Some questions about America's Old West

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

@Danimal

Possibly unrealistically, I envisioned a sod house, especially a dugout-style one, as being prone to cold, damp and leaks, and imagined tipis with their double hide construction and warm air layer in between to be perhaps warmer and more weatherproof than they actually were.

The Plains Indians who used tipis also moved those tipis down into sheltered valleys every autumn in order to escape the winter blizzards, the winds of which come straight down from the Arctic and are known in the Midwest as an “Alberta Clipper”. Soddies indeed were wet and leaky in rainy weather (tales abound of the pioneer mothers who had to cover everything in the soddie every time it rained to shelter it from muddy water drips), but two feet of dirt and grass will stop an Alberta clipper much better than even a double thickness of leather. And then once you were out of the wind, all you needed to worry about was basic air temperature, not drafts (there was always more dirt available to cram into any drafts coming in around your window or door frame).

Anyway, the pioneers were stuck on the land they’d chosen to homestead; they didn’t have the option of traveling, say, a couple hundred miles twice a year to find a warmer spot to winter, and then to get back to their “home place” again.

And, FWIW, the notorious Massacre at Sand Creek was perpetrated against a group of Cheyenne who were in winter quarters on Sand Creek.

@Danimal

But the equally prejudiced settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries adopted Indian corn, Indian tomahawks, Indian moccasins and buckskins, Indian ambush tactics,

Bear in mind that 17th and 18th century settlers adopted Indian ways grudgingly and temporarily. They started growing, eating, and cooking with corn only under duress, when they discovered that their European grains like wheat, oats, and barley didn’t grow as well in the New World. Dishes like cornmeal mush and corn dodgers were considered homely family fare, along the lines of today’s Hamburger Helper. Corn was used in breadstuffs resentfully since it won’t rise like gluten breads will (bread using a mixture of rye and corn was known as “rye ‘n’ injun”), and the minute they could manage to get their hands on wheat flour–IOW, as soon as they were settled, and became part of the trade network, and were wealthy enough to buy it–they did so.

Moccasins and buckskins, like corn, were adopted only when there was nothing else available at the moment, but as soon as possible in the settlement process lengths of cloth and ordinary European-style shoes were either manufactured at home or purchased (or bartered) from their makers. All those colonial-era spinning wheels, looms, and cobbler’s benches now featured at antiques fairs were used to manufacture clothing to replace buckskins and moccasins, not to supplement them. Children may have been allowed to run around in moccasins, but Real Men wore shoes, and once the pioneer had established himself enough so as to be able to buy, or make, himself some real shoes, he did so. (One of the Foxfire books has detailed instructions for how to make your own shoes at home; presumbly those are frontier skills passed down through the generations and into the 20th century. Interestingly, once you have the basic tools, it’s apparently not that difficult.)

As for using tomahawks, I have never heard that 17th and 18th century settlers customarily used them as weapons, since a gun is so much more effective (and flexible–you can use a gun to hunt deer, too) than a thrown tomahawk.

As for Indian ambush tactics, I doubt whether there’s anything the Indians came up with that 10,000 years of human warfare hadn’t thought of before.

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

I have a little correction to an earlier post where I said my great-uncle was a cowboy in Kansas and Oklahoma Territory. It was actually Indian Territory–the ranch he worked on had the state line as its southern border but there wasn’t a fence or anything, so the cattle ran freely across the line–and into I.T.

I also have an artifact from my husband’s family, a peace pipe. The story is that there was some kind of an Indian uprising in western Nebraska–this would have been in the late 1870s, I think–and my husband’s great-grandfather was one who sat down and worked it out with the Sioux. At the conclusion they smoked a peace pipe which the Indians gave to the g-grandfather. As a small boy my husband’s grandfather was playing with the pipe, which was a treasured possession and playing with it was strictly forbidden. He broke it, got whipped, but ended up with it, and now we have it.

I was quite surprised to see that it was made of bone china, white with a blue filigree, and stamped “Made in Holland” (this is in kind of gray letters) and “Rosebud Sioux” is stamped on it in gold.

The Sioux had corporate swag!

(His grandfather’s best recollection of what was smoked in this pipe is a plant called kinnickinnic.)

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

According to the received wisdom of the Internet, “kinnikinnick” is an Algonquian word meaning “mixture”, and refers to what you get when you mix some genuine tobacco with some of whatever smokeable weed or herb you happen to have around, like bearberry, sumac, or dogwood.

[yabob]

@Duck Duck Goose

According to the received wisdom of the Internet, “kinnikinnick” is an Algonquian word meaning “mixture”, and refers to what you get when you mix some genuine tobacco with some of whatever smokeable weed or herb you happen to have around, like bearberry, sumac, or dogwood.

To confirm the other post, it is also a common name for Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, or bearberry (which is presumably why it became “uva-ursi”), often used as a ground cover. As noted, it was also a plant popularly used by Native Americans in smoking mixtures, hence the transference of name. “kinnikinnick” is what I’ve always called the plant.

[Danimal]

@Duck Duck Goose

Bear in mind that 17th and 18th century settlers adopted Indian ways grudgingly and temporarily.

A good point, I think. Even the other two examples I mentioned, the tomahawks and the ambush tactics, were abandoned in due course also. As the settler society developed, tomahawks were discarded in favor of pistols and sabers, and ambush tactics gave way to line infantry tactics as in the Civil War.

This is a data point in favor of Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the development of the frontier, where the earliest frontiersmen adopt Indian ways, which are then replaced by newer customs as the frontier moves on.

As for using tomahawks, I have never heard that 17th and 18th century settlers customarily used them as weapons, since a gun is so much more effective (and flexible–you can use a gun to hunt deer, too) than a thrown tomahawk.

The tomahawk was used by Rogers’ Rangers, as reflected in his famous standing orders: “19. Let the enemy come 'til he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him with your hatchet.”

Also, U.S. Navy sailors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries pretty routinely used boarding axes that they explicitly called tomahawks.

Of course, tomahawks weren’t used exclusively; they were sidearms, much as they were for the Indians who used spears, bows, or (as soon as they could get them) firearms as their primary weapon.

As for Indian ambush tactics, I doubt whether there’s anything the Indians came up with that 10,000 years of human warfare hadn’t thought of before.

Well, yes, other people had developed ambush tactics before, but they were quite new to the English settlers. And proved a nasty shock for the British Army in turn during the Revolution, when the Minutemen turned these tactics learned from the Indians against the mother country.

Still, your basic point holds; as the frontier developed and moved on, the “Indian” ways were abandoned again, and the new soldiers fell to echoing the British about the “cowardly” and “unmanly” tactics of their sneaky opponents.

[Danimal]

@Hilarity N. Suze

They may well have been, but soddies were more permanent. And permanence was important when homesteading.

Apparently so, which is interesting given how many settlers’ homes turned out not to be permanent. I think I read somewhere that as many as one third of all settlers on a new claim had to pull up stakes and move at least once, either to another claim or back home. Didn’t Abraham Lincoln’s family move three times before he reached adulthood?

Evidently, the expansibility of the sod house was a crucial advantage also, judging by your posts and silenus also. That and the greater thickness of the walls that are often mentioned were clearly more important than being able to seek new land if the first claim didn’t work out.

It was equally important–maybe more important–to know your way around horses. On the job, they might refer to themselves as punchers. But a man who never had anything to do with cows might also call himself a cowboy, if he had something to do with horses.

I think that’s clearly right. And reflected by the fact that some minor cattle rustling might be grudgingly ignored, but horse theft was absolutely unforgiveable.

I’ve speculated that part of the cowboy mystique, the thing that makes the cowboy such a quintessentially American symbol, is the fact that he rides a horse as part of his daily job. In old Europe, horseback riding was very closely identified with the gentry and nobility. So when we, the new republic, took the common working man and set him on a horse, we made a powerful statement in favor of republicanism and against aristocracy.

[crowmanyclouds]

@Danimal

… The tomahawk was used by Rogers’ Rangers, as reflected in his famous standing orders: “19. Let the enemy come 'til he’s almost close enough to touch. Then let him have it and jump out and finish him with your hatchet.”

Also, U.S. Navy sailors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries pretty routinely used boarding axes that they explicitly called tomahawks. …

3,800 went to Vietnam. ('bout 2/3’s down the page)

CMC +fnord!

[tomndebb]

@Danimal

Well, yes, other people had developed ambush tactics before, but they were quite new to the English settlers. And proved a nasty shock for the British Army in turn during the Revolution, when the Minutemen turned these tactics learned from the Indians against the mother country.

I’m afraid that this comment reflects a bit of Yankee myth making. Europeans fought pitched battles with orderly lines because they had open farmland they could tramp across to organize their battles. The “ambush tactics” were employed in Europe just as in North America when small groups were engaged in wooded country. Where armies of significant size engaged in North America, they tended to fight in the same manner that they did in Europe–and the Europeans were quite capable of forming their own wilderness or frontier units.

The battles at Lexington and Concord were fought as stand-up lines of massed musketry. When the British began their retreat from Concord, they were harrassed by sharpshooters firing from cover, but a thorough reading of that day’s events provides incident after incident in which a handful of colonial rebels would fire from ambush, following which the British line would order out a squad of soldiers with fixed bayonets who promptly routed the Minutemen. Most of the major battles of the war, Bunker/Breed’s Hill, Brandywine, Bennington, Saratoga, Germantown, Monmouth, Cowpens, and King’s Mountain were fought in the European manner. The battle of Camden opened with an attempt at harrassment from cover, but the British, fighting in the European manner brushed aside the American snipers and eventually overwhelmed the Yank forces.
There were battles fought from cover and ambush–Oriskany, the road to and from Saratoga, several of the battles in the Southern Campaign–but those tended to occur where the topography of the field, not any “Indian” tactics, determined the type of battle fought. No significant battle* of the War for Independence was really won following a plan of ambush, (although guerilla tactics were used by both sides to harrass communication lines).

• A case may be made for the eventual surrender of Burgoyne’s forces following Saratoga to have been the result of constant guerilla harrassment in the forest prior to and subsequent to the battle of Saratoga, but the actual battles, that inflicted far more casualties on the British, were fought across cleared plots at Freeman’s Farm and Barber’s Farm and in attacks on British redoubts near the latter, with both sides firing in the European manner.
  Interestingly, in the context of mythology, I had posted some comments on both the military tactics and the cowboy in the same post a few years ago. (I can’t find it at the moment, but in another thread inwhich I commented on Braddock’s defeat, another poster pointed out that given the constraints of his mission and the terrain, Braddock was not foolishly employing European tactics, either.)

[DrDeth]

@Danimal

A note regarding the unions: the average wage for a silver miner in Virginia City, Nevada during the 1870s was $4 a day, which by my calculation would have been about $100 a month, assuming a six-day work week. An ordinary cowboy wage during the same time period was $25 a month. Obviously both jobs required skill and were very dangerous; was the miners’ wage higher because they needed more skill and/or underwent more risk, or because unionizing gave them more bargaining power?

As Hilarity N. Suze sez, Cowboys got room and board also. How much do you spend on food and housing? Also bonuses at the end of a trail were common as well as running a few herd yourself. Cowboy was nowhere near as dangerous as hard-rock miner, also.

Besides, cowboy has “cool” factor.