During the seventeenth century, four European countries—France, England, Netherlands, and Spain–established permanent colonies in the Americas. As these colonies expanded, the conflicts with the Native Americans over land increased in frequency and intensity.
The reasons for the European invasion of North America are described by archaeologist Jerald Milanich in his book Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians:
“The driving force behind these initiatives was a desire for wealth: precious stones or metals, fertile lands suitable for productive plantations, human populations to be sold into slavery, and animals and plants that could be hunted or harvested and exported.”
While the American Indian nations had superior numbers, the Europeans had a technological advantage. Historians Robert Utley and Wilcomb Washburn, in their book Indian Wars, write:
“The disparity between the military strength of Europe, represented by gunpowder, steel, and the horse, and that of the New World, whose inhabitants fought with bows and arrows and wooden clubs, was immediately apparent to the European soldiery, who quickly saw the human population of the New World as a resource to be exploited.”
One of the things that puzzled many Europeans was the origin of American Indians. Believing that their mythology, as recounted in their many versions of the Bible, was not only a true historical account of the world, but also that it was the only true history, many scholars struggle to connect American Indians with European mythology. In noting that the Bible and Christianity limit the discussion about the origins of Indian people, David Lovejoy, in an article in the New England Quarterly, observes:
“Indians must have originally migrated from the Old World, for it was impossible to believe that they were not descendants of the first Adam by way of Noah and the Ark. Any other theory, suggesting a second creation, was promptly labeled heresy, and in the early years proponents suffered death for spreading it.”
Thus, Indians were viewed in biblical terms as a lost tribe, one of the dregs and refuse of the lost posterity of Adam.
Briefly described below are a few of the Indian events of 400 years ago, in 1623.
Fur Trade
By 1623, the Europeans were actively trading with American Indians to obtain furs and tanned deer hides which were valuable in the European markets.
Trade with the Europeans began to change Native American material culture. This included an increasing dependence on trade to obtain metal for arrow heads which replaced stone; cloth for decoration and clothing; metal pots and pans; firearms; glass beads. Indian people quickly found that metal axes, hatchets, fishhooks, and knives were superior to those made of stone. In his book Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America, Matthew Dennis writes:
“While Europeans focused on the utilitarian advantages of the goods they provided, Indians viewed traded items in broader terms, considering both the supernatural and material potential of the substances they obtained.”
The Dutch, whose presence was not of long duration (about 40 years), were interested primarily in trade and viewed Indians as something to be tolerated, like cold winters and hot summers. Popular history writer Ted Morgan, in his book Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent, reports:
“The Dutch were traders, bottom-line oriented, indifferent to imperial strategies. They didn’t develop strong Indian alliances. Nor were they particularly interested in religious conversion.”
In his book Indians, William Brandon puts in this way:
“The Dutch were also primarily in the beaver business, eager to uphold and sustain the forest nations who might act as district jobbers for them.”
In 1623, the Dutch West India Company established Fort Orange more than 100 miles up the Hudson River and began trading with the dominant Iroquois Indians. Among the items which the Indians, particularly the Iroquois, demanded in exchange for their furs were guns and the ammunition for them. The Dutch supplied their Indian trading partners with guns and with these guns, the Iroquois expanded their territory, often displacing tribes which did not have access to guns.
The French, like the Dutch, sought to establish trading relationships with the Iroquois. The French saw that their best opportunity for economic gain was to be found in the fur trade in which their Native American trading partners would retain their autonomyand provide them with furs. The French traders learned Indian languages, intermarried with them, and learned and adopted Indian ways.
In 1623 the French, having made peace with the Iroquois, sent a party of French traders to winter with the Huron to make sure that they continued to trade with the French rather than with the Dutch.
English
While the Spanish debated about the moral and legal rights of the Indians, the English had no interest in Indian rights: Indian people were simply inconvenient occupants of land desired by the English. Historian Francis Jennings, in his book The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire, reports:
“From their day of first arrival, every single colonial desired and worked to expand English rule over more territory and more people.”
Colonialization meant the expansion of the English legal system over the Indians. Historian Michael Oberg, in his book Uncas: First of the Mohegans, writes:
“English authorities, through their legislation defined Indians as outsiders, living within the jurisdiction of the province but without full membership in the commonwealth.”
Among other things, this often meant that Indians could be punished for labor or play on the Sabbath, as well as other offenses toward the English religion.
The English viewed the land as vacant, thus available to be re-created into a new English countryside. Historian Frances Jennings writes:
“Myth has it that Englishmen arrived in America to create colonies on ‘free land’ as though the land’s previous occupants and possessors had not existed, let alone had social and political institutions of property.”
In 1623, King Charles I of England granted a charter for the land which would become known as Maryland. These lands were not his to give away, as Lee Miller, in his book From the Heart: Voices of the American Indian, notes:
“They belong to the Conoy, Choptank, Assateague, and other nations encompassed by the grant.”
Along the Potomac River, the British negotiated a treaty with Pamunkey tribes led by Chiskiack. To symbolize eternal friendship, the British offered a toast, and, as a result of drinking the poisoned toast, over 200 Indians died. In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, historian James Loewen calls this “the first use of chemical warfare” in the conflicts between Indians and Europeans.
In Massachusetts, English forces from Plymouth defeated an organized armed resistance led by Massachusett sachem Obtakiest. Noting that the Indians had complained to the Puritans about repeated theft of food and that the Puritans interpreted these complaints as a threat against the colony, G. E. Thomas, in an article in the New England Quarterly, writes:
“The Wessagusset incident established the standard English response to any Indian resistance or complaint. No Indian dared raise his hand or even his voice against a white, even in defense of his life, family, or property.”
The Virginia militia attacked and burned the Piscataway town of Moyaone.
Christian Missionaries
Europeans brought with them a great religious intolerance. Missionaries attempted to Christianize Indians and to prohibit and even punish many aspects of Indian spiritual life. The logic of this Christian imperialism, according to Pocahontas’ biographer Frances Mossiker, in her book Pocahontas: The Life and the Legend, was that:
“God intended the savage Indians’ land for the civilized Christian Englishman, who would occupy the earth, increase and multiply, who would farm the land and make it fructify, who would give it order.”
In an article in The Progressive, Howard Zinn puts it this way:
“The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible.”
Sioux writer Charles Eastman, writing in his 1911 book The Soul of the Indian, says:
“The first missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of their age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshippers, and demanded of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar.”
In Ontario, Franciscan missionaries visited the Huron. They rejected native hospitality by refusing to live in the Indian villages. As a consequence, they obtained few converts.
In New Mexico, the Franciscan missionary Fray Benavides encountered a band of Gila Apache. He noted that their war chief was riding a horse. (Note: it is generally thought that Plains Indians acquired the horse following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. This suggests that there were at least a few horses being used by Plains Indians prior to this.)
More 17th-Century Indian Histories
Indians 101: American Indians in 1615
Indians 101: American Indians in 1616
Indians 101: American Indians in 1617
Indians 101: Four Centuries Ago (1618)
Indians 101: 400 years ago, 1619
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1620
Indians 101: American Indians 400 years ago, 1621
Indians 101: American Indians and Europeans 400 years ago, 1622