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6 Encountering Death The White People now live very close to us and are growing ever numerous and we think your living here has a tendency to prevent Trouble and difficulties between us & them—we think it is likely that when they know you are gone they will be more severe toward us, and perhaps you may hear of Trouble in this way before you arrive at Home and some of us may [even] Loose our lives by them.1 THE ONEIDA BRETHREN OF GOOD PETER WHO SPOKE THOSE WORDS IN JANUary 1800 knew all too well that the new century portended more of the troubles and difficulties they had seen in the last. The final quarter of the eighteenth century, since the beginning of the American Revolution , had been especially trying, despite their support for the winning side. Now the unrelenting advance of unlimited numbers of white settlers threatened their peace and perhaps their very lives. And their situation was about to grow worse, with the imminent departure of those with whom these Oneida spoke, a small group of Quaker missionaries who had lived and worked with them during the prior four years. According to this set of native leaders, the Friends’ presence had a quelling influence on other whites; their withdrawal would likely mean more violence and very soon. A handful of Quakers seemingly stood in the gap between Indian survival and Indian death.2 It may seem curious that any body of Native Americans would link their fate to a few pacifists from Philadelphia, but Quakers and Indians had a long history together, a history in which the fates of both peoples had become interwoven. If those Oneida thought that their immediate future depended on what Quakers did, so, too, did Friends tie their future to what became of Indians. In that respect, the spiritual descendants of George Fox were little different from most of their neighbors in ENCOUNTERING DEATH 161 the early republic. Americans were eager to seize the opportunities afforded by the new nation. Like their colonial forebears, they hoped that Native Americans would not stand in their way, but if they did, they were prepared to take whatever steps might be necessary to clear them away. Indians had, of course, been in retreat, or so it seemed to whites, for the past two centuries, and not just geographically. Their populations had plummeted in the wake of the European arrival. As historian Francis Jennings has hauntingly put it, ‘‘The American land’’ that European newcomers entered in the centuries after Columbus ‘‘was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one.’’3 As early American history unfolded, money, time, and numbers were all on the side of the EuroAmericans , so much so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was not hard to imagine a nation void of its original inhabitants. After all, Indians could die in droves for only so long. Historical demographers continue to debate the precise numbers and overall scope of Indian population decline, but the pattern is clear: wherever natives had contact with Europeans and their microbes in North America, the results were disastrous.4 Alien diseases, though hardly the only killer of indigenous peoples, dealt death blows to Native Americans from the Atlantic to the Pacific in large enough numbers to repeatedly catch the attention of the new arrivals. Europeans listened and watched with combinations of curiosity, bewilderment, horror, grief, and delight as Indians told or displayed the story of their people’s misery and affliction . Accounts of lands ‘‘emptied’’ and of villages that were no more became common fare when natives spoke with traders and missionaries or when colonists conversed with one another about the fate of the first Americans. Encountering Indians in early America meant encountering death. Much has been made traditionally of Euro-American fears that contact with Native Americans might result in the colonists’ demise. But for the large majority of settlers in the colonial era, the more prevalent and striking reality was the ubiquity of Indian death. Native mortality was a critical ingredient in all the ways in which Indians and Europeans interacted , and the religious encounter was no exception. In death as in life, Indians exerted an important shaping influence over European colonial religion. From the time the conquering Spanish spoke of the Aztecs lying dead in heaps and wondered what that meant for Catholic evangelism...

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