Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (review)

Thanks to Hollywood movies, dime novels, and sensational journalism, most people who hold stereotypes about settlers crossing North America think American Indians and overland emigrants lived in constant enmity and perpetual misunderstanding. Only the latter half of that stereotype holds, according to thorough research by Michael L. Tate. Tate provides a remedy for those misguided stereotypes with this thoughtful treatment, which humanizes and thereby complicates the story of overland migration by non-Indians in the mid-nineteenth century.

Other scholars, namely John Unruh and Glenda Riley, have blazed a path through this territory. Tate revisited many of their sources intending to update their work to illuminate Indian-emigrant interactions along the central route (emphasizing the California, Oregon, and Mormon trails) for the period 1840 through 1870. As he explains, this allowed him to focus on a certain type of migration (dominated by families) during the period of peak trail use from the earliest settlers bound for Oregon through the completion of the transcontinental railroad. While relying on Unruh's pathbreaking The Plains Across, which ends in 1860, Tate extends his analysis to 1870 to cover disruptive shock waves from the Civil War that threw Indian-emigrant relations into a spiral of violence. In addition to covering the 1860s, Tate contributes to existing scholarship by emphasizing how cultural differences contributed to misunderstandings in life and misinterpretations in history books.

Tate drew heavily upon voluminous records left by overland emigrants and on newspaper reports to tell the emigrants' stories. His efforts to find Indian voices brought much frustration but yielded some important sources that add depth to the story and lend strength to his interpretation. For example, he makes good use of Emily Levine's edition of Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun and Josephine Waggoner, With My Own Eyes: A Lakota Woman Tells Her People's History and work by scholars such as Jeffrey Ostler, who have brought American Indian voices to the foreground in the decades since Unruh's and Riley's books appeared. Scholars need to do more work on this very difficult front, but Tate has advanced the field.

Indians and emigrants found strangeness, danger, and death along the central overland trails, but Tate reports most people found cooperation and curiosity. The neighborhood around the trails held more danger for Indians than for emigrants, a trend exacerbated by the Civil War and depletion of resources as more travelers and animals wore a path across the continent and consumed increasingly scarce vital resources found in the river valleys where trails ran. At various points along the trail, Indians helped emigrants cross rivers (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes for a fee) and traded firewood or food. Tate makes his point about cooperation most vividly in chapter four, where he reports cases of Indians saving emigrant lives. Unfortunately, emigrants conditioned by guidebooks, rumors, and other sources to fear and distrust Indians sometimes interpreted what were really overtures of assistance, trade, or hospitality as aggression. Certainly that held true in some cases, but Tate convincingly contends that in most cases it did not. Conflict born of such misunderstandings produced erroneous testimony about the nature of Indians along the trail and, in the most unfortunate cases, escalated to violence. The likelihood of Indian cooperation began to decline during the 1850s as traffic on the trails grew. When the Civil War drew the West's best soldiers east and hastily raised state forces filled the vacuum, the trails lost one of their most important peacekeeping forces and violence escalated.

Readers looking for Texas tales will find little here. Cynthia Ann Parker and the Comanches make a fleeting appearance in Tate's chapter on captivity tales. Tate promises to focus on the central route, and he keeps his word, which leaves Texas for another project.