The Setting and the People: Ohio
“I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.”Alexis de Tocqueville
In 1839, the year of George Armstrong Custer’s birth, the United States was a country of striking diversity in its physical features, its economy, and its people. There were immigrants from all over Europe and Africa, speaking a variety of languages and carrying on equally varied cultural traditions. There were scores of religions, and although nearly all were within the Christian framework, wide differences marked the various rituals. Within the two basic types of economy, slave labor south of the Ohio River and wage labor to the north, there were hundreds of ways a man could make a living. Frontiersmen, filling up the empty land east of the Mississippi River, worked from dawn to dusk to become self-sufficient. Their tools and work habits were hardly more sophisticated than those of the Indians whom they had only recently replaced. On the East Coast, meanwhile, a complex culture had arisen; American merchants, lawyers, doctors, politicians, and sometimes even manufacturers could match the best Europe had to offer. In the South, despite its political domination by the planters and the slave economy, great opportunities existed for the artisan, the merchant, the small farmer, and even the ironmaker.
The land itself encouraged diversity. With the single exception of Russia, no other country had such a wide pattern of different land forms, soil types, and climate.
Yet there was a unity to the United States, a unity born of many factors, of which possibly the most important was the political genius of the Founding Fathers, who in writing the Constitution had managed to achieve a unique balance between national and local interests and governmental power. If there were few national institutions, there were national feelings and traditions. Americans had unbounded respect for republican government, a deep loathing of monarchy, and a common conviction that their country was without peer. They embraced the idea of political equality, as demonstrated by the position of the Northwest Territories, which—unlike any previous colonies—enjoyed full participation in the central government.
Nearly every white American believed in the future, in the doctrine that things were getting better all the time, for individuals and for the country as a whole. Faith and ambition helped draw Americans together; so did their mobility. Although they were by no means nomads, Americans moved longer distances, and more often, than Europeans had ever dreamed possible. In the process, Americans came to know men of widely separate backgrounds and heritages, giving to most Americans a breadth of experience unknown elsewhere.
No region of the country was typical, just as no man could be said to be a typical American, but there was one state in the United States that pulled together most of the traits usually associated with Americans and produced a blend that could at least be called representative. That state was Ohio. Its population came from both sides of the Ohio River and included people from every part of Europe and most of Africa. In 1850, out of a state-wide population of almost 2 million, 62 per cent had been born in Ohio, 27 per cent elsewhere in America, and 11 per cent in Europe. Ohio’s location, fertility, and opportunities made it equally attractive to Yankees and Southerners; New York State contributed 86,000 emigrants to Ohio’s total, while Virginia also had sent 86,000 settlers to the state. There were 36,000 residents of Ohio who had been born in Great Britain, 51,000 born in Ireland, and 112,000 in Germany.1 Africa contributed 25,000 free blacks to the population, half born in Ohio, half in the slave states.2 Taken together, Ohio had a wonderful mixture of peoples.
In the first decade of Custer’s life, Ohio enjoyed an economic boom. Population increased from 1.5 million to 2 million. Most of the growth was non-agricultural, which meant that Ohio was becoming more complex, specialized, and richer. While there were still settlers trying to scratch out a living on newly cleared land, there were thousands of solid, well-established commercial farmers, artisans of all kinds, lawyers, ministers, doctors and other professional men, and industrialists. In 1840, 272,000 Ohio men were involved in farming; by 1850 that number had dropped to 270,000. The number of men engaged in commerce, trade, manufacturing, or the mechanical arts had grown from 76,000 in 1840 to more than 140,000 in 1850. The number of professional men had grown from 5,600 to 9,000.3 Almost everyone worked. The “whole number of Paupers supported in whole or part,” as the census taker put it in 1850, was 1,250.4
It was a young population. In 1850 only 16 per cent of Ohio’s people were over forty years of age; another 11 per cent was between thirty and forty years old; 73 per cent were under thirty.5 Ohio’s people were even more diverse in their religion than they were in origin or employment; fifty-one distinct religious denominations sponsored nearly four thousand churches in Ohio.6
Ohio was wealthy. The sources of that wealth were the labor of the people—just plain hard work, with lots of sweat, from dawn to dusk—the influx of speculative capital from Europe and the eastern states, and a furious assault on the state’s natural resources, designed to change the environment to one more suitable—i.e., one more immediately productive. All three elements were crucial. Without the back-breaking labor nothing could have been done. But the workers needed tools, and the settlers needed money to purchase their land and equipment, and the towns needed money to build and grow. The risk capital could only come from the East. All the work and money in the world, however, by themselves could not have turned Ohio into the “Garden of the World,” as her residents liked to call the state. Fertile land, virgin to the plow, and minerals within easy reach beneath the earth were also necessary to success.
There has been much speculation about the origin of the American’s penchant for hard work, most of it starting with some reference to Calvinist doctrine. Undoubtedly Calvinism played a role, but few Virginians in Ohio were Calvinists, and yet they evidently worked as long and as hard as did their Yankee neighbors. No dry religious doctrine, not even a burning faith, could account for the way Americans labored. They worked so much that work became a psychic need with them; Americans were fidgety and nervous when they were not “doing something,” anything, as long as it was important enough to be called “work.”
Americans worked because they believed it was godly to do so, because of the vastness of the task facing them, and because the work would be rewarded. They were filled with a feeling that there was much to do—as a western traveler in the 1850s put it, “the forest to be felled, the city to be built, the railroad surveyed, the swamp cleared, political, social, and religious systems to be organized …”7
Americans saw the land different from what it was; looking to the future, they imagined bridges over the rivers, roads over the mountains, the forest replaced by the garden, towns springing up at every bend of every river, great cities growing wherever two rivers came together. They lived in a fantasy world, except that the fantasies were for the most part realistic and came true. With all that work around waiting to be done, Americans were always itchy to get at the job and transform dream into reality.
Ohioans knew that the work would pay off. Nowhere else on the globe, as Henry Steele Commager puts it, “had nature been at once so rich and so generous, and her riches were available to all who had the enterprise to take them and the good fortune to be white.” Ohioans realized, as did every American, the truth of Commager’s statement: “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America.”8
The riches were there to be had, and everything in the society and the environment encouraged the citizen to think big and work hard. There was a sense of spaciousness, an invitation to mobility—physical, economic, and social—and an encouragement to enterprise that made Americans forever optimists. Progress was no mere philosophical notion or ideal; it was all around, visible everywhere, a commonplace. The American, Commager points out, “planned ambitiously and was used to seeing even his most visionary plans surpassed; he came at last to believe that nothing was beyond his power and to be impatient with any success that was less than triumph” or, one might add, with any success that took longer than immediately.9
The political system protected a man’s right to possess exclusively whatever he had earned or built. Squatters were sometimes forced off the land by speculators and lawyers, to be sure, and often enough a frontiersman had to fight for what was his, but within the organized states a man’s property was secure both in law and custom. That security encouraged him to earn or build more, a process that could go on for a lifetime, for there was no limit on how much property or money a man could possess.
Just as the system encouraged each man to work, so did it encourage him to look out for himself and to hell with others. Nearly every European visitor to the United States before the Civil War commented on the extreme individualism of Americans with regard to matters of money or property and wondered how such a dog-eat-dog society could function. To the American mind, the answer was simple: every individual’s economic advance redounded to the benefit of the whole. Every tree felled, every bridge built, every industry established strengthened the nation and made it richer, and the richer the nation was, the greater the opportunity for individuals to get rich. Both federal and state governments, meanwhile, would see to it—at least in theory—that the race for riches was fairly run and that to the victor belonged the spoils.
The stability of the political system, the willingness of the men of the West to work, and the persistent image that in the West lay the Garden of Eden, or the marketplace and manufactory of the world, or a combination of both, all led to making the West a prime investment opportunity for European and eastern capital. Very few men in the West itself ever got rich, at least by eastern standards; the largest share of the profits usually wound up in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or London. Speculators of all kinds poured investment capital into the West, as they had from the beginning of the white man’s conquest of the New World. Like the squatters, the speculators saw in the West “a prospect into unlimited empires,”10 or, more succinctly, a pot of gold. Speculators, or rather their agents, were always stirring up emotions in the West, encouraging men to push on even farther west to extend the frontier, to build new towns, new farms, new factories, anything, everything. The settlers hardly had to be convinced, for they shared with the speculators a sense of bigness and of power and an assumption of destiny.
From the time of the founding of Jamestown, Americans had been optimists, but the size and shape of their optimism were intensified in the 1840s. A world was beginning to open for them, justifying the high hopes of the past and enriching the fantasies about the future. Before the 1840s those who crossed the mountains and descended into the valley of the Ohio cut themselves off from regular contact with the outside world. But the coming of the railroad made travel back and forth, and within the valley, much easier. New printing techniques, meanwhile, cut printing costs and made penny newspapers available to the Ohio people, and the telegraph provided the mass circulation papers with all the news from Europe and the East Coast. In 1828 there were sixty-six newspapers and periodicals published in Ohio; in 1840 there were one hundred twenty-three; by 1850 there were two hundred thirty-seven.11
The forties were a time of increasing specialization of labor. The sewing machine, patented in the decade, relieved women of the task of making men’s clothing by hand; factories took over that job. Saddles and shoes were also factory made. The frontiersman, who could do a tolerable piece of work on any job that needed to be done, gave way to various specialists, who by sticking to one task did it better and simultaneously released time for his customers so that they could concentrate on their specialties. Custer’s father was part of the process, and of the westward movement; in the 1830s he left Maryland to become a blacksmith in the village of New Rumley, Ohio.
New uses for steam power, and new iron boilers to hold the steam inside, extended the American’s power over his environment and provided something of a symbol for the most dynamic people the world had ever seen. Max Lerner sees dynamism as the key to the American character, for it permeated everything. There was the dynamism of the pioneer and the mechanic, the farmer and the inventor, the financier and the managers, the salesmen and the speculators, the lawyer and the politician, the intellectual and the soldier.12
It was a dynamism dedicated to transformation, and nowhere was it seen more clearly than in the assault on nature. The magnificent forests of the Ohio Valley, unsurpassed anywhere, were in the eyes of Ohioans nothing more than obstacles to progress. Standing trees were an affront to Americans because they were worse than useless—they took up sunlight and soil nutrients that could better be used by corn. Although everyone used wood as a source of heat or as building material, few thought of the forest in productive terms since there was more wood than could ever possibly be used, or so the settlers believed. Ohioans were united in their desire, nay passion, to destroy the forest, and much of their working time went into the task.
Clearing the land challenged even the Americans’ capacity for work. One began by girdling the big timber, which would kill the tree in a year. Meanwhile the settler grubbed out all bushes less than six inches in diameter and cut down and burned all saplings. It took a good farmhand sixteen days to clear an acre for the plow. The heavy deadened timber remained. These half-cleared fields were a familiar sight to anyone living in Ohio before the Civil War. One Ohio resident, David S. Stanley, who later attended West Point and then became a major general and served with Custer in the Indian-fighting Army, described the scene: “Huge trees dotted over the field, their bare bodies and naked limbs in the dusk of the evening or the pale light of the moon, having a most dismal and ghost-like appearance.”13 Beautiful black walnut, oak, maple, and other prime lumber stood dead and pathetic—and hated—wherever one traveled in the Ohio Valley.
Removing the huge crop of dead trees was an arduous task. Workers cut the tree down, then chopped the top limbs into ten-foot lengths. These they piled on the main trunk and set afire. Once the great log had burned in half, a team of horses or oxen swung the sections around so that they were parallel to each other. Then came the hardest job of all, rolling the largest logs together. The aid of half a dozen or more neighbors was necessary because one or two men could not handle the big logs. When that task was accomplished, the men piled smaller logs crosswise on the trunks, with all the smaller timber and limbs thrown on top, and started the fire.
“To see ten or fifteen acres on the day or more particularly on the night of firing,” Stanley wrote of his Ohio boyhood, “was to see a grand sight. … The adjoining woods are lighted up, fences stand out in bright relief, the sky is red with reflected forms and firelight, and saddest part of all, hundreds of cords of the finest firewood and thousands of feet of the most beautiful timber—all consumed and for no purpose but to get rid of it.”14
“Getting rid of it”—with “it” meaning anything or anyone who stood in the way of progress—was a universal American passion and a commonplace experience for all those living in the Old Northwest. It took time; by as late as 1850 nearly half the land in Harrison County, Ohio, where Custer lived, was still uncleared.15 But the determination was there, and the job was finished. Arthur Moore describes the results: “Whole forests of oak, beech, poplar, maple, and walnut, standing since Columbus, collapsed … from girdling and deadening with fire. There was in the heart of the new race no more consideration for the trees than for the game until the best of both were gone; steel conquered the West but chilled the soul of the conqueror. This assault on nature, than which few more frightful spectacles could be imagined, owed much to sheer need, but something also to a compelling desire to destroy conspicuous specimens of the fauna and flora of the wilderness. The origin of this mad destructiveness may be in doubt, but there is no question about its effect. The Ohio Valley today has neither trees nor animals to recall adequately the splendor of the garden of the Indian which the white man found and used so profligately.”16
From the beginning, then, the American tendency was to attack and destroy, then build. The Americans eliminated the forest and the game; even earlier they had eliminated the native human inhabitants of the valley. Twelve years before Custer’s father Emmanuel was born, “Mad Anthony” Wayne had opened Ohio to settlement by defeating the Indians at the battle of Fallen Timbers (1794). Emmanuel Custer was himself a member of the local militia, which was something of a joke as a military institution by the 1840s but nevertheless a vivid reminder of the day when the settlers had engaged in combat with the Indians. Western boys took as their heroes the Indian fighters; killing Indians was the noblest activity a resident of the valley could engage in. Hunting Indians was, besides, incomparably more exciting than hunting game, as frontiersman Adam Poe candidly admitted. “I’ve tried all kinds of game, boys!” he exclaimed. “I’ve fit bar and painter [panther] and catamount, but,” he added regretfully, with a vague, unsatisfied longing in his voice, “thar ain’t no game like Ingins—no, sir! no game like Injins.”
Arthur Moore, after an intensive study of the thought of the residents of the Ohio Valley, has concluded that although Indian-initiated atrocities doubtless produced many an Indian hater, “the white man’s desire for fame possibly took as many Indian lives as his passion for revenge.” The Indian, Moore writes in a penetrating passage, “was the finest instrument of the hero’s ambition, for notable deeds wrought against him earned the adulation of the public.”17 As the frontier advanced, newspaper reporters kept up with it, to send back East impassioned, heroic stories about the mighty conquerors of the red man. The stock adventure stories of the 1840s, sold in cheap paperback editions by the thousands to eager young readers, including Custer, recounted the deeds of the Indian fighters.
The Indian fighter was the advance agent of civilization, doing good and necessary work for the future benefit and prosperity of the United States. For the American public, as Andrew Jackson’s and William Henry Harrison’s careers illustrated, no reward was too great for those who drove the Indian out of the path of progress.
But if the frontiersman saw the Indian as only a more exciting and challenging obstacle than a tree, in the eastern states there was a growing sentiment that the Indian was a noble savage. The number of Indian lovers grew in direct relationship to the distance from the frontier. Here, as in so many things, Ohio stood in the middle: if there was no Indian threat, there were old Indian fighters around to remind people of what it had been like. So too, however, were copies of the Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper’s romantic confession of his own ambivalence toward the Indian.
Like so many of his fellow Americans, Cooper was drawn to the ideas of a primitive, free access to the bounty of nature, the rough equality of all men in a society, and of a natural, intuitive theology. These themes enjoyed something of a vogue in the America of Custer’s youth, especially among intellectuals and reformers, who were disappointed at (or resentful of) America’s failure to become a “new society” in a New World. In their eyes, the United States had repeated all the mistakes of Europe, with individual appropriation and inviolable property rights locking the many out from access to the wealth of the few, leading to a social stratification based on unequal distribution of property.18
Indian lovers tended to be reformers, or vice versa, and they saw so much to be done in the nation—starting with the elimination of slavery (Indian lovers and reformers were hard to find in the South)—that they had little time for the Indians themselves. Living on land only recently conquered from the Indians, they were content to defend verbally the rights of the Indians out West. Certainly they never developed the methods necessary to study the Indians. Rather, the Indian lovers, like the Indian haters, were satisfied with their own image of the red man.
Thus two myths existed together, irreconcilable but alive, available as a set of ideas, however contradictory, to any American who wanted to absorb them as part of his thought. To the American, the Indian was simultaneously always honest—and forever a liar; always courageous—and forever a coward; always happy—and forever downcast; always colorful and attractive in appearance—and forever dirty and disgusting. The Indian was faithful and kind—and disloyal and cruel.
Ambivalence always characterized American thought about Indians, but everyone used the Indian to prove some theory. To Southerners, Indians provided evidence of the inferiority of non-white peoples. To frontiersmen, Indian atrocities proved that the primitives were beasts, to be treated as such. Settlers used the Indians to prove their own economic ideas—removal of the red men was just, because they had not improved the land; putting it the other way around, settlers had a right to exclusive title to the land because they had worked on it and improved it, while the Indians who had neglected the land had no just claim to it.19 To reformers, Indians were living proof that a rough form of social equality, with equal distribution and ownership, and a closeness to nature, made for a happy life, in contrast to the “miserable conditions” under which the bulk of the American people lived.
Another element in the attraction of the Indians, or at least the idea of Indians, was that of wildness. The Indians were wild; whites were civilized—and tame. Indians knew the mysterious ways of the forest; whites did not. Indians wore rough, loose fitting, comfortable clothes; whites wore smooth, tight, constraining outfits. Indians were tough and manly; civilized whites were soft and feminine. Indians were at one with nature, while whites had somehow lost touch with the elemental forces.
“It is perhaps the consummate irony,” Arthur Moore writes, “that at each step up from savagery the human race has regarded the fruits of progress with a degree of misgiving and often longed against reason for a return to a simpler condition.”20 This desire for the not-here and the not-now has always existed, of course, nor without reason, but the point is that it added to the American’s ambivalent attitude toward Indians. Officers in the Indian-fighting Army after the Civil War were often heard to say that they much preferred the wild Indians to the tame ones, or that if they were Indians, they would most certainly be out with the hostiles, not drunk on the reservation. Custer expressed such sentiments frequently. These same officers took the lead in making certain that there were no more wild Indians.
So if Americans could not agree on what to think about the Indian, they did agree on what to do about him. If he stood in the way, he had to be moved. This fixed idea sprang, in part, from the nearly universally held notion that the United States had a “manifest destiny” to overspread the continent. Nothing could stand in the way of that achievement, not treaties, not truth, not courage, not suffering, nothing. No boundary lines were fixed and final, not until they became American boundaries. Each time any section or group within the United States cast jealous eyes on neighboring territory, be it Indian, or Spanish, or French, or Mexican, or British, the Americans readily agreed that the true, natural God-given boundaries of the country in actuality lay thither.21
Nineteenth-century Americans went on a campaign of military conquest unrivaled in world history, a campaign that was crucial to keeping alive the fundamental ideas of American life. The conquered land was “unsettled,” and long before 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous address on the meaning of the frontier, Americans knew the central importance of free land to the American way of life. For not only did the conquest of the continent add to the strength of the nation, it also nurtured in the breast of millions of young men the hope that they too could get rich. Expansion by conquest, in short, kept the economic boom, and the boom psychology, alive.
Even an Indian lover like Thomas Farnham, a Vermont lawyer who traveled in the Old Northwest in 1839, accepted the prevailing philosophy. “The Indians’ bones must enrich the soil, before the plough of civilized man can open it,” Farnham declared in a grisly passage. “The noble heart … must fatten the corn hills of a more civilized race! The sturdy plant of the wilderness droops under the enervating culture of the garden. The Indian is buried with his arrows and bow.” Those Indians who did not serve as fertilizer, meanwhile, could be educated and civilized—i.e., made over into white men.
Here again the Indian lover and the Indian hater came together; once the Indian was removed from the path of progress, he should be civilized and Christianized. The problem was, how to do it? How could one change the virtually anarchic Indian, who was in the habit of doing as he pleased, into a stable and productive citizen? The answer was simple and direct, as it had been throughout the period of white contact with the red men.
First, make them dependent. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw this in a flash after their initial encounter with the Sioux, of whom they said, “These are the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri, until such measures are pursued, by our government, as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.”22 All that would then be needed to put the Indian on the road to civilization was, in the words of Henry Knox, the Secretary of War in 1789, to give the Indian “a love for exclusive property.”23
That statement cut through all the verbiage and philosophical dispute about what an Indian was or was not and neatly defined what he must be, if he were to “be” at all. It was the guiding light for the missionaries and other friends of the Indians; they taught their wards that a love for private property and a love for the missionaries’ Bible went hand in hand. Moreover, the statement recognized the fundamental difference between white and red society, the difference from which all others sprang. The Indians had a communal ideal and practice, while the whites had an individual ideal and practice.* The Indians had no real notion of the meaning of private property; the whites not only understood it, they embraced it and all of the consequences that went with it. Even those consequences that led to excesses, such as extreme competitiveness, were exalted into virtues when they furthered the acquisition of wealth or fame.
The way to make the red men into acceptable neighbors or even someday into members of the community was to nurture in them “a love for exclusive property,” for this was the glue binding white society together. Alexis de Tocqueville, looking at America with the eyes of a French aristocrat, was most struck by the “general equality of condition among the people.”24 What he meant was not equality of possession, but rather that Americans were equally free to get rich or famous. “I know of no country, indeed,” he wrote, “where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.”25
The absence of a feudal tradition, the presence of natural wealth in uncountable amounts, and a political system that put its stress on equality of opportunity, all combined to make America the most open society in the civilized world. Anyone could become rich, anyone could become famous. Social and economic mobility, down as well as up the ladder, was the rule rather than the exception. So was the assumption that every man should stand on his own feet, which meant in practice that he should regard all his fellow men as competitors. The co-operation between people that was so central to primitive life and feudal tradition was, if not entirely absent from American life, only incidental to it. Farmers got together to share the work that no individual could do by himself, and cornhusking or logrolling or haymaking became social festivals, but essentially a man farmed by himself and kept what he grew.
In the end, the American was lonesome. De Tocqueville captured this feeling when he wrote, “Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”26
And the American was ambitious, always, to improve himself and his station in his society. “The first thing which strikes a traveller in the United States,” De Tocqueville noted, “is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to emerge from their original condition.”27 Opportunities to improve himself lay all around the American, but precisely because they did and because a man could fall even easier than he could rise, the American carried a heavy burden. There was no real security, no real sense of place, not even for the rich and famous, who necessarily wanted to become richer or more famous.
In pre-Civil War America a son was expected to do better in life —i.e., make more money or own more land or become more famous or powerful—than the father had done. This expectation hung over the head of every boy in the United States. It was a revolutionary expectation. Never before, anywhere, had the mass of the citizenry expected an improvement in their condition, or acted on the assumption that things were getting better all the time, or—most of all—that where the father had eighty acres or a thousand dollars, the son would have one hundred sixty acres or ten thousand dollars. It put an immense strain on the boys, for if they just held onto what the old man had, they would be failures. The American definition of success was something new in world history; the pressure of that definition, that need to improve, to do better, was felt by every lad in the land.
The thought that a man could and should improve his station in life was, I think, what De Crèvecoeur had in mind when he wrote, “The American is a new man who acts on new principles.” Certainly he did not mean that Americans had left European influences behind, not when he saw Christian churches in every village he visited, European technology on every farm, European-style merchants in every town, selling European goods; not when every lawyer he met had read Edward Coke and every politician had read John Locke, not when he saw Americans enslaving black men and calling Indians savage inferiors. What was new in America was individual expectation of personal betterment. It made Americans into the hardest working people in the world, and the most ambitious.
Ambition was the key to the American character. It was the motive power that got the work done, and the one sentiment shared by all white Americans, who were otherwise so diverse. George Armstrong Custer knew it well; late in his life he wrote: “In years long-numbered with the past, when I was verging upon manhood, my every thought was ambitious—not to be wealthy, not to be learned, but to be great. I desired to link my name with acts & men, and in such a manner as to be a mark of honor—not only to the present, but to future generations.”28 In the end his ambition was directly responsible for his early death.
* Obviously, as will be seen later, things were not quite that simple. Within the context of a communal society in which material goods were shared more or less equally, the Indians followed their own conscience and did whatever it was they wanted to do; within an individualistic society in which everyone was free to keep whatever he could get his hands on, most white individuals were tightly constrained in their actions by social and legal mores.