One thing about “the pioneers” as we call them in the US — they were essentially white renegade militias, operating outside of US law, who sought to ethnically cleanse the land for their own acquisition. And that’s the opinion of their own people.

For 250 years, from the 1520s to the 1770s, Europeans interacted with Native Americans in nuanced ways. Most interactions started with trade, attempts to be friendly, and attempts to find common ground. The Spanish raped and pillaged, but they also sought alliances and converts. The French mostly wanted to trade, and intermarried freely. The British often forbade intermarriage, but sought to negotiate and buy land for their own colonies, and accepted many Native cultural practices to secure military alliances.

My own family history reflects this. I’m a descendent of dozens of Cherokees who were on the Trail of Tears. Before that, several of them had intermarried with British traders. I’m a direct descendant of Ludovic Grant. Captain John Stuart, aka Bushyhead, the Indian agent for all the southern colonies in the 1700s, married one of my Cherokee great-grandmothers (though I descend from a later marriage of hers).

To a large extent (the Pequot Massacre notwithstanding), the British sought some kind of peace, middle ground, or understanding on the edges of their colonies. They forbade settlement east of the Appalachians.

White savages

This all ended with in the runup to the American Revolution. American pioneers – largely Presbyterian Scot, Scots-Irish, Pennsylvania Germans, and Virginians wanted land. Their own white governments considered them lawless and out of control. In the late 1700s, just before the American Revolution, British authorities described the illegal homesteaders:

“lawless banditti whose actions are a disgrace to human nature”

“the very dregs of people”

“too Numerous, too Lawless and Licentious ever to be restrained”

“Beyond the arm of government & freed from the restraining influence of religion”

“generally white Savages”

“a Sett of People… near as wild as the country they go in, or the People they deal with, & by far more vicious & wicked”

Thomas Jefferson gave them a mixed and ironic review, calling them “our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization.” Arthur St. Clair, Governor of the Northwest Territories, observed, “Though we hear much of the Injuries and depredations that are committed by the Indians upon the Whites, there is too much reason to believe that at least equal if not greater Injuries are done to the Indians by the frontier settlers of which we hear very little.”

More to the point, the pioneers were Indian haters. They sought to destroy any middle ground between indigenous and European worlds. Henry Knox, George Washington’s Secretary of War, rued, “The deep rooted prejudices, and malignity of heart, and conduct, reciprocally entertained and practiced on all occasions by the Whites and Savages will ever prevent their being good neighbors.” 

In a world that already had 250 years of intermarriages and cultural exchange, the new American pioneers especially targeted Native peacemakers, allies, converts to Christianity, and women and children – symbols of diversity and mixing. For the most part, they made no alliances and took no prisoners. They considered all Natives enemies and sought to make them enemies of all white colonists. They wanted division and war because they wanted the land.

In 1763, the “Fighting Parson” John Elder, a Presbyterian minister, and the men of his congregation, the Paxtony Boys, massacred a local peaceful community of Susquehannock in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They didn’t want to go after the actual Native fighters so they slaughtered the easy targets. When a pacifist Christian sect of Munsee Lenape set up an agrarian community, a white militia massacred all ninety-six of them in 1782.

When my ancestors were on the Trail of Tears, one of their biggest problems was getting enough sleep. Because most nights, after they had stopped the wagons and made camp, drunk white settlers from nearby came among them, sometimes wanting to drink and play cards and win money off them, or heckle them, or steal things. This would go on night after night at each stop.

In the words of Richard White in The Middle Ground, “Pure Indian hating penetrated the middle ground the way backcountry fighters penetrated an Algonquin village – just far enough to destroy it. The middle ground blurred boundaries, and what pure Indian haters sought above all was to keep boundaries intact. Captives and converts, white or Indian, proved the greatest danger to Indian hating because they passed across borders…. They did not believe Indians could become “civilized”. To them, becoming civilized meant becoming white, which Indians could never do.”

Government support

The federal government, forced to choose between honoring treaties or bowing to the passions of white renegade militias, almost always chose the latter, though the pioneers openly “sneered at” federal authority. After all, the pioneers were white, their brothers and sisters.

The pioneers’ ideology of separation and conquest prevailed in Washington DC. In 1830, Congress hotly debated but then passed the Indian Removal Act (101 to 97 in the House).  This was Andrew Jackson’s “Wall”, what he campaigned on — ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. White liberals at the time considered reservations and ethnic cleansing to be merciful, protecting Natives from violent pioneers. Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) was considered a good solution. Congress followed up with the Homestead Act of 1860, a kind of affirmative action government hand-out for whites only, to incentivize ethnic cleansing by the public. Within a few years, calls for indigenous “extermination” were common from Minnesota to California. When white militias massacred peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1864 and again Apaches in 1871, the US federal government condemned them, did investigations, held hearings, but ultimately did nothing.

Revising history

Some argue that past behavior should not be condemned according to modern ethical standards. (I strongly disagree—in most instances, the behavior was controversial at the time and was certainly opposed by its victims.) But in this case, the reverse has happened. The pioneers were considered a basket of deplorables in their own time, and were only later idolized.

Through the 1900s and into the present, white US mythology rallied behind the pioneers, erasing and revising history. They are celebrated as the bedrock of the United States, as if others, indigenous peoples, Latinos, Asians, and Blacks were simply obstacles or tools along the way. Among pioneers, Daniel Boone became the archetypal white savage, appropriating Native virtues while killing them, in a sense becoming a new improved white Indian. The story of Pocahontas, kidnapped and impregnated in the early 1600s, was resurrected and re-written in the 1800s. She became the archetypal good Indian, “snatched from the fangs of a barbarous idolatry”, to quote the artist whose painting of her hangs today in the Capitol Rotunda (along with other Native women fleeing with their clothes off).

The settlers are now explorers and discoverers. Dale Van Every’s Ark of Empire: The American Frontier, written in 1963, is typical:

“Their like [the pioneers] had never been before nor has ever been since. They were as distinct from their fellow Americans as they were from the alien enemies with whom they were confronted.… As befits conquerors, their most striking characteristic was an assurance of their innate superiority to any antagonist… Without regard for land-company designs, restraints of their own governments, Indian resistance, or the opposition of foreign powers, they kept on westward.”

Moving forward

Today we have Pioneer Square, Pioneer Park, Pioneer School, Pioneer Bridge, Pioneer Reservoir, Pioneer Parkway. Lots of them. The Sooners is a name that honors illegal white squatters taking Native land (that would be Oklahoma again).

Today’s culture of guns and anti-government libertarianism, concentrated among white rural people and directed especially toward the federal government, flows directly from the blood-covered “frontier” (another white-centric word). The apples have seemingly not dropped far from the pioneers’ trees. Today’s white supremacist terrorists, like the pioneers who attacked peaceful villages, target people of color where they are most vulnerable—churches, schools, shopping centers.

This is the essence of white supremacy—the notion that the US is primarily for white people, that white people are the center of its story. White rural America will not move past its religious devotion to guns or its fear of fellow citizens of color until it recognizes and acknowledges its past. My family includes both early British fur traders and indigenous people, slave owners and slave traders, Loyalists and Revolutionaries, Unionists and Confederates, settlers and internally displaced people. I have to come to terms with that. Likewise, America has to come to terms with all the parts of its past.

When the story of the nation is told, whether in history class or in place names, it must not be assumed that whites are the protagonists while indigenous, Black, Latino, Asian, and other people, who have been here for hundreds of years, are pushed to the edges of the story. And, remember, in their own time, judged by their own people, the pioneers were considered bad guys.