Friday, March 28, 2014

What was the Sixty Years' War?

9780870139727_p0_v1_s260x420
You know the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, but have you heard of the Sixty Years' War?

Is the Sixty Years' War completely "made-up"?

Well, it consists of several very real military conflicts punctuated by periods of varying levels of tension among a number of groups of people. The Sixty Years' War was simply a power strugle for the Great Lakes. However, to bolster the argument that it was "made-up," let me point out that during the actual 60 years of 1754 to 1814, nobody ever spoke of the "Sixty Years' War."

Instead, the term "Sixty Years' War" was coined by modern academic historians.

Let's go back to ancient Greece when the historian Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War. It was a conflict between the Athenian and Spartan Empires from 431 to 404 B.C. As David Curtis Skaggs writes in his overview of the Sixty Years' War (page 1), the Peloponnesian War "consisted of a series of subconflicts, interrupted by shaky peace, political intrigue, and policy decisions." So Skaggs' reading of Thucydides led to the insight that something similar to the Peloponnesian War occurred on this continent. As Skaggs tells it, a
broader reading of the great Greek historian...brought me to see the multifaceted struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and their basins... not as unconnected events, but rather as part of a broader sequence of episodes involving the Native Americans and Europeans of French, British, and Creole backgrounds for control of the finest bodies of fresh water in the world.

Complicated stuff.

To help you wrap your mind around the Sixty Years' War, it may help to know the names of the conflicts. I'm sure you're familiar with at least some of them.

1. The French and Indian War
2. Pontiac's Rebellion
3. Lord Dunmore's War
4. Frontier Skirmishes associated with the American Revolution
5. The Northwest Indian War (Miami Confederacy vs. The United States)
6. The War of 1812 (western theater)

So, was the Sixty Years' War an important piece of American history?  ....Yes!

I think we're onto something here.

Source:
Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The Gnadenhutten Massacre: Introduction

gnadenhutten
This monument in Gnadenhutten, Ohio honors the 96 massacre victims.


 

I don't know if I can put enough weight on how sad, how shameful, or how unjust the Gnadenhutten Massacre was. But maybe just a description of the uncontested facts will be enough to make you upset - no matter if you are an Indian or non-Indian, Christian or something else. I'm going to quote the description of the Gnadenhutten Massacre from Proud and Determined:
The Stockbridges were keenly aware that a whole village of Christian Indians had already been claimed by frontier violence. The Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten in what is now Ohio had fallen prey to a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Colonel David Williamson in March of 1782. The peaceful Indians...were faithful to the end; even after being told they would die the next day, they spent their last night praying and singing hymns. A total of 96 innocent Indians, including men, women and 39 children were murdered by blows to the head with a [cooper's] mallet and scalped by the militia. No attempt was made to bring them to justice.

 

*  *  *


 
I used the following sources at the time:

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 390.

Olmstead, Earl P. Blackcoats Among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991, 330-335.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 75-78.

 

But since I wrote Proud and Determined, I've become aware of another more current source. Leonard Sadosky wrote a book chapter called "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre."  For the sake of clarity, I'll repeat myself here: ninety-six innocent Indians were massacred. Nobody, including Sadosky, questions that. And maybe that is all that matters to you.

I haven't read all of Sadosky's chapter yet, but early on he gives us a clear tipoff of what it is about:
The massacre has figured prominently in several recent histories of the Revolutionary frontier and Indian-white relations, but it has yet to be put in its appropriate context. Thomas Slaughter describes the massacre as a product of "frustration" on the part of the western Pennsylvanians, and it was but one of many events that prefigured the Whiskey Rebellion that was to follow. For Richard White, the massacre was prime evidence of an omnipresent, almost pathological feeling of "Indian-hatred" that permeated the society of the American frontier. Although the descriptions of the Gnadenhutten Massacre offered by these and other historians are generally accurate, their explanations of the massacre are unsatisfactory.

 

I haven't read much beyond that point myself. But I'm inclined to suspect that it will be fodder for at least one more post, if not several.

By the way, Sadosky's chapter starts on page 187 of the following book:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great
Lakes, 1754-1814
. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

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Friday, March 21, 2014

From Stockbridge, Massachusetts to...not only New Stockbridge, New York

berkPictured above: The Berkshire mountains (hills) of western Massachusetts.


The Munsee Indians by Robert Grumet covers a people who had - to a large extent - intermarried with other tribes by the end of the Revolutionary War. It seems the Munsees were most likely to mix-in with Mohicans (Mahicans) and other scattered Algonquian-speaking people. So I was not surprised that Gromet appears to do as good a job of anybody in following the Stockbridge Mohicans from their town in Massachusetts to their next home, which, he points out, wasn't New Stockbridge, New York for everybody.
Some Stockbridgers also moved north to the Abenaki town of St. Francis Odanak. A few trekked west to join with the Delaware Indian main body in Ohio. Family traditions also affirm that a small number of families refusing to leave settled in remote hollows in the mountainous country about Stockbridge [Mass.] (page 279).

It shouldn't really surprise us that the make-up of a tribe would change somewhat with each migration. To some extent, it also explains how the "people of many trails" came to be made up of many tribes.

I was surprised that Grumet doesn't cover the Gnadenhutten Massacre. I'm saving that shameful event in American history for a later post, but I hoped that Grumet would at least mention it and weigh in on the somewhat controversial issue of whether the victims at Gnadenhutten were Delawares or Mohicans. Nevertheless, the tone of the whole book suggests that by 1782, the Munsee Delawares were so inter-married with other tribes that it might be pointless for him to argue whether they were Mohicans or Delawares: they must have been both.

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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Stockbridge Chiefs and Matrilineality

April 14, 2014.
Bloggers' note: Yesterday Robert Shubinsky made a comment in response to this post (originally blogged last month) and his comment is so important that I'm going to quote it here and ask you to read it before you read my original blogpost:
I was reading the book ‘Samson Occom and the Christian Indians’ and it states that in 1777 Joseph Quanaukaunt or Quinney became sachem.
His three councilors were Peter Pauquaunaupeet son of Peter the 1st deacon of same name, Hendrick Aupaumut and lastly John Konkapot also called John Stockbridge. Joseph was the son of King Ben’s granddaughter and a brother in law to Hendrick Aupaumut who was married to Lydia Quinney.

And here also is my response:
Thanks for your comment Bob.

[The] more complicated “line of chiefs,” [that you get when you add Joseph Quanaukaunt] is evidence that matrilineality continued to a large extent after the Stockbridge mission was founded.

Admittedly, I had an abbreviated list of chiefs. I’d been aware of that passage that you mention, but forgot where it was. History has largely forgotten Joseph Quanaukaunt and I’m sorry that I had also forgotten his place in the order.

At the same time, I appreciate your comment because it bolsters one of the [important] points that I made in the post: the point that the Christian church should not be blamed for coercing matrilineality out of the Stockbridge Mohicans.

I decided not to scrap this post entirely. It may still be considered a worthwhile read, if you keep in mind that the chiefs who - in my own 21st century opinion - were important in history were the ones that I mentioned in the post. Their Christian names (easier for me to spell and type) were Ben, Solomon, and Hendrick. The one that I left out, Joseph Quanaukaunt, in spite of whatever remarkable and good qualities he may have had as a leader or otherwise, might have been wiped off the historical record save for the mention he gets as once being the head chief.

Another thing that has come to mind is that I once attended the Algonquain Peoples' Conference in Albany, New York where I listened to various experts talk about a number of things. One said that Konkapot was the head chief at Stockbridge, MA and another said that Umpachenee was the head chief at Stockbridge, MA. I bring that up here to make the point that not all sources are in agreement about everything. Bob Shubinsky was kind enough to give me/us the source he had used. I think I was using Stockbridge Past and Present by Electa Jones, plus my own memory which, of course, is fallible. Anyway, Thanks again for your input Bob!

 

What follows is my original and unedited blogpost:

matrilineal
Pictured above: Schematic diagram of Cherokee kinship system and British royal succession, both of which are matrilineal --> Source: https://hiddencause.wordpress.com/2011/02/

 

What began - for me -  as a list of who was the head chief of the Stockbridge Mohicans, became a discussion of how one chief succeeded another.

 

"King Ben" Kokhkewaunaunt served for at least thirty years, resigning in 1771. He passed the title of big chief on to his son, Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut. As I understand it, prior to white contact, clan mothers would pick the new chief from the nephews of the old chief - in other words, the clan mothers would pick one of their sons.

The previous sentence is my understanding of matrilineal succession, maybe my explanation or definition of it isn't exactly correct, if it isn't, please let me know. If anybody can add anything to that it would be appreciated. Nevertheless, prior to the Christian era, the Mohicans did not keep written records. So how do we know for sure exactly how things were done? I think the closest we can come is to call it "matrilineal succession" which may have some variations. But seriously, if you know more than that please comment.

But by the time written records were kept, Stockbridge Mohican chiefs were chosen via patrilineal succession, or something close to it.

Leadership went from "King Ben" to his son Solomon Uhhaunauwaunmut and then on to his son, Hendrick Aupaumut and again on to Captain Hendrick's son, Solomon U. Hendricks, whose untimely death - and other factors - appear to have disrupted the string.

I have the impression that Shirley Dunn, author of The Mohican World, and some of the tribe's female elders think that patrilineal succession was imposed or "forced upon" the Stockbridge Mohicans. But, in my view, it was something that the men in the tribe welcomed - maybe they borrowed it from the whites, but I think they borrowed it willingly. Why else would "King Ben" name his son "Solomon"?

I know. That raises other questions. 1) Did Indians call him "King Ben" or just whites? I imagine that Indians only called him by his Indian name, but I don't think that matters at all in this particular discussion. 2) Did "King Ben" have enough knowledge of the Bible to be making a point by naming his son "Solomon'? A good question, arguably a relevant one  to this discussion, but even if he had to be told who "King Solomon" was in the Bible, the fact that he and his wife still named their son "Solomon," at least suggests that they wanted the symbolism that went with the name of a great monarch who was, in turn, the son of another great monarch. 3) Who gave the Indians their Christian names? Answer: Christian parents could pick a Christian name for their Christian infants. Adults who were baptized could pick a Christian name. Those who weren't baptized used only their Indian names unless (or until) they felt they needed an English name.

Anyway, maybe patrilineal succession was different from how things were before, but Indians were already making lots of changes. Not all of those changes were made against their will. I don't think there is anything immoral or "un-Indian" about a chief who wants his son to take his place - unless you want to make the point that women should have as much a chance of taking political leadership as men. Okay, let's take a look at that.

I've read about how the Iroquois had some kind of balance of power between the sexes that continued to some extent into historical times. And maybe the Algonquian-speaking Native nations also had some kind of system that balanced power between genders. (Maybe matrilineality itself was that system.)  However, by the time the Mohicans welcomed a mission into their midst, whatever balance of power between genders there might have once been was already gone. So if there ever was an Algonquian balance of power it was wiped out by the fur trade, not by missionaries.

 

Please use the link below to comment here - I've gotten rid of the old plug-in that made commenting difficult for many of you.

 

Sources include Electa Jones' Stockbridge Past and Present, as well as other sources, including what we might call common knowledge.
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Jeff Siemers Will Speak at the Oshkosh Public Library

OPL

I - Jeff Siemers - will be speaking about my historical research at the Oshkosh Public Lbirary on April 3rd at 6:30 pm.

Hope to see you there!

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Joseph Smith and the Legend of the Golden Bible

townhall
The Town Hall of Palmyra, New York, Joseph Smith's hometown.

One of the great nuggets of history recorded by Electa Jones (published in 1854) was a statement made by Captain Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830) that the Mohican Indians - at one time - had their own Holy Book or Indian Bible. But, according to Captain Hendrick, the people became less civilized and lost their ability to read it. And so this Holy Book was "buried with a chief."

A similar legend had been recorded in 1823 by Ethan Smith, the pastor of a church in Poultney, Vermont. Smith reported a legend that came from an Indian chief who claimed that the Indians
had... a book which they had for a long time preserved. But having lost the knowledge of reading it, they concluded it would be of no further use to them; and they buried it with an Indian chief" (quoted by Lynn Glaser, Indians or Jews, 69).

Lynn Glaser's research shows that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, knew of that particular legend.

jsmith
This painting was by an unknown painter, circa 1842. The original is owned by the Community of Christ archives. It is on display at the Community of Christ headquarters in Independence Missouri. The painting was originally in the possession of Joseph Smith III (died 1914).

In his youth, Joseph Smith had a fascination with digging for artifacts. He, like other whites in western New York State, was something of an amateur antiquarian. Smith and many others were keenly interested in the many mounds in the area. Unfortunately, there wasn't any awareness back then of how disrespectful it was to mutilate or violate burial grounds - which is, of course, what the mounds were.

Anyway, the Mormon religion is based on their Holy Book, the Book of Mormon. Where did the Book of Mormon come from?

Well, if you believe Joseph Smith, he found golden plates with "Reformed Egyptian" characters on them and he was given the power to "translate" those characters. If you aren't a Mormon, it appears to be an incredible story. According to No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's biography of Joseph Smith, many versions of the story of how Smith found his golden plates circulated in Palmyra, New York, his hometown. (By the way, Palmyra was about ninety miles west of New Stockbridge, home of the Mohicans from the 1780's to the 1820's.)

At least one of the accounts has Smith bringing something home and telling his family (but not showing them) that it was the golden plates. The whole family was familiar with the Indian legend of the "golden Bible" and, to some extent, this was their basis for believing Joseph's claim (Brody, page 37).

So the Indian legend that was recorded by a pastor in Vermont entered young Joseph Smith's fertile imagination and - from a non-Mormon viewpoint - he borrowed from the legend. In doing so, he started a new religion.

Is it possible that the legend of the "golden Bible" comes from the same oral thread as the Bible that Captain Hendrick Aupaumut said was "buried with a chief"? What do you think?

 

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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

One More Time: The Munsee Indians in Wisconsin[?]

delaware
This map is from the official site of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

As discussed earlier, the people that I call the Stockbridge Mohicans have a number of other names. Their 1939 constitution gave them the handle "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community."

For a while I was telling my white friends that I was researching the history of the "Stockbridge-Munsee Indians." As a result, they completely missed the point that the tribe identifies mostly with being Mohican. You can be both Mohican and something else, but if you're talking to somebody, does that person (or persons) give you enough time to say "Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians? The answer is no. So you shorten the name, and "Stockbridge Mohicans" works for me.

In my research I've come across a lot of sources that say things about "the Munsees" and certainly there were still groups of Munsees that stayed together after the Lenape or Delaware Indians had been pushed out of their homeland. One of the Munsee groups that stuck together became guests of the Stockbridge Mohicans (from 1837 to 1839) at Stockbridge, Wisconsin. But many of the Munsees didn't stick together. Many generations ago, a large portion of the  Munsees had already begun to disperse across the face of Turtle Island, often marrying into other tribes.

I won't make the claim that no Munsees joined the Stockbridge Mohicans in the 1800's, of course some did. Big Deer is one. John Killsnake is another. And the Mohawk family, they were Munsees and my guess is they took on the name "Mohawk" because they had been living among Mohawks in New York before coming to Wisconsin.

But if the word "Munsee" deserves to be in the tribe's name at all - and I questioned that in Proud and Determined - it is for two reasons, 1) the Munsees and the Mohicans intermarried a lot starting at about 1670, and 2) about two hundred Wappinger Munsees moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts during the French and Indian War. But the Mohicans didn't change the name then. The "Munsee" part of the tribe's name was added by the United States federal government in the next century - that is something for another blogpost entirely.

Anyway, Robert Grumet's The Munsee Indians gives us a lot of insight into the consequences of the Munsees being mixed-in with various other tribes.
The need to choose one's nationality after marriage made things even more difficult for Munsees living in multicultural communities after 1767.... Decisions to adopt spouse's nationalities played major roles in turning many Munsee family names into surnames later primarily found in other Indian communities. The Munsee Nimham family name, for example, gradually became the prominent Oneida Ninham surname after Munsee Nimham men loosened from the ties of their matrilineages adopted the nationalities of their Oneida wives (pages 274-275).

Probably another family that is in a similar situation is the Metoxens. Maybe you know some other examples?

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Friday, March 7, 2014

A Review of Stockbridge Past and Present

Jones

Yesterday I wrote - and posted to the Amazon website - a book review for Electa Jones' 1854 book Stockbridge, Past and Present, or, Records of an Old Mission Station.

With no further adieu, here it is:

This book has been very valuable to historians. It contains quite a few valuable nuggets of history that otherwise would not have been recorded. As such, it has been cited in a number of histories of the Stockbridge Mohican Indians.

In the preface, EWB Canning states "The author laid no claims to profound erudition. She was a plain, sensible woman."
That may be a somewhat euphemistic way to describe Electa Jones' work to modern readers. It might be more accurate to say that she was neither a particularly good author, nor a particularly reliable historian.

It may not be fair to compare Ms. Jones's book with more recent works whose authors had the benefit of a lot more sources, both primary and secondary. Nevertheless, you, as a reader are deciding what you want to read next, so the comparison is apt.

The first thing a prospective reader of this book should know is the author's biases. She was an English-speaking, white Calvinist from the 19th century (1800's). While it would be inexact to say she was a Puritan (true Puritanism was confined to an earlier period), that word may describe her better than any other. It is one thing to have an opinion, but Ms. Jones has no conception of an audience that is not Calvinist. When she states that the Stockbridge Indians' Emigrant Party left Stockbridge, Wisconsin for new lands in present-day Kansas in 1839, a significant point (to her) seems to be that "they started [left] on the Sabbath," and therefore, their leaving was no loss to the tribe. This comes across as judgemental to the modern reader who doesn't think of travelling on Sunday as a sin.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the author accepted some things uncritically from her sources. To put it simply, Ms. Jones didn't have the luxury to follow the Stockbridge Indians to their settlements in New York or Wisconsin. She still manages to include quite a few anecdotes about the tribe after they left Massachusetts, but they cannot be relied on. Fortunately, historians have other sources available that either corroborate or discredit some of these post-Massachusetts anecdotes.

There are other issues. The book isn't organized into much of a narrative. It is largely non-chronological, tending to be organized instead around topics. Typos and/or misspellings are a problem - as is antiquated language. Sometimes Ms. Jones' writing simply lacks clarity.

If you want to read a good book about the Stockbridge Indians in Massachusetts, Patrick Frazier's The Mohicans of Stockbridge (1993) is undoubtedly the best. My own Proud and Determined covers the Stockbridge Mohicans history from 1734 to 2014. I would recommend Stockbridge, Past and Present to you if you are a serious historian. But if you want to read one "good" book about the Stockbridge Indians, this isn't the one.

By the way, Stockbridge Past and Present is available free as an e-book from Google books.

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Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

Munsee

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states
The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

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Monday, March 3, 2014

The Origin of the Lost Tribes Theory

I've written here about the lost tribes theory before. According to the lost tribes theory, American Indians are somehow the descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
Of course I don't have exact numbers, but suffice it to say that some form of the lost tribes theory was accepted in much of Europe and the English-speaking world in the 1600's and 1700's.

How did the lost tribes theory originate?

Lynn Glaser sets out to answer that and other questions in his introduction to a reprint of a book that promoted the lost tribes theory in 1650.
glaser
The book has been made available via Google books:
Indians or Jews?: An Introduction to a Reprint of Manasseh Ben Israel's The Hope of Israel

Glasser's summary of many years' history makes sense to me.
...the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews of Palestine, and...two heretical offshoots of Judaism, Christainity and Islam, waxed great and became the dominant religions of Europe and the Middle East. Presently hostility among Christians, Muslims, and Jews was whipped up by their respective priesthoods. Being the fewest, the Jews suffered the most in strife, and soon began to wish that there were a powerful Jewish state somewhere to which they could go for refuge, or which could at least give them some protection. The wish was father of the thought, with the result that by the seventh century [the 600's], rumors circulated about a mighty Jewish kingdom in the East.

In other words, explorers were looking for the lost tribes of Israel long before they became aware of the Western Hemisphere. On page 58 Glaser writes
As missionaries and travellers covered more ground they constantly were uncovering new people with strange customs which needed explaining and announced that they had discovered the Ten Lost Tribes. The Jewish Encyclopedia devotes three pages of small print to listing them.

So it wasn't just Indians. There was a list three pages long of ethnic groups believed to be descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel.

And it all started hundreds of years before European explorers found their way to Turtle Island.

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Saturday, March 1, 2014

Volney Describes Native Drunkenness

volney

A bust of Constantin-François Chassebœuf de La Giraudais - comte Volney -  

Artist: Philippe Dessante

 

 

An important part of what we know about the great Miami war chief Little Turtle and his son-in-law, William Wells, is based on interviews they had with the frenchman Constantin Francois Chassebouef comte de Volney. Volney is the one that told the world about how Little Turtle's cow was killed and he also wrote up a short Miami dictionary. That and more was part of a larger book with a title that says nothing of the Miamis:

A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of America

It was translated into English by a C.B. Brown who added some of his own remarks. The English edition was published in Philadelphia in 1804 and a facsimile of that edition came out in 1968 (thanks to the Hafner Publishing Company of New York).

Anyway Volney was not required back then to be politically correct in his observations of the unfortunate Indians. He was staying at Vincennes, a center of commerce for "Weeaws, Payories, Sawkies, Pyankishaws, and Miamis, all living near the head of the Wabash"(page 352). After describing what they wore, Volney continues (page 354) with his observations on the devastating effects of alcohol on the Natives:
Men and women roamed all day about the town, merely to get rum, for which they eagerly exchanged their peltry, their toys, their clothes, and at length, when they had parted with their all, they offered their prayers and entreaties, never ceasing to drink till they had lost their senses....

Sometimes tragical scenes ensue: they become mad or stupid, and falling in the dust or mud, lie a senseless log till next day. We found them in the streets by the dozens in the morning, wallowing in the filth with the pigs. It was rare for a day to pass without a deadly quarrel, by which about ten men lose their lives yearly.

 

It goes without saying that the rum was produced by whites and sold by white traders.

Meanwhile, a lot of missionaries did what little they could to keep alcohol out of Indian Country.
 


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