To the early settlers the savage seemed a strange being, not more than half human, who happened to be in possession of the land they coveted. They thought they did God service when they flung to the Indian a Bible and a handful of beads, in exchange for the land which had been his birthright for centuries. They cheated and cajoled him when he was angry, as they might have wheedled an angry tiger; yet, strange to say, they were quite off their guard when, at length, the tiger made his spring, and glutted the vengeance he had been nursing so long.
When the news of the Indian massacre reached England, it roused a frenzy of revenge equal in fury to that of the savages. The Virginia Company quite forgot that they had set forth in their charter that the conversion of the Indians was one of the main objects of the new adventure, or if they remembered it at all, it was only to apologize lamely for a complete change of base. “We condemn their bodies,” they wrote to the colonists, “the saving of whose souls we have so zealously affected. Root them out from being any longer a people.... War perpetually without peace or truce: yet spare the young for servants” (the Englishman even in a rage has an eye to the main chance). “Starve them by destroying their corn, or reaping it for your own use! Pluck up their weirs! Obstruct their hunting! Employ foreign enemies against them at so much a head! Keep a band of your own men continually upon them, to be paid by the colony, which is to have half of their captives and plunder!”
These short, nervous sentences fell like hammer-strokes on the ears of the Englishmen in America, and they found an echo in their hearts. It is easy for us to characterize their revengeful spirit as inconsistent and unchristian. It is easy to tolerate a bear in a menagerie, or an Indian on a reservation. It is quite another thing to exercise toleration toward either in the life-and-death grip of a frontier struggle.
These men had seen their homes go up in flames. They had heard the blood-curdling war-whoop. They had counted the bloody scalps hanging at the Indian’s belt, and marked on them the hair of those they loved. It was idle to preach toleration to them. Henceforward for many years it was war to the knife.
Yet, both as friend and foe, the Indian had given the colonists many lessons. He had taught them the culture of maize and tobacco, he had taught them to stalk the deer, to trap the bear, and to blaze the forest path. Many a lesson in woodcraft the settlers learned from him. Washington’s shrewdness in borrowing native methods of warfare, would, had his advice been taken, have saved Braddock’s army from utter rout in the Western forests. The very enmity of the Indian was a help to the Colonial Cavalier, whose ease-loving temperament might easily have sunk into sloth had it not felt the spur of danger and the necessity for being on the alert. The docility of the negro was a perpetual temptation to the white man to the abuse of arbitrary power, but the resistance of the Indian was a constant reminder that here was a force unsubdued and unsubduable.
Of the influence of the white men on the Indian, 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 firewater. 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.
An old sachem in the eighteenth century, meeting a surveyor, said to him: “The French claim all the land on one side of the Ohio, the English claim all the land on the other side. Now, where does the Indian’s land lie?”
The savages exchanged their corn and tobacco for the rum-cask and the firearms of civilization, and a strange jumble of a new religion, whose ceremonies they grafted onto their own, with grotesque results. It is hard to say whether they fared worst as the white man’s friends or foes. When the English made a treaty with the Chickahomanies, “a lustie and a daring people,” these were the terms offered them by the whites:
“First: They should for ever bee called Englishmen and bee true subjects to King James and his Deputies.
“Secondly: Neither to kill nor detaine any of our men, nor cattell, but bring them home.