A work of bloody vengeance - Ruxton's Blood Meridian

When I described George Frederick Ruxton’s 1848 fictionalized account of the lives of Rocky Mountain fur trappers, Life in the Far West,  as “postmodern” and “my favorite Victorian novel” and so on, I was joking, up to a point, although it in fact does use several techniques associated with postmodern fiction, and is in fact a Victorian novel, however unusual its subject matter.  I could also have described it, more credibly, as an application of the methods of Walter Scott, or, for all I know, of Bulwer Lytton, to the place and time that Ruxton knew well and had witnessed for himself.

As much as I enjoyed Life in the Far West, the novel left no doubt why it is well-known among historians of the American West and entirely ignored by scholars of English literature.  Ruxton’s novel is competent but not complex; memorable for its material but not a strong candidate for re-reading.  Layers of meaning will fail to unfold, mostly.

But that material, that surface meaning!  About two-thirds of the way through the book, the fur trapper protagonists decide, for no clear reason, to become horse thieves, joining a party that plans to raid the herds of the California missions.  No, I am wrong, two reasons are clear:  the love of pure risk, and an undirected vengeance on Native Americans.  The raiders begin in Colorado.  It is a long way to California.  There are a lot of Indians in between.

Threats of vengeance on every Redskin they met were loud and deep; and the wild war-songs round their nightly camp-fires, and grotesque scalp-dances, borrowed from the Indians, proved to the initiated that they were, one and all, “half-froze for hair.”  Soon after Killbuck and La Bonté joined them, they one day suddenly surprised a band of twenty Sioux, scattered on a small prairie and butchering some buffalo they had just killed.  Before they could escape, the whites were upon them with loud shouts, and in three minutes the scalps of eleven were dangling from their saddle-horns. (140)

The most interesting aspect of Life in the Far West is Ruxton’s adoption of the moral perspective of the mountain men, who have themselves adapted the mores of the Rocky Mountain Native Americans.  Ruxton’s book is violent, but until this point the trappers and Indians existed in some sort of parity.  They squabbled and traded, fought and cooperated.  With this episode, though, the book turns into a prefiguration of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; the violence becomes concentrated, in purpose if not scale beginning to resemble genocide.

Actually, I doubt McCarthy ever wrote a sentence like this:

We will not follow them in their work of bloody vengeance, save by saying that they followed the savages to their villages, into which they charged headlong, recovered their stolen horses, and returned to camp at sundown with thirteen scalps dangling from their rifles, in payment for the loss of their unfortunate companion. (144)

McCarthy would have followed the mountain men, no matter how horrible the results, and would have intended the irony of horse thieves exacting righteous vengeance on other horse thieves, and savored the horrifying misapplication of the word “savages.”

With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach - Francis Parkman's insensitivities, such as they are

When Francis Parkman traveled up the Oregon Trail in the summer of 1846, he had already decided, at age 22, to write a massive, multi-volume history of the "American forest," as he described the subject.  He meant the exploration and settlement of French America, and the conflicts with the English.   At the center of the work, always, were a dizzying variety of Native Americans.  Parkman thought he needed to get to know them.  Thus, his trip west, his sojourn with a band of Lakota Sioux, and his first book, The Oregon Trail. 

Parkman was violating my Guideline #1, letting the culture of one group (one subgroup of one group) stand in for the whole.  Thus his all-too-common generalizations about the "mind" or "character" of the Indian.  In fairness, though, Parkman's descriptions seem more observed than received.  But today's historians have to be more careful.

Another problem for - I was about to say "the modern reader," but I mean "me" - is Parkman's incessant use of the word "savage."  Here, he's using a word that is essentially forbidden now.  Too many malignant connotations are attached to it.  Yet Parkman does say, in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, just what he means:

With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach.  The Indian would look with equal scorn on those who, buried in useless lore, are blind and deaf to the great world of nature. (end of Ch. 5)

Or later, describing a soldier's murder of a group of Shawnee, including his own wife and children, for the price of the scalps, Parkman writes:

His desertion was pardoned; he was employed as an interpreter, and ordered to accompany the troops on the intended expedition.  His example is one of many in which the worst acts of Indian ferocity have been thrown into shade by the enormities of white barbarians. (Ch. 27)

It's here in The Conspiracy of Pontiac, actually, that Parkman presented the proof (which he discovered) that English officers considered using smallpox-infested blankets as a weapon against the Indians (see Chapter 19).  Parkman was appalled; professional, but appalled.  He never violated Guideline #3: to Parkman, Native Americans were people.

Style in History

I'm stealing the title of a Peter Gay book (1974) that I have looked at but not read, a study of the styles of a number of European historians (Gibbon, Burckhardt, etc).  I want to write a bit about the style of some American historians.

This week I have presented a few samples of Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire, enough to demonstrate that he's a good, concise professional writer.  The difficulty of the book comes not from its style, but from the huge mass of material and the difficulty of organizing it: two centuries, three borderlands, multiple European nations, a multitude of Indian nations.  Hämäläinen himself succumbs to the problem a time or two.  See the beginning of Chapter 5, where he resorts twice in two pages to the "In this chapter" formulation.  I recognize the symptom, and can diagnose the problem - that section must have been a beast to write.  At some point, he gave up - "Good enough, it works." 

It is good enough, and it does work.  Like I said at the beginning of the week, the book is a triumph.  A generation or more of American history students are going to have to work their way through it.  If I were one of them, the first thing I would do upon re-reading is to make a giant timeline, which would have been a nice addendum to the book.

As I have been writing about The Comanche Empire, I have been reading a different book about a different episode of Native American history, Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851).  Parkman's book about the 1763 uprising of the Great Lakes Indians immediately following the French and Indian War was a similarly path-breaking history in its time.  That hardly explains why the book is still in print, as part of the Library of America, along with the rest of Parkman's massive France and England in North America, all seven fat volumes, and God willing I'll read them all.  The Conspiracy of Pontiac was excellent.

Parkman's books are still read for their style.  He is one more author writing under the shadow of Walter Scott, and the somewhat more transparent shade of James Fennimore Cooper.  It for some reason had never occurred to me that Scott's historical novels might influence not only novelists but also historians.  If a novel can include history, why can't history read like a novel?

Well, there are lots of good reasons why it can't, but Parkman really worked on the problem.  Some of the best scenes  in The Conspiracy of Pontiac are at least as exciting as Scott's battle scenes (the siege of Detroit, for example).  Other sections are more traditional - dense but necessary summaries of the political or military background of an event.

Some atmospheric but overwritten, even ridiculous, Parkman:

The wildcat glared from the thicket; the raccoon thrust his furry countenance from the hollow tree, and the opossum swung, head downwards, from the overhanging bough. (Ch. 28)

And some of Parkman at his best, the very last paragraph, on the fate of the murdered Chief Pontiac:

Neither mound nor tablet marked the burial-place of Pontiac.  For a mausoleum, a city [St. Louis] has risen above the forest hero; and the race whom he hated with such burning rancor trample with unceasing footsteps over his forgotten grave. (Ch. 31)

Guidelines for the historical study of Native Americans - it's so complex!

Exam question: Describe the material conditions of 13th century Plains Indians.

Answer: It's a trick question.  There were no Plains Indians in the 13th century:

The dry period that had begun in the thirteenth century had plunged the plains' vast bison herds into a sharp decline, discouraging the Shoshones from entering.  In fact, the decrease in animal populations was so drastic that most plains people had sought refuge from the bordering regions, using th grasslands only for seasonal hunts. (The Comanche Empire, 21-2)

This startling fact is not Pekka Hämäläinen's own, but is borrowed from the work of archeologists and anthropologists and such.  See David A. Baerreis and Reid A. Bryson, "Historical Climatology of the Southern Plains: A Preliminary Survey," Oklahoma Anthropological Bulletin, March 1963.  Note carefully, 1963!  Note also that this coincides with the Medieval Warm Period.  Note also (also) that it lines up with the collapse of Cahokia, which was not on the Great Plains at all. 

I'm developing some personal guidelines for the study of Native Americans.  Please add more, or tell me I don't know what I'm talking about (since I don't).  Maybe they're all obvious.

1. Categories are necessary, but any statement beginning "Native Americans were" or "Native Americans did (not)" is likely to be wrong. Be specific.

2. Expect nothing to stay the same, large or small.  Civilizations rise and fall.  Climate changes.  Cultures intermingle and split.  Fish and fowl were taboo foods for the Comanches, until the catastrophic drought of the 1850s, when the starving Comanches "routinely ate both" (302). 

3. Native Americans were human (I just violated Guideline #1).  Some were innovative and adaptive, others were stubborn and hidebound.  They made use of their physical environment to increase their material comfort.  The Comanches deliberately turned western Texas into an enormous grazing land for their horse herds, driving out the buffalo, on which they traditionally subsisted.  Timothy Pauketat, who wrote the short book on Cahokia that I recently read, is withering in this subject.  An older generation of researchers told him that Cahokia could not have been a city, because Native Americans did not build cities.  It could not have been ruled by a imperial religious elite, whose power was partly based on mass human sacrifices. 

At the peak of Comanche power, during the 1830s, about one-sixth (very roughly) of the population of Comanche territory were slaves (see pp. 250-1). About one-sixth of the population of the United States at that time were slaves. Comanches were human.

These guidelines of course applies to the study of anything.   I always know something is going to be wrong when a sentence begins "In Europe during the Middle Ages..."  Whatever follows may very well be true for England or parts of France, but rarely has much applicability to medieval Poland or Greece or Iceland.

Scholars continually divide and recombine. The historical study of Native Americans seems to be in an aggressively divisive stage.  It's intensely interesting.

How to miss (and see) evidence - the obese Comanche chiefs

Chief A Big Fat Fall by Tripping, it is told, owned fifteen hundred horses, but he was so fat that he could not ride any of them and had to be moved around on a travois. (The Comanche Empire, 259)

I want to discuss an example of how we (I) misunderstand evidence that is directly in front of us (me!), and how professional historians do their job.

The Comanches may have been the greatest horsemen in American history.  They culture was fundamentally mounted, as was much of their economy, which was based on a mix of seasonal buffalo hunting and raiding for horses, cattle, and humans.  Wealth was often measured in horses.  Yet they were also a trading nation. Meat, hides, horses, and slaves were traded for carbohydrates (squash and corn) and metal goods.

George Catlin, in Letter 42 of Letters and Notes of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841), describes his meeting with "a huge mass of flesh," the Comanche chief Ta-wah-que-nah (The Mountain of Rocks - see left for Catlin's portrait).  The chief "would undoubtedly weigh three hundred pounds or more," and was a "perfect personification of Jack Falstaff."  Catlin is baffled by the man, since "[c]orpulency is a thing exceedingly rare to be found in any of the tribes, amongst the men."

Catlin paints Ta-wah-que-nah and moves on to the next portrait subject.  Reading Catlin (a great book, by the way), I did the same thing. 

I should have known better.  Pekka Hämäläinen knew better.  In fairness, he was aware of multiple examples of overweight Comanches, all from roughly the same time period, the peak of Comanche power.  They are evidence, not anecdote.  Hämäläinen calls these chiefs "the new elite men who led the Comanche society in the early nineteenth century."  They became leaders because they were extraordinarily successful traders, not warriors.  They were so rich that they could abandon core aspects of their culture yet maintain their status.  These men were organizers, entrepreneurs, managing enormous households of slaves, wives, and affiliated herders and raiders, producing goods for the American market. 

Their corpulence was a sign, just as it was in other contemporary societies, of their wealth - high calorie input, low energy output.  These men are evidence of a profound change in Comanche society.  Historians depend on witnesses like Catlin, who rarely penetrated past the edge of the Comanche Empire, and only saw disconnected fragments.  With the help of anthropologists and demographers and ecologists, historians like Hämäläinen can reassemble the pieces.

Hämäläinen saw what was going on.  Catlin and I missed it.

Pekka Hämäläinen's audacious The Comanche Empire

A sample of Pekka Hämäläinen's startling The Comanche Empire (2009):

The assault came in March 16, 1758, when an estimated two thousand allied Comanches, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais appeared at the gates of the San Sabá mission, announcing that "they had come with the intention of killing the Apaches..." Their faces "smeared with black and red paint," equipped with lances, cutlasses, helmets, metal breastplates, and "at least 1,000" French muskets, and led by a Comanche chief clad in a French officer's uniform, they set fire to the buildings... (59)

Does this seem remotely plausible? A large band of Comanches approach a Spanish mission in Texas. Their chief is wearing a French military uniform. The warriors wear French helmets and armor, and wield swords. Try to picture it in a movie. An audience would snort - it would look ridiculous.  Is this how Plains Indians are supposed to look?  Yet it appears to be true, known through multiple eyewitness accounts.

Hämäläinen makes an audacious argument, that the Comanche-occupied territory (in contemporary terms, western Texas and parts of neighboring states) should, from the early 18th through the mid-19th century, be considered as a unified state, as an empire, subclass: nomad.  Like the Mongols, as a for instance.  Hämäläinen demonstrates that Spanish New Mexico, for example, was essentially a tributary province of the Comanches for about a century.

The book is filled with startling reversals like this.  It's become common for historians to simply flip perspectives - to look at America's westward expansion, say, from the point of view of the conquered peoples.  The Comanche Empire is doing something else.  Hämäläinen argues that for a long time the Comanches were the conquerors.  There is no reversed perspective.  Earlier perspectives were simply mistaken.

They were mistaken, often, because of partial evidence, the limited view of the participants.  Spanish residents of Taos and Santa Fe, desperate to scrape up enough tribute to buy off Comanche raiders, had no idea that the horses stolen in New Mexico ended up on the other side of the empire, in the hands of French traders in Louisiana.  Those Comanches in French uniforms and armor are not only plausible, but likely.  Hämäläinen, with the assistance of hundreds of earlier historians, is able to put all of these pieces together. 

I'll try to write about it for a couple more days.  It's a complex book, meant for academic historians and what one might call "advanced undergraduates."  Often, I found myself ill-equipped to judge it.  It's packed with "no way" moments.  Maybe I'll share a few of those.  The book's a triumph.

Human sacrifice, supernovas, competitive sports, slavery, zigzag-nosed gods - Timothy Pauketat's Cahokia

For reasons only distantly related to 19th century literature, I have been reading about Native American history. I'm trying to "learn something" by "reading books." I had not really planned to write about any of this, but I can't help myself, because the book I just finished is so good.

The book is Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi (2009) by University of Illinois anthropologist Timothy Pauketat. Pauketat tells an almost unbelievable story of human sacrifice, supernovas, competitive sports, slavery, zigzag-nosed gods, and the rise and fall of empires. All of this was, I remind myself, not in central Mexico, but in the Mississippi valley.

I have visited the Cahokia Mounds State Historical Site, long ago, in the late 1970s, I think. So I knew a little bit of this story - that in the 11th and 12th century, Cahokia was a city of dramatic earthen mounds in habited by 20,000 or more people. "Larger than London" is the standard comparison, like 11th century London was so special. Still, before European settlement, it was the largest city in the history of the territory that would become the United States; one of the mounds is the third largest in North America.

As Pauketat tells the story, it is clear that there have been massive changes in the archaeological and anthropological understanding of the Cahokian and Mississippian culture, much of it in the past twenty years. Pauketat uses the history of the archaeology as a plot - the development of the story is his story.

Cahokia is a tiny book (170 little pages) in a series of tiny books - the Penguin Library of American Indian History. I recently read another one of the series, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (2007) by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. I can easily recommend the Perdue and Green book to anyone curious about the subject in the title. But it is not particularly exciting or well written. It's a useful book.

So Pauketat's book was a surprise. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone. Some of it is a bit gruesome, I guess - those human sacrifices. One might think that the Cherokee history would have more grip because it has real characters - the great Chief John Ross, for example. But Pauketat's a better writer, and that makes all the difference. Plus, the archaeologists are good characters, and Pauketat knows how to use them, to b ring them to life and even argue with them. He calls one "paranoid." This book has personality.

Funny thing is that I've already found another fantastic Native American history, The Comanche Empire (2008) by  - just a minute - Pekka Hämäläinen. No idea how to pronounce his Finnish name. This book is  a serious academic history, so it's not so little and not so friendly. It's overturning every other fact I thought I knew about Plains Indian history, and I've barely started it. Maybe I'll write about it more at some point. It'll take me a while to finish - it's real work.

"This day I shot a condor".

Sort of a shocking thing to read. But Darwin is a scientist, so it's all right. It's possible that the condor is on view at the Natural History Museum in London - they seem to still have the specimen.

Regarding the governor of an Argentinian frontier province: "The governor's favourite occupation is hunting Indians: a short time since he slaughtered forty-eight, and sold the children at the rate of three or four pounds apiece". Now this is not just sort of shocking. I have an impression, confirmed here by Darwin, that the crimes of U.S.-Indian policy look a little pale compared to what went on in Argentina. Greed and neglect compared to open genocide. Native Americans and their allies were able to achieve some political success in the U.S., although they lost the fight at most crucial points. But in Argentina, there were no advocates, there was no organization. Just open warfare, or total submission. I need to learn more. A subject for future research.

All about Andean condors: pp. 194-8 of the Everyman's Library Voyage of the 'Beagle', the governor's hobby: pp. 140-1.