Colin G. Calloway

One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark

This magnificent, sweeping work traces the histories of the Native peoples of the American West from their arrival thousands of years ago to the early years of the nineteenth century. Emphasizing conflict and change, One Vast Winter Count offers a new look at the early history of the region by blending ethnohistory, colonial history, and frontier history. Drawing on a wide range of oral and archival sources from across the West, Colin G. Calloway offers an unparalleled glimpse at the lives of generations of Native peoples in a western land soon to be overrun.

Dawnland encounters : Indians and Europeans in northern New England

Colin G. Calloway collects, for the first time, documents describing the full range of encounters of Indians and Europeans in northern New England during the Colonial era. His comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the subject of Indian and European interaction in northern New England covers early encounters, missionary efforts, diplomacy, war, commerce, and cultural interchange and features a wide range of primary sources, including narratives, letters, account books, treaties, and council proceedings. Together with period illustrations, the documents testify to the richness and variety of the inter-ethnic relations in northern New England. They also show that while conflict certainly occurred, the encounters were also marked by cooperation and accommodation.

White People, Indians, and Highlanders

PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1. Cycles of Conquest and Colonization 2. Scots and Indians in a Changing World 3. Savage Peoples and Civilizing Powers 4. Warriors and Soldiers 5. Highland Traders and Indian Hunters 6. Highland Men and Indian Families 7. Clearances and Removals 8. Highland Settlers and Indian Lands 9. Empires, Myths, and New Traditions EPILOGUE: HISTORY, HERITAGE, AND IDENTITY

Spiritual Encounters: Interactions between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America

Encounters between religions and the resulting questions pertaining to belief and faith are among the most intriguing subjects with which scholars grapple. How do people adjust, accommodate, resist, reinterpret and harmonize different systems of belief? Do religious conversions often mask more worldly concerns such as political power, economic well being, and the ability to control ones destiny? Specifically adopting a cross-hemispheric approach, this volume draws on experiences of religious change principally in hispanophone America, but also in anglophone and francophone America, in order to transcend cultural frontiers, illuminate the circumstances and conditions which determined the form that spiritual encounters took across the hemisphere, and encourage a comparative approach.

Talking to the Peace Commissioners: The Treaty of Medicine Lodge, 1867

With the Civil War won, the United States turned to rebuilding the defeated states in the South and to resolving the Indian question in the West. The government aimed ultimately to concentrate the Indians of the plains on two large reservations: one south of Kansas and the other north of Nebraska. Not only would this clear a corridor for American expansion across the central plains, but it would also begin the process of eradicating the Plains Indians’ way of life, something the government regarded as essential to lasting peace. The United States intended to achieve these ends by peaceful negotiation if possible, and by force if necessary. As a result, federal Indian policy toward Plains Indians vacillated between peace and war, even though the ultimate objective — the dispossession and acculturation of the Indians — was basically the same. Plains Indians fought to defend both their lands and their way of life.

Counting Coups and Fighting for Survival

Warfare had existed on the Great Plains since prehistoric times,1 but by 1800 the area had become a vast theater of intertribal conflict. Warriors fought for prestige or revenge and waged ritualized battles in which counting coup carried more honor than inflicting casualties. White observers, especially Army officers accustomed to winning victories by inflicting massive losses, often were bewildered and bemused by Plains Indian warfare, dismissing it as petty skirmishing.

The Life and Death of Sitting Bull

Tatanka-Iyotanka, or Sitting Bull, is best known to non-Indians as the Hunkpapa Sioux chief who masterminded Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In fact, as befitted a man in his mid-forties, whose arms were still swollen from the sacrifices made in the sun dance, Sitting Bull directed most of his energies that day to protecting the women and children. His major influence on the battle was exerted before the conflict began, in his vision of the soldiers falling into camp.

Lone Dog’s Winter Count

Like many other native societies, American Indians often have been regarded as “people without history” before Europeans arrived to record what was going on.1 In reality, of course, all peoples, whether literate or not, devise ways of recording their history and preserving for posterity the events that give meaning to their collective lives. In oral cultures like those of the Plains Indians, the memories of the elders served as repositories of tribal histories, and songs, stories, dances, and other public performances fastened traditions in the lives of successive generations. But Indian people also made visual records of noteworthy events: Individual warriors recorded their own heroic deeds; tribal historians compiled winter counts or calendars of events significant to the community as a whole.

Killing the Dream

Killing Sitting Bull did not stop trouble on the Sioux reservations; instead, it proved to be only a prelude to greater tragedy. Two weeks later, amid continuing tensions occasioned by the spread of the Ghost Dance religion, soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry slaughtered some two hundred Miniconjou people at Wounded Knee. The event marked the end of the armed conflict between Plains Indians and the United States Army and came to symbolize the end of a way of life.

Attending the White Man’s Schools

Indian children bore the brunt of the United States government’s campaign of cultural genocide. Many non-Indian reformers threw up their hands in despair at the cultural conservatism of Indian adults but believed that children could be changed, and thereby “saved.” Children represented the future and, in the eyes of American reformers and educators, the only hope for Indian people to adapt and survive into the twentieth century. Educating Indian children in the white man’s ways was nothing new — several colonial colleges had attempted it — but in the late nineteenth century, the United States launched a sustained campaign to rid Indian children of their tribal heritage and reeducate them in the skills and values they deemed necessary for life in modern America.