[42: 684–94] The emigrant having been drawn out from the more civilized communities, in such a manner as we have seen, while at the shipping port in Europe, while on the voyage, and at landing, has commonly met with a severe experience of brutal, reckless, irresponsible ruffianism and barbarity, and this mainly for the reason that the action of law and the other constraints upon selfishness usual in Christian countries is partially suspended, and the fear of punishment operates, weakly and intermittently, if at all. On board ship, especially, the strong, the cunning, the sly and selfish rule over and spoil the weak, the sick, the simple with only so much check, from regard for future consequences, as is necessary to make falsehood, perjury, and the practice of all sorts of deceit and subterfuge and petty swindling and tyranny so common that after a voyage of ordinary length few emigrants have not been taught by severe lessons to consider that when among strangers “every man must take care of himself,” “all advice must be regarded with suspicion,” “a man must wear a bold face;” that “if he waits for constables and courts [683]to protect him, he will soon not have a rag to his back.”

The experience of the emigrant at present in this respect is a far less cruel one than it was ten years ago, the passage having been shortened on an average more than half, the laws both of the old and new country being much better for his protection, & being much more efficiently administered, and the whole business being conducted under the management of much less unscrupulous & reckless men. And ten or twenty years ago at least as strong a claim as this we make for our own day over that, might have been made for that over the colonial period of emigration. It is hard for us to conceive how dreadful the passage of the majority of emigrants must have been when it was made in vessels of from one to three hundred tons and when ships were often longer in finding their way to America than they now are from the same ports to China.

The reader will please here form for himself such estimate as he finds possible of the common or average condition of the whole body of emigrants to America at the moment of their arrival in respect to the state of mind, temper, impulses, inclinations and habits of each for taking part in the foundation of that state of trustful, large, provident cooperation with all other members of society which we call the civilized condition of mankind.

Then let him remember that after the emigrant has settled or found occupation, in the new country, he comes in contact with people mostly of his own class, that is to say, people who have by the action of similar causes been led to emigrate before him; who have in emigration and since their emigration been subject to similar influences, and who have generally yielded still more to them; upon whose character the effect of these influences therefore is more deeply stamped. The conditions to which the emigrant has been exposed after reaching the United States have varied so greatly that it would hardly [be] possible to treat of their educational effect to advantage except by illustrations of the special & peculiar elements of American life which directly or indirectly must have exercised a strong influence upon the great body of emigrants at all times.

What elements of American life are there of which this can be truly said? What is there in the life of Europeans in America that is not European? Clearly it is the pioneer condition of life, the breaking of the ways of the old world. It is true that all emigrants, especially in later times, have not had much direct experience of these conditions, but all have been affected by them more or less indirectly if not directly.

The germ of nearly all our towns, villages and minor communities has been originally planted in the pioneer condition. People have constantly gone from the older settlements to the newer settlements; from the intermediate settlements to the outer ones, and from the newer settlements men have constantly been returning to the older ones. We [684]hear a great deal of the influence of the old settlements upon the new but the influence of the new upon the old, in perpetuating habits of thought, prejudices and inclinations which originate in the pioneer state, is not sufficiently considered. There is not a town in New England in which we may not hear the school boys useing words and phrases in the common conversation which had not been heard by their fathers ten years ago and the origin of which is readily traced by the traveller to the conditions of life which have been recently met by emigrants in Texas, Kansas or California. The very beginning of all that is new in the forms and methods of civilized life in America will be found in the conditions influencing the requirements and the character of the pioneer settlers.

The number of emigrants directly subject to the pioneer condition has been very large. For many years all the inhabitants of the Atlantic coast were so. The larger part of every state except Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Deleware, Maryland & New Jersey has been in the pioneer condition within the present century. The larger part of the Southern states are not yet fairly out of the pioneer condition. There are Indians within a hundred miles of the Atlantic who do not to the present day acknowledge the sovereignty of the United States. For the past two hundred years the line of actual frontier settlements has at no time been less than —— miles in length. It has latterly been more than twice that. If we consider the frontier region of settlements to include all within a day’s journey of the outermost settlers and suppose that in this region there is one [42: 716] settler on an average for every —— square miles we should find that there has been constantly at least —— settlers living under the purest pioneer conditions. At present the number is doubtless many times as great. We find also that the average progress of the line has been at the rate of about —— miles a year, from which it may be inferred how prolonged has been the pioneer condition with most of those entering it. [42: 715] The present white population of the organized, self governing communities which are parts of states, leaving out the great territories in which the white population is much more scattered and including all the great cities of the East, is yet settled at the rate of only —— families to —— acres of land. The land under plow in 1860 [42: 714] was yet but —— of the whole.

Obviously then it is in the pioneer condition that we must expect to find the strongest exhibition of the novel influences which emigrants have had to encounter on arriving in the new country.

[42: 713] Let us consider first what has been the more important elements of the advance guard of civilization in America.

The first Europeans making permanent settlements on the Atlantic formed bases of operations for thousands of pioneers who were [42: 695–710] pushed inland, outflanking, closing in upon and dislodging the old occupants. Such of the latter as were not dislodged became demoralized—demoralized [685]in every sense, allowed themselves to be surrounded and sent to the rear of the still advancing forces of their enemy, where they remained, for the most part, abject subjects of the older settlers, sneaking, broken-spirited, diseased, dishonored, drunken, dissolute savages, living by sufferance of the out-comers from civilization and slaves to their every lust.

This warfare of the pioneer has been going on constantly since it began more than two hundred years ago. There is not a night in which at some point blood does not flow now, and there probably never has been one.

I have spoken of the advance of the frontier line as a warfare but it must be recollected that it has no characteristic of civilized warfare on one side, and very seldom is any pretension made to such a character for it on the other. The United States Army in latter days is constantly engaged, it is true, with the Indians, and the army is controlled in a great degree by civilized men, officers and gentlemen. But the fighting Indian avoids the army, always found in bodies of some strength, and but little 10f the real war between the whites and the Indians comes on the army. I have shown what the Indian tactics are in my ’Texas Journey,’ and need not repeat the account here.

The fighting Indian met with on the frontier is the antitype and the natural enemy of the civilized man. According to the savage standard he may be a brave and all that. According to the civilized standard he is a lazy, ravenous, brutal, filthy, improvident, lying, treacherous, blood-thirsty scoundrel. We must go in [a] civilized community to a police station to find what we know of mankind most like him. He is boastful, bullying and sneaking. It [is] his business to be. He is elaborately trained to just these ways. Cowardly as all bullies are cowardly, but being a gamester, when the odds are all in his favor, he stakes his life readily and plays a strong game, just as the worst gamesters of civilization do.

The advanced pioneer whites as far as my observation goes are generally as nearly of the same character and habits with the savages as men whose blood has been drawn from the more civilized races can be supposed to be. They must be to cope with the enemy. They boast that they are. I said that we should look in the Station-houses for what was most like the Indians who live nearest the frontiers and not within them. A considerable proportion of the frontier settlers in many parts are men who have become pioneers to escape the penalty of crimes, or because they could not live in the terror of the gallows which in following their natural propensities they constantly brought upon themselves when in the more fixed settlements. These or the children and such as have been mainly educated by these. No government can stop such men from going to the frontier; no government can protect them when on the frontier, no government could guard effectively against their dealing in a treacherous, [686]cruel, mean, exasperating and barbarous way with the Indians when they were there, if it desired to do so.

Thus it happens that a desultory warfare of the most cowardly and brutal assassination is constantly going on on the frontier. The whites pursue it a little less in the traditional mode of warfare of savages than the savages themselves, perhaps, yet I have direct and credible information of deeds committed by considerable bodies of white men wearing the uniforms of United States Volunteers, very recently, quite as savage, as horrible, as detestable, as any I ever heard or read of that were committed by the red savages. I cannot find language to express the horror with which these facts affect me, and I will not describe them. They were not of a rare and isolated character, and their important significance is simply this, that they were committed by men who, before enlistment, had been educated and trained in the customary school of the population of the frontier, and whose disposition and habits of regarding the Indians had not yet fully yielded to military discipline. To know the spirit of this warfare, read to what Englishmen—not English ruffians or English rabble, but an English army, English soldiers, English officers, gentlemen and Christians—were brought in a few months by the influence of the atrocities of the Sepoys. No savage could excel these gentlemen and Christians in revengefulness, bloodthirstiness and stomach for torture and the most brutal cruelty. All the horrors of the Sepoy rebellion have been experienced for two hundred and fifty years, somewhere on this American frontier, every year.

There are always bodies of Indians along the frontier who have been recently forced to abandon hunting and camping grounds which have been used by their fathers, for generations, who have had the worst in skirmishes with the pioneers, and in which are included the parents, brothers, women and children of those who have been killed by the pioneers. These bodies also have lost property and are obliged to live under conditions in which they have had no experience; they suffer from lack of their accustomed food, they are full of hatred and revenge toward all white men. They are cowardly and their highest skill is the skill of sneaking. They naturally, inevitably, resort to thieving, robbery and plunder, always when possible practicing their skill in these arts, upon whites, under conditions as little dangerous to themselves as they can find. They take the horses and cattle which are ranging near the settlements, killing any white men who get in their way, and thus perhaps, making widows and orphans. Or they attack in large bodies, small parties of emigrants or traders, generally butchering them on the spot, but perhaps saving the women or children with whatever other plunder they are able to carry off.

Occasionally these attacks, especially the bolder ones, create great excitement in a cluster of white settlements, perhaps a panic occurs, and [687]a period of furious, half-mad, savage fear and hatred of Indians, in which, throughout the communities affected, no red man, no Mexican or Negro who can be imagined to have affinity with red rather than white men, are safe. Finally the army cooperates with the settlers, or some sort of systematic movement is made against the real enemy. He is driven farther back, the frontier advances, the settlements move up correspondingly, and henceforth those who last suffered from Indian barbarities are a little more safe.

And something like this, the incidents varying infinitely, has, I repeat, been going on for the last two hundred years, all along the crooked frontier lines—a distance of from one to three thousand miles.

Has it been necessary? Is it necessary? Absolutely so, if whites were to live in America, in my judgment. No human wisdom could have made it far otherwise. For how could any government, regal or republican, wholly prevent abandoned wretches from sneaking off to the frontier to stake their lives in the chances of getting the wealth, the squaws, the lands of the Indians, in this grand game of assassination, with all the exciting horrors, in comparison with which the prize rings and the game-pits, and the melodramatic theatres of England can offer nothing half so attractive to certain uncivilized natures. Much less so do I see how a civilized government could prevent savages, especially when thus used, from pursuing the same practices.

Let us look a little farther back, within the boundary of the comparatively fixed settlements.

Here, first, we generally find that at certain intervals, bodies of Indians of the less enterprising sort, have allowed the pioneer lines to be extended beyond them, so that at length they are unresistingly corralled (in frontier phrase) by the emigrants. These segregations of so-called peaceable Indians, as the settlements grow thick about them, are generally intolerable nuisances to their white neighbors. When under the influence of some unusual impulse of revenge, of jealousy or of whiskey, some of the Indians indulge in one of their characteristic feats of bravery, the whites in a mob (excusable on the ground of self-preservation and the general uncontrollable passion which it has produced) proceed to teach them a lesson of subordination and peace. Some whites generally benefit by the results of this lesson. The Indians occupy lands which are growing [688]valuable, and they are perhaps driven from them, or they offer to surrender them for the sake of peace. Nor is this the worst. I myself have seen men who simply with the apology that Indians were troublesome neighbors, did not shrink from stating that they had taken part in the distribution of clothes and blankets to them, which carried the infection of small pox. This in California within the last ten years. Many whites discriminate but imperfectly between hostile and peaceable indians, and are always suspicious of and rancorous toward the latter. White men who engage in crimes attended with danger, if possible take advantage of this feeling, and by assuming the dress of Indians, darkening their faces, leaving Indian arrows or moccasins near the locality of their crime, and spreading false reports of circumstances calculated to turn attention to the Indians, direct the aim of public vengeance or justice toward them. Rarely is there anything like a judicial investigation or any proper care taken in these cases to fix the guilt upon individuals, but the public zeal is recklessly expended upon some cluster of Indians living together.

In this and various other ways the various original bodies of Indians are dispersed and thenceforth many of them wander about in small companies, somewhat after the manner of gypsies in England.

These miserable, demoralized, drunken, diseased, abandoned wrecks of the feebler sort of savages, are and always have been by thousands a part of the population of all those communities wherein the authority of government and all the machinery of law, and many of the institutions of civilization—churches, schools, newspapers—have been, after a sort, established, and which lie immediately in the rear of those where the war with the Indians is still kept up in a more or less intermittent way.

This then is the Indian element of pioneer society, varying in different localities, of course, according to the former habits of the tribes from which it has been discorporated, and other circumstances. And in many parts of this pioneer society, even at the present day, a majority often consists of European emigrants.