American Rifle - Alexander Rose [6]
By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, a harsher attitude toward the Indian was beginning to prevail. Europeans still widely saw them as God’s errant children but as too different from His European offspring to be counted as kin. This unfortunate impression was not alleviated by the failure of the praying towns, which by 1764 had confirmed to Nathaniel Rogers, among many others, that “the [ferocious] manner of a native Indian can never be effaced . . . nor can the most finished politeness totally eradicate the wild lines of his education.” By the time of the Revolution hardly anybody, outside the rarefied circles of well-meaning clergymen and liberal-minded reformers, believed that the Christianization of the Indian was a course worth pursuing.41 If he could not be assimilated, some went so far as to speculate, it might be more merciful to exterminate his kind. From his pulpit in Boston in 1689 Cotton Mather exhorted his parishioners to “beat them small as the dust before the wind, and cast them out, as the dirt in the streets . . . those ravenous howling wolves.”42 (This likening of Indians to diabolically possessed wolves was common at the time, as were comparisons to such devilish beasts as serpents and dragons.)43
Perhaps paradoxically, the farther west one traveled from the cities, the less one heard such talk. On the frontier proximity fostered a more clear-eyed understanding of the Indian worldview. Usually quite pacific, the frontier could suddenly turn extremely violent, but these spasms of killing between Indians and frontiersmen were restricted to small groups or individuals and exhausted themselves once the score had been settled.
These isolated types of incidents nevertheless helped create the frontier’s dreadful image as a hell deserted by Christ and his saints. For enlightened Europeans, taking a trip out there was like being hurled back to the Dark Ages; Connecticut Yankees might well have thought themselves in King Arthur’s barbaric court. Bred on the Greek rationalist classics and bestirred by the great Roman republican orators, visitors were horrified to witness (or much more likely, to hear about at third hand) eye-for-an-eye blood feuds, ferocious plundering, and alien rituals set amid a pitiless moral universe reminiscent of Beowulf and the Gilgamesh epic.
That great chronicler of eighteenth-century American life, Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, was convinced that only extreme necessity, misfortune, congenital criminality, or unpayable debts would induce white men to enter “the great woods”—a place “beyond the reach of government.” The frontier’s inhabitants, he believed, “are often in a perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by blows, sometimes by means of the law; that of man against every wild inhabitant of these venerable woods, of which they are come to dispossess them.” In the backcountry “men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are not able, they subsist on grain.”44 He believed that eating more vegetables cooled the passions.
Not quite as abhorrent to respectable opinion