School of War - Ep 87: Wayne Lee on Native American Warfare

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Wayne Lee, Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at UNC and author of The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800, joins the show to talk about war in the ‘Eastern Woodlands’, both before and after European contact. ▪️ Times      •    01:48 Introduction      •    02:50 Coincidences     •    07:19 “Woods and rivers, deer and rabbits, corn and beans”     •    12:51 Unused land     •   19:29 Sacred spaces     •    21:56 Strategic objectives     •    28:35 Why not occupy?      •    32:50 Logistics     •   41:57 The role of the prisoner      •    49:10 Something like the truth      •    54:34 Offense and defense Follow along on Instagram

This week's episode has been one of my favorite to prepare for and to record. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and I moved back and live here now today. And since I was a boy, I've been fascinated by the notion that the wooded, hilly, riverine terrain here is now largely developed as suburbs, was once the scene of the clash of nations, Native American nations to be specific with their own appreciations of strategy and diplomacy, their own ways of war formed long before European contact. As a kid, I'd wonder if battles have been fought in the places that I went about my daily business. battles that had never been written about and that had in large part been forgotten forever.

Frankly, as an adult, these thoughts still occur to me. I've always wanted to read something serious about pre-contact Indian warfare, and I'm happy to have now read such a book by Professor Wayne Lee, a cutting off way, and to have a conversation with him this week here on School of War. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For maps, photos, and more School of War content, follow along on Instagram at School of War. Just tap the link in the show notes and subscribe. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I'm delighted to be joined today by Wayne Lee. He is the Bruce W. Carney, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, author of numerous books. Most recently, The Cutting Off Way, Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1,500 through 1800. Wayne, thank you so much for joining the show. Yes, thanks for having me on. So I want to open with a bit of a brief confession on my part and then a sort of more of a personal question for you, which is I have this. romantic fascination with your subject matter, indigenous warfare. I grew up here in northern Virginia. I'm talking to you not far from the banks of the Potomac River. And I have, you know,

since childhood, been fascinated by the idea that, you know, what's left of the woods around me, which are just really in small patches now in this part of Virginia, you know, these were once the scene of a kind of history, a kind of history that is largely lost, much of it at least. And I try to explain these things to my children and they sort of look at me in And maybe when they get a little older, they'll think it's interesting, too. Right. My question for you is, you're based in North Carolina. You focus a lot on warfare that occurred, you know, along what is now the North Carolina,

South Carolina line in your book. And to what extent does your geographical location and background sort of influence your interest in this subject matter? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I hadn't ever thought about it in exactly those terms. But there are essentially there are a series of coincidences that led to their, regional focus that I take. I mean, I want to emphasize that the book's attempts to do a continent-wide, or at least the Eastern seaboard-wide analysis. But a lot of the examples are deliberately

pulled from the southeast in part because of the history of the discipline, which has been, for most of the history of history, focused or emerges from the northeast. All the examples are about, you know, what are the Pilgrims do? What are the Massachusetts Bay Colonists do? And that's partly because Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the ivies had a lock on this field for a very long time. One of my mentors, in fact, Peter Wood, who was a Harvard graduate, broke the mold in his own dissertation work by studying South Carolina and rice cultivation and the rise of the black majority. In fact, the book is called the Black majority. So when I studied colonial history here at Duke in North Carolina with Peter Wood, who had written about South Carolina,

we sort of naturally adopted a southeastern perspective. And many of Peter Woods' other students have gone on to do major studies of Native nations in the southeast, greatly changing how we understand the sort of broader corpus of Native American history. For myself, I actually went to high school in Virginia in Fairfax, and then went to Duke as an undergraduate and then was in the Army. So the Eastern seaboard is my stomping ground mostly as an adult, except I was an army brat.

So I moved around a lot as a kid, but that included time. I'm in North Carolina when my father was at Fort Bragg, and then I went back to North Carolina. It would be an undergrad. So the region is topography and geography and relationship to Virginia and South Carolina is comfortable to me. I know it. And that makes certain things easier to do. The other crucial coincidence here is that my very first book, my dissertation,

was about North Carolina, and that was a budgetary decision. I was not funded in graduate school. And so I was trying to figure out how to work a bunch of different jobs while completing my dissertation research. And that meant I couldn't do a lot of travel. And so I wrote my study of violence within the set piece of North Carolina because North Carolina was easy to get to. The archives were relatively easy to get to. And it was when I finished that book, it's then that I really realized that I didn't know enough about Native American warfare. And that's, that was the, I hate to go back and read the sections in that book about Native American worker because I find them naive.

And so I really set out to dig deeper. It was my first post-dissertation project was essentially one of the chapters in this book, which was the one about the Tuscaroors and the Cherokees, defensive fortifications and strategies. That was the first post-dissertation work. And it was because I was trying to respond to this question. what really did Native American warfare look like? Because I was pretty sure I wasn't doing it justice in the little small section I had done in my first book. And that's why, again, because the first book was about North Carolina

and mentioned the Tuscarora War and the Cherokee War just sort of in passing, when I turned to study Native American warfare specifically, those two wars loomed large and they become big pieces of this book in various places. Yeah, I definitely identify. with both your Fairfax upbringing and also your military experience, my time in the woods in Quantico also, I think, helps me to more vividly picture the kind of deprivation and just physical challenges that warfare would have presented.

Not to mention the swamps of the eastern seaboard. If you haven't seen the tide country, the tidewater in Virginia or in North and South Carolina, you don't really understand what kind of the environment that is. It's really quite a challenging environment. Yeah, in Northern Virginia, it's very limited. I mean, there's, you know, some of these creek outlets into the Potomac can get a little marshy, but it's nothing on the scale of what you're describing further south. Right.

Well, James Town, of course, in the Virginia-Togwater. So this next question, I mean, we could spend the whole hour and much more on this, so we'll do our best. But the time period you're covering is 1,500 to 1,800. Talk a bit about the eastern woodlands, you know, the political economy of indigenous America at the outset of your period and how it conditioned war. What should we be picturing here as the way of life at roughly the time of European contact? Right.

And that's very much, it's very important to the way I start the book, because I start with that notion of the socioeconomic systems that Native Americans were living in. And I actually am kind of proud of one of the sentences it hadn't occurred to me to read this, but I want to just read a part of this sentence that we're talking about an environment of woods and rivers, deer and rabbit, corn and beans. and crucially the absence of domesticated draft animals. And those qualities, those subsistence items and environmental factors are shared across the eastern seaboard. And I talk in the book and the introduction, of course, this excludes things basically north of Maine. It does exclude some areas in Florida where corn-based agriculture just doesn't take off in the same way. But having said that there's this common ground, there is also enormous, variety. And so the challenge of anybody trying to do this continental wide survey is to acknowledge

the variety that can occur especially moving from east to west. So if I'm a native society living on the eastern seaboard right on the coast, I'm going to get a whole lot of my protein from aquatic sources because they're reliable, they're predictable, they're substantive. You're talking about oyster banks, shellfish banks. You know, we have oyster mounds that have been excavated or at least known all up and down the eastern seaboard where Native Americans didn't necessarily reside, but returned to on a regular basis as a part of their subsistence seasonal round, as they would go from place to place, gathering. And that protein source makes the lifestyle of someone living right on the coast somewhat different from the Cherokees living up in the mountains in what's

now Western North Carolina, South Carolina, where their protein sources are going to be much more about hunting, especially deer. And so you have to acknowledge that difference. And by the way, I think sometimes that difference explains polity size, that the seaboard polities could be quite a bit smaller because they don't, territorially speaking, because they don't need access to a large hunting area. They have more concentrated protein sources. At the same time, you get possible exceptions.

For example, Poetan's Chieftain, when he rises to power in the Tidewater, Virginia, one of the arguments that I make sort of briefly in the book, because there's not a deep study of potent, but I make briefly in the book is that one possible reason why he's able to consolidate power so successfully is because water transportation is available for his whole region. He can go up and down the tidewater rivers in the Chesapeake Bay, and that means that it's easy to transport protein, it's easy to transport troops, soldiers, warriors, it's easy to move food. It's also easy to claim subsistence from those places. that you've conquered, it can be delivered cheaply.

Bulk subsistence tribute can be delivered cheaply. That same thing is not true in the interior. It's difficult to move over vast distances in the interior without water transport. And I think that is one of the explanations for the size of Poetan's Cheaple. There's another big exception here that I do talk about, which is that cut off date of 1,500 is difficult and deliberate, a difficult and deliberate choice. Because in 1500, you know, basically eight years after Columbus has done his thing in the islands, not, you know, North America as such, there are still large-scale Mississippian chiefdoms operating in the southeast and the Midwest.

And a hundred years later, they're mostly gone. And there's long bit of debate about why that is. Is it DeSoto's wandering around in the 1530s that kill those chiefdoms? Not that he conquered them, but that he left. behind disease in his wake and in such things like that. And archaeologists more or less now agree that that's not the case, that whatever damage DeSoto did was merely hastening an ongoing process of those chiefdom cycling down into a smaller level society,

less complex level society in this, in the anthropological sense of complex, meaning not tiered. You don't have a chiefdom ruling a set of villages underneath. Those villages tend to become more and more autonomous and not less responsive to achieve. And as they became less and less responsive to achieve, they moved into essentially a subsistence system that looks more or less like their cousins in the Northeast

in the sense of being politically autonomous towns clustered together, doing maize agriculture, relying on hunting in the winter season, and some amount of movement and gathering, again, varying from place to place as to how sedentary they would be. And so I try to both generalize and be specific when necessary. Yeah.

You have this great riff in the book pushing back on this notion that native peoples inhabited what was in effect of wilderness. You don't like this notion of the wilderness and the sort of, you know, fantasies that can be associated with sort of Rsoian fantasies of propertyless folks living in something like a state of nature. On the other hand, you don't have, you know, a mental terrain space that looks like Europe. You've got something in between. Can you help us understand how the in-between works? Yeah, absolutely. And that, there's a whole bunch of issues that spin off just from that observation to say that this is not wilderness. One is the legal observation.

So the colonists come in and very quickly adopt the legal notion that this land is unused. unused, unworked, unshaped by human hand. And the savages are just living on it by the fruits that it bears naturally. And they say that out loud to themselves, in part because that gives them the opportunity to make legal title to it. There is a legal doctrine, the vacuum domicillium, which means that they can acquire title to land is not worked. But they're also saying it at the same time they're staring at giant fields of corn.

And so it's a kind of willful blindness in order to make claims in the face of the facts. But even if we move away from that blindness about looking at a field of corn, what they definitely could not see was that much wider territorial claim that hunting and gathering required, that a community that is dependent on protein that is gathered, again, potentially at shell mounds, oyster banks, but also the hunting requirements, means that native nations had a much wider sense of the territory they own. And within that territory and even beyond it, they not only knew the routes of travel, they would cultivate routes of travel. They would famously, not just for traveling purpose,

but for hunting purposes, burn forests so that the lower undergrowth and the lower branches would be gone. We have descriptions of early colonists, because all the descriptions come from colonists, not from Indians, for the most part. You know, being able to ride through the forest on horseback without worrying about getting knocked off by a branch, a ride through the forest, not on a road, you know, on horseback. And because all of the lower branches and undergrowth were burned out on a regular basis,

that's a cultivated landscape. That is a managed landscape because that was done to enhance hunting. The further you can see in the forested environment, the more you will be able to see gain. if there's all sorts of undergrowth, undergrowth, you can't see gain. Furthermore, as I talk about in the book, Native Americans regularly rotate their field so that we'll have a field in this spot for three to five years, and then we're going to move over here into what's now a wooded area.

We're going to cut down those trees. We're going to turn that into the new field, and the old field will become meadow. In fact, the term old field is a common toponym throughout the eastern North America. or people talk about the old field or the old town. Very often, that's referring to where there was a, where there used to be a field, where there used to be a town, and is now a meadow. And a meadow is where deer go.

If you've ever spent any time driving around the southeast, you'll notice that deer hunting stands are set up at the edge of a meadow. Typically, you own the woodline, so they're camouflaged against the woodline, looking out into the meadow where you can see deer at a distance and where the deer go to browse. And so those are crucial. subsistence gathering points, the old fields, the old town, the sites of the old towns, which are now

matter. And so this is a managed and cultivated landscape supporting the subsistence systems of Native American societies. It is not wilderness. Furthermore, the transportation networks are a key part of this from the military perspective. How do you move force across the landscape? And a European system is dependent by the 17th and 18th century. We could talk about the Romans and other stuff if you really want to, but it's kind of a slightly different story. But European systems of logistics are dependent on horses, oxen, and carts. When they go up into the mountains, for example, in the Alps, they'll stop using carts and they'll do horse packs, so that part actually transfers to North America. They're not unfamiliar with the notion of just using a horse as the beast of burden. But the horse does not

exist for Native Americans until the Europeans bring them. And so their logistical systems do not depend on the building of roads suitable for horses, much less the building of roads suitable for wagon. And so you have this class of environment and logistical system. Europeans show up and they need the logistical systems associated with roads and draft animals. And Indians don't. And so that becomes a part of the story of how Europeans adapt and also part of the story about how Indians resist because their capabilities are organic to their environment, an environment they have shaped, as much as European capabilities are organic to their environment

and the environment they shape. And you get environment-shaping competition. When Indians see settlers arrive, one of the things that they are seeing, I mean, like, say, Cherokee and mountains of Western North Carolina, they don't just see white people showing up in the Piedmont, What they see showing up in the Piedmont are wagons and roads and cleared fields with fences. And all of those things, fences, roads, wagons are military threats.

And so that's how they are going to imagine that process. Yeah. I'm also talking to you from about four or five blocks away from Braddock Road here in Alexandria. You have another great passage in the book describing General Braddock's somewhat inept diplomacy with the tribes who are watching this robe. You avoid the word tribes. Nations, Indians who are watching this road being built and ask him, well, what does this road mean? He means all of this belongs to us now. In effect, this is his answer.

And they unsurprisingly, don't react well to that. Right. It's one of the few truly, that quote from that source is one of the few truly inside looks we get at the Native American response to the British road bill. Because they see that clearly is a threat. So I want to, what I'm driving out here is I'm going to ask you at the sort of strategic level what the goal. of Indian warfare were. But before I get there, on this question of how the world looks,

how the eastern woodlands look, the description you just provided is fascinating and also very tied to economics and resources and transportation and means of making war and sustenance and so forth, all very enlightening and also in a way easy for us to kind of think through sitting where we are with the information that we have,

I imagine there's also a kind of sacred overlay to all of that that must vary from nation to nation and probably very hard, I imagine, for historian to deal with because the sources on it would be difficult to interpret and thin on the ground. To what extent does that matter to our conversation and how do you deal with it as a historian? It does matter. It certainly matters to the nations involved, and especially in the present, where the claim for sacred space is a crucial political and legal tool in their negotiation of their sovereignty in the modern world. our ability to penetrate and understand what it meant for a territory to be sacred in the 18th and 17th century is much more difficult.

And I don't deal with it much in part because part of my goal was to get, one says, get past the spiritual analysis of Native Americans and get to their strategic analysis, the way they think about resources and maintaining sovereignty in a highly violent sovereignty contest as opposed to the modern. sort of legal jousting sovereignty content. And so I wanted to focus in on the sort of, if you will, I hate this term in political science, but the realist approach for Native Americans. What do they need to eat? What do they need to survive? What do they need to do to defend their villages when the European armies show up?

And also, I want to be cruelly. So far, we've more or less been focusing in kind of by accident on examples of European Indian. and the differences between European and Indian system. And part of the premise of the book is that Indians been fighting Indians before the Europeans showed up for centuries for these reasons, for the resource reasons, for subsistence reasons, for survival reasons and self-defense reasons, all the reasons that you can imagine, and possibly very likely sacred reasons.

For example, the Mississippian chiefdom warfare would guess because we don't really know that one of the objectives of that warfare was to attack sacred sites, that to undermine the power of a chief in a chiefdom, one of the quickest ways to do that was to show that he can't defend what is sacred. And so that you would go in and attack a sacred site in the chiefdom center and thereby demonstrate their weakness. We don't see necessarily that same exact thing happening in the later period or in the non-chiefdom smaller-scale societies,

or at least it's not as obvious to us in our later source. It's kind of a little bit of an archaeological claim rather than a narrative historical claim for the Mississippi. Well, let me broaden out from here then. So generically speaking, around the time of 1,500 or so, what are the common strategic objectives of Indian warfare? Well, I always want to emphasize that the first and most important objective is always self-defense, right?

That there's a background level of violence that requires every society to be able to defend itself. And I always like to put that out there because it doesn't necessarily mean that war is happening all the time. I do use occasionally the word endemic because I do say that it happens a lot. But if war is happening just often enough that it might wipe you out if you're not paying attention, that that means you're constantly building in sort of security issues into the way you think about the world and how you organize your life. I mean, one reason for a village to be nucleated and not all.

native villages were nucleated, but one reason to be nucleated is simply for self-defense. There's more of us here if we get attacked, be able to respond. And it's going to be easier if we choose to build a fortress around that nuclear village, if it's nucleated. If we're all inside the fort and we build the walls around the houses, then that gives us a kind of security. And so self-defense drives some of what we see. But the other big issues here are essentially three. And I don't list them quite like this in the book, but I think we can boil it down. One is reputation management. And that refers to that issue of self-defense.

If I'm attacked and I don't attack back, if I don't make it clear that I'm capable of retaliating, then my reputation goes down. I appear more vulnerable. And I'm using I for a weed here. I appear more vulnerable. And so one thing that we, the thing that we called bloodfeard, in Native American society that we and our European sources at the time called revenge warfare. I agree. It's essentially revenge warfare, but I like to give it a slightly more sophisticated

construction is reputation management. There is political purpose in revenge, and that purpose is ultimately self-defense. And some of the native societies will be more invested in it than others, but virtually all of them will play in the blood revenge, the blood feud, game one way or another where that feeling of obligation is conveyed to young men to take revenge on behalf of their society or behalf of their family when they've been attacked. So that's one. The other is the other two are essentially about resources. And one resource is available through the submission of neighboring nations in which you demand tribute from them, that you've defeated them often enough that they decide that they're going to just submit and offer you tribute.

And we see this both in forms of symbolic tribute in high value, low bulk items, which we sometimes see archaeologically or think of archaeologically as long-distance trade. And sometimes it's long-distance trade. And sometimes it's the movement of high-value goods through submission and tribute. And we see that a lot, and by the way, in New England, in the early New England colonies. We see this tribute relationship amongst some of the coastal people. The other form that I explore in the book, kind of for the first time, I don't really think anybody else has done this,

is to imagine the function of offensive war as generating displacement, that you push your enemy further away from it. And therefore, the space between you and them becomes more yours and less theirs. as you make their villages essentially the closest villages to you uninhabitable because they are too dangerous to live in they displace they shift sometimes by tens of miles sometimes by hundreds of miles and when you do that you've created new hunting territories that you now claim and in one of the ways that I saw this kind of by accident was when I was looking at the Creek Cherokee War years ago

and I was documenting where Cherokee towns had moved or disappeared during the very long war between the creeks and the Cherokees. And I focused on this in part because this was a Creek Cherokee War, not an Anglo-Chairkey war, but an inter-Indian conflict. And one of the things I suddenly noticed one day, and I only remember what led me to sort of see it, was that almost all of the towns that were abandoned between 1715 and 1752, And that abandonment could be about disease and lower population, but they weren't scattered throughout the whole Cherokee Nation. They were all on the southern edge of the Cherokee Nation, the edge that was the closest to the creeks, the towns that literally, when I really started looking at the map, you can't see my hands on a podcast. But there's ridge lines between the creek country and Cherokee country. And essentially, the creeks were going up the river lines, over the passes, coming down the other side and hitting Cherokee. towns in the valleys on the other side and then retreating back up over those passes back to their

homeland because they weren't conquering or taking a town and holding it they were hitting it and going home and then hitting it and going home and then hitting it and going home progressively making that town or those towns on the southern edge of the Cherokee nation uninhabitable and in the long term when eventually they reach a piece in the 1750s there's the creeks and Cherokees decide to end that war for a variety of reasons we don't have to go into. But then the creeks make clear in later documents in the 1770s that they had taken that land by conquest. But remember, they didn't occupy that. Creeks didn't move into that. They displaced the Cherokees who were in that land. And when they had displaced them in their minds, they had acquired ownership. And that's a sovereignty

claim over now vacant, huntable land. Remember, vacant doesn't mean nothing. it means huntable. I want to ask what will sound like a dumb question, but I think your answer to it will be clarifying on this subject. If you go to all this trouble to mount expeditionary warfare, and let's say you do meet with success and you do eliminate, you know, a significant political center of another nation, why not occupy?

Why not stay? Why go about it in the way you just described? Well, ironically, you're not asking about the much larger problem. of which this book is a part. This is a book I had to write in order to write a different. I needed the data that this book gathered together because my larger project is about the history of conquest in the pre-industrial world.

And the fundamental argument that I make in that larger project that I've written about other societies in different pieces elsewhere, and then I needed this book to sort of flesh out all of the comparative arguments I'm making, is that your subsistence, system is determinative of your military logistical system. Makes sense, right? What you, what you normally eat is going to be, it's going to be shaping how you would then take food on the road and how you would supply and shore up a military, remembering that in the pre-industrial

world, food is always what matters. Ammunition is small potatoes compared to food and water. So your subsistence system shapes your military logistics. And the military logistical system shapes what you think you will get from victory. It shapes what you imagine conquest to be. Conquest isn't even the right word, because in some cases it's not about, we always think of an English, and conquest means taking territory.

In reality, what it really should be about is, what do you get from victory? So that we think in terms, in historical sweeping terms, we tend to think, you know, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Greeks, they conquer a city, they take the city, they take territory,

they make it a new province, They fold it into their bureaucratic and administrative system. That's because they're agricultural. And therefore, taking territory that you can grow food on is how you get wealthier, how you get more power. If you're a Mongol on the steve, your basic expectation for success in war is not territory. It's flocks and people. You defeat another tribe, and I'll use tribe in this case for the steppe society.

and you take especially the women and children and you fold them into your system. And even the men, if they're willing, they fight the same way you fight. So you fold them into your system. Talking about step on step warfare, nomad on nomad. But what you really wanted were they're animals, they're sheep and their horses. And they're easy to fold into your system. And that's because in part, you're going backwards in a little, your military logistics were dependent on horses and sheep.

And your subsistence system was dependent on horses. and sheep. So the one follows from the other. For Native Americans, conquest, what you want from victory is access to more resources. And the resources that are at the heart of your subsistence system is corn, deer, and aquatic protein. And so on the coastline, you see submission and tribute where it's easy to move bulk subsistence, and where you can claim access to an oyster bank, If another society is submitted, you can say, well, I get to use that oyster bank now as well as maybe you get to keep using it. I don't know.

These things vary. In the interior, we see displacement. We want more hunting territory. So we're going to make your villages move because our logistical system is not capable of sustaining garrisons. So we go back to another comparison. If I'm an agricultural society, state-based in Europe that's like the Romans, and I conquer province, I drop a garrison behind me when I leave with the army. The garrison is then supplied by

local agriculture. That's how they eat and they exert force to settle this new territory. If I'm Native Americans and I try to drop a garrison inside, you know, Cherokee country, I have to leave to go hunt. And so it doesn't, your logistical system doesn't sustain what Europeans would think of as take and hold warfare. I know that's a very long answer, but that's because this was part of a larger project. It's totally fascinating. Let's move from strategy and we've already, we've sort of gotten into operations and logistics. So let me start there and we'll move from there into tactics. So these expeditionary campaigns are mounted for whatever reason. Talk a bit about how they move and then let's get to how does the fighting actually work? How generically around 1500 does that

does battle happen? Well, you're asking the right question. how do they move? And one of the things that I had to do for this book, one of the reasons I had to, again, had to write this book was because no one had ever done a study of Native American logistics in this area, in this region of North America. They've been a little bit on the horse cultures, but not, you know, the plains, but not Eastern North America. And so I really wanted to look at what literally were they putting in their mouths while on campaign? And how much of it did they have to carry? And how much of it was carried for them? And then there was, it turns out there were questions about what were women doing in the terms of

carrying and moving food for war parties on the move, and that's still not entirely clear to me. I'm not sure if there's a standard pattern. But one of the things that we know, even for the inland society, is that water movement was critical. Water transport makes everything simple. And that's why in American history, the Ohio River is so important. When you get over the Appalachian Mountains and into the Ohio River, all the, a sudden you can start moving directly at relatively high speeds from east to west all the way to the

Mississippi and beyond. And so the Ohio and the Tennessee River as well are crucial transportation corridors moving from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. And so a campaign that wants to go a long distance, the first thing they're going to try to figure out what to do is how much of it can we do on a boat, in a boat, a canoe. And then after that, how much of it are we going to have to do overland? And of course, the most famous and well-known overland challenge is moving from north to south or south to north on the eastern side of the Appalachians. Because that does not lend itself to river travel, except when you get far enough north that you can use the Hudson or parts of the Delaware River coming down from upstate Pennsylvania.

But other than that, it's all overland. So we have what's called the Warriors Path that runs from essentially Pennsylvania to Georgia on the eastern side of the Blue Ridge, and which will later become the Great Wagon Road through which the backcountry settlers will move by wagon. And when you're moving hundreds of mine overland like that, essentially your logistical requirements are varied. The way you're going to handle that are varied,

but a lot of it is going to be hunting while you move. Now, you're wondering why I'm not talking about tactics yet, because now this is where the direct connection is to tactic. If you are hunting on the move, you need to spread out. You need to be in small groups that will re-rondeevous later. And so you're going to move across the landscape in relatively small groups. And I was able to find, with the help of a friend of mine who had found this document, an example of this, when the Cherokees go to reinforce the American expedition

that's building Forbes Road in western Pennsylvania, they're arriving in Winchester as their rendezvous point. And the British Army official who was there records their arrival. They're all Cherokee. I think there might be a couple of Katava, but they're almost all Cherokee. And he records them arriving in bands. Like one day there's 10 who show up. Two days later, there's 20 more who show up.

Four days later, there's going to be 20 more who show up. And he records their arrival every day. So in that case, we can actually literally see the fact that they've been coming up the same path. They're all following the Warriors' path from Cherokee Country up to Winchester. Winchester is literally. The reason Winchester is there is because it sits on the Warriors' back. And they're just moving in small groups and they're hunting along the way. That means that if your target, let's pretend their target was Winchester.

They were going to attack Winchester. It was like another Indian town. That means they would have designated a point somewhere south, probably west of Winchester, as their rendezvous. They would go in groups to that rendezvous point. They would then probably cash some food at that rendezvous point. They might even stop there for a week and hunt and cash the food that they killed there on site. And then they're going to move towards to Winchester in an attempt to surprise. it most likely at dawn.

They're going to surround it and they're going to, in the gunpowder era, they're going to probably, and I can't tell this for sure, our accounts are not clear. Try to sneak right up to the palisade walls, if it's a palisaded town, stick their gun

barrels between the trunks of the palisaded walls and pull all their triggers simultaneously more or less as a surprise volley that will penetrate into the long houses or the wigwam or whatever form of house structure you have inside the penalty, killing some people and completely surprising the rest.

And then you kind of wait. It's dangerous to charge straight in after that, although we do see that happen. You sort of wait for them to try to pour out of the single gate and you start trying to kill them as they come out of the gate. And this is an aggressive version. I mean, there's more than one way to do this. But the way I'm describing it would be one that's sort of more hopeful

that they have the numbers. that they can actually kill a whole bunch of people. And then the tactic now becomes a matter of the ticking clock. Because as soon as you pull those triggered, your enemy village in a traditional setup before the depopulation that has hit in the late 18th century, that town is sitting in a cluster of related towns. And those other related towns are nearby,

not being attacked at the same time. And they're hearing the booms. And the function of the clustering of the towns is mutual reinforcement. And so they're going to be rushing troops, rushing warriors to the site of this attack. And the attackers know that. And so they don't want to get caught from behind while facing the walls. And so the ticking clock is, how long can we stay and try to do damage before we need to get out of here? And they're going to then flee back to that rendezvous point where the food is cashed.

they're going to take whatever plunder and prisoners they've been able to get, prisoners being a key part of the plunder, and get to that rendezvous point, take some food, and then keep moving, and try to avoid pursuit. And so that's what the cutting off way is, is that it seeks to cut off a piece of an enemy society. And if it's a very large rating party, it might try to cut off this whole town.

I might try to destroy all, again, I'm using Winchester as our example. But if it's a small rating party that's just, sort of doing reputation management work, that's motivated by sentences of revenge and not necessarily of large-scale plunder or large-scale strategic success, they move into enemy country and they look for a hunting party, where they look for a party that's going out cutting wood or getting water, and they kill two or three people and then do the same thing. Because as soon as they pull their triggers, reinforcements will start to move towards them, and they flee. And so they try to get a cutoff of five people, 10 people, 20 people, a whole village,

do it for as long as you think you can sustain it, and then you get out. And of course, none of those calculations are ever done perfectly, so sometimes they get caught, and sometimes they don't. And that is the sort of balancing act that both of all of these societies are trying to do, is how do I take risks without taking lethal risks, risks that I can't sustain over the long haul? I want to ask you about prisoners here in a second, but before we get to that issue, just as you were speaking, something that occurred to me,

and I'm not entirely sure what to do with this thought, but it is fascinating how for everything that you just said that is sort of specific to the period that you are describing, when you were talking at a high level about the military geography, east and west of Appalachia, the echoes of this are very much, you know, audible in the American Civil War. You have war in the Eastern Theater concerned about rivers as obstacles and war in the Western theater essentially, you know, using rivers, trying to use rivers primarily, and that those become the axes along which fighting occur. Again, I'm not entirely sure what to do with that observation, but it is just striking the parallels of warfare, you know, two, three, four centuries apart.

Yes, and that's why in the American Civil War on the Eastern Theater, in the Eastern Theater, that any railroad that was moving in the North-South direction was absolutely crucial. Right. And many of the railroads, especially in Confederacy, in the Eastern Seaboard, were not moving north. They're pointed to the ports. They were designed to bring cotton to port. And so they don't, they actually parallel the rivers, they don't cross them. And the railroads that are exceptional, the ones that do cross those rivers and move north-south become crucial strategic point. So you mentioned prisoners. You discuss prisoners at some length in the book. Talk about, and this is obviously, you know, fraught and controversial issue at the time that leads to no end

of ongoing conflict between colonists and Native Americans. What is what is the role of the prisoner in Indian warfare. Yeah, you know, the longer I spent with this problem, the more complicated it got. And so the probably the best way to start is with how we used to imagine, you know, decades ago, what the role of the prisoner was. And especially taken from our original English and French and Spanish sources. It used to be that we thought the primary role of the prisoner was. was to become a victim of torture that would satisfy some revenge notions,

revenge requirements in the society that took the prison. That is to say, I'm a I'm a member of the, or let's just go with Mohawk. I'm a member of the Mohawk Nation, and we've experienced casualties at the hands of the Mohicans, and therefore the next time we go to war, we're going to go after some Mexicans, we're going to take someone in a prisoner. We're going to bring them back to our Mohawk town. And on that spot where everybody can see it, participate, we're going to torture them to death, and that will be a way of fulfilling our

revenge requirement. And then Dan Richter, amongst other historians, very famously pointed out that many of the captives are not killed, tortured to death. They're in fact adopted. That in one of the functions of the Mohawks going after the Mahican village is yes, to take revenge. That doesn't go away. That notion of that requirement is not wrong. It's just been overplayed. What Dan said was that we need to understand that they're also taking captives as a way of literally restoring, restocking their population. Because those captives would be adopted fully in to Mohawk society as kin.

I'm using the Mohawks in this case because Dan Richter's analysis is of the Urquil, the Hunloshani, of which the Mohawk was one of the five nations. And so other scholars around who working in the whole continent started seeing adoptive warshare occurring amongst many other societies. It's not as prevalent in some other societies as it does seem to be in Mohawk, for example, but that it was quite common. And that we would see this blend of prisoners being taken, some of them killed and tortured, tortured and killed, others of them adopted. And typically children and females adopted, typically males killed, not 100%. We have, in fact, some of the most famous stories in American white colonial history are of adopted male captives. Daniel Boone, just as an example.

Since then, since Daniel Richter's work, especially with people working in the Midwestern upcountry, we've started to see, picking of Brett Rushford. We've started to see other ways in which captives were treated that do not suggest full kin-level adoption. that in fact prisoners could be taken for the purposes of subservient labor. And sometimes even deliberately feminized, they would be given a feminine role, for example, a man would be given a feminine role in their new society. They're not being enslaved in this case, but they are being made into a form of labor that serves the community, is fed like everyone else, lives like everyone else, but is not necessarily your new cousin.

and in fact will not fulfill, for example, therefore a warrior's role in the society. And I talk about that a little bit with one of the captives that I discuss in the book, who seems to be fulfilling a feminine role as a male captive in the Native American society that adopted. Furthermore, when the Europeans show up, the role of captives is changed forcibly by European interventions. one of the ways it changes is that Europeans want slaves and they persuade Native Americans who are already going to war to take captives in the first place to take some of those captives and sell them to them

that is to sell the Indian captives to whites for enslaving purposes and because they typically did not make good slaves in North America because it was easy for them to escape many of them were shipped to the Caribbean to function to work on the sugar. plantations where most of them, of course, would die of disease and overwork. And so there becomes relatively easy, methodologically easy, but painfully demographic transition,

painful demographic transition of taking prisoners to adopt to taking prisoners to sell, amongst especially some southeastern societies. That more or less ends in the early 18th century because it's essentially replaced by the Atlantic Blackslee, which is cheaper and easier than trying to get Indians to take captives and sell them to you and safer, or at least initially seen as safer. In the long run, it's definitely not safer. So that's why I said before in sort of in passing that prisoners are a key part of plunder. When I said that before, I mean in the podcast earlier, I didn't say why. I didn't say what function they would fulfill because they could fulfill actually a variety

of functions. And one of the things that we need more of is more specific specific regional nation-by-nation studies of exactly what happens to captives taken by the Shawnee, by the Cherokee, by the Creek, by the Choctaw. Because I think there's more variety there. And we've been sort of, for the last few years, because of Dan's

work with the Hoddocheoni, we've been sort of smoothing it over as saying it's adoptive warfare. And I think there's actually a lot more variety there going on. And I'm not sure I've cracked the code. I'm not the one who's done it, but I think there should be some more work. Christina Snyder's

work on this is really important. And she's talking about slavery across the whole experience of Native Americans. And she's one of the first other people to sort of poke at this and say, you know, there's more going on here than just adoption. And some of the best evidence for that is actually going back to what we talked about before, the Mississippi and chiefdoms. It seems pretty clear that those southeastern and Midwestern chiefdoms were taking prisoners as something even closer to slaves than what Brett Rushforth was documenting in the upper Midwest. If I may, I want to praise your book for what seems to me to be a really deliberate and successful effort to steer between, and I don't know if you would accept this breakdown,

but steer between these poles of kind of, if you like, long-running traditional demonization of indigenous practices on the one hand, dating from the period in question, understandable in a way, but nevertheless sort of inhibits actually understanding what's going on. And then on the other hand, a kind of how to characterize it, romanticization, a notion that, you know, things were uniquely peaceable and sort of better, better, if you like, than European civilization in some ways. Who knows whether or not that was true in certain respects? It just seems to me you were very carefully and deliberately trying to see through these two poles to something like the truth.

And it comes out that that's a part of the project. Well, thank you. And it certainly is a part of the project. project because I want to treat Native Americans as human beings engaged in competition like every other human being on the planet. And that starts from my perspective as a military story of the world. I don't, yes, there are occasionally we will find ethnographically some little tribe or something somewhere in the world that seems to live entirely peacefully, but that is not the normal experience of humans on this planet, I think. And there are people who would argue that it is.

And I'll give you a good example of this back and forth, the middle ground between the demonization and the pacified. It's the toft of the term that's used, you know, the pacified past. And by the way, I encountered this exact problem. The very first time I tried to TA as a teaching assistant for a Native American history course at Duke, I had students in my recitation in my sections who were on both sides of that divide. I had students who still held on to these old notions of, you know, the Red Savage who does, who scalps people. and also the pacified. I had them both in the same room,

and that was a struggle to try to get them both to the middle. So I think in one sense, from the very beginning of my approach to this problem, I've always been trying to deal with that divide. But one of the stories that I tell, it's not in the book because there's no place for it in the book, but one of the things that I try to do with my students is I asked them, I talked to them about scalping.

And I'll say, you know, so if you can't take a prisoner because you've killed them, more or less by accident, because things happen in battle. You tried to knock them on the head and knock them out and come back and take them prison or later, but they died. You still wanted to have for personal reasons.

We haven't talked much yet about personal motivations for war. We've been talking about communal motivation. But there were also personal motivations to go to war, as there are in any society. We have to be careful about why does the community go to war, why do individuals go to war? Those aren't always the same. But your personal status is enhanced by getting home with a prisoner,

but it's also enhanced by getting home with a scout. And so you take that rent, and I'm going to be a little graphic, so bear with me. You take that round disc of flesh from the top of an enemy's head off, and you take it home. And if you're going to keep it as a trophy, as an emblem of your success, that means it's now going to have to be made into leather. So you have to, you have to tan it. And then the first thing you do with a piece of skin, with deer or human, is you have to stretch it. And it's a round disc coming off the top of your head. So you get a wooden hoop and you tie the edges of the scalp to that hoop to stretch it.

And then you might paint the inside, the skin side, and leave the hair. And then you're going to sort of decorate the hoop. And then you hang it up outside your wigwam. And we call that in modern terms a scalp hoop. But in the pacified past terms, what would you call that? Picture it in your mind. I can't say any ideas are coming to mind. I'm fascinated to know.

Dream catcher. Huh. Because a dream catcher is the hoop with the string, and the leathers just shrunk right out of the middle. We remove it from the center. And, you know, it's still got the feathers dangling from it. It's got the wooden hoop and the strings that stretch across it. And it's capturing magical power in the same way that a scalp was emblematic of your

possession of the spiritual power of the enemy that you would kill. And that's part of pacifying the patent. This is why I don't like, and every time I tell this to my students, they're all freaking out because they all have a dream catcher hanging from their rearview mirror or in their mother's kitchen and the window. And I'm like, that is a scalp hoop. And by telling them it's a scalp hoop, I don't necessarily want them to think of Indians as any more violent than anybody else in the world because I can then immediately turn around and talk about English judicial torture or the treatment of prisoners in the English Civil War in Ireland. You know, I don't, humans do this sort of thing. And what they do varies by culture. But violence and the mutilation of bodies is held in common amongst every society.

So in the time we have left, I want to ask about one of the central themes of the book, which is this question of how does European, the intervention of European civilization change the nature of Indian warfare? You seem you are very resistant to older scholarly claims that there is a kind of clear dichotomy to be drawn. And, you know, I'm going to kind of conflate things here in the question. You're welcome to pick them back out and separate them again. But, you know, one such notion, which when I read it in your book, you know, I'm not a scholar of this subject matter. It seemed sort of on its face. It's like, oh, that makes sense. I could see why a dichotomy like this would be reasonable.

this notion that both sides failed to meet the other side's expectation of war. And so the consequence was increased savagery, if you will, on both sides, because both sides felt that their customs of warfare had been transgressed. And so we're inclined to strike back in ways that they may not have to a culturally peer force. That's one kind of dichotomy that you're resistant to. But there's a whole series of them. You take particular aim at this other book, The Skulking Way of War. Talk a bit about this set of arguments that suggest that.

that something dramatic changes pre-imposed contact in Indian warfare and why you seem skeptical of those assertions. Yeah. So part of what you just said, I support, in fact, have written about the notion that both sides, you know, we're going to do as a binary that is not accurate, right? So we're going to Indians and Europeans as two. And of course, there's more than that. You know, there's Spanish and French and Dutch.

And there's obviously lots of native societies. But setting that aside, we're going to deal in biners. that both sides come to conflict with each other with a system and the next set of expectations about war, culture of war that includes limits, includes expectations of how diplomacy works, includes expectations of how prisoners are treated. And again, both sides have notions about them. And when they meet each other, they don't mesh. And the failure to mesh, and sometimes the failure to even understand what the other side's rules are leads to escalation. I think that's absolutely true. And there's a whole chapter that tries to show, excuse me, and it tries to show how that is true.

But there is a simplified version of that that says that the pacified Indian, that is to say, I'm using that pejoratively, that the Indians before European contact did not destroy whole towns. They did not use fire as a weapon. There was one scholar who even says they didn't usually kill anyone. And there was, there's even an older, 1960s era pacified Indian past that said that scalping was an European invention that Indians adopt from Europeans. And that is archaeologically demonstrably false. Scalping is a very old millennia old tradition in North America. So that's the part that I'm pushing back against. The idea that the Indians had prior to European contact did not engage in highly lethal warfare. What I say instead is that Indians engaged in both highly lethal warfare and highly restrictive ritualized warfare, depending upon which was appropriate at the time.

And in part because there was a relative balance amongst native societies between the power of the offense and the power of the defense. That it was rare to cut off and massacre a whole village because it was hard and dangerous. And so it just didn't happen very often. And when Europeans show up, the first thing that they do without even really realizing it is they're introducing new technologies into the system that will upset the relative balance of offense and defense. And so it enables more per capita killing in any given encounter than had been true before. Just to give a simple version, if 10 of me and 10 of them are. standing in the woods shooting at each other with bows, there's going to be a whole lot of ways in which the arrows are not going to become lethal. They might hit a stick and go off course. I can see

it coming. I dodge. It hits me, but it's just a pointy stick that's gone into a fleshy bit, and I can pull it back out and survive that perfectly fine. It can be lethal. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say it's not lethal, but there's a whole lot of ways in which that exchange of fire can be non-lethal. And that goes into that risk calculation. Remember the cutting off way of war is fundamentally about the risk calculation and the ticking clock and how long can I stay and what do we do when they come out of the village to fight back. Now, if I make those guns, those bows into guns, and there's 10 of me and 10 of them standing shooting at each other in the woods, I have a different set of problems. Now, I'm not going to be able to shoot as fast because the reloads speed. But if a bullet

hits me, it is going to, if it hits bone, it's going to blow that bone apart. And I'm not going to be able to recover from that kind of fracture. I will lose the limb at best and die most likely. If it hits clothing and goes into my fleshy bits and not, doesn't hit bone, it takes clothing into the fleshy bits. And clothing is dirty and then I get infection and sepsis and dot. I can't see the bullet. So I can't dodge it. The bullet hits a leaf or a branch. It doesn't change its path. It keeps going straight. And so I've statistically greatly increased the lethality of that encounter by introducing gunpowder. And Indians figure that out.

And so, yes, I agree to an extent with the older scholarship that says battle, that open battle of 10 guys firing at 10 guys in the open, in the woods, but in the open, becomes less common. And especially any form of battle that had massed groups of people, because it's easy to hit a mass with a gun. The battle wasn't the only way the Indians used to fight. They also used to use ambush. And ambush had always been lethal because if you're not 10 versus 10 facing each other in the woods,

but a few guys walking through the woods who were attacked from behind with bows and clubs, that's also lethal. I'll give you an example that we actually know a great deal about because it happened in the modern world in New Guinea, which is the Donnie people who lived in the highlands of New Guinea, very much cut off from any other society until after. World War II because of the remoteness of where they live. They're an agricultural people. They're not hunters and gatherers. They were agricultural, but they were not living in states. They lived in tribes, essentially. And when they went to war with each other, the very first time

that a European saw that, it was a European with a video camera. So we have film of a bat's, actually several battles, between two different Donnie nation. And it looks very unlethal. because they're all jumping and bouncing around, dodging bows and javelins. They use both. They use javelins and bows and arrows. They're dodging arrows and spears. You actually see one guy pull a barbed spear point out of his butt.

You know, he got one in the fleshy bits, but he survived. And it looks like if this is the only way they fight, yeah, this is not a particularly lethal form of war. It was only later that the filmmakers, these were ethnographic filmmakers who were doing this, realized that actually quite a large precaution, capita percentage of the population was dying in war, but they were dying in little tiny ambushes, one after another. They weren't dying in the battles. They were dying in the little

ambushes. And it took them a while, it took the investigators a while to realize that this was happening because it wasn't happening in a big open plane where you could see it all happen. And that gets back to the whole individual versus communal motivation. Because the individuals who are out there in the big open battle, in part are fighting for the visibility, say, to be seen by their own side as partaking and showing, especially the younger men, showing their prowess and stature in battle. And Native Americans had a similar expectation for individuals and show their prowess and stature to bring home the trophy. And so that individual motivation is always sometimes in tension with the communal motivation, which is don't everybody go out there and die

because then that makes us vulnerable. And that's, as I talk about in the book, you know, if a rating party goes out and a whole bunch of people die, the rating, party leader gets fired. In some cases, there were often threats to kill them. Wayne Lee, author of The Cutting Off Way, Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500 to 1800. I very much enjoyed this conversation. I've learned a lot. I'm very much looking forward to your future work or forthcoming work on pre-modern warfare. Is that the phrase? Pre-industrial conquest. Pre-industrial conquest. I hope you'll come back and talk about it when it's ripe. And thanks for making the time.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.