The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac
Parkman, Francis
When a Potawatomi woman told me that a female relative had once helped boil and eat a white man's heart, I was struck more by her own bluntness than by her ancestor's grisly deed. Such frank...
...The fear planted by the threat of such horrors bore ugly fruit...
...And like those books, its introductory chapters on colonial rivalries portray the struggle for a continent in terms few historians today would endorse: "Feudalism stood arrayed against Democracy...
...WHAT THE HOMELESS CRISIS TELLS US Richard W. White, Jr...
...Most of the homeless today, as in the past, are single adults, and . . . the typical homeless family is a never-married mother staying with her children in an inner-city homeless shelter...
...He had suffered greatly from illness that summer—"and yet to this hour I cannot recall those savage scenes and savage men without a strong desire again to visit them...
...Yet certainly Parkman, like all good Americans, prefers warlike Indians, saved by the "powerful stimulus" of martial spirit "from lethargy and utter abasement...
...Seven out of ten homeless adults RUDE AWAKENINGS...
...There are forts all around us, and therefore we are apprehensive that Death is coming upon us...
...Had this story run in one of New York's tabloids, the headline might have read: HOMELESS SPOKESMAN: I'M A LIAR...
...But "the bottom line," he said, "is that we have to tell the truth...
...Pennsylvania offered a bounty for scalps of "enemy" Indian males and females above the age of ten...
...His features were remarkably mild and open, without the fierceness of expression common among these Indians...
...Let your rifle be ever in your hand...
...The Library of America's one-volume edition of Francis Parkman's first two books thrusts us back toward an era when shyness about unnerving Indian customs was not a problem...
...ICS Press / 333 pages/$24.95 reviewed by TERRY TEACHOUT 68 The American Spectator December 1992...
...One woman slew her own child lest its cries reveal her hiding place, while a contemporary notes how an express rider saw a freshly scalped woman lying in the road, "her Brains hanging over her Skull...
...the vices and virtues that have sprung from their innate character and from their modes of life, their government, their superstitions, and their domestic situations...
...The American Spectator December 1992 67 corpses, "gashed with knives and scorched with fire, floated down on the pure waters of the Detroit, whose fish came up to nibble at the clotted blood that clung to their ghastly faces...
...The rest scattered and ran yelling in an ecstasy of superstitious terror back to their lodges...
...His first historical work, it would ultimately serve as a sequel to his mighty series France and England in North America...
...Louis to Wyoming's Fort Laramie, young Parkman flouts political correctness at every turn...
...Rely on the natives' altruism...
...for from minnows up to men, life is an incessant battle...
...Kongra-Tonga] garnished his story with a great many descriptive particulars much too revolting to mention...
...Read how Parkman "dismounted, and amused [him]self with firing at the wolves...
...For Hayes, founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, had spent the better part of a decade lying about what he and every other homeless "advocate" knew Terry Teachout is the author of City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (Poseidon Press...
...squalid" Mexicans have "vile faces overgrown with hair...
...In one alarming passage Parkman (shortly before informing us that he and his companion the Panther were "excellent friends") pauses to reflect that a "civilized white man," even when disposed to recognize their good qualities, must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren of the prairie...
...Conscious of the tragedy, but believing that "the doom must come," Parkman was more concerned with its inevitability than with white guilt—though inclined to the then-popular belief that the Indians would literally die out as a result of contact with civilization...
...Living among these "wild democrats of the prairie," Parkman foresaw their corruption and knew that the frontier he was privileged to see would soon perish: "Its danger and its charm will have disappeared together...
...Along the Western frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, terror reigned supreme . . . the settlers in the valley of the Mohawk, and even along the Hudson, were menaced with destruction...
...Advocates like Robert M. Hayes say that they have shied away from discussing the problem of addiction in the past, in part because they feared that the public would lose its sympathy for the homeless...
...But he rode off...
...171 that most homeless people are, among other things, chronic substance abusers, and that their addictions are in large part responsible for the fact that they are homeless...
...but the proud and ambitious Dahcotah warrior can sometimes boast of heroic virtues...
...his Companions made a Proposal to knock her on the head, to put an End to her Agony...
...by WAYNE MICHAEL SARF 66 The American Spectator December 1992 little compunction as they themselves would experience after performing the same office upon him...
...parkman retains his appeal because he was there—riding with Indians, hunting buffalo—as his readers would like to have been...
...Americans not quite convinced that our eastern Indian wars actually took place may profitably read of how naked Questions about your subscription...
...Alas, his superficial insight into Indian character (which he views as"hewed out of a rock," though seemingly malleable enough when absorbing white vices) mars even his portrait of "the savage hero of this dark forest tragedy...
...Learning of warlike preparations among the Sioux, he shamelessly explains: I was greatly rejoiced to hear of it...
...Meanwhile, war-parties had broken out of the woods "like gangs of wolves" to lay waste the settlements...
...He then adopted the unusual expedient of an extended siege...
...And while many refugees remained paralyzed by fear, others found every faculty "absorbed by the burning thirst for vengeance, and mortal hatred against the whole Indian race...
...The rebellion's success was temporary, of course, and Pontiac surrendered only to be murdered years later—tomahawked near St...
...And we sense his pleasure...
...Animal rights...
...Soon "a plot was matured, such as was never, before or since, conceived or executed by a North American Indian...
...and as he detailed these devilish cruelties, he looked up into my face with the same air of earnest simplicity which a little child would wear in relating to its mother some anecdote of its youthful experience...
...Many Quakers, justly renowned for their kindness toward the Indians, initially acted as apologists in denying or downplaying accounts of the bloodletting (striking a strangely modern note for those familiar with liberation theology...
...Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that having breathed for a few months or a few weeks the air of this region, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast, and if expedient, he could shoot them with as THE OREGON TRAIL and THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC Francis Parkman edited by William R. Taylor Library of America /951 pages/$35 reviewed...
...He is at work on a biography of H L. Mencken...
...But the undaunted thunder, refusing to be frightened, kept moving straight onward, and darted out a bright flash which struck one of the party dead, as he was in the very act of shaking his long iron-pointed lance against it...
...Parkman's equally rude comments on non-Indians, from lowly emigrants to his "brutish" fellow travelers, display a snobbery scarcely to be borne in our paperback age...
...Carefully tending his firearms, he lets a hard-eyed romance mingle with pre-Darwinist musings, as when observing fish seemingly at play, yet actually engaged in "a cannibal warfare": "Soft-hearted philanthropists," thought I, "may sigh long for their peaceful millennium...
...In The Oregon Trail, his account of an 1846 horseback odyssey from St...
...In fact, reliable estimates suggest that no more than 300,000 Americans are homeless at any given time...
...Some embraced a war of extermination...
...With The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), he sought to "portray the American forest and the American Indian at the period when both received their final doom...
...a dying frontiersman, giving his gun to a boy, urged: "Whenever you see an Indian, kill him with it, and then I shall be satisfied...
...descriptions, and his prissy Victorian omissions on grounds of "good taste"—no one can accuse him of minimizing white beastliness, or the price exacted from the red men by Progress...
...p ontiac's plan to take Detroit—with warriors sauntering into the fort with sawed-off muskets beneath their blankets—failed when the English proved forewarned...
...Few "Indian" horrors can equal his account of how, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the infamous "Paxton boys" slaughtered fourteen peaceful Indians—whose long-buried bones, he tells us without comment, were ultimately disinterred "in preparing the foundation for a railroad...
...But if The Oregon Trail were merely a barrage of arcane prejudices, it would not have endured...
...The date appears above the subscriber's name to the right of the account number . Example: 311541 940501 TASR1 Thus, in the example above, the subscription expires with the May 1994 issue...
...Such "unquenchable and indiscriminate hatred" was, Parkman conceded, not easy for those "living in the tranquility of polished life" to understand...
...It may seem odd that Bernard DeVoto, writing in 1943, should accuse the young weakling of admiring not merely the Indians' vigor and bravery, but their very cruelty...
...Despite the odds, the tiny garrison of English and provincials held on for months—for "where barbarism has beenarrayed against civilization, disorder against discipline, and ungoverned fury against considerate valor, such has seldom failed to be the result...
...An Iroquois sachem pronounced his people "penned up like Hoggs...
...Call the American Spectator Toll-Free Subscriber Service Line 1-800-783-6707 (9 am-5 pm, Eastern Time) YOUR EXPIRATION DATE Readers often ask how to read the expiration date on their mailing label...
...W bile Parkman viewed his frontier sojourn as helpful in understanding the eastern Indians of the colonial era, one suspects that his very observations were colored by previous historical readings...
...the sword against the ploughshare...
...Others were remarkably uncowed by the "terror of the tomahawk," their reasons ranging from raw courage to an inability to recognize their peril...
...His observations never penetrate the surface, and his Indians seem less men shaped by a particular culture than mere creatures of passion, with glittering eyes (a trait I have not noticed among the Indians of my acquaintance...
...More timid red men, less warlike, had "little of humanity except the form...
...But Parkman not only welcomed "rude and stern scenes," he sought them out...
...Reading him today, we gain insight not merely into the history of the eighteenth century, but into the mentality of the nineteenth...
...nor can he bestow higher praise on a tortured Jesuit priest than by writing that he "died calmly as a martyr of the early church, or war-chief of the Mohawks...
...Wear next to your heart the old chivalric motto, `Semper paratus.'" Passing on an anecdote of Sioux "thunder fighters" setting forth with guns, drums, and whistles, he fails to exhibit the proper New Age reverence: One afternoon, a heavy black cloud was coming up, and they repaired to the top Wayne Michael Sail is the author of God Bless You, Buffalo Bill: A Layman's Guide to History and the Western Film and the forthcoming The Little Bighorn Campaign...
...War is the breath of their nostrils...
...I had come into the country almost exclusively with a view of observing the Indian character . . . I wished to satisfy myself with regard to the position of the Indians among the races of men...
...Parkman's moralistic index reference begins: "Owen, David, diabolically kills and scalps his own Indian wife and several of her relations . . .") Intent on "reducing the Indians to reason," General Amherst considered giving them smallpox-infected blankets, while another Briton predicted sadly that "instead of Colours and Cannon, our Trophies will be stinking scalps," in a war "conducted by a spirit of Murder . . ." Whatever Parkman's flaws—his consistent misuse of "rifle" when muskets are meant, his suspiciously novelistic On May 22, 1989, the New York Times ran a front-page story with this uncharacteristically soft-spoken lead: Drug and alcohol abuse have emerged as a major reason for the homelessness of men, women and families, complicating the search for solutions, advocates for the homeless say...
...While the forthright Kongra-Tonga may have had his faults, one can be reasonably sure that he would never have protested against Atlanta Braves fans doing the "Tomahawk Chop...
...One soldier, having deserted to the Indians years before, was pardoned when he returned with five scalps—including his wife's...
...But of course...
...While the obtuse English produced extreme suffering by refusing to supply the usual "presents" to Indians now dependent on European trade goods, white settlement, fast extending to the Alleghenies, ate away the forest "like a spreading canker...
...But if Parkman's analysis no longer persuades, his narrative still compels...
...With the English triumph in the Seven Years' War, the Indians so carefully cultivated by the French found themselves subject to their old enemies...
...of a hill, where they brought all their magic artillery into play against it...
...He cannot mention the Iroquois' fondness for torture without adding that they possessed "bravery, generosity, and all the savage virtues...
...But even they ultimately took defensive measures...
...Yet this is precisely what Parkman could or would not do—no matter how manfully he devoured the boiled puppy served by the "Dahcotah...
...But Hayes's belated confession has had little effect on media coverage, which is still dominated by two assumptions: (1) There are around three million homeless people in America, including many homeless nuclear families, and (2) most of them are just like you and me...
...Popery against Protestantism...
...The breaking point came in 1763, when the Indians were informed that their French father, without asking his children's leave, had ceded their lands to the English...
...Peace-loving Sioux...
...Frenchmen eager to drive rivals from the fur country told the Indians that while the King of France had "fallen asleep" and allowed the English to conquer Canada, he was now awake, and would pfovide troops to help expel them...
...Such frank revelations are rare these days, when we are told to damn Columbus, vaporize Custer's name from the field where he gave his life, and praise Kevin Costner's absurd parody of Sioux culture in Dances With Wolves (not to mention Russell Means's balding, fiveo'clock-shadowed attempt to impersonate a full-blooded Indian in The Last of the Mohicans...
...Pontiac, without whom the scheme might have ended in a few raids "and a little whooping and yelling under the walls of Fort Pitt," was then principal chief of the Ottawas and untitled head of their loose league with the Ojibwas and Potawatomis, his influence extending far beyond these tribes...
...Here again, a horror of—and fascination with—barbarity is complemented by admiration for courage...
...Want to place an order...
...Mormons are "blind and desperate fanatics...
...Praising Pontiac's eloquence and capacity for magnanimity, he must nevertheless remind us that "He was a thorough savage, with a wider range of intellect than those around him, but sharing all their passions and prejudices . . . His faults were the faults of his race, and they cannot eclipse his nobler qualities...
...Louis by an Illini warrior for an English trader's barrel of liquor...
...And thus "basely perished this champion of a ruined race...
...The massacre of a teacher and his young pupils, standing out even in this "horrible monotony of blood and havoc," incurs the wrath of older warriors, who rebuke the killers with the ultimate charge of cowardice...
...In Rude Awakenings, Richard White refutes these assumptions, and shatters other myths as well: • The late Mitch Snyder, for years the best-known homeless advocate in America, admitted in 1984 that the widely accepted figure of three million homeless was a fiction: "We got on the phone, we made lots of calls, we talked to lots of people, and we said 'Okay, here are some numbers.' They have no meaning, no value...
...Other victims were eaten by the Indians, though Parkman assures us they were not "habitual cannibals...
...Trust not an Indian...
...An old woman slashes open a corpse and quaffs its blood "with a ferocious ecstasy," and an English soldier writes of one mangled victim that "the Indians wip'd his Heart about the Faces of our Prisoners...
...But his descriptions of practices and preoccupations ring true, as when his host Kongra-Tonga tells of an enemy brave scalped alive: They then built a great fire, and cutting the tendons of their captive's wrists and feet, threw him in, and held him down with long poles until he was burnt to death...
...The English frontier forts were to be simultaneously captured and destroyed, and the settlements then laid waste...
...To accomplish my purpose it was necessary to live in the midst of them, and become, as it were, one of them...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
