Sherry Chandler

Indigenous again

Some glimpses of the natives.

Though in many of the accounts in Ellen Eslinger’s Running Mad for Kentucky (Univ Press of Kentucky, 200, the Shawnee and other nations are present as lurking danger, they record very few incidents of actual contact. Here are the only two I’ve found.

From John May, “an affluent and ambitious Boston merchant,” that is to say, a land speculator, 1788:

Friday, May 9. there are a number of Indians on the other side of the river—many of them are often over at Pittsburgh. I can not say that I am fond of them for, they are frightfully ugly, and a pack of thieves and beggars. one of their chiefs died day before yesterday. these Indians are pretty cross and some almost infernals, they killed a white man 3 days ago . . . [p. 148]

Wednesday, May 14. . . . we visited a farm of Colonel Butlers on the north side of the river. it is a very beautiful spot. We went to see some Indian Graves, at the head of which are poles fixed, daub’d with red. they are left out of the ground the height of the deceased. we visited the grave of old Rumtony—this is the name of the chief who died a few days since. Rumtony in Indian is Warpole in english. he had this name on account of his exploits in war. we then returned to my quarters and refreshed ourselves with some good grog, which was the best I had to offer. [p. 150]

From Francis Baily, another English tourist who decided to see Kentucky and had a hard time of it. From the weather, not from Native Americans. By this time, the settlers have prevailed and the wars are over.

Here Baily describes what you might almost call his descent into the heart of darkness:

Tuesday, February 21. . . . The night was exceedingly dark, so that we could not tell in what part of the river we were, save when the lightning broke through the clouds, kindly informing us of our situation, and seeming to roll in volumes along the stream; this, mixed with the most tremendous thunder I ever heard, resounding from the echoing woods, rendered it one of the grandest, though at the same time the most awful, sight the imagination can conceive. This continued through the whole of the night, though the wind had, fortunately for us, considerably abated; and we had the satisfaction of seeing the dawn advance, and usher in one of the finest mornings the eyes ever beheld. About the middle of the night I was witness to one of the strangest scenes imaginable; both the novelty and the horridness of it will make so indelible an impression upon my mind that I shall never forget it. We were surprised at seeing a light at some distance before us, apparently on the banks of the river. On our nearer approach to it, we observed this fire to move in different strange directions, and for some time puzzled our imaginations in conceiving what it could be. At first we thought it might be some kind of ignis fatuus, produced from the particular situation of the country, which appeared to be swampy; but on our coming opposite to it, we saw distinctly the appearances of human beings nearly naked, and of a colour almost approaching to black; and each of these beings furnished with a couple of firebrands, which they held in each hand. There might be about a dozen of them, and they had got a large fire blazing in the middle of them, and were dancing round it in the wildest confusion imaginable, at the same time singing, or rather muttering, some strange incoherent sounds. Their peculiar appearance, whose effect was heightened by the contrast of the tempestuousness of the night, and the rolling of the thunder and lightning around us, put me in mind so much of the descriptions which are given of the infernal regions, that for the moment I could not help considering them as so many imps let loose upon the earth to perform their midnight orgies; though it proved to be nothing more than a few Indians, who, disturbed by the inclemency of the weather, could not sleep, and were innocently diverting themselves with singing and dancing round their fire.[pp. 217-128]

Bit of an anticlimax, that. Not even torturing a prisoner.

Here is a telling paragraph from James H. Howard in Shawnee! The Ceremonialism of a Native Indian Tribe and Its Cultural Background (Ohio Univ Press, 1981):

The frontiersmen, however, operated under a philosophy that had no place for Indian rights. It seemed inevitable to most whites on the Indian frontier, and to most politicians behind it, that Indians, being savage, would resist savagely; that they would have to be beaten down savagely; that some whites would have to make the sacrifice of meeting them on their own terms. Some of the whites, and all of the Indians, would be destroyed in the process but in the end civilization, as defined by the whites, would triumph. . . . An understanding of this philosophy makes quite clear what treatment the Shawnees and other Native Americans received throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even today, in a period when one reads and hears much about equal rights and equal access to “the good life” for ethnic minorities it is this philosophy wich lurkes behind most government decisions relating to Indians—decisions as to whose land will be flooded by a certain dam, or whose age-old pattern of land use will be altered to provide a new source of fuel or recreation for the white man. [p. 14]

Viewed wider, this philosophy still informs the way the United States views the entire world.