There is a second, and to me more persuasive, reason for Indians’
drunkenness. It is their attempt to “escape” from facing the devastation of
their societies. Like the shocked survivors of the black death in fourteenth-
century Europe, or the distraught people Hogarth drew in seventeenth-
century London’s “Gin Alley,” or like some heroin addicts today, Indians
found that their lives had become nearly unbearable. We have no means to
judge the psychological impact on the Indians, at least from their own
words, but we would probably not be wrong in assuming that the survivors
were so traumatized, disheartened, and disorganized that they found it dif-
ficult to continue. In modern terms, their experience would be like surviv-
ing a nuclear war in which family, friends, and whole communities
perished, and all that had made life worthwhile was gone.
Whatever the reason for their susceptibility, rum was almost as lethal
to the Indians as smallpox. “Rum-debauched, Trader-corrupted,” was
Benjamin Franklin’s summation of their predicament. Occasionally, colo-
nial governments tried to curtail sale of liquor. Bans were enacted, violated,
and then lifted. The brutal reality was that sober Indians were not so will-
ing as drunken Indians to give up land, and that addicted Indians were will-
ing to give up everything. Liquor was a tool of colonialism. One official
who openly acknowledged this was the British Indian agent Sir William
Johnson; he advocated lifting one recently imposed ban on the sale of
liquor, figuring that, drunk, Indians would destroy themselves. The Board
of Trade agreed and provided tens of thousands of gallons of rum, which
traders almost literally poured down the Indians’ throats.
“Indian traders,” as the English called them, or coureurs de bois, led the
penetration into Indian lands. As “advance men,” they peddled cloth, guns,
and rum for pelts; scouted the land; made contacts; learned local customs
and languages; and unintentionally prepared the way for settlers. The first
known Indian trader, Ensign Thomas Savage, came to the fore shortly after
Jamestown was established. Having learned a dialect of Algonquian, Savage
became an important intermediary. Knowledge of Indian languages was to
become the great virtue of his successors; their great vice was spreading the
curse of liquor.
Not only Indian traders were involved in swapping rum for furs;
although less openly, many coastal plantation owners built their fortunes
Whites, Indians, and Land 193