The war of the Indians with the Dutch in 1675 in New York was caused by the sale of liquor and firearms to the Indians, as well as all the trouble that the Dutch ever seem to have had with their Indian neighbors.
Liquor entered largely as a consideration into the purchase of land from the Indians, and the dispute over title and inadequate amounts frequently caused trouble.
In 1675 Robert Livingston purchased a tract of land on the east side of Hudson river, near Catskill, which was paid for in guilders, blankets, shirts, cloth, tin kettles, powder, guns, twenty little looking-glasses, fish hooks, awls, nails, tobacco, knives, strong beer, four stroud coats, two duffel coats, four tin kettles, rum and pipes, ten pairs large stockings, ten pairs small stockings, adzes, paint, bottles, and scissors. The treaty with the Creek Indians was signed on October 21, 1733, when the governor distributed the following presents among the Indians: A laced coat and a laced hat and shirt to each of the chiefs; to each of the warriors, a gun and a mantle of duffils (a coarse woolen cloth with nap and fringe), and to all their attendants coarse cloth for clothing; a barrel of gunpowder; four kegs of bullets; a piece of broadcloth; a piece of Irish linen; a cask of tobacco pipes; eight belts and cutlasses with gilt handles; tape, and of all colors; eight kegs of rum to be carried home to their towns; one pound of powder, one pound of bullets, and as much provision for each one as they pleased to take for their journey home.
In the spring of 1795 the directors of the Connecticut Land Company sent out surveyors through the Mohawk, over the portage of Wood creek, Oneida lake, and the Oswego river to Lake Ontario. At Buffalo the agent bought of the Indians their remaining claim to the lands east of the Cuyahoga river for five hundred pounds, New York currency, two beef cattle, and one hundred gallons of whiskey.
The murder in 1774 without provocation of the family of Logan, a friendly chief of the Cayuga nation and of great influence, Jefferson shows was due to the drunkenness of two traders, Greathouse and Tomlinson, and caused Logan to deliver the speech which is often given in school readers. The Seminole War had the combined causes of slavery and liquor. President Jackson gave slave traders permission to buy slaves of the Seminole Indians. The trader, knowing that the Indians were intoxicated, would induce them to give bills of sale for negroes they did not own, and the complications thus caused led to the Seminole War.
The Black Hawk War was directly caused by the liquor traffic, while the career of Pontiac, the ablest Indian statesman his race ever produced, illustrates that drunkenness was the bane of the Indian race. In the same speech in which Pontiac said, "our people love liquor and if we dwelt near your old village of Detroit, our warriors would be always drunk," he concluded his harangue with the desire that the rum barrel might be opened and his warriors allowed to quench their thirst. His life was ended by an English trader named Williamson, who bribed a strolling Indian of the Kaskia tribe by a barrel of rum to murder him, and for that reward the savage stole softly behind Pontiac while he was meditating in the forest and buried his hatchet in his brain.
Of the influence of the white man on the Indians the less said the better. They eradicated none of his vices and they lent him many of their own. They found him abstinent, and they made him a guzzler of fire water. They found him hospitable, and they made him suspicious and vindictive. They found him in freedom, the owner of a great country: they robbed him of the one, and crowded him out of the other. The Dutch were too much beer drinkers, became with speed rum consumers, and opposed prohibiting the sale of rum to the Indians. William Penn wrote in 1683: "Ye Dutch, Sweed and English have by brandy and specially rum almost debauched ye Indians all." On arriving at a trading post an Indian hunting party would trade perhaps a third of their peltries for fine clothes, ammunition, paint, tobacco, and like articles. Then a keg of brandy would be purchased and the council held to decide who was to get drunk and who was to stay sober. All arms and clubs were taken away and hidden and the orgie would begin, all the Indians in the neighborhood being called in. It was the task of those who kept sober to prevent the drunken ones from killing one another, a task always hazardous and frequently unsuccessful, sometimes as many as five being killed in one night. When the keg was empty brandy was brought by the kettle full and ladled out with large wooden spoons, and this was kept up until the last skin was disposed of. Then, dejected, wounded, lamed, with their fine new shirts torn, their blankets burned, and nothing but the ammunition and tobacco saved, they would start off down the river to hunt, and begin again the same round of alternating toil and drudgery. Nevertheless, with all their rage for brandy they sometimes showed a self control quite admirable in its way. When at a fair, a council, or a friendly visit their entertainers regaled them with rations of the coveted liquor, so prudently measured out that they could not be the worse for it, they would unite their several portions in a common stock, which they would then divide among a few of their number, thus enabling them to attain that complete intoxication which, in their view, was the true end of all drinking. The objects of this benevolence were expected to requite it on a similar future occasion. In 1708, of the sixty-three settlers at Detroit, thirty-four were traders, and the only profitable articles of trade were ammunition and brandy, the English being able to undersell the French in all other commodities. At the time of the sales of furs every house in Montreal was a drinking shop. In a letter of Governor Halderman to Captain Lernoult, dated July 23, 1729, Halderman says: "I observe with great concern the astonishing consumption of rum at Detroit, amounting to seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty gallons a year."
In his notes on Virginia, Jefferson states that the census of 1669 showed that the Indians of Virginia in sixty-two years decreased about one-third, which decrease Jefferson attributes to spirituous liquors and the smallpox. When president, Jefferson recommended that the sale among the Indian tribes of intoxicating liquors be prohibited.
Of the traffic and its effect on the Indians a large amount of practically unanimous evidence can be produced. LeClercq observes with truth and candor that an Indian would be baptized ten times a day for a pint of brandy or a pound of tobacco. Father Etienne Carheil says: "Our missions are reduced to such an extremity that we can no longer maintain them against the infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, impurity, insolence, scorn, and insult which the deplorable and infamous traffic in brandy has spread universally among the Indians of these parts. In the despair in which we are plunged, nothing remains for us but to abandon them to the brandy sellers as a domain of drunkenness and debauchery."
On one occasion the French Denonville lectured Dongon, the English governor, for allowing West India rum to be sent to the Long House. "Think you that religion will make any progress while your traders supply the savages in abundance with the liquor, which as you ought to know converts them into demons, and their wigwams into counterparts of hell." One seems to see the Irishman's tongue curl under his cheek as he replies: "Methinks our rum does as little hurt as your brandy, and in the opinion of Christians is much more wholesome."