An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (11 page)

What transpired up the coast in the founding and growth of the New England colony was different, at least at first. Just before the 1620 landing of the
Mayflower
, smallpox had spread from English trading ships off the coast to the Pequot fishing and farming communities on land, greatly reducing the population of the area the Plymouth Colony would occupy. King James attributed the epidemic to God's “great goodness and bounty toward us.”
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Consequently, those who survived in the Indigenous communities had little means to immediately resist the settlers' expropriation of their lands and resources. Sixteen years later, however, the Indigenous villages had recovered and were considered a barrier to the settlers moving into Pequot territory in Connecticut. A single violent incident triggered a devastating Puritan war against the Pequots in what the colony's annals and subsequent history texts call the Pequot War.

The Puritan settlers, as if by instinct, jumped immediately into a hideous war of annihilation, entering Indigenous villages and killing women and children or taking them hostage. The Pequots responded by attacking English settlements, including Fort Saybrook in Connecticut. Connecticut authorities commissioned mercenary John Mason to lead a force of soldiers from that colony and Massachusetts to one of the two Pequot strongholds on the Mystic River. Pequot fighters occupied one of the forts, while the other one contained only women, children, and old men. The latter was the one John Mason targeted. Slaughter ensued. After killing most of the Pequot defenders, the soldiers set fire to the structures and burned the remaining inhabitants alive.
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This kind of war was alien to the Indigenous peoples.
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According to their ways of war, when relations between groups broke down and conflict came, warfare was highly ritualized, with quests for individual glory, resulting in few deaths. Colonial wars inevitably drew other Indigenous communities in on one side or the other. During the Pequot War, neighboring Narragansett villages allied with the Puritans in hopes of reaping a large harvest of captives, booty, and glory. But after the carnage was done, the Narragansetts left the Puritan side in disgust, saying that the English were “too furious” and “slay[ed] too many men.” After having made the Pequots the enemy, the settlers set out to complete the destruction. Fewer than two hundred half-starved Pequots remained of the two thousand at the beginning of the war. Although they had ceased fighting and were without any means of defense, the settlers started a new attack on the Pequots. The colony commissioned the mercenary Mason and his murderous crew of forty men to burn the few remaining homes and fields.
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Puritan William Bradford wrote at the time in his
History of Plymouth Plantation
:

Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.
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The other Indigenous nations of the region assessed what was in store for them and accepted tributary status under the colonial authority.

During the late seventeenth century, Anglo settlers in New England began the routine practice of scalp hunting and what Grenier identifies as “ranging”—the use of settler-ranger forces. By
that time, the non-Indigenous population of the English colony in North America had increased sixfold, to more than 150,000, which meant that settlers were intruding on more of the Indigenous homelands. Indigenous resistance followed in what the settlers called King Philip's War.
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Wampanoag people and their Indigenous allies attacked the settlers' isolated farms, using a method of guerrilla warfare that relied on speed and caution in striking and retreating. The settlers scorned this kind of resistance as “skulking,” and responded by destroying Indigenous villages—again extirpation. But Indigenous guerrilla attacks continued, and so the commander of the Plymouth militia, Benjamin Church, studied Indigenous tactics in order to develop a more effective kind of preemption. He petitioned the colony's governor for permission to choose sixty to seventy settlers to serve as scouts, as he called them, for what he termed “wilderness warfare.” In July 1676, the first settler-organized ranger force was the result. The rangers—60 settlers and 140 colonized Indigenous men—were to “discover, pursue, fight, surprise, destroy, or subdue” the enemy, in Church's words. The inclusion of Indigenous fighters on the colonists' side has marked settler colonialism and foreign occupations ever since.
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The settler-rangers could learn from their Native aides, then discard them. In the following two decades, Church perfected his evolving method of annihilation.

Indigenous people continued to resist by burning settlements and killing and capturing settlers. As an incentive to recruit fighters, colonial authorities introduced a program of scalp hunting that became a permanent and long-lasting element of settler warfare against Indigenous nations.
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During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered
ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.
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Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”
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Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.
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The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization—destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging, and scalp hunting—became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the late nineteenth century.
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Having cleared the Indigenous populations from much of the coastal region from New England to the Carolinas, another wave of settlers employed the same kind of warfare in establishing the colony of Georgia beginning in 1732. Technically, it was the part of Spanish-occupied
Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squatted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Brigadier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rangers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony, Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander. The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters—in other words, brutal killers. It was unusual at the time to put a local militia officer in command of army regulars.
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The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war broke out between Britain and Spain over British encroachment into Spanish Guale. Traders from Carolina had already brought smallpox and rum to the Cherokees, which had killed many in their villages and made them suspicious of all English people. Oglethorpe himself visited Cherokee towns but was rebuffed. Meanwhile Spanish agents were also trying to win over the Cherokees to fight on their side against the British. In the fall of 1739, on the verge of war, Oglethorpe won commitment from some Cherokee villages in exchange for corn, but he was aware that, like other Indigenous nations, the Cherokees would likely play one colonial power against the other for their own interests and could change sides at any moment. In December, English invasion farther into Spanish territory began. Anglo and Scots rangers and their Indigenous allies destroyed Spanish plantations and intimidated the Maroon communities in northern Florida composed of local Indigenous families and escaped African slaves from the British colonies. The rangers sacked and looted, burned and pillaged, while hunting scalps of Spanish-allied Indigenous people and runaway slaves. Lasting nearly a month, the operations ravaged Florida, in part because the Spanish put up little fight. During the 1740s, the British War Office and Parliament commissioned two companies of colonial rangers and authorized more than a hundred men for full-time duty in the Highland Rangers in Georgia.
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Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.

The decade leading up to the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1754–63), known in Europe as the Seven Years' War, saw conflict on the British-French frontiers in New England, New York, and Nova Scotia, all of which were well populated with Indigenous villages of various nations as well as French settlers called Acadians.
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A clash of interests among British settlers, Indigenous communities, and Acadians in the region of the present-day Canadian Maritime Provinces led to a four-year conflict that the British called King George's War. Although Britain had gained nominal possession of Nova Scotia, it could not control the population of Acadians and the mixed communities of intermarried Acadians and Mi'kmaq and Malisset people. The Acadian-Indigenous villages insisted on neutrality in the British and French disputes, and the powerful Haudenosaunee confederacy supported them in that stance. But British imperialists wanted the land, and they permitted Anglo-American settlers to play a prominent role in the fighting, which included ranging and scalp hunting. By the end of the war, settler-rangers dominated the British military presence in Nova Scotia, setting off sustained Acadian-Indigenous resistance against British rule.
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At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, while the British regular army and navy focused on French imperial positions in the Maritimes, the settler militia forces continued ranging against the Acadian-Indigenous villages, which led to an expulsion of the Acadians, sometimes known today as the Great Upheaval. In a period of weeks, British army forces and colonial militias forced four thousand noncombatants out of Nova Scotia, and at least half that number died in the Acadian diaspora. Some eight thousand escaped deportation by fleeing into the woods. The Acadians thus became the largest population of European settlers in North American history to be forcibly dispersed. This feat was accomplished with slaughter, intimidation, and plunder. By this time, there was no hesitation on the part of Anglo settlers to consider unarmed civilians of all ages as appropriate targets of violence.

Major General Jeffery Amherst—after whom Amherst, Massachusetts is named—commanded the British army in the North
American theater of the Seven Years' War. In 1759, Amherst appointed Major Robert Rogers, the seasoned leader of New England's Rogers's Rangers and perhaps the most famous and admired ranger in frontier lore, to lead a force of settler-rangers, British volunteers, and allied Stockbridge Indigenous scouts—all to be handpicked by Rogers. Amherst ordered them to attack a resistant Abenaki village in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Although Amherst ordered Rogers not to allow torture or killing of women or children, the commander would have known about these rangers' reputation of sparing no one in their blood-drenched raids on Indigenous villages. In commissioning Rogers, Amherst effectively sanctioned settler-ranger counterinsurgent warfare. In general, the British military not only tolerated but made use of the settlers' dirty war, in the Cherokee war, the subsequent French and Indian War, and in the effort to crush Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763, in which Amherst is best known for his support of using germ warfare against Indigenous people.
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“Could it not be contrived,” Amherst wrote to a subordinate officer, “to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” The colonel promised to do his best.
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Amherst then gave orders “to bring them [Pontiac's forces and allies] to a proper Subjection” until “there was not an Indian Settlement within a thousand Miles of our Country.”
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