Adventures of John Tanner--Habits of the American
Indians--Their sufferings from famine, and from the absence
among them of the principle of division of labour--Evils of
irregular labour--Respect to property--Their present improved
condition--Hudson's Bay Indians.
In the year 1828 there came to New York a white man named John Tanner,
who had been thirty years a captive amongst the Indians in the interior
of North America. He was carried off by a band of these people when he
was a little boy, from a settlement on the Ohio river, which was
occupied by his father, who was a clergyman. The boy was brought up in
all the rude habits of the Indians, and became inured to the abiding
miseries and uncertain pleasures of their wandering life. He grew in
time to be a most skilful huntsman, and carried on large dealings with
the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company, in the skins of beavers and
other animals which he and his associates had shot or entrapped. The
history of this man was altogether so curious, that he was induced to
furnish the materials for a complete narrative of his adventures; and,
accordingly, a book, fully descriptive of them, was prepared for the
press by Dr. Edwin James, and printed at New York, in 1830. It is of
course not within the intent of our little work to furnish any regular
abridgment of John Tanner's story; but it is our wish to direct
attention to some few particulars, which appear to us strikingly to
illustrate some of the positions which we desire to enforce, by thus
exhibiting their practical operation.
The country in which this man lived so many years is that immense
territory belonging to the United States, which at that period was
covered by boundless forests which the progress of civilization had not
then cleared away. In this region a number of scattered Indian tribes
maintained a precarious existence by hunting the moose-deer and the
buffalo for their supply of food, and by entrapping the foxes and
martens of the woods and the beavers of the lakes, whose skins they
generally exchanged with the white traders of Europe for articles of
urgent necessity, such as ammunition and guns, traps, axes, and woollen
blankets; but too often for ardent spirits, equally the curse of savage
and of civilized life. The contact of savage man with the outskirts of
civilization perhaps afflicts him with the vices of both states. But the
principle of exchange, imperfectly and irregularly as it operated
amongst the Indians, furnished some excitement to their ingenuity and
their industry. Habits of providence were thus to a certain degree
created; it became necessary to accumulate some capital of the
commodities which could be rendered valuable by their own labour, to
exchange for commodities which their own labour, without exchange, was
utterly unable to procure. The principle of exchange, too, being
recognised amongst them in their dealings with foreigners, the security
of property--without which, as we have shown, that principle cannot
exist at all--was one of the great rules of life amongst themselves. But
still these poor Indians, from the mode which they proposed to
themselves for the attainment of property, which consisted only in
securing what nature had produced, without directing the course of her
productions, were very far removed from the regular attainment of those
blessings which civilized society alone offers. We shall exemplify these
statements by a few details.
[Illustration: Dying Lion]
The country over which these people ranged occupies a surface that may
be roughly described as five or six times as large as all England. They
had the unbounded command of all the natural resources of that country;
and yet their entire numbers did not equal the population of a
moderately sized English county. It may be fairly said that each Indian
required a thousand acres for his maintenance. The supplies of food were
so scanty--a scantiness which would at once have ceased to exist had
there been any cultivation--that if a large number of these Indians
assembled together to co-operate in their hunting expeditions, they were
very soon dispersed by the urgent desire of satisfying hunger. Tanner
says, "We all went to hunt beavers in concert. In hunts of this kind the
proceeds are sometimes equally divided; but in this instance every man
retained what he had killed. In three days I collected as many skins as
I could carry. But in these distant and hasty hunts little meat could be
brought in; and the whole band was soon suffering with hunger. Many of
the hunters, and I among others, for want of food became extremely weak,
and unable to hunt far from home." What an approach is this to the case
of the lower animals; and how forcibly it reminds us of the passage in
Job (c. iv., v. 11), "The fierce lion perisheth for lack of prey."[9] In
another place he says, "I began to be dissatisfied at remaining with
large bands of Indians, as was usual for them, after having remained a
short time in a place, to suffer from hunger." These sufferings were
not, in many cases, of short duration, or of trifling intensity. Tanner
describes one instance of famine in the following words:--"The Indians
gathered around, one after another, until we became a considerable band,
and then we began to suffer from hunger. The weather was very severe,
and our suffering increased. A young woman was the first to die of
hunger. Soon after this, a young man, her brother, was taken with that
kind of delirium or madness which precedes death in such as die of
starvation. In this condition he had left the lodge of his debilitated
and desponding parents; and when, at a late hour in the evening, I
returned from my hunt, they could not tell what had become of him. I
left the camp about the middle of the night, and, following his track, I
found him at some distance, lying dead in the snow."
This worst species of suffering equally existed at particular periods,
whether food was sought for by large or by small parties, by bands or by
individuals. Tanner was travelling with the family of the woman who had
adopted him. He says, "We had now a short season of plenty; but soon
became hungry again. It often happened that for two or three days we had
nothing to eat; then a rabbit or two, or a bird, would afford us a
prospect of protracting the sufferings of hunger a few days longer."
Again he says, "Having subsisted for some time almost entirely on the
inner bark of trees, and particularly of a climbing vine found there,
our strength was much reduced."
The misery which is thus so strikingly described proceeded from the
circumstance that the labour of the Indians did not take a profitable
direction; and that this waste of labour (for unprofitable applications
of labour are the greatest of all wastes) arose from the one fact, that
in certain particulars these Indians laboured without appropriation.
They depended upon the chance productions of nature, without compelling
her to produce; and they did not compel her to produce, because there
was no appropriation of the soil, the most efficient natural instrument
of production. If the Indians had directed the productive powers of the
earth to the growth of corn, instead of to the growth of foxes' skins,
they would have become rich. But they could not have reached this point
without appropriation of the soil. They had learnt the necessity of
appropriating the products of the soil, when they had bestowed labour
upon obtaining them; but the last step towards productiveness was not
taken. The Indians therefore were poor; the European settlers who had
taken this last step were rich.
The imperfect appropriation which existed amongst the Indians,
preventing, as it did, the accumulation of capital, prevented the
application of that skill and knowledge which is preserved and
accumulated by the Division of employment. Tanner describes a poor
fellow who was wounded in the arm by the accidental discharge of a gun.
As there was little surgical skill amongst the community, because no one
could devote himself to the business of surgery, the Indian, as the only
chance of saving his life, resolved to cut off his own arm; "and taking
two knives, the edge of one of which he had hacked into a sort of saw,
he with his right hand and arm cut off his left, and threw it from him
as far as he could." The labour which an individual must go through when
the state of society is so rude that there is scarcely any division of
employment, and consequently scarcely any exchanges, is exhibited in
many passages of Tanner's narrative. We select one. "I had no pukkavi,
or mats for a lodge, and therefore had to build one of poles and long
grass. I dressed more skins, made my own mocassins and leggings, and
those for my children; cut wood and cooked for myself and family, made
my snow-shoes, &c. &c. All the attention and labour I had to bestow
about home sometimes kept me from hunting, and I was occasionally
distressed for want of provisions. I busied myself about my lodge in the
night-time. When it was sufficiently light I would bring wood, and
attend to other things without; at other times I was repairing my
snow-shoes, or my own or my children's clothes. For nearly all the
winter I slept but a very small part of the night."
Tanner was thus obliged to do everything for himself, and consequently
to work at very great disadvantage, because the principle of exchange
was so imperfectly acted upon by the people amongst whom he lived. This
principle of exchange was imperfectly acted upon, because the principle
of appropriation was imperfectly acted upon. The occupation of all, and
of each, was to hunt game, to prepare skins, to sell them to the
traders, to make sugar from the juice of maple-trees, to build huts, and
to sew the skins which they dressed and the blankets which they bought
into rude coverings for their bodies. Every one of them did all of these
things for himself, and of course he did them very imperfectly. The
people were not divided into hunters, and furriers, and dealers, and
sugar-makers, and builders, and tailors. Every man was his own hunter,
furrier, dealer, sugar-maker, builder, and tailor; and consequently,
every man, like Tanner, was so occupied by many things, that want of
food and want of rest were ordinary sufferings. He describes a man who
was so borne down and oppressed by these manifold wants, that, in utter
despair of being able to surmount them, he would lie still till he was
at the point of starvation, replying to those who tried to rouse him to
kill game, that he was too poor and sick to set about it. By describing
himself as poor, he meant to say that he was destitute of all the
necessaries and comforts whose possession would encourage him to add to
the store. He had little capital. The skill which he possessed of
hunting game gave him a certain command over the spontaneous productions
of the forest; but, as his power of hunting depended upon chance
supplies of game, his labour necessarily took so irregular a direction,
and was therefore so unproductive, that he never accumulated sufficient
for his support in times of sickness, or for his comfortable support at
any time. He became, therefore, despairing; and had that perfect apathy,
that indifference to the future, which is the most pitiable evidence of
extreme wretchedness. This man felt his powerless situation more keenly
than his companions; but with all savage tribes there is a want of
steady and persevering exertion, proceeding from the same cause. Severe
labour is succeeded by long fits of idleness, because their labour takes
a chance direction. This is a universal case. Habits of idleness, of
irregularity, of ferocity, are the characteristics of all those who
maintain existence by the pursuit of the unappropriated productions of
nature; while constant application, orderly arrangement of time, and
civility to others, result from systematic industry. The savage and the
poacher are equally the slaves of violent impulses--equally disgusted at
the prospect of patient application. When the support of life depends
upon chance supplies, the reckless spirit of a gambler is sure to take
possession of the whole man; and the misery which results from these
chance supplies produces either dejection or ferocity. The author of
this book used to observe the habits of a class of such persons, who
frequent the Thames at Eton; and he thus described them in verses of his
boyhood:--
What boat is this which creeps so lazily
Up the still stream? How quietly falls the drip
Of the slow paddle! Now it shoots along,
As if that lone man fear'd us. Well I ken
His rough and dangerous trade. He knows each hole
Where the quick-sighted eel delights to swim
When clouds obscure the moon; and there he lays
His traps and gins, and then he sleeps awhile;
But rouses up before the prying dawn
Betrays his course; and out he cautiously glides
To try his doubtful luck. Perchance he finds
Stores that may buy him bread; but oft'ner still
His toil is fruitless, and deject he comes
Home to his emberless hearth, and sits him down,
Idle and starving through the busy day.
Mungo Park describes the wretched condition of the inhabitants of
countries in Africa where small particles of gold are found in the
rivers. Their lives were spent in hunting for the gold to exchange for
useful commodities, instead of raising the commodities themselves; and
they were consequently poor and miserable, listless and unsteady. Their
fitful industry had too much of chance mixed up with it to afford a
certain and general profit. The accounts which of late years we have
received from the gold-diggings of California and Australia exhibit the
same suffering from the same cause. The natives of Cape de la Hogue, in
Normandy, were the most wretched and ferocious people in all France,
because they depended principally for support on the wrecks that were
frequent on their coasts. When there were no tempests, they made an easy
transition from the character of wreckers to that of robbers. A
benefactor of his species taught these unhappy people to collect a
marine plant to make potash. They immediately became profitable
labourers and exchangers; they obtained a property in the general
intelligence of civilized life; the capital of society raised them from
misery to wealth, from being destroyers to being producers.
The Indians, as we thus see, were poor and wretched, because they had no
appropriation beyond articles of domestic use; because they had no
property in land, and consequently no cultivation. Yet even they were
not insensible to the importance of the principle, for the preservation
of the few advantages that belonged to their course of life. Tanner
says, "I have often known a hunter leave his traps for many days in the
woods, without visiting them, or feeling any anxiety about their
safety." The Indians even carried the principle of appropriation almost
to a division of land; for each tribe, and sometimes each individual,
had an allotted hunting-ground--imperfectly appropriated, indeed, by the
first comer, and often contested with violence by other hunters, but
still showing that they approached the limit which divides the savage
from the civilized state, and that, if cultivation were introduced
amongst them, there would be a division of land, as a matter of
necessity. The security of individual property is the foundation of all
social improvement. It is impossible to speak of the productive power of
labour in the civilized state, without viewing it in connexion with that
great principle of society which considers all capital as appropriated.
When 'Capital and Labour' was written twenty years ago, the Indian
tribes who were abiding in the territory of the United States were
principally in the condition which has been described by Tanner. The
want of resources in the country of the Indians was so manifest, that,
when commissioners from the government of the United States, in 1802,
gathered together the chiefs of the various tribes of the Creek Indians
in their own country, to propose to them a plan for their civilization,
it became necessary to provide for the support of the people so
assembled by conveying food into the forests from the stores of the
American towns. The Indians have now vanished from their old
hunting-grounds. Where they so recently maintained a precarious
existence, there are populous cities, navigable rivers, roads, railways.
The clink of the hammer is heard in the forge, and the rush of the
stream from the mill-dam tells of agriculture and commerce. But even the
Indians themselves have become labourers. They have been removed to a
large tract of country, far away from the settled parts of the United
States, and have been raised into the dignity of cultivators. The
Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Choctaws, with many smaller tribes, now
breed cattle instead of hunting martens. They have houses in the place
of huts; they have schools and churches. Instead of being extirpated by
famine or the sword, they have been adopted into the great family of
civilized man.
[Illustration: Penn's Treaty with the Indians.]
But this wise and humane arrangement of the United States has not wholly
removed the Indians from the wide regions of North America. In the
Hudson's Bay territories the life which Tanner described still goes
forward. The wants of civilized society--the desire to possess the
earth--have transported the Indians from the banks of the Ohio to the
lands watered by the Arkansas. The opposite principle has retained them
on the shores of Hudson's Bay. They are wanted there as hunters, and are
not encouraged as cultivators. They are kept out of the pale of
civilization, and not received within it. The rude industry of the
Hudson's Bay Indians is stimulated by the luxury of Europe into an
employ which would cease to exist if the people became civilized. If
agriculture were introduced amongst them--if they were to grow corn and
keep domestic animals--they would cease to be hunters of foxes and
martens, because their wants would be much better supplied by other
modes of labour, involving less suffering and less uncertainty. As it
is, the traders, who want skins, do not think of giving the Indians
tools to work the ground, and seeds to put in it, and cows and sheep to
breed other cows and sheep. They avail themselves of the uncivilized
state of these poor tribes, to render them the principal agents in the
manufacture of fur, to supply the luxuries of another hemisphere. But
still the exchange which the hunters carry on with the European traders,
imperfect as it is in all cases, and unjust as it is in many, is better
for the Indians than no exchange; although we fear that ardent spirits
take away from the Indians the greater number of the advantages which
would otherwise remain with them as exchangers. If the Indians had no
skins to give to Europe, Europe would have no blankets and ammunition to
give to them. They would obtain their food and clothing by the use of
the bow alone. They would live entirely from hand to mouth. They would
have no motive for accumulation, because there would be no exchanges;
and they would consequently be even poorer and more helpless than they
are now as exchangers of skins. They are suffering from the effects of
small accumulations and imperfect exchange; but these are far better
than no accumulation and no exchange. If the course of their industry
were to be changed by perfect appropriation--if they were consequently
to become cultivators and manufacturers, instead of wanderers in the
woods to hunt for wild and noxious animals--they would, in the course of
years, have abundance of profitable labour, because they would have
abundance of capital. This is the better lot of the tribes with whom the
government of the United States has made a far nobler treaty than Penn
made with his Indians. As it is, their accumulations are so small, that
they cannot proceed with their own uncertain labour of hunting without
an advance of capital on the part of the traders; and thus, even in
the rude tradings of these poor Indians, credit, that complicated
instrument of commercial exchange, operates upon the direction of their
labour. Of course credit would not exist at all without appropriation.
Their rights of property are perfect as far as they go; but they are not
carried far enough to direct their labour into channels which would
ensure sufficient production for the labourers. Their labour is
unproductive because they have small accumulations;--their accumulations
are small because they have imperfect exchange;--their exchange is
imperfect because they have limited appropriation. We may illustrate
this state of imperfect production by another passage from Tanner's
story:--
"The Hudson's Bay Company had now no post in that part of the
country, and the Indians were soon made conscious of the advantage
which had formerly resulted to them from the competition between
rival trading companies. Mr. Wells, at the commencement of winter,
called us all together, gave the Indians a ten-gallon keg of rum
and some tobacco, telling them at the same time he would not
credit one of them the value of a single needle. When they brought
skins he would buy them, and give in exchange such articles as
were necessary for their comfort and subsistence during the
winter. I was not with the Indians when this talk was held. When
it was reported to me, and a share of the presents offered me, I
not only refused to accept anything, but reproached the Indians
for their pusillanimity in submitting to such terms. They had been
accustomed for many years to receive credits in the fall; they
were now entirely destitute not of clothing merely, but of
ammunition, and many of them of guns and traps. How were they,
without the accustomed aid from the traders, to subsist themselves
and their families during the ensuing winter? A few days
afterwards I went to Mr. Wells, and told him that I was poor, with
a large family to support by my own exertions; and that I must
unavoidably suffer, and perhaps perish, unless he would give me
such a credit as I had always in the fall been accustomed to
receive. He would not listen to my representation, and told me
roughly to be gone from his house. I then took eight silver
beavers, such as are worn by the women as ornaments on their
dress, and which I had purchased the year before at just twice the
price that was commonly given for a capote;[10] I laid them before
him on the table, and asked him to give me a capote for them, or
retain them as a pledge for the payment of the price of the
garment, as soon as I could procure the peltries.[11] He took up
the ornaments, threw them in my face, and told me never to come
inside of his house again. The cold weather of the winter had not
yet set in, and I went immediately to my hunting-ground, killed a
number of moose, and set my wife to make the skins into such
garments as were best adapted to the winter season, and which I
now saw we should be compelled to substitute for the blankets and
woollen clothes we had been accustomed to receive from the
traders."
This incident at once shows us that the great blessing of the civilized
state is its increase of the powers of production. Here we see the
Indians, surrounded on all sides by wild animals whose skins might be
made into garments, reduced to the extremity of distress because the
traders refused to advance them blankets and other necessaries, to be
used during the months when they were employed in catching the animals
from which they might obtain the skins. It is easy to see that the
Indians were a long way removed from the power of making blankets
themselves. Before they could reach this point, their forests must have
been converted into pasture-grounds;--they must have raised flocks of
sheep, and learnt all the various complicated arts, and possessed all
the ingenious machinery, for converting wool into cloth. By their
exchange of furs for blankets, they obtained a share in the
productiveness of civilization;--they obtained comfortable clothing with
much less labour than they could have made it out of the furs. If Tanner
had not considered the capote which he desired to obtain from the
traders, better, and less costly, than the garment of moose-skins, he
would not have carried on any exchange of the two articles with the
traders. The skins of martens and foxes were only valuable to the
Indians, without exchange, for the purpose of sewing together to make
covering. They had a different value in Europe as articles of luxury;
and therefore the Indians by exchange obtained a greater plenty of
superior clothing than if they had used the skins themselves. But the
very nature of the trade, depending upon chance supplies, rendered it
impossible that they should accumulate. They had such pressing need of
ammunition, traps, and blankets, that the produce of the labour of one
hunting season was not more than sufficient to procure the commodities
which they required to consume in the same season. But supposing the
Indians could have bred foxes and martens and beavers, as we breed
rabbits, for the supply of the European demand for fur, doubtless they
would have then advanced many steps in the character of producers. The
thing is perhaps impossible; but were it possible, and were the Indians
to have practised it, they would immediately have become capitalists, to
an extent that would have soon rendered them independent of the credit
of the traders. They must, however, have previously established a more
perfect appropriation. Each must have enclosed his own hunting-ground;
and each must have raised some food for the maintenance of his own stock
of beavers, foxes, and martens. It would be easier, doubtless, to raise
the food for themselves, and ultimately to exchange corn for clothing,
instead of furs for clothing. When this happens--and it will happen
sooner or later, unless the remnant of the hunting Indians are
extirpated by their poverty, which proceeds from their imperfect
production--Europe must go without the brilliant variety of skins which
we procure at the cost of so much labour, accompanied with so much
wretchedness, because the labour is so unproductive to the labourers.
When the ladies of London and Paris are compelled to wear boas of
rabbits instead of sables, and when the hair of the beaver ceases to be
employed in the manufacture of our hats, the wooded regions of Hudson's
Bay will have been cleared--the fur-bearing animals will have
perished--corn will be growing in the forest and the marsh--the
inhabitants will be building houses instead of trapping foxes;--there
will be appropriation and capital, profitable labour and comfort. Three
hundred thousand mink and marten-skins will no longer be sent from those
shores to London in one year; but Liverpool may send to those shores
woven cottons and worsteds, pottery and tools, in exchange for products
whose cultivation will have exterminated the minks and martens.
[Illustration: Pine-Marten.]
[9] The authorized version has _old_; the more correct translation is
_fierce_.
[10] A sort of great-coat.
[11] Skins.