In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

"National" WarAmongIndiansof Northeastern NorthAmerica Leroy V.Eid The fundamental question of survival forces any society to maximize its institutional skills and energies in the presence of war and peace situations. Scholars diverge widely in their views about how skilfully American Indian societies in the northeast woodland cultural area defended their societal and territorial interests. A large number of the most thoroughly informed firsthand observers of Indian life in the eighteenth century believed that the Indians were relatively sophisticated in military matters. Some of these observers linked this military expertise with an emphasis on a private/public war-making distinction in which two entirely different types of warring took place. The terrorist-type action needs to be distinguished from the largescale public armies whose appearance always seemed to surprise most colonial military. Tactically and strategically the two types of war differed immensely. The formal use of councils to control public war constituted the characteristic political difference between the two types of war; however, many primary and scholarly sources that challenge the very possibility of large-scale Indian military organizations following council directives can be readily adduced. Only the acceptance of the general outlines of a model of societal relations founded on recent, viable stateless societies can begin to explain both the apparent administrative anomalies of Indian woodland war and its wide success. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 1985, 125-154 126 Leroy V.Eid Undisciplined Savages or Ski/full Soldiers? Colonial records and twentieth-century studies based on them have generally assumed that Indian warriors were not dependable soldiers. Savages committing brigandage, warriors using the most primitive of methods to wreak vengeance almost solely out of personal motives of glory-these pejorative views appear as common judgments in the colonial records and, until quite recently, in much of the historiography. Summarizing early 1970s work on colonial adaptation of Indian war, Reginald C. Stuart reports that these analyses generally emphasized as Indian military characteristics "deliberate terror," "brutality" and "savagery [as] a fixed pattern." 1 If one thinks of Indian soldiers in these terms it becomes obvious why it seemed almost self-evident to an older, much quoted military historian that such a simple tactic as a bayonet charge would be particulary effective because "the Indians [were] virtually without discipline. "2 Tribal leadership has been widely parodied: "One word from the Chief and every warrior does as he individually pleases." As a result, Indian "armies" are usually considered, even by sympathetic twentieth-century writers, to have been incapable of group maneuvers and thus unreliable in battle. "In skirmishes it was every man for himself"; an "Indian war party was merely a collection of individual warriors attracted by the fame of an eminent war chief." 3 European and American military leaders who nevertheless inexplicably suffered defeat when fighting Indians are, therefore, a particularly disparaged group among folklorists and historians. The peculiarly colonial (or American) aspect of the late-eighteenth-century military tradition flourished on the picture of the courageous but incompetent Braddock or, more generally, the European-trained officer, foolishly leading brave and well-disciplined troops into a wilderness debacle. Contrariwise, as can be seen in the contemptible episodes related in the Journal of Ebenezer Denny, the professional part of the same colonial military tradition rose from the obvious inability of most frontier militia to defeat Indians ready for a battlefield conclusion. In both cases the assumption was the same-properly led troops should rather easily disperse hostile Indians. Soldiers and writers-whether professional or amateur, colonial or contemporary-generally believe in this assumption. Indians should not be able to beat real soldiers since (in the words of one military historian) it was "the amateur versus the professional" and because (in the words of a popularizer) "the Indian had no feeling for grand strategy, was a sketchy tactician, and was nothing more than a primitive warrior." 4 These authors reflect faithfully the traditional views of most European-trained soldiers and many colonial molders of public opinion. Just four years after the Indians annihilated a British army in the Pennsylvania woods, the Annual Register for the year 1759in "An Indian Tale" inanely pictured an Indian watching the British army and...

pdf

Share