if one excludes the short-lived John Paul I), and only seventeen since the independence of the United States. The pope also heads an institution of rare longevity (nearly 2,000 years), is at least the nominal spiritual leader of more than one billion Catholics, and has the power, if he waves at you on parade, to allow sex without sin.

I was a bit disappointed, of course, that the new pope chose not to resume the nomenclatural progression first observed by Eddie Izzard and set aside by Benedict: “First we had Pope John, then Pope Paul, then Pope John Paul. The next pope will be John Paul George...and I think we see where they're going with this.”

(I title this short post “habetis papam” rather than “habemus papam” because I am not a Catholic, so this pope isn't really mine to have. I prefer to say “habemus papadum,”* particularly at the outset of a good Indian dinner.)

* Or "habemus papadas," but that doesn't sound as funny.

The War That Came Early, Drank All the Booze, Fell Asleep under the Coffee Table

Apropos of my recent (I thought well-deserved) trashing of Millard Fillmore, my grad-school friend Chris Paine argued that had Zachary Taylor lived, and Fillmore not succeeded him in 1850, the Civil War would have started ten years early, and the North would have lost. I was prepared to concede the first point, which Mark Stegmeier made pretty persuasively (in Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of 1850 [Kent State U. Press, 1996]). Prof. Stegmeier believes the flashpoint of an early American Civil War would have been Santa Fe, capital of the former Mexican province of New Mexico, whose post-Mexican-War ownership was disputed by the state of Texas and the U.S. government. In 1850, as Southern whites threatened secession over California statehood, and Congress deadlocked on a package of compromise bills, President Taylor sent 600 federal soldiers to Santa Fe. Governor Bell of Texas organized his own military expedition, and Southern politicians and newspapers endorsed Texas's claim and threatened war in the event of a clash between Texan and U.S. forces. The final Compromise of 1850, which Fillmore signed, included a peaceful resolution of Texas's boundary dispute with New Mexico. Coupled with some horse-trading about slavery in the Mexican Cession, this quieted Southern hot-heads and prevented a war. Taylor, however, opposed much of the Compromise and would have rejected it if he had lived; he probably also would have started a war with Texas, which several of the more bellicose Southern states would surely have joined.

I was less inclined to believe that the South would have won an early conflict with the Union, because, however underdeveloped the North's factories and railroads were in 1850 compared with their 1860 counterparts, the determinative factor in the war of 1861-65 was not industry but manpower, and in 1850 the free states already had twice as many people as the slave states. Fergus Bordewich's book America's Great Debate (Simon and Schuster, 2012), however, disabused me of the idea that the North's demographic advantage would have been enough to win a war with the South. What would have mattered most of all in such a war, Bordewich argues, was the willingness of large numbers of free-state or slave-state men to fight, and Northerners simply weren't very interested in fighting for the Union in 1850 (pp. 393-394). In 1861, by contrast, thousands of free-state men were eager to stomp Southern whites' guts out, thanks to a decade of "Slave Power" outrages: the vicious over-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton Constitution, the Dred Scott decision, and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner. In 1850, martial keenness was all on the southern side of the Mason-Dixon Line: Southern whites had contributed tens of thousands of troops to the Mexican War, and many were threatening violence if California entered the Union as a free state or Texas didn't get to annex most of New Mexico. The North had more people, but not necessarily more willing soldiers, than the South.

If war had broken out between the states in 1850, it would have started in Texas and spread eastward as some of the slave states announced their secession and seized federal forts and arsenals. I suspect the seceding states would be pretty much the same crew that first left the Union in 1860-61: the Deep South states from Texas to Florida, plus Georgia and South Carolina, and possibly including Tennessee (which had strong ties to Texas) and Arkansas. I also suspect there would have been some resistance by federal soldiers to the seizure of their posts, as President Taylor, unlike Buchanan ten years later, would probably have ordered his men to defend their positions. It's hard to determine how the rest of the war would have unfolded, but I think that one could draw an analogy between the Civil War of 1850 and the War of 1812: reluctance on the part of Union men to enlist, several states (chiefly the slave states remaining in the Union) disaffected to the point of mutiny, increasing difficulty passing war-finance measures in the Union Congress, and, on the tactical side of things, a lot of small battles around the borders of the region the U.S. was trying to conquer, but little territory changing hands.

I can't see the secessionists gaining any of the advantages in the 1850s that might have delivered a knock-out blow to the Union in the 1860s war: European recognition or capture of the Union capital. The British government (which had a Liberal plurality in the early '50s) was only mildly interventionist, the French were under the unstable Second Republic until late 1851, most other European governments were uninterested in American affairs, and the Confederates would have found it difficult to take Washington if, as I suspect would have been the case, Virginia had nominally remained in the Union (as a de facto neutral). One particular political event, though, would have helped bring an early end to the conflict, and that was the presidential election of 1852. Absent an early Union victory it is unlikely that a Whig candidate for president could have won election in the U.S., even if (especially if) Whig incumbent Zachary Taylor decided to stand for another term. The new Democratic president would owe much of his political support to Democratic grandees in those slave states still in the Union, few of whom would have wanted the war to drag on, and would be under great pressure to negotiate with the rebels. I suspect the new president would have arranged an armistice with the secessionists in 1853 and a peace treaty in 1853 or '54, granting them their independence (perhaps with an empty clause allowing the seceded states to re-enter the Union in future) with provisions for the repayment of Southerners' debts and for the return of runaway slaves (both of which would have been dead letters, as with their counterparts in the Anglo-American treaty of 1783).

What of the war's aftermath? Here I think Bordewich is right to paint a bleak picture of American prospects. The United States would not go on to become a world power by the early twentieth century, if ever. Even given favorable trade terms with the new Southern confederacy, the Union would not have the same access to cheap Southern raw materials (timber, iron, coal, cotton) that helped fuel the industrial expansion of 1865-1900. The confederacy probably would have been able to conquer and hold New Mexico and make it difficult for the Union to send settlers, administrators, or troops to Oregon and California during the war; I suspect Californians and Oregonians would have considered seceding from the Union themselves, and there's a small chance that Britain would seize California during or after the conflict, using "the protection of British interests" as the pretext. (California had several hundred million dollars in gold to serve as the real motive.) As for the confederacy itself, life would remain much the same there after the war as before for a very large percentage of the population – namely, African-American slaves. Some slaves would have been able to escape during the secession war (as during the Revolution and the War of 1812), but it's unlikely that, given the limited opposition to slavery in the North in 1850, the Union Congress would have passed Confiscation Acts mandating the freeing of runaways, or that many Union generals would have done so on their own. I can, however, see free states in the Union refusing to return runaway slaves to rebels or allow slave-catchers into their territory after the war, and abolitionists maintaining an Underground Railroad into the free states of the Union.

Beyond the borders of the old United States, a secessionist victory would certainly have had significant consequences. The 1850s historically saw a number of American filibustering expeditions against Central America and Spanish Cuba, and while few of these would have occurred during the secession war, there is little reason to assume that citizens of the newly-independent Southern confederacy would not have attempted to expand their nation southward by military conquest. The confederate government might even have quietly backed some of these expeditions, since expanding the domain of American slavery was important to many white Southern leaders; with state backing, private efforts to grab Nicaragua or part of Mexico or might have succeeded. Meanwhile, as the war would have disrupted the domestic American slave trade - the U.S. government would not have allowed those slave states which stayed in the Union to export slaves - the confederates would probably also have tried to reopen the African slave trade, either directly or using Brazil (which continued to import African slaves until 1870) as an intermediary. The Southern confederates' support in Britain, if any, would have shrunk as a result.

Speaking of Britain, it is less likely that the British government would have endorsed dominion status for Canada, at least not as early as 1867, if it had not been worried about the possibility of a powerful United States conquering the Canadian colonies or luring them into the American Union. And it seems equally unlikely that, if Napoleon III had decided (as he did in our continuum) to put Maximilian on the Mexican throne in 1861, he would have been sufficiently intimidated by the weakened United States - or the confederacy - to withdraw his support for a Mexican empire. The Monroe Doctrine might well have been a dead letter in the aftermath of our early Civil War.

On the positive side, there would not have been any re-enactors of this Civil War.  Thank heaven for small favors.

Anti-Presidents' Day!

Who were the worst U.S. presidents? asks Able Reader First Class Katherine Osburn in a recent comment. One is tempted to answer this question by listing some of the poltroons, criminals, and plain old dopes who have adorned the White House in the past half century, but honesty and a wider scope of historical understanding oblige me to reply "The Doughface Presidents of the 1850s, hands down."

The term "doughface," or "Northern men with Southern principles," is used by historians to refer to pre-Civil War politicians from free states who supported slave-state politicians on issues (like territorial laws and fugitive slaves) pertaining to slavery. The word was coined by the outre Virginia Senator John Randolph, who said that pro-slavery Northerners were so afraid of the South that "they were scared at their own dough faces." This may have been a reference to a children's game, but no-one thought to ask Randolph, who was an eccentric crank with a short temper. (Leonard Richards, The Slave Power, [LSU Press, 2000], 85-86)

The Doughface presidents, properly called, were the three Northern politicos who held the White House in the 1850s and actively exerted themselves to appease Southern white radicals. They ostensibly did so to hold the Union together, but their actions contributed to the immiseration of black slaves and were also unpopular among Northern whites. They thus placed a rather tarnished ideal above the lives and interests of a substantial part of the population. (While Lincoln allegedly valued the Union as much as the Doughfaces, his refusal to compromise on the issue of slavery in the territories helped ensure the Union would break up in 1860-61.)

The Three Amigos were

Millard Fillmore (New York, 1850-53): A Whig who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of Zachary Taylor, and who not only signed the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (which compelled Northerners to assist slavecatchers) but zealously enforced it. In a particularly infamous episode, Fillmore indicted for treason several men indicted for attacking slave-catchers in southern Pennsylvania. The jury acquitted them. Paul Finkelman's biography, which I briefly reviewed here, has more details on why Fillmore isn't just an obscure nonentity.

Franklin Pierce (New Hampshire, 1853-57): Democrat who sent federal troops to Boston in 1854 to escort runaway slave Anthony Walker back to Virginia. Pierce's action helped turn many moderate Yankees into abolitionists. He also signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the inhabitants of those territories to admit slavery if they chose, and supported the forcible installment of a pro-slavery government in Kansas.

But the Palme d'Or for ultimate presidential asshattery goes to

James Buchanan (Pennsylvania, 1857-61): Endorsed the ghastly Dred Scott versus Sanford decision. More or less destroyed his own party (the Democrats) by bribing Northern Congressmen to vote for the Lecompton Constitution, a blatantly fraudulent and authoritarian pro-slavery constitution for the future state of Kansas, and by attacking Democrats like Stephen Douglas who refused to go along with it. Supported re-opening the African slave trade, half a century after the U.S. and many European states had outlawed it as an insupportable evil. And, while we can't blame every U.S. president for the actions of their Cabinet secretaries, we may note that Buchanan's secretary of war was a Southerner who tried to send artillery to the Confederacy shortly before the end of JB's presidency. Really set the gold standard for presidential awfulness.

Buchanan's two predecessors had equally discreditable post-presidencies.  Fillmore ran for the presidency again in 1856 as the candidate of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party. Pierce openly sympathized with the Confederacy and ran over an old woman with his carriage. Buchanan, at least, had the good grace to do nothing in particular until he dropped dead in 1868.

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Professor Osburn suggests we establish an Anti-Presidents' Day for the worst U.S. presidents, which would be most of them. We differ on the best date for such a commemoration; my preference would be for January 9th, Richard M. Nixon's birthday, but your mileage may vary.

Embracing Despair, or Not

In his alarming online essay “Can America Survive What Our 1% and Their Useful Idiots, the GOP and the Dems, Have Done to Us?”, Evert Cilliers answers his own question with a resounding no. In his own words, “You and I are screwed forevermore." Cilliers argues that American workers have become impoverished “peasants” living marginal lives in the world's richest country, slaving away for a pittance while their corporate masters take home all of the profits from three decades of productivity gains. The U.S. government has been completely captured by the rich, who use their Democratic and Republican lackeys to reduce their own taxes and to assail what's left of the 99-percenters' social safety net. The only way to fix the problem, Cilliers concludes, is to revive labor unions and restore progressivism to the Democratic Party, and both changes are impossible. “The 1% have won, and the 99% are too powerless to reverse a process that has now stultified into an oppressive, predatory, corrupt status quo. We're a plutocracy, plain and simple...The fix is in. We the 99% are powerless to change it.”

Shorter version: Embrace despair, and drink yourself to death, because you are a peasant forevermore and your children will all be slaves.

I find this type of essay fascinating, but also useless. As my sister might say, when I follow this line of doom-saying myself, “What are you going to do about that?” What indeed? Que faire?

To answer that question, I think we first need to look at two important reasons why Americans have allowed their government to enrich the one percent and engineer such alarming economic inequality. First of all, since the 1960s voting Americans – the people who actually vote the “useful idiots” into office – have tended to emphasize social issues rather than economic equality when they go to the polls. Thomas Frank, in What's The Matter With Kansas?, argued that this was the key to the Republicans' capture of the same poor white voters their economic policies tended to screw. However, it is also true of progressives. We acknowledge that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent corrodes our democracy, but we are much more incensed by attacks on individual rights, such as the right of gay people to marry, the right of poor and minority citizens to vote, the right of women to control their own bodies, and the right of immigrant children to go to school. All of these rights remain under active threat in 2013, and I would not suggest we sideline them in favor of focusing on economic inequality, even if they do tend to distract us from the huge wealth and income gaps in this country. President Obama's supporters aren't pathetic dupes; many of us recognize he has been overly friendly to the malefactors of great wealth, but we give him credit for the social positions he has taken and give other Democratic lawmakers credit for defending us against Dominionist Republicans who want to enact The Handmaid's Tale. There are worse monsters than investment bankers in our country.

Incidentally, the social issues just mentioned were on very few Americans' radar in the 1950s, the golden age of American economic redistributionism. Gay Americans were considered mentally ill and probable national security risks; they were expected to stay in the closet and marry someone of the opposite sex, however repugnant the prospect. Immigration was nearly as restrictive in the 1950s as in the 1920s, and Eisenhower deported about one million Mexicans during his presidency. Voter suppression and Jim Crow were the laws of the land in the South. Birth control was illegal or heavily controlled in some states, abortion was illegal in all of them (even though middle-class women with discreet doctors often used it as birth control), and women were expected to stay home and raise babies; most were unable even to take out a loan or start a business without their husbands' permission. It was also an era of strong labor unions, political party membership, bowling leagues, and civic participation, a consequence, I suspect, of a stronger sense of American fraternal solidarity. But that fraternal unity was only really among white men, and it rested on the marginalization of women, gay people, racial minorities, immigrants, and in fact of most of the population. Also, there was a perceived need for Americans to hang together against the Red Menace, the evil Soviet super-villain that threatened to conquer the world and make everyone wear ugly suits. That, too, is part of the past. In the 2010s we have less fraternity and a lot less economic equality, but we do have more social equality and most of us have more liberty.

Returning to the twenty-first century, we should note that some of the most important Republican battles against economic equality (and they are primarily driven by Republicans) are being fought in state legislatures, which American progressives have tended to ignore during the last 30 years while the Democrats struggled to control the White House and Congress. Cilliers is guilty of the same problem: he excoriates President Obama and wishes for progressive new U.S. Senators to lead us out of our current dilemma, without focusing on the conservative takeover of the states. Statehouses have a huge impact on regional economies, and the Republicans who control most of them are determined to use that power against their perceived enemies – basically, anyone who isn't white and male and wealthy. GOP governors and legislatures cut aid to public and higher education, refuse federal infrastructure money that might benefit Democratic cities, pass right-to-work laws, break public unions, shift the tax burden to regressive sales taxes and fees, and draw Congressional district boundaries that will probably ensure GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives until 2022, if not 2032. I like Senator Elizabeth Warren very much, and think she could be a perfectly good president, but control of the presidency won't do much for progressives if the rest of the U.S. government is gridlocked by the Tea Party and the states have reduced public spending to eighteenth-century levels. Progressives need to worry more about what's going on at the state level, hard as it may be to focus on Lansing or Tallahassee rather than DC.

Finally, American workers, if their resistance to exploitation and falling real wages seems “pathetic,” have reached that point in part because they identify more with their individual jobs than with their social class (because we don't have social classes in America, after all [note sarcasm]), and have been willing to listen to the demand that they “do more with less” because they consider that job part of their core identity. Our national cult of individualism also discourages Americans from associating economic misfortune with malfeasance by the rich; when someone suffers a demotion or loses a job, they try to figure out what they, as individuals, have done wrong, because if they assume individual responsibility for their misfortune they can perhaps fix it themselves. Moreover, as Mssr. Cilliers notes, Americans have been able to counteract stagnant wages, for several decades at least, by relying on women's earnings after they entered (or, rather, re-entered) the workplace in the 1970s and '80s, and by using the old standby of credit, particularly home-equity loans. These standbys are no longer useful, because housing prices have collapsed and most American women work if they can. But empowering workers to address economic misfortune on their own remains useful, if only because our social safety net can only cover so much and because most of us prefer to work. American workers have generally stopped regarding their jobs as a lifetime commitment, as IBM and other salarymen regarded theirs in the 1950s, and all of us need to ready ourselves to switch jobs if our employers make conditions intolerable. This means we all need to update or improve our educations, build our savings, keep an eye open for better employment elsewhere, and not behave like serfs. Many American workers are doing all of these things already, but it would be helpful to receive more federal, state, and not-for-profit aid. We may be less able or willing collectively to pressure our bosses, but we can still vote with our feet.

One more thing: the idea that the GOP and Democrats are ready to dismantle what's left of the American social safety net on behalf of their wealthy masters is only half right. In 2005 Democrats proved themselves willing, even as a badly demoralized minority party, to take on a popular president to protect Social Security, and they won. Dubya did not mess with them on this issue again. Medicaid has actually undergone significant expansion since 1996, and there are powerful forces militating against its elimination; Wal-Mart, as Cilliers knows, tells many of its underpaid employees to sign up for Medicaid, and the nation's nursing homes would have to dump tens of thousands of enfeebled geezers on their families if Medicaid were eliminated (and I think the geezers' children, most of whom are older Americans themselves, already know this). We will see how proposals to raise the Medicare age fare in the current round of budget negotiations, but I suspect they won't go far. On most economic issues there isn't a dime's worth of difference between the parties, but there's at least a half-dollar's worth of difference on the matter of keystone entitlement programs.

Better Know a President!

In honor of President's Day, here are links to several blog pieces I've written about each of the first five American presidents:

George Washington: His precedent of retiring after two terms, and creating thereby the "post-presidency," is discussed here; this entry mentions a microbrew created with Washington's own recipe. My favorite online link regarding Washington is here, but be warned: it is very Unsafe For Work or for children.

John Adams: This entry reviews the John Adams miniseries that played on HBO a few years ago. It's less inaccurate than other films about the Revolutionary era, but I probably won't be using it in class.

Thomas Jefferson: A regular on this site, he was the subject of a short piece on the Beringian hypothesis of Native American origins, another on the first American diplomatic contact with Vietnam, a short primary-source-based reply to the Tea Partiers, and an essay replying to a blog entry by the inimitable Paul Bibeau.


James Madison: One of the more obscure early American presidents, unless one is in advertising, lives in Wisconsin, is a fan of the movie Splash, or likes to read the Federalist Papers for fun. Here are my thoughts on Madison's true legacy.

James Monroe: Despite being named for a famous Doctrine, Monroe has not previously piqued my interest on this weblog. I did note in a Twitter post a couple of years ago one of the more interesting pieces of trivia I discovered while researching a book chapter on Monroe: in the mid-1790s, when Monroe served as U.S. minister to France, his daughter Eliza attended school with Hortense Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte's stepdaughter. This probably gave the two men some familiarity with one another when they met a decade later to discuss the Louisiana Purchase. Wikipedia, which knows more than me, points out that one of Hortense's portraits now hangs in James Monroe's plantation home in Virginia.

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More to come on this subject, probably.

Blood and Spices

Last spring Harvard Magazine reported on a recent (2010) translation of a thirteenth-century German illuminated manuscript, De Regimine Mensium, that provided brief monthly instructions on how to maintain one's health. The manuscript, held by Houghton Library, included this advice for the month of January: “It is healthiest (sumere sanum) to eat warm food.” I guess most of us can check that off the list, though I'm not sure how effective this would be as a treatment for, say, influenza. The author provided similar dietary advice for other months: “Eat roasted meat and take baths”* (March), “Eat lettuce leaves with apples and drink from fountains” (June), “Avoid warm food, this month you have no need of it” (August), and “Drink cattle or curdled sheep's milk” (October). Demonstrating attachment to the humoral theory of illness, the manuscript sometimes recommended bloodletting - “Avoid frost and let blood flow from the thumb” (February), “Fill your belly with fluids and drain the foot of blood” (April) – though the entry for July recommends “Do not slash the veins...avoid them altogether,” which is good advice for any month. 

The entries for May and November are of particular interest to yours truly, because they both recommend spices such as cinnamon**, evincing the medieval and early-modern European belief that spices had great medicinal value. (The entry for September is a two-fer: “Bloodletting is good, and then you ought to eat spices.”) This is probably a consequence of the Eurasian belief that spices, such as pepper (“the grains of paradise”), were literally otherworldly, and it explains why European aristocrats were willing to spend such large sums of money on them – and thus why mariners like Columbus, Verrazano, and Hudson spent so much time seeking a short all-water route to China and Indonesia. (See William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World [Grove Press, 2008], 112-113; Peter Mancall, Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson [Basic Books, 2009], 21-25.)

Anyway, if any of my readers plan to spend February filling their bellies with generic fluids and draining the blood from their feet, they will have to let me know how that works out.

* Perhaps not at the same time, though.
** According to a late sixteenth-century author cited by Mancall, "cinnamon soothed upset stomachs, strengthened the brain and liver, helped prevent dropsy...eradicated pain in the lungs, guts, and breast...[and] could both freshen breath and whiten teeth" (Fatal Journey, 22).

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Monsieur Sabrevois, Part Three

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Leaving Detroit, however reluctantly*, our guide to the early eighteenth-century Midwest takes us up the Detroit River into the heart of the Great Lakes region: Lake Huron, the Mackinac Strait, and Lake Michigan. Twelve leagues (24-36 miles) above Detroit, Sabrevois pauses to point out a town of 250-400** Mississaugas, members of the Anishinaabe ethnic group, residing on an island in the Detroit River. Thirty-eight leagues further, off the eastern shore of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, he notes another village of Odawas on an island at the mouth of Saginaw Bay. Both of these communities raise crops, presumably with corn as their main staple; both hunt and fish; and both, like the Odawas and Potawatomis at Detroit, make “a great many bark canoes” for transportation (p. 370). These vessels, constructed of birch bark on a light cedar wood frame, are sometimes considered stereotypical Native American vessels, but in the 1700s their use was confined to the Anishinaabeg. In The Eagle Returns (Michigan State University Press, 2012, pp. 7-9), Matthew Fletcher notes that these canoes were up to 30 feet long and could carry hundreds of pounds of cargo, and allowed the Odawas (whose name means “traders”) to travel hundreds of miles to trade. Sabrevois provides an additional detail here about canoe manufacture: both genders contributed to the finished product, with men cutting the bark and fashioning the frames and women sewing and gumming the hulls. The canoes thus represented a familial and communal effort, and one may presume the Anishinaabeg considered them an important part of their overall wealth.

Sabrevois bypasses the Indian towns and French settlement at Michilimackinac - “it would be possible, if one desires, to dispense with going” there, he writes (371), and so he does. His memoir proceeds instead to La Bay, known today as Green Bay, Wisconsin, which French missionaries and traders had been visiting for over 80 years. Its Indian residents in 1718 were the Ho-Chunk, known to their enemies as the Winnebagos (a derisive term, translatable as “stinkers”); the Menominees or Folles Avoines (“wild rice people”); the Sauk, who built their settlements on the Fox River 15-18 leagues (30-50 miles) above the Bay; and the Fox or Mesquakie Indians, “Renards” as the French called them, another 18 leagues further upriver, toward the Fox-Wisconsin River portage. He estimates these nations' respective populations, or at least that of their communities in eastern Wisconsin, at 300-500 each for the Ho-Chunk and Menominees, 400-600 Sauks, and 2000-2500 Mesquakies. The first three of these nations, Sabrevois asserts, have lifeways and languages similar to the Odawas', a curious assertion given that the Ho-Chunks belonged to a different language family (Siouan) from most of the other Lakes Indians'. I can think of two explanations for this discrepancy: either Sabrevois was misinformed, or the Ho-Chunks, a relatively small Indian nation by this time, learned to speak one of the more common Algonquian languages in order to communicate with their neighbors. If the second is true, I suspect the language they learned was Odawa, given the Odawas' extensive trading connections.

 
The most distinctive Indian group in the Green Bay region, according to Sabrevois, was the Fox or Mesquakie nation, whose language bore little resemblance to the Anishinaabe languages, though it was similar to those of the Kickapoos and Mascoutens (or Fire People). The Fox sustained their larger population with “extraordinary crops of Indian corn” and an “abundance of meat and fish” (371-372). Most likely they ranged into central Wisconsin, an ecological boundary zone (ecotone) between woodland and grassland, to hunt. They were less reliant on European trade than their neighbors to the east, at least as far as one can tell from their sartorial habits: Mesquakie men wore garments of fur and hide, while women wore a combination of woven blankets (as wraps) and deerskin waistcloths. One should note that they did fringe these waist-cloths with small metal bells or ornaments, obtained from the French in trade. Does Sabrevois mention, by the way, that France has just fought a war with the Mesquakies, in which its Indian allies slew or enslaved 1,000 Foxes near Detroit, and which ended with the capture of the principal Fox town in Wisconsin? He does not, except to note that the Mesquakies' towns are “well fortified” (371). Since the first Fox War ended in a treaty (1716) guaranteeing peaceful trade with the French, Sabrevois was presumably writing under the assumption that the Mesquakies were now friends and trading partners. However, this assumption would not last another decade.

Coming next: the tattooed multitudes of northern Illinois.

* Sabrevois was fired as commandant of Detroit for executing several Lakes Indians who had traded with the English.

** The author has estimated Indian population figures by multiplying Sabrevois's estimate of the number of men in each community or nation by 4-5. Sabrevois estimates that in the Wisconsin Indian towns women outnumbered men by 4 to 1, which may be slightly exaggerated.

An Utterance of Superfluous Coin

Earlier this month economist Paul Krugman proposed that President Obama adopt an unorthodox solution to the interminable debt-ceiling crisis: rather than default on the national debt or cave in to Republican lawmakers' demands, the president could use his statutory authority to mint platinum coins to issue a single one-trillion-dollar coin, deposit it with the Federal Reserve, and "thereby avoid...the need to issue debt" to pay the federal government's bills. This sounds like a crackpot idea, but it is less cracked than threatening a sovereign default to force the Democrats to dismantle what's left of the American social safety-net. The main defects in Krugman's plan, it seems to me, are twofold: 1) he only proposes minting one coin in one very high denomination, eliminating the possibility of selling a few slightly smaller high-denomination coins to eccentric billionaires, and 2) he doesn't indicate whose image(s) these coins should display. Politically, it might be wise for the president to exploit Republicans' obsession with Ronald Reagan by stamping his image on the anti-debt-ceiling coins.  But that's no fun. Coins, after all, provide an opportunity for nation-states to express their values and celebrate their people's achievements, and there are an awful lot of obscure American leaders, artists, and heroes one could take this opportunity to celebrate.

My own proposal for new high-value platinum coin denominations, and whose visages they should display, follows.  Feel free to propose your own, bearing in mind that U.S. coins should display persons who are a) more or less American, and b) more or less deceased.

$1 million: Emily Dickinson, poet (1)
$5 million: Eugene Debs, presidential candidate
$10 million: Mercy Otis Warren, historian
$20 million: Percy Julian, inventor (2)
$50 million: Jeannette Rankin, pacifist Congresswoman
$100 million: Duke Ellington, musician and composer
$1 billion: Jane Addams, social activist
$5 billion: Carl Sagan, astronomer (3)
$10 billion: Wilma Mankiller, Cherokee principal chief
$20 billion: William S. Burroughs, author (4)
$50 billion:Victoria Woodhull, activist, presidential candidate
$100 billion: Herman Husband, populist and pacifist
$1 trillion: Lori Ann Piestewa, soldier

(1) Obverse: something with feathers.
(2) Of synthetic steroids.
(3) For obvious reasons, given the denomination.
(4) Warning: coin may contain heroin.

Blogroll update

I have finally retired the link to the Orwell Diaries from my blogroll, as the site editors have posted the last entry from G.O.'s wartime journal.  Orwell went to work for the B.B.C.* in late 1942, and did not resume keeping a diary until 1946 (and his postwar diary focused almost exclusively on trivia).  It's been fun following his account of World War Two.

Replacing Mssr. Blair is a link to a new weblog put together by a group of graduate students and recent Ph.Ds in early American history, The Junto.  The site launched a couple of weeks ago, and already the authors have published several excellent articles on Jay Gitlin's Bourgeois Empire, the communitarianism of the Founding Fathers, the best history books of 2012, and other subjects.  I look forward to following their exploits.

Your humble narrator has also been alerted to this list of the 50 best American history blogs, in which his humble site appears as number 45.  Huzzah!**

Updated Update, 4 January 2013: Allow me to introduce my readers to "Baby Got Bactria," Briana Kristler's research blog on commerce, law, and architecture in pre-modern Balkh (Bactria).  Really, how could one not support a weblog with that title?


* If memory serves, the B.B.C.'s headquarters was the architectural model for the Ministry of Truth in 1984, and one of the conference rooms where Orwell's section met was Room 101.


** Pronounced "hoozay."  Really!

What I Saw of the 2012 Ethnohistory Conference

Your faithful working boy managed to attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, which met last month in Springfield, Missouri.  Thanks to a full teaching schedule, several midweek professional obligations (including a breakfast meeting with my university's president), and a long drive from Indiana to southwestern Missouri, I was unable to attend any panels on the opening day of the conference, though I did register and pick up my convention swag bag, including this kick-ass coffee mug.  (The Mayan letters, included in honor of the forthcoming End of Days, either read "Here Comes the ASE" or "All Hail King Seven-Jaguar Snake-Person.")

On Friday (November 9) and Saturday (the 10th), I attended the following papers, which I summarize on behalf of those of my readers who'd like to know what North American ethnohistorians are up to this year:

**

David Buhl ("Water Out of Nowhere: Technological Solutions to a Legal Failure on Salt River Reservation") discussed the early 20th-century struggle for water rights on the Salt River Pima reserve, noting that despite a federal court decision (the Winters case of 1905) upholding Pima water rights, the Office of Indian Affairs let white farmers take most of the Salt River's water and sink new wells whenever there was a drought.



Brenda Child ("Healing and Renewal: Ojibwe Women, Nursing, and the Influenza of 1918") gave a brief biography of Lucient Levoy, an Ojibwa boarding-school student who worked as a volunteer nurse in Washington, DC, during the Spanish flu pandemic.  Child used this to start a brief discussion of the impact of the flu pandemic on the Anishinaabeg, who created a new "healing culture" (based on ceremonies like the jingle-dress dance) in the wake of the flu.


Regna Darnell ("The Transportability of 'Home' across First Nations Territory and Generation") discussed the concept of home for the formerly nomadic Algonkian peoples of Ontario.  She defined a homeland as a place with which a people have a personal and familial relationship, where they gather periodically to renew social relationships; it is not necessarily a long-term dwelling place nor a store for resources.  Darnell's paper would have nicely complemented Sami Lakömaki's argument (based on his work on the Shawnees) that a people's kin network, however far-flung, can serve as their homeland.  Indeed, Darnell and Lakömaki were scheduled to be on the same panel, but Sami wasn't able to make it.



Tom Fujii ("Cash, Gold Dust, and Credit: California Indian Economic Advancement") gave a wide-ranging paper on California Indians' economic strategies (to 1870), from which I learned that archaeologists have discovered glass trade beads in California dated to the early seventeenth century, and that the California Indians used glass and shell beads as currency into the mission era.



Mattie Harper ("White, Black, or Ojibwe?: The Bonga Family and Race in Minnesota") made the useful point that race was a fluid category in early Minnesota Territory.  Census takers were happy to classify mixed-race families like the Bongas as white in order to qualify Minnesota for a territorial legislature, while missionaries generally distinguished Indians from "half-breeds" by cultural markers like clothing and the "habiliments of civilization."



Clara Sue Kidwell ("Law and Order in the Choctaw Nation") talked about the 1826 Choctaw constitution, which she argues is (in part) a product of the 1825 diplomatic mission to Washington, DC that killed two of the Choctaws' traditionalist chiefs, Pushmataha and Puckshunubbe, and cleared the way for a more progressive faction to draft a new frame of government.  The paper was a preview for a book Clara Sue has coming out soon on this constitution.



Daniel Monteith ("A Story about the Taku Kwaan and a Tlingit Village on Douglas Island") presented on the Tlingit community of Douglas Island, Alaska, who were marginalized when the Treadwell Mining Company built a massive mining complex and refinery near their home in the 1880s.  Treadwell killed off most of the herring population, left toxic ore tailings on the beaches, and bulldozed one of the nearby Tlingit villages after it was partly destroyed in a fire.  From this paper I learned an interesting piece of climate history: the Alaska Gold Rush was partly a product of global warming, since glacial melting at the end of the Little Ice Age exposed surface quartzite deposits that indicated, to experienced miners, the presence of subsurface gold.


Jonathan Olsen ("Fur Trade Imports, Indigenous Spirituality, and the Conflation of Economic Performance") revisited Claude Schaeffer's 1965 Ethnohistory article about the Kutenai female berdache, Madame Boisverd, observing that she claimed to have had both her gender and her physical sex altered by British traders and to have received the power of prophecy from them.  Olsen argued that we need to remember the close connection between economic and spiritual power, and between trade and religion, in Native North America.  For my part, I was somewhat distracted by Olsen's statement that the Pacific Northwest was part of the "Atlantic World," an assertion supported by much of the audience.  Throw in the towel, would-be Pacific World scholars; you've lost.




Robert Przeklasa, Jr. ("One Flea-Bitten Grey Horse: Women, Horses and Economy on the Yakama Reservation") reported that among the early 20th-century Yakamas, the principal purchasers and owners of horses were women, who used the animals on their long-range gathering expeditions.  About 60 percent of the Yakamas' calories came from wild plants, and women traveled up to 80 kilometers from their winter camps to gather them.

Michael Witgen's paper ("Crime and Punishment on the Borderland of Anishinaabewaki and the United States") I could barely hear, but it apparently dealt with an 1837 murder case in western Wisconsin, in which territorial officials intervened by employing biracial American Fur Company employees as witnesses.  Witgen also brought up the distinction between colonialism (the subordination of an indigenous people to a settler/intruder population) and settler-colonialism (the extirpation and replacement of indigenes), but I didn't see the connection between this analysis and the rest of the paper.  One hopes he will publish this paper in the near future, so that I can figure out what the author was saying.

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Commandant Sabrevois (Part Two)

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Jacques-Charles Sabrevois was for several years the commandant of the French post at Detroit, and it is to this community that his memoir now takes us. Detroit ("the Strait") had been founded in 1701 by Antoine Le Mothe de Cadillac, who established the settlement to bar English expansion into the upper Great Lakes. In 1718 the site had a small French fort and trading post, but most of the local inhabitants were Indians whom Cadillac had invited to Detroit to serve as his farming population and military auxiliary. At least three Native American nations had built villages at Detroit by the time of Sabrevois's memoir: the Huron-Wendats, an Iroquoian-language-speaking people whom the Mohawks had driven from their homeland in 1648; the Odawas ("Traders"), one of the three constituent nations of the Anishinaabe people; and the Potawatomis ("Fire-Keepers"), another Anishinaabe nation from southwestern Michigan. The Hurons had "100 men" (16:370) at Detroit in Sabrevois's time, probably equivalent to a total population of 250-300 men, women, and children; the Potawatomis had equal numbers; and the Odawas had "100 men and a great many women," a gender imbalance no doubt due to that nation's recent wars with the Iroquois.

Not surprisingly given their common background, the Odawas and Potawatomis had very similar customs, differing only in the construction of their dwelling places: the Potawatomis lived in portable huts built of overlapping reed mats, while the Odawas built wood and bark cabins like those of the Hurons. (Perhaps they adopted this building style from the Hurons while the two peoples lived together at Michilimackinac in the seventeenth century.) Both groups otherwise had the same economic base: fishing, commercial hunting, trading animal pelts for textiles and other European goods, and farming. Odawas and Potawatomis both cultivated the "Three Sisters" of Native North American agriculture (corn, beans, squash), along with melons and peas. Both had the same gendered division of labor: women did the "drudge" work of farming, preparing food, treating skins, and transporting and assembling shelters, while men did the "fun" jobs like hunting and fishing and fighting. (Lakes Indian men actually worked about as hard as women, but women supplied most of the calories and raw materials that their kinsmen consumed.) Both also had similar dances and games, of which more below.

To the Hurons of Detroit Sabrevois devotes relatively little attention, though more than he gave the Senecas who resided near Niagara. They are, in his telling, an "exceedingly industrious nation," brave, intelligent, and generally praiseworthy, but rather dull. Their town near Detroit consisted of a fort enclosed in a double wooden palisade, several bark longhouses - Sabrevois calls them "cabins" but describes them as "high...and very long" - and extensive fields of corn, legumes, and "sometimes French wheat." While Huron men were expert hunters and spent most of their time, summer through winter, in their hunting ranges, Huron women generally remained closer to home, tending their fields, gathering wood, and guarding the Hurons' fort, a task they leave to "old women."  (16: 368). Of the Hurons' cultural and religious lives, Sabrevois appears to be unaware.

Sabrevois provides far more information about the cultural lives of the Potawatomis, and by extension the Odawas. Their clothing style, he observes, was beginning to change in consequence of the fur trade: women increasingly wore white dresses, glass-bead necklaces, and vermilion to community events, while men dressed in red and blue cloth garments in the warmer months, though they generally donned bison robes in the winter. Their dances Sabrevois divides into three types: war or "scout" dances, wherein men took turns striking a pole and reciting their martial exploits; social dances, in which dancers of both genders moved to the accompaniment of male singers, drums, and rattles; and midewiwin or medicinal dances, performed in the evening by older men.

Of the Detroit Indians' games, finally, Sabrevois describes two, which he has probably seen played in person. One is lacrosse, which the Odawa, Potawatomi, and Huron towns play against one another in the summer, with some of the French joining in as well. It is, as most modern North Americans know, a field game in which two teams of players (20 each, in this case) drive a wooden ball toward their team's goal with wooden rackets. Sabrevois noted that the game's players, all male, usually dressed in no more than breechcloths but usually painted themselves lavishly, some with white pigment in patterns resembling lace. (Sabrevois infers that this "lacework" was a coincidental effect, not a deliberate one.) The Indian spectators were just as lavish in the bets they placed on the games' outcome, wagers which could collectively exceed 800 livres' (francs') worth of goods (367). The other Native American game Sabrevois encountered at Detroit was "dish," a game of chance in which the players "tossed on a dish" eight "balls" or disks with two differently-painted sides (369), winning the round and the bet whenever seven or eight tokens landed on the same side. Thankfully, they did not have to yell "Yahtzee!" to collect their winnings.

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Jacques-Charles Sabrevois

For the next few blog entries, I am going to take my readers on a tour of the Midwestern United States, at a time when the region was considerably less dull than we believe it to be today. Our tour guide will be Jacques-Charles Sabrevois, a French military officer who served as the commandant of French Detroit, and who in 1718 either wrote or helped write a "Memoir on the Savages of Canada as Far as the Mississippi River," which nineteenth-century researchers found in the French colonial archives in Paris and reprinted in volume 16 of the Collections of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Sabrevois's memoir, which I first encountered in the footnotes to Richard White's Middle Ground (1991), appears brief and superficial on first glance, but it is actually full of ethnohistorical detail for those who pay close attention to it.

**

Sabrevois begins his memoir at Niagara, where the French were in the process of establishing a fort and trading post, and carries his account thence to Lake Erie and the Detroit River, where we will end this first entry. Like most Europeans who have traveled through western New York, he of course mentions Niagara Falls, "the grandest sheet of water in the world" (364), but his chief interest in these first couple of pages is a small Seneca village located on the portage road around the falls. Like the rest of the Five Nations Iroquois, this Seneca community derived most of its subsistence from agriculture – the "Three Sisters" of corn, beans, and squash, plus peas and melons – but also obtained European goods, like ammunition and mitasses(cloth leggings), by working for hire. In return for helping to move French trade goods up the portage road and French furs and pelts down it, the local Senecas earned French merchandise. The Great Peace which the French and their Great Lakes Indian allies had concluded with the Iroquois (1701) allowed some Iroquois to become middlemen in the Lakes fur trade, and apparently it turned some of them into employees of French voyageurs.

(Our guide also tells us that this village consisted of "ten cabins," which recalls a point raised by Daniel Richter in Ordeal of the Longhouse (1992): by the 18th century, the Iroquois had stopped living in multi-family longhouses and had moved into smaller cabins, suggesting a more family-oriented than clan or lineage-oriented society.)

Casting his gaze southward and westward, Sabrevois notes the "abundance of game" south of Lake Erie, including herds of bison, an animal whose range extended well eastward of the Mississippi River.  He mentions some of the water routes connecting the Great Lakes to the "Auyo" (Ohio) or Beautiful River, including the Genesee (which approaches the headwaters of the Allegheny, though Sabrevois seems a bit confused about this) and the "Sandosquet" (Sandusky), which is separated from the southward-flowing Scioto by a one-mile portage. Our narrator has heard that bison and other game animals are so plentiful on the banks of the Ohio River that one must drive them off with gunfire if one wants to walk along the shore. He is equally interested in the uses to which the Indians put these rivers: the Odawas, Potawatomis, and Huron-Wyandots who live near Detroit use the Sandusky, Scioto, and Ohio Rivers as war corridors, descending the latter two waterways in "canoes of elm bark" (364) to attack the Cherokees, Shawnees, and "Tetes Plattes" (presumably Chickasaws or Choctaws) living near the Tennessee River. This came as news to me; I knew that the Iroquois made war on the southern Indians during this era, but not that the Hurons and Anishinaabeg did so. I suppose the 1701 peace treaty between the Five Nations and the Lakes Indians encouraged warriors from the latter nations, formerly used to fighting the Iroquois, to find alternative adversaries.

Reaching the western end of Lake Erie, Sabrevois mentions the abundance of fish, including 5-foot-long sturgeon, off Point Pelee, and the large population of raccoons on the western Erie islands – presumably they swam there, but I wouldn't put it past raccoons to build boats - as well as the many turkeys that roost on the Ile aux dirdes near Detroit. On a similar trip an Anglo-American traveler would preoccupy himself with soil fertility and the species of trees (supposedly clues to the quality of the underlying soil) he encountered, but Sabrevois does so only when discussing the farmland around Detroit. Otherwise he is interested in subjects that would interest a traveler and trader rather than a developer: what game one could catch, what rivers one might follow, and the habits of the Indians with whom one might trade. To that latter subject I shall devote more attention in my next entry on Sabrevois's memoir.