Winning the West

Revisionist historians today focus on the short-term harm that white European settlement visited on America’s native people. European civil­iza­tion’s lasting benefits to the Indians are dismissed with the shrug that “the cost was too great.” Certainly it was high, and indeed even to discuss the wholesale destruction of aboriginal cultures in such stark terms seems to imply a callous lack of human feeling.

Yet the inescapable fact is that when the last wild Apache warrior laid down his rifle in 1886, the huge, rich North American continent was united under one sovereign state from coast to coast. Thanks to the vision and determin­ation of our white European forefathers, the United States government is powerful enough to secure the safety of all people within its borders forever (1). Fear and hatred locked settlers and Indians in a fatal dance of destiny. But their real struggle was for a way of life.

To appreciate the essential nature of the Indians’ involuntary sacrifice one has only to imagine how different our lives would be if the South had won the Civil War, or if France or Spain controlled the country west of the Mississippi. To us this is an academic exercise. To 19th Century Americans, it was not. They understood that we must be unified, or that we in turn would be invaded and die. The shelt­ered academics who ignore this reality are not only callous but foolish, and ultimately delusional.

No one claims that the red men’s grievances were without cause. The history of the United States’ dealings with North America’s native inhabitants is a disgusting tale of ruthless avarice, cruelty, fraud, and murder. Colonel Thomas L. McKenney, U.S. Super­intendent of Indian Trade under Presidents Madison through Jackson, was a sincere, honorable man whose experience with his country’s corrupt and crooked Congress parallels the fate of the Indian nations themselves. Not much has changed.

Paleo-anthropologists now believe that the North American aborigines are descended from the race of fierce, tough nomads who have roamed the high deserts of Asia since before the last Ice Age. These people are not Chinese or Korean, but are of separate Mongolian extraction. Racial cousins of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan confronted descendants of the builders of Stonehenge, Saxon barbarians, and Viking marauders translated to the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

Both races committed the most horrifying atrocities against each other. It is fair to say, however, that in general – though not always – the settlers’ and soldiers’ offenses involved straightforward assaults in the heat of battle. The Indians, on the other hand, reserved their most appalling cruelties for defense­less captives tortured at leisure. Nor did reservation life mitigate their savagery. During Apache Chief Geronimo’s last out­break, in Arizona in 1886, his raiders murdered all of a farm family named Philips, except for their five-year-old daughter. Two days later a posse found the little girl alive, hanging on a meat hook (2).

None of this disgrace is excused by observing that, just as earlier in South America, Australia, India, China, and later Africa, profound political, economic, and demographic forces made inevitable civiliza­tion’s invasion and occupation of the American Indians’ immemorial hunting grounds across the North American continent. By the time of the Civil War, “many of the tribes on the eastern side of the Mississippi had vanished or were now shabby, drunken remnants of great races.” Some forty years later, at the turn of the century in 1900, the same could be said of the plains tribes who had lived west of the Mississippi, the great river that their ancestors called the Father of Waters.

President Ulysses S. Grant conquered the West by deliberately starving out the Plains Indians. A grand and ruth­less strategist, Grant waged war by encouraging settlers to kill off the buffalo herds on which the Indians depended for their food and shelter. Within 20 years, between 1870 and 1890, Washington had “depleted their commissary,” with the slaughter of some 30 million of these magnificent animals. Mountains of bleached buffalo bones were turned into fertilizer. A century later the herds are just now starting to recover from their all-but-complete extermination.

Viewing the last 200 years in worldwide perspective, we find destruction of cultures not unique, or even surpris­ing. Whenever different peoples collide, deadly conflict always results. World Wars One and Two were global struggles among the tribal national­ities of Europe and Asia. The scale and destructiveness of these bloody confrontations make America’s 19th Century Indian campaigns look like child’s play. Our Indian Wars took perhaps 5,000 lives over 20 years. In 1916's Battle of the Somme, German machine gunners firing 600 rounds per minute mowed down over 60,000 attacking British soldiers in two days.

Such historic upheavals are not exceptions. Turmoil and change are the norm of our human condition, and to pretend, as racist demagogues like Jeremiah Wright do, that such conflicts are peculiar to Euro­peans, is dishonest drivel. Neanderthal Man died out; Imperial Rome imposed its rule on the Mediter­ranean Basin; Attila’s Huns, “The Scourge of God,” spread havoc throughout the Continent; and in only a few years the Black Death, imported from Asia, wiped out nearly half of Europe’s entire population.

The real story is that the 19th Century witnessed nothing less than a trans­formation of worldwide human society from its immemorial agrarian past to a concentrated, inter­dependent urban industrial culture. The Stone Age lasted some 195,000 years, from the rise of Homo Sapiens to the first stirrings of civilization around the Mediterranean Sea about 6500 BC, only 8,500 years ago. The Indust­rial Rev­olu­tion that replaced animal labor with machine power is just 200 years old, and historians date Modern Times only from the first network radio broadcast in 1920. Horse-and-buggy days are within our grandparents’ living memory. If the past fifteen years are any indication, the new 21st Century will witness even greater changes in humanity’s everyday experience.

Why should American Indians not be part of this process? They might as well try to excuse themselves from life. Nostalgia is one thing, and your author defers to no one in celebrating America’s rich Western as well as Eastern heritage. But it is simply nonsense to pretend that the aboriginal tribes of the Great Plains would be better off living in the Stone Age, frozen in time as human exhibits in a vast zoolog­ical garden. No one, even the Indians, advocates such a thing. So what are they advo­cat­ing? The critics of America’s great surge from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast sound like children, whining for the benefits of Western civilization with none of its respon­sib­ilities.

“Political imperatives were irreconcilable with moral imperatives,” writes Robert M. Utley in The Lance and the Shield, his book on the “life and times of Sitting Bull.” But this facile judgment is not true. Indeed, Utley’s statement libels white American pioneers, our ancestors, by declaring that their settle­ment of the vast empty spaces of post-Ice Age North America, seeking to build a good life for themselves and their posterity, was morally wrong.

Mr. Utley, like most fashionable academics, is too glib by half. Who is he, the safe and secure bene­ficiary of latter-day American freedom and civilization, to say that the conquest of the American West a century ago was immoral? Of what, exactly, does he think morality consists, and what “moral impera­tive” does he refer to? The imperative of allowing wild Indians to raid American frontiers and murder white settlers with impunity? What is “moral” about permitting a few hundred thousand barbaric aborigines to monopolize an entire contin­ent, while millions of other people, who are just as “worthy” and “deserving” as any stone-age savage, fester and starve in crowded, oppressed, stultified Europe?

Only a morally blind intellect­ual elitist could possibly promote such a one-sided view. Utley cannot have taken the trouble to think seriously about he’s saying. He reveals himself as merely another so-called liberal intellect­ual poseur.

All morality derives from ethics, those absolute, timeless, and universal standards that express our highest human nature as rational, responsible, self-conscious beings. Morality is what we consider “right” and “wrong” with reference to ethical standards. Such questions engage the profoundest philosophical issues of ultimate importance, and when a professional historian employs them to analyze and judge momentous events of the past these terms require definition. Utley doesn’t seem to know what they mean.

Your author has expressed his thoughts on this difficult and even controversial subject in an essay, and will summarize them here. Contrary to the deconstructionist fantasy which Marxian nihilists inspired by Nietzsche foist on American campuses today, the world is “real.” “Reality” means “the brute facts of existence, which cannot be denied.” Since reality is objective and absolute, not subjective or relative, there must be, accordingly, an absolute ethical standard that applies to all living things in the real world. The greatest reality that cannot be denied is the difference between life and death. For all animals, indeed all organisms, the ultimate ethical standard is survival.

Religion and other fields of subjective opinion, like history, deal with cultural “mores,” the ever-changing fashions of acceptable behavior dependent on time and place. Ethics, however, are Thomas Jefferson’s “self-evident truths,” eternal verities that exist apart from tran­sitory morals. With the reservation that no end justifies using any means -- only effective ones -- we define actions that are truly necessary to promote the ethic of group survival as in the highest degree “moral.” Right actions lead to happi­ness, prosperity, and health; wrong actions lead to misery, destruction, and death. Wisdom is knowing the difference. The only appeal is to nature, and nature recognizes only winners. Questions of public versus private morality involve considerations of “higher” good, meaning individuals’ responsib­ility to their com­mun­ities. But the standard is the same. Ethical individuals and nations choose life. This is not debatable, for to do otherwise is to be drunk or insane.

Utley entirely begs this transcendent issue, though he does recognize that “pointless regret and guilt over what ‘we’ did to the Indians [is] a historical distortion and an emotional dead end.” No regrets or guilt are approp­riate, however, when we consider the alternatives. We do not say that “might is right;” only that competing groups cannot deny the natural ethic of Charles Darwin’s absolute biological imperative.

The process of white conquest might have been more gentle and orderly. But if Indian cultures had been more advanced or innovative, as were the Japanese, the struggle for ascendancy in North America could well have turned out differently. No one would expect the natives to have pulled their punches, and we would receive no apology from them for their victory. European-Americans, on the other hand, respected the Indian nations and did not commit genocide, as did happen in South America and especial­ly in Tasmania. Most of the North American Indian die-off was caused by cholera and small­pox epidemics, not by hot lead or cold steel. Europeans brought the horse and the wheel, and the New World gave them syphilis.

Sitting Bull, chief of the warlike Dakota Sioux, had a right to say, “All white men are thieves and liars. They took our land, and left us outcasts” (3). But Sitting Bull had fought and lost. His bitter words were wrong, as wrong as those of U.S. cavalrymen who swore that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The iconic chief’s buffalo-hunting days are gone forever, and life is better for it. Now that the Sioux and their brethren are done being children of nature, we will see what the noble red men are really made of. Let them advance the cause of harmony, mutual under­standing, and human progress, now that they are called to contribute as responsible adult citizens of the modern world.

We trust that the American Indians’ truly great days lie ahead. In the mean­time, anyone red, yellow, white, brown, or black is free to improve the quality of his life by going to live on the prairie in a skin tent with the buffalo and the wolves. Mr. Utley should ask himself why not many choose to do so.

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1. We appreciate that to write about white Europeans is politically incorrect in 2008. Those who duck this seminal truth are the same people who complain about historical bias and cultural centrism. But why should we be racially biased in favor of red-skinned aborigines, or pretend that the stone age culture we encountered was not an obstacle to civilizing the great American West? Clearly the opposite is true.

2. George Constable, Ed., The Old West.

3. The Canadian Indians had a further complaint. When steel magnate Andrew Carnegie mined the Masabi Range above Lake Michigan for iron ore, Canada’s native tribesmen declared, “First they killed our game and stole our hunting grounds. Now they come back for the dirt.”