Drunks Read online

  Once the Indians lost their fear of alcohol, they fell in love with it. The euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death. A Jesuit attempting to convert the Cayuga Indians in the seventeenth century reported that they would announce their intention to get drunk before a drinking episode. “I am going to lose my head,” a man would shout. “I am going to drink the water that takes away one’s wits.” Another missionary noted that the native people appeared to relish the disorientation that occurred as the alcohol took effect. “They rejoice, shouting, ‘Good, good. My head is reeling!” Once a man was drunk on alcohol, he found new powers in himself. When an Ottawa Indian was asked what brandy was made of, he said, “Of hearts and tongues. . . . [A]fter I have drank of it, I fear nothing and I talk like an angel.” The drinker experienced a surge of self-confidence. “[I]n their drunkenness, . . . they become persons of importance, taking pleasure in seeing themselves dreaded by those who do not taste the poison,” a third missionary said. Of course, inebriation also made Indians more vulnerable to manipulation by white men.10

  The Europeans expressed shock over the self-destructive way the Indians drank. Alcohol abuse was certainly not unknown among whites, particularly those living on the frontier where many fur traders were killed in drunken brawls. But coming from cultures that had encountered alcohol centuries earlier, some of them had clear rules against abusing alcohol. Prohibitions against drunkenness were spelled out in Christian scripture, Western social etiquette, and even law, but the natives had no prohibitions against getting drunk. Wasn’t that the point? One Indian observed: “The Great Spirit who made all things made everything for some use, and whatever use he design’d anything for, that use it should always be put to; Now, when he made rum, he said, Let this be for Indians to get drunk with. And it must be so.”11

  From the beginning, Indians drank to get drunk, to escape. “[G]ive two Savages two or three bottles of brandy. They will sit down and, without eating, will drink one after another until they have emptied them,” a missionary said. At first, there were limited supplies of alcohol in America. But if the Indians didn’t have enough brandy or rum to get everyone drunk, they gave it all to a chosen few. “And if any one chance to be drunk before he hath finisht his proportion (which is ordinarily a quart of Brandy, Rum or Strong-waters), the rest will pour the rest of his part down his throat,” a colonist wrote. The Europeans agreed that the Indians had a drinking problem. “They will pawne their wits to purchase the acquaintance of it,” Thomas Morton said in 1637. “Their paradise is drinking,” Louis Antoine de Bougainville observed a century later.12

  The Europeans would have continued simply to take advantage of Indians getting drunk if alcohol hadn’t also sometimes made them aggressive. For the most part, early contact between the Puritans and the Indians had been peaceful. While the natives did not welcome the white man, they generally avoided attacking him and even offered critical assistance when the early settlers were on the verge of starvation. “The Natives are of two sorts, (as the English are),” Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, reported. “Some are Rude and Clownish . . ., the Generall, are sober and grave, and yet chearfull in a meane. . . . There is a favour of civility and courtesie even amongst these wild Americans, both amongst themselves and towards strangers.” But the behavior of drunken Indians was often terrifying, both to the colonists and other natives. In 1680, Jasper Danckaerts, who was visiting America in search of land for his religious community in Holland, experienced Indian drunkenness while staying with friends in what would later become Brooklyn, New York:

  When we arrived at Gouanes, we heard a great noise, shouting and singing in the huts of the Indians. . . . They were all lustily drunk, raving, striking, shouting, jumping, fighting each other, and foaming at the mouth like raging wild beasts. Some who did not participate with them, had fled with their wives and children to Simon’s house, where the drunken brutes followed, bawling in the house and before the door, which we finally closed.

  Danckaerts, a religious and fair-minded man, did not blame the Indians for getting drunk. The fault lay with the so-called Christians who sold them the liquor. He even lectured his hosts, who admitted that they had participated in the trade. “The subject is so painful and so abominable, that I will forbear saying anything more for the present,” he wrote in his journal.13

  Colonial authorities agreed with Danckaerts that the solution to the problem of native drunkenness was a prohibition against selling or trading spirits. The Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted the first ban in 1633, declaring that “no man shall sell or give any strong water to an Indian.” New Netherlands approved a similar law a decade later. The most vigorous interdiction campaign was conducted in Canada, where Jesuit missionaries battled against the use of brandy in the fur trade. The Bishop of Quebec ordered the excommunication of any French trader who sold liquor to the Indians. A French governor had two traders shot for the offense. But the king of France ordered an end to restrictions on the liquor trade, and the laws elsewhere had little chance of success. As Danckaerts discovered, an Indian who wanted to buy alcohol didn’t need to look farther than the next white homestead. Everyone was eager for his trade.14

  The British and the French wooed the Indians with alcohol in an effort to gain an advantage in their continental rivalry. The records of colonial traders who operated in Indian country show that 80 percent of the charges to government accounts were for gifts of alcohol to the natives. The quantity of alcohol in Indian country increased dramatically after 1720 as the fur trade prospered. Thousands of gallons of rum were carried across the Allegheny Mountains to exchange for pelts at trading posts deep in the interior. At Detroit, three hundred thousand skins bought twenty-four thousand gallons in 1767. A government official estimated that Indians in the southern territories were consuming ten thousand gallons of rum every month in 1776. An Iroquois observed the rum flowed “so plentifully as if it ware water out of a fountain.”15

  It was obvious to all that drinking threatened the survival of the natives. Danckaerts had observed that the Indians were willing to trade anything for alcohol, including their blankets, leggings—“yes, their guns and hatchets, the very instruments by which they obtain their subsistence.” The impact on the Indian economy was devastating. Little Turtle, a leader of the Miami, told a group of Quakers in 1801 that Indians returning from the hunt with furs were targeted by white men who invited them to drink. Even those who repeatedly refused found themselves weakening:

  [O]ne finally accepts it and takes a drink, and getting one he wants another, and then a third and fourth till his senses have left him. After reason comes back to him, he gets up and finds where he is. He asks for his peltry. The answer is, you have drunk them. Where is my gun? It is gone. Where is my blanket? It is gone. Where is my shirt? You have sold it for whiskey. Now, brothers, figure to yourself what a condition this man was in—he has a family at home, a wife and children that stand in need of the profits of his hunting. What must their wants be, when he is even without a shirt?

  Furs were all the Indians had to trade. Guns were one of their few capital goods. When these were gone, the hunters and their families found themselves sinking into poverty. If the harvest had not been good, they faced starvation as well. In 1737, Conrad Weiser visited a village of Onondagas and Shawnees that had been hit hard by alcohol. “Their children looked like dead persons and suffered much from hunger,” he reported.16

  Many Indians didn’t live long enough to starve to death. “When we drink it makes us mad,” a Delaware Indian lamented. “We do not know what we do, we then abuse one another. We throw each other into the fire.” Drinking-related injuries were common. “[S]ome falling into Fires, burn their legs and arms, contracting the sinews, and become Cripples all their Life-times. Precipices break their Bones and Joints, with abundance of Instances,” explorer John Lawson wrote, describing natives in the Carolinas. Many drunks died of exposure after wandering away from their villag
es and passing out in the snow. John Josselyn, a naturalist, noted that the victims included women, “especially old women who dyed dead drunk.” The number of alcohol-related deaths among Indians appears to have been shockingly high. A Choctaw leader estimated that his tribe had lost a thousand people in just eighteen months.17

  The Indians began expressing fear of alcohol in the seventeenth century. Tequassino and Hatsawap, two Nanticoke sachems, persuaded the governor of Maryland to ban the sale of liquor to their tribe in 1679. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, approved a similar law. When a new governor promised vigorous enforcement of the law twenty years later, the Indians reacted cautiously. One leader, Orettyagh, “Exprest a great Satisfaction and Desired that the Law might Effectually be put in Execucon and not only discoursed of as formerly it has been.” The Indians would be disappointed again. Two decades later, Mingoes, Shawnees, and Conoys urged another governor to take action against the liquor dealers. Officials admitted they were powerless to enforce the law because “the Woods are so thick & dark we cannot see what is done in them.”18

  Recognizing that they could not count on the colonists to solve the problem, natives took matters in their own hands. In 1738, a hundred Shawnee warriors living along the Allegheny River signed a statement that was delivered to the Pennsylvania governor. “This day we have held a council, and it is agreed by the Shawnee in general that whatever rum is in our towns shall be broke and split and not drunk,” they said. The Shawnee were as good as their word, spilling at least forty gallons of liquor in the streets. Indians in other places also took action: villagers at Otsinigo, New York, warned liquor dealers to stay away; some Iroquois chiefs banned the sale of rum in their communities as well. But even the most vigorously enforced Indian ban could not stop natives from purchasing liquor from the colonists. Indians who lived close to white communities were the most susceptible to alcohol abuse. According to one of their chiefs, the Tuscarora “lived but wretchedly being Surrounded by white People, and up to their Lips in Rum, so that they cou’d not turn their heads anyway but it ran into their mouths.” To escape alcohol, they finally moved from the Carolinas to southern New York.19

  The Indian efforts at self-policing generally failed. The natives were divided: for every sachem who saw the devastating impact of the trade on his people, there were a dozen young men who wanted to drink when they returned from months of hunting, and they had the pelts to trade. Some tribes fled into the wilderness to escape alcohol, but that didn’t work for long as the white population moved westward. The great Indian leader Pontiac, who moved his followers from Detroit, admitted that their new home was close enough to whites “that when we want to drink, we can easily come for it.” Aucus al Kanigut, the Tuscarora chief who had moved his people from the Carolinas to New York, feared that the victory over alcohol was only temporary. “We also request you would give us some medicine to cure us of our fondness for that destructive liquor,” he said. The whites had no medicine and offered very little advice. In 1767, a group of Indians sought the counsel of William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs in the northern territories. “[T]he best Medicine I can think of to prevent your falling into your former Vice of drinking is to embrace Christianity,” Sir William replied.20

  Although Benjamin Franklin shared with his fellow colonists many stereotypes about Native Americans, he was also deeply concerned about the impact of alcohol on them. His newspaper periodically reported on the consequences of alcohol abuse among the natives, and in 1753 he issued a public warning of the danger. In his famous Autobiography, Franklin expressed fear for their future. “[I]f it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means,” he said.21

  By the time of Handsome Lake’s first vision in May 1799, America’s indigenous people had lost most of their land in the East and Midwest. William Henry Harrison, a future US president who was governor of Indiana and the Louisiana territories, told his superior in Washington that the Indians were suffering a crisis of leadership:

  This poisonous liquor not only incapacitates them from obtaining a living by Hunting but it leads to the most atrocious crimes—killing each other has become so customary amongst them that it is no longer a crime to murder those whom they have been accustomed to esteem and regard. Their Chiefs and their nearest relatives fall under the strokes of their Tomahawks and Knives. This has been so much the case with the three Tribes nearest us—the Peankashaws, Weas, & Eel River Miamis that there is scarcely a Chief to be found amongst them.

  Harrison blamed white settlers for corrupting the Indians with alcohol. “This is so certain that I can at once tell by looking at an Indian who I chance to meet whether he belong to a Neighboring or more distant Tribe,” he wrote. “The latter is generally well Clothed healthy and vigorous, the former half naked, filthy and enfeebled with Intoxication, and many of them without arms except a Knife which they carry for the most villainous purposes.” Harrison believed the Indians were close to “exterpation” and begged his superior to bring the problem to President Thomas Jefferson’s attention. The following year Jefferson signed legislation banning the sale of alcohol to the Indians. Once again, the authorities lacked either the will or the resources to enforce the law.22

  New, more militant Indians began to take the place of their discredited leaders. They opposed all efforts by white men to “help” them, believing that the Indians must arrive at their own solutions. Banning the consumption of alcohol was at the top of their list. In the 1750s, a Delaware woman who had been relocated to western Pennsylvania announced that she had been told by the “Great Power that they should destroy the poison from among them.” Soon, other Delaware prophets emerged to urge the people to recapture the happiness of the days before the arrival of the white man by resisting incursions on their lands, rejecting Christian religion, and reviving the religious ceremonies of their forebearers. All the prophets agreed that it was essential for their people to stop drinking alcohol. “Hear what the Great Spirit has ordered me to tell you,” the prophet Neolin announced:

  You are to make sacrifices, in the manner that I shall direct; to put off entirely from yourselves the customs which you have adopted since the white people came among us; you are to return to the former happy state, in which we lived in peace and plenty, before these strangers came to disturb us, and above all, you must abstain from drinking their deadly beson [poisonous, bewitched medicine, i.e., liquor], which they force upon us for the sake of increasing their gains.

  The warrior Pontiac would later cite Neolin’s teachings as an inspiration for the attacks that wiped out nine of the thirteen British forts from the frontier.23

  Forty years later, the most militant of all Indian prophets began to speak. Ellskwata was the son of a Shawnee chief and the brother of Tecumseh, who would come as close as any man ever did to uniting the natives in opposition to the newly minted Americans during the War of 1812. Ellskwata was a known drunkard and braggart until one day in 1805 when he had his first vision. His visit to heaven bore several similarities to Handsome Lake’s Sky Journey, which had occurred only a few years earlier. The drunkard was punished by “a cup of liquor resembling melted lead; if he refused to drink it he [the tormentor] would urge him, saying: Come, drink—you used to love whiskey. And upon drinking it, his bowels were seized with an exquisite burning.”24

  Like the prophets before him, Ellskwata, now calling himself Tenskwata (Open Door), urged the Indians to reject white ways, including alcohol. Indians and whites had separate origins, and “the Great Spirit did not mean that the white and red people should live near each other” because whites “poison’d the land.” Tenskwata’s preaching was not confined to the Shawnee; many Indians accepted his prophecy.25

  By September 1807, Indian thirst for liquor was disappearing in Michigan. “All the Ottawas from L’abre au Croche adhere strictly to the Shawney Prophets advice they do not we
ar Hats Drink or Conjure,” one trader reported. (Hats were a symbol of white settlers.) “Rum is a drug [on the market]. . . . Indians do not purchase One Galln per month,” another complained. But Tenskwata’s hopes for an Indian revival died with his brother during the Battle of Tippecanoe. He was exiled to Canada for ten years.26

  Handsome Lake shared with other nativists a desire to save his people by restoring their pride in being Indians. Soon after awakening from his first vision, he said the messengers had told him that the Strawberry Festival, then under way, must always be held and that all must drink the berry juice. Later, he was instructed to revive the white dog ceremony, which involved eating the flesh of the sacrificed animal. The revival of Indian religion was crucial because Handsome Lake’s vision had revealed that Christianity was not intended for Indians. He had seen a church with a spire but no door, which he saw as a symbol of the difficulty that Indians had in accepting the white man’s religion. Jesus Christ also appeared in his dream and told him this in as many words. According to Handsome Lake, Christ said, “Now tell your people that they will become lost when they follow the ways of the white man.” Handsome Lake was obsessed by the danger posed by magic and would soon lead a campaign against witches that would result in the murder of at least one woman.27

  Handsome Lake also opposed the sale of any more land to the whites and was ambivalent about the arrival of the Quakers. The Quakers did not attempt to convert the Seneca. They wanted to help the Indians make the transition from hunting to farming. But this fundamentally changed Indian life, as the Quakers pushed the men toward the fields that women traditionally tended and attempted to move the women into strictly domestic duties. No less threatening was the opening of a school where the Quakers taught the children how to read and write English. Many worried that the students would cease to be Indians. Handsome Lake was not opposed to all English education, but he believed that it should be limited to enabling Indians to protect their interests by reading treaties and other contracts.