American Rifle - Alexander Rose [4]
Europeans expertly manipulated the Indian hunger for guns for profit and control. By the 1720s Indian dependence on European firearms was well established. No one dissented when Long Warrior observed to his fellow Cherokees that the warriors today “have all their goods of the English arms to defend themselves [without which] they could not go to war and that they’ll always be ruled by them.” For some colonists, nevertheless, the gun trade was an altruistic one. The British often claimed that by arming the native Americans with modern weaponry, they were raising the savage to civility. To that end the South Carolina governor James Glen reminded an audience of young Cherokees what life was like before his kind arrived: “Instead of the admirable firearms that you are now plentifully supplied with, your best arms [were] bad bows and wretched arrows headed with bills of birds and bones of fishes or at best with sharp stones . . . Your knives were split canes and your hatchets were of stone, so that you spent more days in felling a tree than you now do minutes.”25
Despite Glen’s optimism, the trade was not always equally beneficial. From the Indians, the British needed only skins and pelts; from the British, the Indians wanted—in addition to weapons, powder, and parts—ironware, clothes, shoes, utensils, bric-a-brac, food, medicine, and liquor. Owing to this imbalance, if a particular tribe was not being cooperative, the British could easily threaten to switch suppliers; that same tribe, however, would have a hard time weaning itself from British goods if relations worsened. For dedicated officials the gun trade was key to maintaining imperial order and realizing peaceful stability on the frontier. “Trade governs these people,” observed Colonel Charlesworth Glover in the late 1720s as he counseled against sending troops to beat down the Creeks.26 He was right. By the 1780s the Creeks were finished, undone by rampant consumerism and rum.27
The irony of the early firearms business was that even as the British succeeded in creating an ever-greater Indian dependency on them for guns, they became increasingly vulnerable to lethal Indian attacks using those very same weapons. The preservation of their own security, in short, was based on undermining it.
Indeed, despite their low rate of fire, guns escalated the level of violence ever higher from what was once a modest base. When Europeans first arrived, they were sometimes shocked, but more often amused, by how bloodless Indian warfare was. The early colonist Captain John Underhill, witnessing a clash between his Mohegan allies and the Pequots, jeered that “they might fight seven years and not kill seven men.” He thought their fighting was “more for pastime than to conquer and subdue enemies.”28 Observed the eminent theologian Roger Williams, seldom were more than twenty combatants killed in any “battle.”29
Few Europeans understood that in Indian culture death in battle was terrifying to contemplate: warriors who perished were consigned to wander eternally in the afterlife to seek vengeance on their killers. No Valhalla and no Heaven welcomed fallen heroes; they would know only bitter solitude and separation from friends and family. Thus it was that a war band, even when perched on the edge of victory, might retreat if it sustained a few casualties.30
Inter-Indian conflict rarely focused on the “serious” European objectives of territorial aggrandizement, religious supremacy, and economic gain. Instead, warriors were more concerned