American Rifle - Alexander Rose [5]
The spread of guns transformed Indian-on-Indian conflict into an economic struggle for survival. European-armed eastern Indians—who had shot unprecedented numbers of elk, deer, and bears in their own territories to pay for their weapons—were forced to surge westward, where those still using bows were inevitably at a disadvantage. As a result, several bands were simply exterminated. The Mohawks’ original source of power, for instance, had been their connection to Dutch and English traders in Albany, in what is now upstate New York. Addicted to arms, the Mohawks relentlessly sought beaver pelts and had acquired three hundred muskets by the early 1640s. After quickly killing off their own beaver population, the Mohawks expanded into others’ hunting grounds and used their guns to devastating effect against the French-backed Hurons. Over the decades they clashed with the nations of the St. Lawrence River region—the Erie, the Neutral, the Khionontateronon—and many other tribes to satisfy an insatiable hunger for supremacy. In 1661–62 alone the Mohawks and their allies in the Five Nations attacked the Abenaki of New England, the Algonquians of the subarctic, the Siouans in the Upper Mississippi, and other tribes in Virginia.33 Their advantage began to erode in the 1660s, when they met the Susquehannock of southern New York and Pennsylvania, who were still more heavily armed.34
As the supply of ordnance increased, the butcher’s bill toted up after each clash rose inexorably. Whereas Underhill had spoken of a few dead men here and there in the 1630s, the missionary Daniel Gookin reported in 1669 that when a force of Massachusetts warriors were am-bushed by the Mohawks, “about fifty of their [the Massachusetts] chief men” were slain.35 Within the decade the fearsome toll that the gun exacted on the Mohawk nation itself had become startlingly evident: in the 1640s they had been able to field between 700 and 800 warriors; by the late 1670s that number had been whittled down to 300.36
War between Indian and Indian was not the only sort of violence that the spread of guns magnified. Europeans and Indians increasingly found themselves behaving more violently toward each other.37 Previously, hostile encounters had generally been limited skirmishes with a minimal level of casualties; but the “chivalric” traditions that had historically kept the practice of war within certain boundaries eroded. Colonists accused Indians of viciously torturing prisoners (in 1637 John Tilley was kidnapped and was kept alive, handless and footless, for three days) and of kidnapping women and children.38 The Indians regarded these barbarous forms of behavior as either ritually blessed or militarily necessary. European-style “total” warfare, they said, was beyond the bounds of acceptability. Indians criticized the practices of razing crops, slaughtering livestock, and destroying property—regarded as perfectly aboveboard in Old World warfare—as condemning to lingering deaths warriors and noncombatants alike.
Only during the last quarter of the seventeenth century did the chivalric boundaries finally disappear. During the Pequot War the Indians had never thought to use fire to destroy Fort Saybrook and the other English settlements, but during that of King Philip, some four decades later, arson became a common Indian method of terrorizing the enemy.39 As indeed it had long been among Europeans.
The rise of the gun also contributed to changing colonists’ attitudes toward the Indians. Initially believing that the Indians were a lost tribe of Israel—in 1650 Thomas Thorowgood argued that Indians and Jews were mighty similar in their speech