American Indians: Fourth Edition

By William T. Hagan and Patricia Nelson Limerick

William Hagan’s classic American Indians has become standard reading in the field of Native American history. Daniel M. Cobb has taken over the task of updating and revising the material, allowing the book to respond to the times. Spanning the arrival of white settlers in the Americas through the twentieth century, this concise account includes more than twenty new maps and illustrations, as well as a bibliographic essay that surveys the most recent research in Indian-white relations. With an introduction by Cobb, and a foreword by eminent historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, this fourth edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the original publication of American Indians.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226923475

Book preview

William T. Hagan (1918–2011) was professor emeritus of history at the University of Oklahoma and the author of The Sac and Fox Indians, Indian Police and Judges, United States–Comanche Relations, and The Indian Rights Association.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13         1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31238-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31239-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92347-5 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31238-0 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31239-9 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92347-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hagan, William T. (William Thomas), 1918– author.

American Indians / William T. Hagan ; revised and expanded by Daniel M. Cobb. — Fourth edition.

pages cm. — (Chicago history of American civilization)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-31238-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-31238-0 (cloth: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-31239-2 (paperback: alkaline paper) — ISBN 0-226-31239-9 (paperback: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92347-5 (e-book) — ISBN 0-226-92347-9 (e-book) 1. Indians, Treatment of—United States. 2. Indians of North America—Government relations. I. Cobb, Daniel M., editor. II. Title. III. Series: Chicago history of American civilization.

E93.H2 2013

323.1197—dc23

2012013094

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

AMERICAN INDIANS

FOURTH EDITION

William T. Hagan

Revised and expanded by Daniel M. Cobb

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

THE CHICAGO HISTORY OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

Daniel J. Boorstin, Editor

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Foreword to the Fourth Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction to the Fourth Edition

1. Colonial Preparation

2. Foes and Friends, 1776–1816

3. Indian Removal, 1816–1850

4. The Warriors’ Last Stand, 1840–1876

5. Acculturation under Duress, 1876–1920

6. The Indian New Deal and After, 1920–1968

7. Sovereignty and Self-Determination, 1968–1988

8. Testing the Limits, 1988–2011

Notes

Important Dates

Suggested Readings

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Native America, ca. 1500

2. Town of Secota

3. Catawba map

4. Neolin’s vision

5. Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant)

6. Sequoyah

7. A Mandan village

8. Black Horse ledger drawing

9. Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868)

10. White Bull ledger drawing

11. Buffalo hide yard

12. Riverside Indian School

13. Quanah Parker and his council

14. Tribal Lands, 1860–1890

15. Cherokee cabin home in North Carolina

16. John Collier

17. Indian workers

18. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps

19. Code Talkers

20. National Congress of American Indians

21. Occupation of Alcatraz Island

22. Native America, 2010

23. Seminole Hard Rock, Tampa

24. Tribal Colleges, 2011

THE HISTORIAN ON THE PRECIPICE OF THE PRESENT

Foreword to the Fourth Edition

Patricia Nelson Limerick, Center of the American West, University of Colorado, Boulder

If we asked members of the general public to name strenuous sports that appeal only to people with unusual daring, it is a safe bet that writing a historical synthesis would not figure in their responses. And yet, when compared to writing an overview of an enormously complex field of history, activities like ice climbing or open-water swimming register closer to croquet or crocheting in respect to the courage they ask of their practitioners. And, if you add the adrenaline delivered by writing about historical figures who are still alive, who might be persnickety, and who may be asked to review your book, then William Thomas (Tom) Hagan and Daniel Cobb qualify as the intellectual equivalent of Olympic contenders in the most strenuous of sports.

Bringing hundreds of specialized studies together into one narrative is a difficult enterprise in any field of history. Given the great cultural diversity of Indian people, the spectrum of their responses to the Euro-American invasion of their lands, the enormous variation in their geographical settings, their economies, and their religions, and the far-from-unitary attitudes and actions of the invaders, Tom Hagan did not opt for a relaxed or easy life when he decided to write American Indians.

For the better part of a century, the name of the game in academic scholarship has been specialization. An analogy drawn from architecture has served as a familiar justification for studies of narrow topics. Specialized studies of particular topics were to be individual bricks which would somehow coalesce into larger structures of greater historical meaning. This plan encountered some complications. The brickmakers and their works proliferated. The project of assembling them into larger structures of knowledge remained noticeably under-staffed.

In 1961, Tom Hagan stepped forward as an exemplary, risk-taking synthesizer, examining the studies produced by specialists, selecting the ones of greatest strength, and mortaring them into a sturdy structure. Since selectivity and omission are the key features of the social contract between writers of historical synthesis and their readers, an intellectual achievement of this sort is not guaranteed a reception of unanimous applause. Reviews lamenting the fact that the author chose some stories to tell and some stories to omit were almost guaranteed. But Hagan’s agility and thoughtful selectivity seem to have exempted him from many of these standard laments. Robert J. Miller in the Wisconsin Magazine of History did write that the book was weakened by its failure to explore in depth the exceedingly involved story of cultural conflict it seeks to document.¹ Acknowledging that Hagan faced difficult problems of selection and interpretation, the historian Loring B. Priest then paid him a great compliment: Only after reading Mr. Hagan’s narrative can one fully appreciate how effectively so much history can be summarized in so limited a space.² Another reviewer chimed in to declare that one of the chief merits of this book results from the author’s ability to condense.³ Matching these judgments, an attentive reader soon notices and appreciates the degree to which Hagan, while pursuing the goal of brevity, still found space for many telling quotations and anecdotes, bringing big historical patterns literally down to earth.

Hagan’s timing made him, however, more vulnerable to one of the predictable criticisms directed at historical synthesis: the assertion that the author has misled readers by claiming a larger topic than the book actually covers. The reviewers who made this point in 1961 rested their judgment on a dated belief that now seems considerably less convincing. Hagan, they sighed, claimed to be writing about Indians, when he was writing only about Indian-white relations. It is a history, pronounced William A. Hunter in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, not of the American Indians but of Indian-white relations.⁴ Under the power of their own conventional wisdom, none of these critics appeared to have noticed that Indian history and the history of Euro-Americans had become tangled into a snarl very soon after 1492. The devastation of diseases; the transformations brought by involvement in the fur trade; the birth of children to parents of Indian, white, and African American identities; the battles, wars, and incidents of retaliation and vengeance; the emergence of religions promising the restoration of a lost well-being; the federal government’s purposeful disruption of traditions and customs; the forced migrations from homelands to reservations; the process of ethnogenesis giving rise to new cultural and political affiliations; the resilience of tribes who had faced every form of grief and loss and who still took on the future with hope and enterprise: all these are interwoven stories of groups who originated in distant parts of the planet and then met each other in encounters ranging from collaboration to collision. These are unavoidably stories characterized, not by purity and separation, but by mixture and by hybridity. Even though some of Hagan’s critics faulted him for writing a history of Indian interactions with Euro-Americans (and with the federal government), and not a history of Indian people purely on their own terms, the passage of the decades has made his choice of emphasis and subject matter seem considerably more defensible.⁵

Why did Tom Hagan take on this demanding project, thereby making himself fair game for criticisms of this sort? In the introduction to this volume, Daniel Cobb tells us that Hagan felt that his publication of American Indians arose from the serendipity of encountering a friend who was writing a synthesis on railroads for the Chicago History of American Civilization series. With all due respect to serendipity, it is important to note that Hagan responded to the news of his acquaintance’s railroad book by stepping forward with his own enterprising proposal for an overview of Indian history.

The context of the 1950s helps us understand why a person of Hagan’s character and spirit would find this project worth proposing and deserving of his time and commitment. Indian people were under siege from the program to terminate federal obligations to tribes. In the years after World War II, as the Cold War took shape, the American people worried a lot more about international struggles with communism than about the dilemmas of Indian people. In truth, when it came to a recognition that the nation’s status as an international superpower arose from the resources acquired by the dispossession of Indian people, the American public was in a state of amnesia and oblivion.

When an individual is stricken with amnesia, this is perceived as a crisis, and that person is rushed to an emergency room. When a nation comes down with amnesia, this is an even greater crisis, and the historian’s office or study becomes the surprising equivalent to the emergency room. The book American Indians thus offers the historical profession an example and model of a historian mapping for his nation a route to recovery from amnesia.

Many reviewers remarked on the enthusiasm for direct expression with which Hagan challenged his era’s indifference and forgetfulness. Dr. Hagan, wrote one commentator, does not belittle or excuse the blundering and dishonesty that so damaged the effectiveness of even the best intended Federal programs.⁶ Or, as Loring Priest put it, Much of the merit of this volume rests in the author’s willingness to make judgments concerning the men, measures, and movements he describes. Hagan’s comments, Priest continued, demonstrated a commendable willingness to take sides.⁷

Tom Hagan, who in life was gracious and generous to beat the band, nonetheless had a way of sharpening his style of expression and letting it fly at a deserving target. Many of his occasions of target practice responded to what he saw as contradiction and inconsistency, or even hypocrisy and duplicity. Reflecting his commitment to brevity, Hagan could pack a very solid punch into a sparse eight words: If Indian-white interests conflicted, Indians were sacrificed. Or consider this razor-sharp remark on the position of New Englanders who opposed Indian removal from the South and the Midwest: New Englanders who had destroyed tribes with matchlock and sword a century earlier now deplored the inhuman tactics of Georgians and Midwesterners. Or contemplate his observation on the variability in the nation’s decisions to use military force: The United States could not maintain discipline among its own people; nevertheless, it was always ready to employ its army to harass and punish Indians. In a discussion of the grafting that transferred Indian land in Oklahoma into white ownership through the workings of the allotment policy, Hagan struck hard: Had it not resembled what had been happening for three centuries whenever Indian property aroused cupidity, one would have concluded that some tragic deterioration of American character had taken place.

One reviewer found nothing to like or admire in these sharp appraisals. This prickly reviewer, who was also one of Hagan’s principal historical subjects, was John Collier, the famous and influential commissioner of Indian affairs in the New Deal, who expressed his opinion of American Indians in a review in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Generosity and an expansive spirit were not, one quickly discovers, Collier’s defining characteristics as a book reviewer.

Collier did not hold back in taking a whack at Hagan with the familiar set piece of criticism aimed at every overview and synthesis. Hagan’s book impresses this reviewer as being structurally deficient. It selects from thousands of events a few hundred; and the few hundred events are presented with a jostling hastiness of narrative which leaves even their dramatic values unrevealed. He also covered familiar territory by bemoaning the fact that the book deals with Governmental-Indian relations, and not anthropologically or socially with Indians.

But Collier’s principal criticism of the book was far more distinctive. He charged Hagan with writing with the bias of cynicism. With this phrase, he seems to have had in his sights the book’s blunt commentary, praised by other reviewers, on the moral dimensions of federal Indian policy. Collier’s key passage deserves quoting at length:

The book deals cynically with the Government, and generally with the white man, across the whole reach of time from Colonial years until nearly 1930. Surely, the Government’s—and the white man’s—record invites cynicism. There has been vast wickedness in that record, and vast dogmatic senselessness; and, recurrently within the record, faithful and wise intentions defeated within the event. The record invites cynicism. And yet, does the cynical mind ever produce revealing history?⁸

John Collier’s term as commissioner of Indian affairs was a sustained effort to correct and reverse the injuries resulting from this history of vast wickedness and vast dogmatic senselessness. Readers who know this will be rattled by the perspective expressed here. Why on earth would John Collier, of all people, characterize Hagan’s frank appraisal of this nation’s troubled history as cynicism, and not as honesty or accuracy? Why would John Collier, of all people, be inclined to declare that this supposed cynicism rendered Hagan unable to produce revealing history?

Struggling to interpret the reasoning behind Collier’s critique—or pique—does not get easier upon reading his appraisal of Hagan’s last chapter in the 1961 edition, The Indian New Deal and After. In that chapter, in which Collier was a central figure (remember that he had only been out of office for sixteen years in 1961), Collier declared that the history of White-Indian relations is told in all its complexity, and without cynicism. Surely this pleasant shift in tone, in play when the subject of Collier’s own career came up, would generate a little tolerance and even warm fellow feeling in this reviewer? No such luck: the story of the Indian New Deal was accurately but too briefly told. And even though Hagan changes his ways and departs from cynicism and permits Government-Indian events to speak for themselves, Collier still lamented, a pallidness of vision persists. If this was Collier in a mood softened by an appreciative appraisal of his actions in office, it was hard to locate exactly where the softness had entered the picture.

In decrying Hagan’s sharp comments on the nation’s past bad behavior, was Collier speaking in solidarity with his fellow holders of office in Indian affairs (one prominent, retired federal official once gave the term FIPs, or Formally Important Persons, to this cohort)? Was Collier asking for a charitable exemption of this whole cohort of federal figures, stretching back for decades, from hindsight critique?

Maybe, or maybe not. With John Collier, such questions are not easy to answer.

Understanding the complicated history of the Indian New Deal requires an understanding of the complicated mind and character of John Collier, a man who lived at the highest elevation of good intentions and inflexible self-righteousness, of earnest commitment to a good cause and equally earnest refusal to adjust his course to deal with unexpected outcomes from his efforts. Thus, his contradictory and perplexing review of American Indians makes its own valuable contribution to the recognition of the historically consequential, but very mixed dimensions of his temperament. When Collier himself condemned the history of the United States’ conduct toward Indian people, this was moral honesty and righteous activism. When Hagan did the same thing, this was cynicism. That apparent contradiction represented, for better or worse, John Collier in a nutshell.

Hagan wrote bravely and honestly about the people of both the distant past and the recent past. In the introduction to this volume, Daniel Cobb reminds us that, with each of the editions of this book, Tom Hagan stood on the precipice of the present. He made no effort to pretend that he occupied an omniscient, unchanging position in the currents of time. Writing his second (1979) and third (1993) editions, Hagan not only added a discussion of the changes that had occurred since the previous edition, but he also rethought and rewrote each ending, recognizing that the recent events "necessitated a reevaluation of the whole story."

In 2012, we are not spared the challenge that Hagan took on so impressively. We, too, must reckon with the way that present conditions shape our thinking about the past. Upon the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of American Indians, the nation is in a lasting recession. Antigovernment feelings are widespread. Cutting the federal budget has become a widely recognized mandate, even though there is no agreement on how to put that mandate into practice. Enhancing government’s revenues through increased taxation arouses widespread resistance.

In a recent speech to the National Congress of American Indians, the journalist and Twitter poet Mark Trahant, a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, placed these shifts and trends in the context of massive demographic and political change: In the United States, Trahant points out, the debate over the future has focused on the national debt and on domestic federal programs, those very programs that mean so much to people living in Indian Country. The result, Trahant declares in stark language, is that severe austerity is our future as the United States and Indian tribes enter a new phase: the Era of Contraction. He does not try to protect his listeners and readers from a harsh prospect: The tide of austerity—the Era of Contraction—will occur whether we like it or not.⁹

Hagan, I think, would have urged us to pay close and respectful attention to Trahant’s comments, while also reminding us to keep in mind the uncertainty of any prophecy or prediction. Hagan, I believe, would have seen the conclusion of Trahant’s speech as a proper occasion to pause and to reflect when we begin—and when we finish—reading this newest edition of his book:

Indian Country must once again adapt to a new relationship with the federal government.

We know how to do that. Native people have faced and survived policies of extermination, removal, allotment with millions of acres of land stolen, and, in recent memory, termination.

As Elias Boudinot (the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix at the time of Indian Removal) said, survival requires us "to reflect upon the dangers with which we are surrounded; to view the darkness which seems to lie before our people—our prospects, and the evils with which we are threatened; to talk over all these matters, and, if possible, come to some definite and satisfactory conclusion.

Like Tom Hagan before them, Mark Trahant, Daniel Cobb, and many others committed to the well-being of Indian peoples stand bravely on the precipice of the present, asking the American people—Indian and non-Indian—to think hard about the past, present, and future of their intertwined and inseparable destinies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grants from the Faculty Research Fund of North Texas State University helped support the preparation of the first edition of this book. Donald J. Berthrong read the first five chapters and saved me from several errors; Hugh M. Ayer read the entire manuscript and was particularly helpful in matters of style. I was assisted in all stages of the enterprise by my wife, Charlotte N. Hagan, and I was fortunate in having the services of two able typists, Mrs. Jonita Borchardt and Mrs. Nana Rylander.

My principal debts for assistance in the second edition were to Mrs. Mary Notaro, a cheerful and efficient typist, and to the ever-helpful Charlotte N. Hagan.

In this third edition I am most indebted, again, to my wife, Charlotte N. Hagan. My research assistant, Jacki Thompson Rand, was most helpful, and my colleagues John Moore and Morris Foster contributed of their expertise.

For their assistance with the development of the fourth edition, Daniel M. Cobb wishes to thank William T. and Charlotte N. Hagan, who spent an afternoon in Norman, Oklahoma, talking about their lives and the life of this book.

My colleague Michael D. Green read and provided helpful comments on the new introduction and chapters 6 through 8. Two anonymous readers offered critiques that led to major improvements to the same.

A debt of gratitude also to Joshua A. Sutterfield, Jessica Cattelino, Bill Wingell, and staff at the Newberry Library, University of Oklahoma’s Western History Collections, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Library of Congress, and Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Library—all of whom contributed to the illustrations. A small grant from the University Research Council at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offset the cost of reproducing and securing permissions to publish them.

A final word of thanks to Dr. Stephen G. and Barbara Cobb for spending hours reading the entire revised manuscript—and portions of it more than once. Their insight and encouragement served as a constant source of sustenance.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FOURTH EDITION

Serendipity. William T. (Tom) Hagan offered this simple explanation for how he came to write American Indians for the Chicago History of American Civilization series in 1961. A friend of mine had signed a contract with the University of Chicago Press to do a book on railroads, and he said that was going to be one of a series of books, he recalled in a conversation with me in August 2010. It occurred to me that if they were interested in railroads, why wouldn’t they be interested in Indians? So I wrote them and told them what I would like to do, and that was it. It was a fluke, Hagan added. If I had not had this conversation with him at this stage, I don’t think I would have made the move. So happenstance works out.

A similar twist of fate explains my role in presenting the fourth edition of American Indians, marking its fiftieth anniversary. In early 2009, Arizona State University Distinguished Professor Donald Fixico called to inform me that my first book had won the inaugural Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award. As we talked, he mentioned that someone really ought to oversee the publication of a new edition of Tom Hagan’s classic synthesis. I had benefitted from Tom’s counsel during my days as a doctoral student at the University of Oklahoma and developed a proposal, which both he and the press greeted encouragingly. The rest, as they say, is history.

Working on this project presented both learning opportunities and challenges that I did not foresee at the outset. I originally imagined that I would simply bring the book up to date by adding a new chapter. Reading the first three editions of American Indians, however, caused me to reflect anew on the field of American Indian history, its evolution, and the role of historians as interpreters of the past. I found most remarkable the fact that Hagan rewrote the ending each time. I do not mean this solely in a chronological sense. He did, of course, integrate recent events in 1978 and again in 1993. But he also argued that their addition necessitated a reevaluation of the whole story—about what, in a cumulative sense, all of the events added up to mean. The same can be said of the contributions I have made to carry the story into 2011: we now have a fourth edition with a fourth ending. I have more to say about all of this, but an exploration of the history of a history necessarily begins with its author.

William Thomas Hagan was born in Huntington, West Virginia, a mid-sized city on the