Jon Manchip White - Everyday Life of the North American Indian

The Conestoga wagons creak and lumber across the prairie, their canvas flapping like a convoy of little ships labouring across an enormous empty ocean. The sun is just passing its zenith and beats down pitilessly. The trail-boss and his outriders urge on the teams of tired mules and their drivers; they must make the waterhole marked on their makeshift maps by nightfall. Suddenly the trail-boss stiffens in his saddle. He lifts his hand to his dust-streaked face and peers under it at the distant horizon. Where the edge of the vast plain meets the sky he can see a brown plume coiling into the air. Could that dim smudge be anything more than an ordinary dust-devil? No: this is Indian country. A moment later his ears catch the drumming of hoofs and the yelling of war-cries. Quickly he orders the toiling wagons to swing inwards and laager into a tight circle. Men leap out and pull down packing-casks, chests, trunks, even pieces of furniture, thrusting them beneath the wagons and into the gaps between to serve as a barricade. Winchesters and Navy Colts are snatched from their holsters and boxes of ammunition are broken open. The women crouch beside their menfolk, loading the spare weapons or huddling protectively above the children. None too soon. The first wild wave of horsemen is already breaking against the flimsy barrier. The men lying behind the upturned armchairs and chests of china and water-barrels fire into a blur of half-naked bodies daubed with paint and feathers. The air is filled with savage yells, with the crack of guns, with the reek of blood and sweat and gunpowder. Again and again the attackers return to the charge, leaving their dead draped across the barricade and the upturned shafts of the wagons. Finally they fall back on their traditional tactic of riding full tilt around the besieged band, yelping and yippying, guiding their bedizened steeds with their knees, twisting sideways to loose off their arrows and fire the rifles stolen from the victims of earlier massacres or sold to them by renegade white traders. The defenders squint grimly down the scorching barrels of their guns and pour fire into the maddened mass of the savages as they pound by, the manes and tails of their mounts and their own plaited locks and headdresses streaming out behind them. Bullets thud into bodies. Redskins topple to the ground to be trampled by their own comrades as they whirl past in a vortex of dust. The trail-boss is hit. His second-in-command snatches up his rifle and takes command. There can be no surrender, for the white men know that they can expect no quarter. They will be scalped, their wives and daughters will be seized as slaves and squaws, their children will be brought up in Indian ways. And now the arrows ripping into the wagons are tipped with fire and the tindery canvas burns with an oily flame. There is no alternative but to fight to the last, to sell their lives dearly...

1 Indians attacking a wagon train. After a painting by Frederic Remington.

Such is the portrait of American Indian activity with which we are familiar from watching a thousand movies. It is exciting and entertaining. But is it true? Does it really correspond to historical facts?