Peace chiefs and blood revenge: Patterns of restraint in native American warfare, 1500-1800

Journal of Military History

Volumn 71, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 701-741

  Lee, Wayne E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 66949131378     PISSN: 08993718     EISSN: 15437795     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jmh.2007.0216     Document Type: Article

References (277)

1. The argument for rapid and largely unseen change as a result of European contact is now well rehearsed, but its implications for military behavior are still not clearly understood or agreed upon. See Keith F. Otterbein, "A History of Research on Warfare in Anthropology," American Anthropologist 101 (2000): 794-805, and the follow-up commentaries in the same journal by Neil Whitehead, 102 (2000): 834-37
2. Leslie E. Sponsel, 102 (2000): 837-41
3. Otterbein again, 102 (2000): 841-44
4. R. K. Dentan, 104 (2002): 278-80
5. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead, eds. , War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Societies (Santa Fe, N. M. : School of American Research Press, 1992)
6. R. Brian Ferguson, "Violence and War in Prehistory," in Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past, ed. Debra L. Martin and David W. Frayer (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1997), 339-42
7. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt and Co. , 1997), 132-43
8. Essentially this is another caveat. During much of the competitive imperial colonial period, many Native American peoples limited the impact of war by manipulating their position at the crux of competing European empires, playing one side against the other to limit their own exposure. Although in part such a diplomatic role was made possible because of Native political structures discussed herein, the specific nature of the imperial standoff is not considered. Daniel K. Richter, "Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 357-60
9. Frederic W. Gleach, Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 88-105
10. J. Frederick Fausz, "Patterns of Anglo-Indian Aggression and Accommodation along the Mid-Atlantic Coast, 1584-1634," in Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American Cultural Institutions, A. D. 1000-1800, ed. William W. Fitzhugh (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 235-36
11. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 1:237
12. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 130
13. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 142
14. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 2000), 102
15. Gleach calls the attack a "coup" in an effort to emphasize the limited goals of this style of warfare. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 148-58
16. This is not a reference to the "counting coup" practices of Plains Indians. For other narratives of the 1622 attack and the subsequent war, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. , 1975), 98-101
17. William L. Shea, The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 25-50
18. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 49-53
19. Kupperman, Indians and English, 196
20. For recent reviews of the development of this debate, see José António Brandão, "Your Fyre Shall Burn No More": Iroquois Policy Toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 5-18
21. Thomas S. Abler, "Iroquois Policy and Iroquois Culture: Two Histories and an Anthropological Ethnohistory," Ethnohistory 47 (2000): 483-91
22. William A. Starna and José António Brandāo, "From the Mohawk-Mahican War to the Beaver Wars: Questioning the Pattern," Ethnohistory 51 (2004): 725-50
23. For the Iroquois' success in obtaining guns and their impact, see Keith F. Otterbein, "Why the Iroquois Won: An Analysis of Iroquois Military Tactics," Ethnohistory 11 (1964): 58
24. Bruce G. Trigger, ed. , Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 352 (hereafter HNAI, 15)
25. Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: a History of the Huron People to 1660 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1976), 2:627-33
26. This account follows Keith F. Otterbein, "Huron vs. Iroquois: A Case Study in Inter-Tribal Warfare," Ethnohistory 26 (1979): 141-52
27. who is basically summarizing the French Jesuit account found in Reuben Gold Thwaites and Edna Kenton, eds. , Jesuit Relations (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1925), 34:123-37 (hereafter JR)
28. The main source for the outbreak of this war is George Chicken, "Journal of the March of the Carolinians into the Cherokee Mountains, in the Yemassee Indian War, 1715-16," Yearbook of the City of Charleston, 1894, 315-54
29. See also Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Revolutionary Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 24-25
30. John Phillip Reid, A Better Kind of Hatchet: Law, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Cherokee Nation During the Early Years of European Contact (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 61-73
31. John Phillip Reid, A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 175
32. Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 1929), 162-86
33. Chicken, "Journal of the March (1715)," 345
34. Wayne E. Lee "Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture Adaptation," Journal of Military History 68 (2004): 753-57
35. For Taliwa, see Hatley, Dividing Paths, 93
36. for the Creek attacks of 1752 and the subsequent peace, see David Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier, 1740-1762 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 35-37
37. Tobias Fitch, "Captain Fitch's Journal to the Creeks, 1725," in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York: Macmillan Co. , 1916), 202-5
38. Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 44
39. A sophisticated and detailed discussion of the blood feud is Reid, Law of Blood
40. Among many others, see Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 230-32, 239-40
41. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 80
42. Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 279-80
43. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 242
44. based on James Adair, History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (1930; repr. , New York: Argonaut Press, 1966), 407
45. See also Cadwallader Colden's description of the possibility of such interpeople resolution of blood feud between the Adirondacks and the Iroquois. Cadwallader Colden, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (London: n. p. , 1747), 22
46. For other examples of intergroup attempts to assuage a blood feud before it got started, see Kupperman, Indians and English, 106
47. Fitch, "Captain Fitch's Journal," 203
48. Reid, Law of Blood, 171-72
49. James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1999), 116-21
50. Colin G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 165, 189-90
51. Wendell S. Hadlock, "War among the Northeastern Woodland Indians," American Anthropologist, new ser. , 49 (1947): 213-14
52. Reid, Better Kind of Hatchet, 9
53. Richter, "Native Peoples of North America," 349-50
54. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 42-44
55. Ferguson argues that this lack of coercive structures was the most fundamental limitation on prestate warfare. Ferguson, "Violence and War in Prehistory," 336
56. For one example of this ideology at work, see John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandel, unabridged ed. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996), 252
57. Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony in Virginia (London: n. p. , 1622
58. Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 116
59. David H. Dye, "Warfare in the Sixteenth-Century Southeast: The de Soto Expedition in the Interior," in Columbian Consequences, vol. 2, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 211-22
60. David H. Dye, "Warfare in the Protohistoric Southeast, 1500-1700," in Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast, ed. Cameron B. Wesson and Mark A. Rees (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 131-32
61. Karl T. Steinen, "Ambushes, Raids, and Palisades: Mississippian Warfare in the Interior Southeast," Southeastern Archaeology 11 (1992): 132-39
62. David G. Anderson, "Fluctuations between Simple and Complex Chiefdoms: Cycling in the Late Prehistoric Southeast," in Political Structure and Change in the Prehistoric Southeastern United States, ed. John F. Scarry (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 245-46
63. Leroy V. Eid, "'National War' among Indians of Northeastern North America," Canadian Review of American Studies 16 (1985): 125-54. For Mississippian conquest warfare, see note 54
64. Quote is from Joseph François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared With the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974), 2:101
65. Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 229
66. For other discussions of "political" goals for Native American warfare, see Gleach, Powhatan's World, 51-54
67. Thomas C. Parramore, "The Tuscarora Ascendancy," North Carolina Historical Review 59 (1982): 322-23
68. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 257
69. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 40. See also below in the section on making peace
70. For examples of the red stick or red flag, see Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 243
71. Adair, History, 408
72. Similarly, there is the famous story of the Narragansett chief Canonicus sending a clear warning of impending war to the Plymouth colonists in the form of a rattlesnake's skin wrapped around a bundle of arrows. Governor Bradford's response of returning the skin stuffed with powder and shot impressed Canonicus enough to make him back off from his challenge. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (New York: Random House, 1981), 106
73. Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675, 3rd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 79-80
74. Richter, "Native Peoples of North America," 357
75. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 44-45
76. Lee, "Fortify, Fight, or Flee," 761-62
77. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 243-44
78. Adair, History, 167-78
79. John Gyles, "Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, etc. ," in Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1981), 120
80. Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, ed. Neil Salisbury (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 100
81. Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 22
82. J. Frederick Fausz, "Fighting 'Fire' with Firearms: The AngloPowhatan Arms Race in Early Virginia," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3 (1979): 41-42
83. Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, 155
84. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1-22, contains an extensive discussion of the relationship of the spiritual, the material, and war
85. George Turner to Governor Lyttelton, 2 July 1758, in Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, 1754-62, ed. William L. McDowell, Jr. (Columbia: Colonial Records of South Carolina, Series 2, 1970), 2:471 (hereafter DRIA)
86. Colin Calloway records a similar instance of the Creeks delaying a war party until the completion of the Green Corn ceremony. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62
87. War parties also carried medicine bundles or other sacred objects whose loss could send the warriors home. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 244, 247
88. Adair, History, 409
89. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 53
90. James Axtell, "The White Indians of Colonial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. , 32 (1975): 67
91. Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness, 107 n82
92. Thomas S. Abler, "Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Values in War," Anthropologica 34 (1992): 13
93. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 9-10
94. Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 28, 81
95. Cave, Pequot War, 20
96. Elizabeth Hanson, "God's Mercy Surmounting Man's Cruelty," in Puritans and Indians, 242
97. Adair, History, 171-72
98. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 107
99. Adair, History, 260-61
100. Richard White reports another instance of Indians taking revenge for the rape of women in the 1760s. White, The Middle Ground, 345
101. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 252
102. See also Starkey, European and Native American, 28
103. Native American societies that had combined, or partially combined, this tripartite power structure into one person were typically more militant and aggressive. Frederic Gleach has made this argument for Powhatan's power in Virginia: that for reasons unknown, Powhatan had successfully combined civil, military, and religious authority in his person, and thus was able to embark on building a paramount chiefdom. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 31
104. Similarly, the more centralized and urbanized Mississippian societies of the late prehistoric southeast were ruled by "priest-kings," who combined civil, military, and sacred functions, and waged aggressive conquest warfare in competition with each other and with surrounding less-centralized peoples. Charles M. Hudson, Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 17
105. David H. Dye, "The Art of War in the Sixteenth-Century Central Mississippi Valley," in Perspectives on the Southeast: Linguistics, Archaeology and Ethnohistory, ed. Patricia B. Kwachka (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 54-56
106. Dye, "Warfare in the Sixteenth-Century Southeast," 213-14
107. Adair, History, 167-68
108. Colden, History, 6-7
109. Gyles, "Memoirs," 120
110. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains, 275-76
111. See, for example, Richter, Ordeal, 34-35
112. Cave, Pequot War, 3
113. Trigger, Children, 69
114. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21
115. Hadlock, "War," 211
116. Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal of a Voyage to North America (London, 1761), 1:360
117. cited in Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204
118. See also the Iroquois mobilization process described in José António Brandão, ed. , Nation Iroquoise: A Seventeenth-Century Ethnography of the Iroquois (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 67, 73, 75
119. Adair, History, 416
120. See also Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 34
121. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains, 270
122. Cave, Pequot War, 157
123. Chicken, "Journal of the March (1715)," 342
124. Richter, Ordeal, 35
125. Bruce G. Trigger, The Huron: Farmers of the North, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth, Tex. : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990), 54
126. Adam J. Hirsch, "The Collision of Military Cultures in Seventeenth-Century New England," Journal of American History 74 (1988): 1191
127. Fausz, "Fighting Fire," 34
128. Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics Among the New England Indians (Lanham, Md. : Madison Books, 1991), 29-31
129. Nathaniel Knowles, "The Torture of Captives by the Indians of Eastern North America," American Philosophical Society Proceedings 82 (1940): 151-225
130. Daniel Barr, "'This Land is Ours': The Western Lenape Struggle for Autonomy, 1754-64," paper presented to the Organization of American Historians Conference, Washington, D. C. , April 2002
131. Malone, Skulking Way of War, 65
132. Otterbein, "A History," 800
133. William Tulio Divale, Warfare in Primitive Societies: A Bibliography (Santa Barbara, Calif. : ABC-CLIO, 1973), xxi-xxii
134. Thomas B. Abler, "European Technology and the Art of War in Iroquoia," in Cultures in Conflict: Current Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Diana Tkaezuk and Brian C. Vivian (Calgary: University of Calgary Archaeology Association, 1989), 278-79. Lawrence Keeley's emphasis on the per capita lethality of primitive warfare in general is an important stimulus to this argument, in his War before Civilization
135. George R. Milner, "Warfare in Prehistoric and Early Historic Eastern North America," Journal of Archaeological Research 7 (1999): 126-27
136. Patricia M. Lambert, "The Archaeology of War: A North American Perspective," Journal of Archaeological Research 10 (2002): 227-29
137. Maria Ostendorf Smith, "Osteological Indications of Warfare in the Archaic Period of the Western Tennessee Valley," in Martin and Frayer, Troubled Times, 241-66
138. Winthrop Papers, 3:413-14
139. cited in Malone, Skulking Way of War, 29
140. Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada's 'Heroic Age' Reconsidered (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985), 175-76
141. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 43-44, reprints the colonists' descriptions of the battle, but Gleach does not believe it represented their normal way of fighting
142. Paul Hulton, ed. , The Work of Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues: A Huguenot Artist in France, Florida and England (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1977), 1:144, and plate 105
143. Williams, Key into the Language, 188-89
144. Richter, Ordeal, 35
145. Craig S. Keener, "An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Iroquois Assault Tactics Used against Fortified Settlements of the Northeast in the Seventeenth Century," Ethnohistory 46 (1999): 777-807
146. Hulton, The Work of Jacques Le Moyne, 1:149 and plate 123
147. Compare: Malone, Skulking Way of War, 14
148. Vaughan, New England Frontier, xxv
149. This does not mean that "ritualism" disappeared, just the ritual battle. Fausz, "Fighting Fire"; Starkey, European and Native American, 24-25
150. Richter, Ordeal, 54
151. Otterbein, "Why the Iroquois Won," 59-60. Note that these sources argue for the shift in tactics due to firearms. My argument, with significant influence from Otterbein and Divale, is for a broader shift from a duality of war styles (ritual battle and deadly ambush) to a stricter reliance on the ambush based on the shifting balance of offense vs. defense (see note 67)
152. Leroy V. Eid, "'A Kind of Running Fight': Indian Battlefield Tactics in the late Eighteenth Century," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 71 (1988): 147-71
153. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 43
154. Williams, Key into the Language, 184-86. As an indication of its importance, there is a single word for the half-moon formation: "Onoettug. "
155. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. , 1975), 152-53
156. Malone, Skulking Way of War, 103-4
157. Lion Gardiner, "Leift Lion Gardiner his relation of the Pequot Warres," in History of the Pequot War, ed. Charles Orr (Cleveland: Helman-Taylor Co. , 1897), 132
158. Paul A. Robinson, "Lost Opportunities: Miantonomi and the English in Seventeenth-Century Narragansett Country," in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632-1816, ed. Robert S. Gruniet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 22-23
159. John Underbill, Newes From America (London: n. p. , 1638
160. See above, note 75, especially Keener, "Ethnohistorical Analysis," 783, 785
161. D. Owsley and H. Berryman, "Ethnographic and Archaeological Evidence of Scalping in the Southeastern United States," Tennessee Archaeologist 31 (1975): 41-60
162. Gardiner, "Relation," 132
163. There is also strong archaeological evidence for prehistoric killing of women. Richard G. Wilkinson, "Violence against Women: Raiding and Abduction in Prehistoric Michigan," in Martin and Frayer, Troubled Times, 21-44
164. The extent of such killing is debated, but it certainly occurred. See Brian Ferguson's summary essay, "Violence and War in Prehistory" in the same volume, pp. 321-55
165. Karen Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Native Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (New York: Routledge, 1991), 169-78
166. Richter, Ordeal, 35-36
167. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 254-55
168. Hudson also indicates that intertwined with torture as an expression of grief was a spiritual component, that is, torture also served a ritual purpose. Cf. Trigger, Children, 1:73-74
169. For a survey of the different torture rituals, see Knowles, "The Torture of Captives. "
170. Brandão, Your Fyre, passim, 130-31
171. Richter, "War and Culture. "
172. See, for example, Helen C. Rountree, "The Powhatans and Other Woodland Indians as Travelers," in Powhatan Foreign Relations, 1500-1722, ed. Helen C. Rountree (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 50
173. Starkey, European and Native American, 29-30
174. James Merrell, The Indians' New World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 30-31
175. Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 142-51
176. A critical essay for understanding the use of prisoners as labor is Christina Snyder, "Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives," Journal of Southern History (forthcoming)
177. Axtell, "White Indians," 59-61
178. For a good discussion of the various uses of prisoners, see Ian K. Steele, "Surrendering Rites: Prisoners on Colonial North American Frontiers," in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, ed. Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, Clyve Jones, and Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U. K. : Boydell Press, 1998), 138-42
179. Richter argues that the whole nature of Iroquois warfare (reliance on surprise, avoidance of assaulting forts, ritualized battles) was determined by this desire to take prisoners. Richter, Ordeal, 37-38
180. Increase Mather, "Quentin Stockwell's Relation of his Captivity and Redemption," in Vaughan and Clark, Puritans among the Indians, 81
181. Ian K. Steele, Betrayals: Fort William Henry & the "Massacre" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 121
182. Richter, Ordeal, 40
183. James Axtell, "The Scholastic Philosophy of the Wilderness," in The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 138-50
184. Wayne E. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 119-29
185. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London: n. p. , 1709
186. John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 24, 29, 33, 38-39
187. Adair, History, 427
188. Steele, Betrayals, 113, 131, 184
189. Chicken, "Journal of the March (1715)," 345-46
190. Roger Williams's dictionary is again helpful in imagining this process, including such phrases as "let us parley" or "let us cease Armes. " Williams, Key into the Language, 189
191. A third party would not be implicated in the ongoing cycle of blood revenge, and therefore could approach the warring sides in greater safety. The English often saw themselves as filling this third party role, but usually for their own economic reasons, since they preferred to trade with all comers. See, for example, the Pequots' appeal to the English in 1634. Cave, Pequot War, 69-70
192. Similarly, the Indians sought to use Rhode Island as an intermediary between themselves and the other New England colonies at the outset of King Philip's War. John Easton, "A Relacion of the Indyan Warre," in Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner, 1913), 8-9
193. See Richter, Ordeal, 41
194. and Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 257, for more details on the peacemaking process
195. Quotes from Gardiner, "Relation," 131-32
196. For another example of the protection of embassies, see Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness, 102-3, especially where the Wampanoag leadership expressed regret that some "Matchit" (bad) Indian had stolen provisions from the English embassy
197. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 34-35
198. Aron, How the West, 34
199. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 223-24
200. "The Examination of James Quannapaquait," in Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness, 124-25
201. Lafitau, Customs, 2:101-3
202. Calloway, Western Abenakis, 172
203. Saunt, A New Order, 23-25
204. One European observer, for example, exactly reversed the real power relationship among the Cherokees: "Every Town has a Head Warrior, who is in great Esteem among them, and whose Authority seems to be greater than their Kings, because their King is looked upon as little else than a Civil Magistrate, except it so happens that he is at the same Time a Head Warrior. " Sir Alexander Cuming, "Journal of Sir Alexander Cuming (1730)," in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, 1540-1800, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (Johnson City, Tenn. : Watauga Press, 1928), 122
205. Rennard Strickland, Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law From Clan to Court (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 47-48
206. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 222
207. Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 40
208. James Axtell, "Making Do," in Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 139
209. Fred Gearing, Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the 18th Century (American Anthropological Association, Memoir 93, 1962)
210. Calloway, New Worlds for All, 111
211. See also the theoretical discussion of this issue in Ferguson, "Violence and War in Prehistory," 336
212. For pushing men to war: Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 101
213. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, 60, 224
214. For pushing an end to war: Saunt, New Order of Things, 25
215. Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 187
216. The role of Europeans in diminishing women's influence within Native societies forms a substantial literature. See Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot
217. Calloway, New Worlds for All, 191
218. Saunt, New Order of Things, 25
219. Reid, Better Kind of Hatchet, 10
220. Richter, Ordeal, 40, 44-45
221. Kupperman, Indians and English, 197-99
222. Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia (1615) (London: n. p. , 1615
223. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 152-54
224. Rountree, "The Powhatans and Other Woodland Indians," 50
225. Kupperman, Indians and English, 198-99
226. For a discussion of diplomatic marriages in another context, see Hudson, Southeastern Indians, 234
227. Indians in general relied heavily on real or fictive kin relationships to establish and maintain peace. Many Europeans never fully grasped the role of fictive kinship in maintaining peaceful relationships. The complexities of real and fictive kinship in peacemaking lie beyond this essay, but see: Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America (Cambridge, Mass. : Da Capo Press, 2005), 193-94
228. Jon Parmenter, "After the Mourning Wars: The Iroquois as Allies in Colonial North American Campaigns, 1676-1760," William & Mary Quarterly 3d Ser. , 64, no. 1 (2007): 39-82
229. Fintan O'Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Gi roux, 2005), passim, 2005-6
230. Reid, Better Kind of Hatchet, 9-10
231. Cave, Pequot War, 157 (for the Pequots' killing of English-allied Mohegans living among them after the disaster at Mystic)
232. Ian K. Steele, "Surrendering Rites," 138
233. Hatley, Dividing Paths, 94
234. Richter, Ordeal, 111
235. Reid, Better Kind of Hatchet, 111
236. Trigger, Huron, 53
237. Cave, Pequot War, 66-67
238. Wayne E. Clark and Helen C. Rountree, "The Powhatans and the Maryland Mainland," in Rountree, Powhatan Foreign Relations, 132
239. White Outerbridge to Gov. Lyttelton, S March 1757, all in William Lyttelton Papers. Reid points out, however, that such resident aliens could also be loose cannons, acting on their own needs and thus creating trouble for the community in which they lived. Reid, Law of Blood, 163-72
240. See also the warnings passed along by one of Robert Rogers's Indian scouts to the target of Rogers's impending attack. Calloway, Western Abenakis, 178
241. Karim Tiro has argued in a similar vein for the warnings passed back and forth between the divided members of the Iroquois Confederacy during the American Revolution. Karim M. Tiro, "A 'Civil' War? Rethinking Iroquois Participation in the American Revolution," Explorations in Early American Culture 4 (2000): 148-65, and personal communication
242. Gleach, Powhatan's World, 49-53
243. Kupperman, Indians and English, 196
244. "The Examination of James Quannapaquait," in Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness, 120
245. Lee, "Fortify, Fight, or Flee," 757
246. There are two other significant peacekeeping structures worth mentioning, but space forbids detailed treatment. The first was the Iroquois Confederacy, an elaborate governmental device designed to keep the peace between its five (later six) members (Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and later Tuscarora). It seems to have originated to quell blood feuds among those groups that at the time were deemed out of control. It was not necessarily designed to conduct diplomacy with outside groups, but to preserve peace internal to the Confederacy. Richter, Ordeal, 30-19
247. Wallace, Death and Rebirth, 44-47
248. The other was the ball game known to posterity as lacrosse. There is some suggestion that intertribal lacrosse matches, known as the "little brother of war," may have served as an outlet for young men's aggression, although it did not seem to deal with revenge issues or serve as a substitute for "grand" or national war. Thomas Vennum, American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994)
249. Peter Way, "The Cutting Edge of Culture: British Soldiers Encounter Native Americans in the French and Indian War," in Empire and Others: British Encounters With Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850, ed. Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 123-48
250. Hirsch, "Collision of Military Cultures"; Gregory T. Knouff, "Soldiers and Violence on the Pennsylvania Frontier," in Beyond Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania Hinterland in the American Revolution, ed. John B. Frantz and William Pencak (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 171-93
251. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 117-29
252. A variant of this argument postulates that Europeans arrived in North America during the horribly violent era of the Religious Wars, and that they brought that form of unrestrained warfare with them. In the face of an "uncivilized" enemy, the colonists preserved that way of war despite changes in Europe itself. John Ferling, A Wilderness of Miseries: War and Warriors in Early America (Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1980), 29-54
253. John Morgan Dederer, War in America to 1775: Before Yankee Doodle (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 127, 129-36
254. Malone, Skulking Way of War, 102
255. Ronald Dale Karr, "'Why Should You Be So Furious?': The Violence of the Pequot War," Journal of American History 85 (1998): 876-909
256. The idea that European technology increased lethality is a commonplace in histories of Native American warfare (for example: Malone, Skulking Way of War, 65
257. Donald E. Worcester and Thomas E. Schilz, "The Spread of Firearms among the Indians on the Anglo-French Frontiers," American Indian Quarterly 8 (1984): 103
258. Calloway, Western Abenakis, 56, 61, 88)
259. The role of a desire for European trade goods in producing an increased frequency of war for control of trade routes or trade items (notably fur) is more complex. See note 12 and George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois: A Study in Intertribal Trade Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940)
260. Richter, Ordeal, 55-74
261. Ferguson, "Violence and War in Prehistory," 339-42
262. Alan Gallay, moreover, has convincingly demonstrated the increased frequency of Indian warfare as a result of their participation in the European slave trade; a participation which also dramatically altered the function and scale of prisoner-taking. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 2002)
263. Richter, Ordeal, 58, 60
264. James Drake argues that there was even a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of "hostage" during King Philip's War. James David Drake, King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 115-16
265. Hamor, A True Discourse, 44
266. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 21
267. Drake, King Philip's War, 87
268. Lepore, The Name of War, 156-58
269. For a moving story of how two Praying Indians struggled to prove their loyalty in the face of persistent doubt, see "The Examination and Relation of James Quannapaquait," in Rowlandson, Sovereignty and Goodness, 118-28
270. Two famous examples in Pennsylvania were the Paxton Boys massacre in 1763 and Gnadenhutten in 1782: Benjamin Franklin, "Narrative of the Late Massacres," in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1967), 11:42-69
271. White, The Middle Ground, 389-91
272. For other similar incidents, see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, "Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom's War," William & Mary Quarterly, 3d sen, 53 (1996): 459-86
273. Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 65-87
274. Aron, How the West, 49
275. See Steele, "Surrendering Rites," 152-54, for a rare example of all sides' expectations of prisoner treatment being met, although the details of that success clearly delineate the fragility of the process
276. See note 130 and White, The Middle Ground, 345
277. Karr argues in a similar vein about the failure to establish "reciprocity" in "Why Should You Be So Furious," passim, especially 888