Made In America - Bill Bryson [88]
Further north, French-speaking trappers provided many useful words to the settlers, notably gopher, rendezvous, peak for a mountain top (from the French pic), badlands (translated literally from the French mauvaises terres), and park in the sense of a mountain valley. This last named didn’t survive in a general sense but lives on in some place names, such as Estes Park, Colorado. As with Spanish, many French words came into English well ahead of the western migrations, among them chute (1804), butte and picayune (1805), coulee (1807), depot (1832) and to sashay (1836). Often they, too, went through convoluted transformations. Lagniappe, usually attributed to the French of New Orleans, in fact originated among the Kechuan Indians of Peru as yapa. The Spanish adopted it as ñapa. The French then took it from the Spanish and we from the French.
If the English-speaking settlers of the West didn’t shoot each other much, they did shoot a lot of buffalo and a lot of Indians. The two were not unconnected. Between 1830 and 1895, the 70 million buffalo that roamed the great plains were reduced in number to just 800, most of those in zoos or touring shows. The virtual extermination of the buffalo was not simply a matter of sloppy overkill, as we are often led to believe, but the result of ‘a conscious policy connived at by the railways, the army and the cattle ranchers as a means of subduing the Indians and keeping them on their reservations’.34 During roughly the same period, the number of Indians fell from 2 million to 90,000 as war, disease, and poverty born of the loss of their lands and livelihood took their brutal toll.
To say that the Indians were often treated abysmally barely conveys at the scale of the indignity heaped upon them. Again and again, they were uprooted and moved on until they were crowded on to the meanest, most unproductive land. Though America’s wars with the Indians ended in 1886 with the surrender of the great Apache chief Geronimo, their mistreatment did not end there. Between 1887 and 1934, they were deprived of a further 86 million acres. Altogether, as Howard Zinn notes, the United States made 400 treaties with the Indians and broke every one of them. They weren’t even made citizens until 1924.35
Today no one knows how many Indians there are. All we know is how many people think they are Indians, which is of course not the same thing. Some two million Americans claimed on the 1990 census to be Indian, but that was a rise of almost 40 per cent from the 1980 census – clearly not in line with population growth.36
Some 300 tribes remain in America today, but much of the linguistic diversity that once existed is gone for ever. According to Dr Duane King of the National Museum of the American Indian, ‘fewer than 200 [Native American] languages are spoken today, and 80 to 100 of those will probably disappear within a generation’.37 Among those most perilously on the brink of extinction are Mandan (with only six known speakers left in 1991), and Osage (spoken by only five). Lakota, the language used in the movie Dances with Wolves, appears to be dead. No native speaker could be found to act as adviser to the film crew. In only half a century or so America conquered the West, but at a terrible price to its own native cultures.
9
The Melting-Pot: Immigration in America
I
By the early 1830s America’s cotton trade with Britain had become so vast that up to a thousand ships at a time, a significant portion of the Atlantic fleet, were engaged in carrying cotton to Liverpool. The problem was that most made the return journey largely empty. Seeking out a convenient cargo for the return trip, the shipowners hit on an unusual one: people.
Never mind that