Download Russian Fur-vor: 1741-1867

13. European Contact: The Character of the Invaders
One of the most complex aspects of
the story of Native America is its intertwining
with the story of the European Colonists.
There is no way to know what Indian
societies might have been like if Europeans
had not come. But come they did, and from
the viewpoint of today's rapidly shrinking
Global Village, it is hard to imagine that the
peoples of Europe and the Americas would
have not come together.
We might try to imagine that the
encounter between the peoples who occupied
these continents and the Europeans who
invaded could have been less dark. As Fr.
Vine Deloria told us, it is composed of very
good and very bad. Whatever might have
been, the actual story has many dimensions,
many events, people, voices. We cannot tell it
all here. However, a few aspects need to be
surveyed.
The invaders were varied in their
characteristics, motives, values, attitudes,
styles, goals, and tactics. From the Native
American viewpoint, it matters a great deal
with whom you came into contact, how and
when. The "conquest" took 400 years. Those
who were "hit" first, were decimated early.
Peoples in remote areas, although affected by
the invasion in various ways long before they
actually laid eyes on the invaders, had a very
different story.
Here we shall take an overview of
five invading European groups: the Spanish,
the French, the Russians, the Dutch, the
British and the Americans.
The Spanish: Gold, God, Glory 1492-1846
The story of the European invasion is
not only a matter of the relations between
Europe and the Natives. It intricately involves
the
Europeans'
relationships
among
themselves. So we need to understand both
the why and the how of each group to
appreciate the impact they would have on the
Native peoples around the globe. Moreover,
as Jack Weatherford has demonstrated so
dramatically in his Indian Givers: How the
Indians of America Transformed the World,
Europe and the rest of the world were
radically transformed as well.
The close of the Fifteenth Century
was a momentous time in Spanish history. It
was a time of almost total transformation
from the Old World of medieval feudalism to
the brave new world of Renaissance,
Reformation, Exploration, and Colonization.
Christian Iberia had been at war for 700 years
with the intruding Muslim Moors from North
Africa. In 1492, the newly combined
kingdom of Aragon and Castile, the core of
what would become the modern Spanish
nation, succeeded in expelling the Moors
from their Granada, their last Iberian bastion.
The situation left a residue of restless and
under-utilized soldiers, sailors, adventurers,
particularly in the South.
At the same time, a commercial and
industrial revolution was exploding in Europe
generally, spurred by new scientific and
technological developments. While the
economies of other nations burgeoned, the
Spanish had no product to meet the price of
entry into this new game. They needed a new
source of wealth, and trade routes to Asia
would solve their problem. The Muslims had
sealed routes to the East. Cristobal Colon sold
Queen Isabella on the idea of getting there by
sailing West. No one was remotely prepared
for what he would actually find.
Playing out all the dimensions of God,
Gold and Glory in Spain and New Spain
would take volumes. For many people they
were hardly separable. The rise of nationstates had a strongly theological basis, and
from the viewpoint of Los Reyes Catolicos,
the Protestant Reformation was as much an
act of rebellion against the Holy Roman
Empire as anything else. The defense of
Spain, fighting to expand its hegemony and
loyalty to God and His Church was hardly
possible without one another. For Protestants
and Catholics alike, missionizing was part
and parcel of national purpose.
Despite its apparent unity, this
multiphase national purpose was not without
its tensions. The concrete embodiments of the
religious, political and economic forces at
work were often deeply at odds. From the
beginning there was noticeable schizophrenia
in the Spanish approach to the natives.
Columbus noted the gentle, generous and
loving spirit of the Natives while treating
them with the brutality that commonly
characterized Spanish colonial rule.
On the one hand, the Native people
were to be treated as fully human with rights
to property and the capacity to be baptized
and protected as citizens of the realm. On the
other hand, they were often treated as
subhuman beasts of burden for the mines and
plantations of Spanish colonies. Papal
admonition, royal decree and intense protest
by Dominican missionary clerics like friars
Bartolome de las Casas and Antonio de
Montesinos were insufficient to stem the tide
of exploitation, enslavement and decimation
by disease, starvation and massacre practiced
by Spanish colonial fortune seekers. More
than one Spanish dignitary, including
Columbus himself, would be dragged to trial
for dehumanizing acts, but this was largely
too little and too late, with little effect on the
scene at large. The Spanish involvement in
slave trade from Africa is also well
documented.
The discovery of gold among the
more prosperous and powerful Natives fueled
expansion and opened up vast deposits of
silver in Mexico, Peru and other places. As
Weatherford shows, Spanish gold and silver
not only bought entry into the New World
economy, but it bankrolled the European
industrial revolution.
By the middle of the 18th Century,
because of title to the vast territory of
Louisiana, Spain could lay legal claim to
most of the territory, now called the United
States, West of the Mississippi River along
with Florida in the Southeast. With this went
the claim of dominion of the vast array of
Native peoples. Effective control, which
meant
Hispanicization
economically,
politically, culturally, and religiously, was
uneven and gradual. General plans governing
settlement, architecture, taxation, government
and commerce were established by the
Spanish crown and mediated through the
Viceroy in Mexico and provincial governors
in the hinterlands. Missionaries established
various tactics in different places to wrestle
the Natives into agricultural communities in
missions adjacent to Spanish settlements,
although they generally succeeded better with
Natives that were already settled. With some
exception for the upper class, there was
relatively little inhibition about marriage
between Spanish and Indian individuals to the
extent that, in outlying areas at least, virtually
everyone was Mestizo to some degree.
Despite revolts and insurrections at one time
or another, Pueblo and other Natives often
banded together with the Spanish for
common defense against raids by "wild"
Indians.
Despite the failure to find gold in the
North, the Spanish were kept there by fears of
French, English and later American
encroachment. Commerce with outsiders was
forbidden. The boundaries of the Empire
were guarded jealously, as American explorer
Zebulon Pike discovered when he entered
into northern New Mexico in 1806, was
arrested and taken to Santa Fe as a spy.
After Mexican independence, the
boundaries softened, and the influx of
Americans led to takeover by the United
States in the 1840's.
The French: Furs and Friends 1608-1763
Foreclosed from the East Coast of
America by the Spanish, the Dutch and the
British, the French entered from the northeast,
down the St. Lawrence River valley and
pushed their way through the Great Lakes
region down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
Though the French government may have had
ideas of settlement similar to those prescribed
by the Spanish crown, the pattern of
colonization by the French was dramatically
different from that of the Spanish. If the
Spanish approach was characterized by
domination, the French approach overall was
one of collaboration.
It is a little staggering to realize that
much of the colonization of the northern part
of North America was motivated by sartorial
fads in Europe. This is certainly true of the
French. While the original intent of
colonizing New France was to include
thorough Francification, villages and
agriculture like old France, the colonials soon
realized that the real benefit was in the fur
trade. It is estimated that at the high point of
French colonization, which lasted from 1608
to 1763, there were 17,000 French men in
New France and virtually no French women.
Beyond the fact that women were not
generally given to paddling canoes into the
wilderness in order to trap beaver for making
felt hats, the adventure and the money of fur
trapping and trading particularly stimulated
the French men. This was especially the case
given the inflexibility of society in Old
France.
Hence it was the "forest runner," the
coureur de bois, the voyageur, rather than the
farmer and the merchant who came to the
epitomize French colonization. After several
failed attempts at more conventional forms of
colonization, the French reverted to a kind of
accommodation that was favorably regarded
by the Natives. Seeing little advantage in
trying to domesticate the Indians who were so
expert at trapping and finishing pelts, the
French were content to co-opt the Indians into
a mutually beneficial arrangement. The result
was a close kind of collaboration in which the
French adapted themselves as much to Indian
languages, customs, dress and lifestyles as the
Indians did to French. Rather than replace
Indian trade systems, for example, the French
went in as business partners, married Indian
women, learned Indian languages and
respected Indian ways. Despite occasional
lapses for particular reasons, the French
enjoyed
a
thorough-going
amicable
relationship with the Natives, a relationship
that was repaid by genuine loyalty to the
French and opposition to the British and their
confederates, the Iroquois.
The French did not compete with
Indians for land or resources significantly but
tended to respect Indian Territory and claims
unless they seriously violated French
interests. They regularly held councils,
required by French colonial policy, between
governors of regions and the Indian leaders of
the area, and went out of their way not only to
respect Indian leaders but to incorporate them
into French governance of the territory.
New Netherlands: 1598-1664
The Dutch were not long as a colonial
force nor did they occupy a large territory.
Nevertheless, their influence and impact was
significant and lasting.
Beginning around 1598, Dutch traders
began trading furs for manufactured goods off
shipboard on the Hudson and Delaware rivers
with the Algonkian Indians of the eastern
seaboard. While there was no initial impulse
for land, the voracious appetite for furs by the
Dutch traders ("Swannekens") and for trade
goods by the Indians led to the establishment
of permanent trading posts.
Initially the Dutch policy required
non-interference with the Indians, a
conciliatory stance that respected Indian
sovereignty and avoided anything that would
interfere with trade. Traders were forbidden
to get involved in inter-tribal disputes, and the
modest needs for land were negotiated by
treaty, respecting Indian land ownership.
Since Dutch involvement was essentially
commercial in motive, little energy was put
into religious mission work.
The desire for land eventually
increased, however. At its peak, Dutch
colonial
claims
covered
most
of
Pennsylvania, southern New York and
Delaware. While this was a small territory by
English, French, or Spanish standards, Dutch
practices gradually but radically and
permanently altered the balance of power
among Native peoples in this territory,
leading to the utter decimation of many tribes.
As trade expanded, depletion of
furbearing animals in nearby areas led to an
expansion farther into Indian trade networks.
The Dutch systematically built ties with the
powerful Iroquois Confederacy, placing their
earlier Algonkian friends at a great
disadvantage. While the Iroquois pushed out
further in search of new sources of pelts,
economic interest spurred the Dutch to
supplement their activities by expanding into
agriculture. This move put further pressures
on the local Algonkians who eventually
resisted.
Dutch policy toward the Algonkian
peoples hardened until by the 1640's it
became one of deliberate provocation and
extermination. Dutch brutality, including that
of Peter Stuyvesant, the last governor-general
of New Netherland, was ended by the English
takeover of the Dutch colony in 1664.
Russian Fur-vor: 1741-1867
Russian involvement figures less in
the popular American vision of European
colonialism in the Americas because of its
geographical remoteness. Nevertheless they
deserve mention if only because of the fact
that they surpassed all the European colonists
in their mindless cruelty and brutality toward
Native Americans during their tenure in the
Americas between 1741 and 1867.
Russian fur hunters (promyshlenniki)
came to the northwest coast of North America
by working eastward across Siberia,
decimating the furbearing animals as they
went. The abundance of furbearing animals in
the Aleutians and the Alaskan peninsula
offered them a new, seemingly inexhaustible
source of pelts.
It took the Russians a while to
develop the maritime skill to handle
navigation in the treacherous Alaskan region.
Initially independent groups of hunters and
traders made expeditions to the eastern
islands. By 1765 Siberian companies
mounted seasonal ventures. In 1799, a
government monopoly, the Russian American
Company took over. Spotty government
attention, policy and regulation during most
of this time, combined with the lowlife
character of the typical promyshlenniki, left
the Natives with even less than the inadequate
safeguards of the other European colonizers.
In the process of expanding their fur
getting activity, the Russians came into
significant contact with three main groups of
Natives: the Aleuts, the Eskimos and the
coastal Indians. All these groups were
accomplished hunters and water navigators
themselves.
The Russians soon figured out that it
was easier to get the Natives to work for them
than to labor at it themselves, especially
because the Aleuts were much better both at
hunting and in processing the pelts. This was
commonly accomplished by taking women
and children of prominent men hostage until
the hunting men returned with the desired
shipment of pelts. Lack of cooperation
brought torture and death to the hostages or
the hunters. An Aleut revolt in the 1760s led
to retaliation directed by trader Ivan Solovief
who brutally crushed Aleut resistance.
In the 1780s and 90s, British and
American intruders began to compete with
the Russians for the fur trade. In addition to
supplying superior trade goods, they sold
arms to the indomitable Tlingit Indians whose
military independence became a major factor
in the eventual demise of Russian North
American enterprise. The Russian traders
consolidated their efforts and reduced the
Aleuts to virtual slavery in an effort to
revitalize the slackening flow of pelts.
Entrepreneur Gregory Shelikhov sought a
monopoly grant from the czar, including
promises to facilitate the opening missions
and secure better treatment of the Natives.
The challenge of an adequate food
supply for Russian traders in Alaska led to
establishment of a Russian colony in northern
California where the Russians attempted to
obtain labor by treating the local Pomo
Indians the way they had the Aleuts. Despite
Pomo resistance, the agricultural enterprise
enjoyed some success. The conditions of
forced labor reduced the population of the
Pomos by a third between 1812 and 1841,
however.