policy of forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to reservations.
Whites were baffled by Native ingratitude at being “offered” this land, Way
claims: “White Americans could not understand the Indians. To them, owning
land was a dream come true.” In reality, whites of the time were hardly
baffled. Even Gen. Philip Sheridan—who is notorious for having said, “The
only good Indian is a dead Indian”—understood. “We took away their country
and their means of support, and it was for this and against this they made war,”
he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?”^66 The textbooks have turned history
upside down.
Let us try a right-side-up view. “After King Philip’s War, there was
continuous conflict at the edge of New England. In Vermont the settlers
worried about savages scalping them.” This description is accurate, provided
the reader understands that the settlers were Native American, the scalpers
white. Even the best of our American history books fail to show the climate of
white actions within which Native Americans on the border of white control
had to live. It was so bad, and Natives had so little recourse, that the Catawbas
in North Carolina “fled in every direction” in 1786 when a solitary white man
rode into their village unannounced. And the Catawbas were a friendly tribe!^67
From the opposite coast, here is a story that might help make such dispersal
understandable: “An old white settler told his son who was writing about life
on the Oregon frontier about an incident he recalled from the cowboys and
Indians days. Some cowboys came upon Indian families without their men
present. The cowboys gave pursuit, planning to rape the squaws, as was the
custom. One woman, however, pushed sand into her vagina to thwart her
pursuers.”^68 The act of resistance is what made the incident memorable.
Otherwise, it was entirely ordinary. Such ordinariness is what our textbooks
leave out. They do not challenge our archetypal Laura Ingalls Wilder picture of
peaceful white settlers suffering occasional attacks by brutal Indians. If they
did, the fact that so many tribes resorted to war, even after 1815 when
resistance was clearly doomed, would become understandable.