Catholic missionaries to convert the Indians and, like the Spaniards, created
settled mission communities. The missionaries were crucial to French impe-
rialism, but above all it was the Indian trader, the coureur de bois,who was the
Frenchman best known to the Indians.
Because the English most affected the Indians and because land
became the cause of the destruction of so much of Indian society, I will
focus here on what the English did to the Indians and on how the Indians
attempted to meet the challenge.
The relationship between the incoming colonists and the Indians usu-
ally began in peace and friendship and was often characterized by the set-
tlers’ hunger and the Indians’ generosity, but it invariably turned sour.
Hostility arose faster when the incoming colonists stole Indians’ food
caches (as in Virginia and Massachusetts) or kidnapped Indian children (as
in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Carolina), and more slowly when the
colonists were at least polite (as in Maryland) or reasonably honest (as in
Pennsylvania). In each case, though, an eventual clash seemed unavoidable.
This was because colonialism is about land: those who live on it want
to keep it while those who come among them want to take it. The inhabi-
tants assert their rights and in desperation sometimes fight. The newcom-
ers feel a need to cloak their aggression in more exalted terms than simple
greed, and readily find a justification: the natives do not efficiently use the
land; they are gypsies, nomads, or drifters, whose land means nothing to
them; they are treacherous and murderous; they do not respect the true
religion (that is, the colonists’ religion), so God has ordained the colonists’
success; and, finally, the natives are little better than wild animals.
Such arguments have been advanced by various colonizing groups not
only in America but also in Ireland, the Canaries, Central Asia, South
Africa, the Congo, and Algeria from the sixteenth century to our own time.
In each of these places, the technologically advanced people saw the natives
as merely a hindrance to progress. Soon the newcomers come to look upon
the natives as the intruders although as John Lawson remarked of the
American colonists in 1701, it is “we [who] have abandoned our own
Native Soil, to drive them out, and possess theirs.”
When the first English settlers began to arrive in the Chesapeake in
188 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA