A curious tale attends the French explorer La Salle’s 1680 exploration of the Mississippi. It happens that La Salle, having run short on supplies, paused to establish a small fortified camp on frozen ground near Peoria, Illinois. He gave the tiny outpost a name—Fort Brokenheart (French: Fort Crèvecoeur)—which reflected the general mood of the expedition. Already, six of his original crew of thirty men had mutinied, fleeing into the woods rather than face the horrors of the Mississippi. It was a deadly river, or so the natives told them, teeming with serpents, surrounded by hostile peoples, and ending in an abyss. The Frenchmen wanted no part of it. La Salle placed Fort Brokenheart under the command of his Italian friend Henri de Tonti, a redoubtable veteran who’d lost his right hand in a grenade explosion and subsequently wore a glove to cover his iron hook. Leaving de Tonti with a skeleton crew, La Salle headed north to Canada for supplies.
The trip north was difficult. Often, after wading through icy waters, La Salle and his companions found their clothes had frozen to their bodies. When they arrived in Canada, they had little opportunity to relax. Messengers had followed the explorer north to apprise him of desertions from the fort. La Salle set off once more for the Mississippi, hoping to resupply his men before it was too late.
As La Salle made his way down the Mississippi, drawing closer to Fort Brokenheart, he came upon the remains of a terrible war. The feared Iroquois had swept through the region, wiping out any tribes that stood in their path. Nothing in La Salle’s experience had prepared him for the sight of such carnage. The longer he searched, the more butchery came to light. In some villages, completely burned, nothing remained standing except for a few charred stakes, topped with trophy skulls. Half-burned cadavers had been left to the wolves, crows, and vultures that noisily squawked and howled amid the destruction. Some bodies lay partially cooked in kettles next to the carcasses of victims who’d been impaled and roasted. La Salle carried on with numb fortitude, meticulously examining skulls for signs that they may have been Frenchmen, until at last he found his tiny camp. A final chilling discovery awaited in the remains of Fort Brokenheart: a plank on which Tonti had left behind a message in French: NOUS SOMMES TOUS SAUVAGES.
We are all savages.
* * *
The New World had a way of turning everything upside down. Here, where La Salle had landed, there were no walled sanctuaries where one might escape the brutality, the trophy killings, or the endless cycles of vengeance. Everywhere was war. The tiny company of Frenchmen had tried to wall off the horror, much as their prehistoric ancestors had back in Europe, but with insufficient labor at hand, their efforts failed miserably. Without the protection of their flimsy barriers how could they even hope to be civilized? To be there and to survive was to succumb to another way of life, to become a part of it, un sauvage.
If de Tonti could have seen more of the New World, he might have reconsidered his parting message. It wasn’t all savagery, after all. There were, for example, the Maya, whose cities had certainly seen better days by then, but who could still look back, like the Europeans, on their own classical antiquity. Not too much earlier, they had written in hieroglyphs, built cities and pyramids, and developed fine systems of math and astronomy. Farther south lay the imperial world of the Incas, remarkable for engineering achievements. In Central America, the Aztecs commanded a massive empire, echoing the Eurasian models of Hammurabi, Theodoric the Great, and Kublai Khan, wherein former barbarians take over an urban civilization and build on it rather than destroy it. In all these lands, massive fortifications provided the sort of sanctuary La Salle and de Tonti couldn’t find among the tribes of the Mississippi.
There were no shortcuts to civilization in the Americas, no skipping what had always been the rule in Europe and Asia. The march toward civilization in the Americas was everywhere preceded by the adoption of walls that secured the passage from warrior to worker. In Peru, the first steps were always higher, up the slopes of the Andes Mountains, where safety beckoned at ten thousand feet, even if not for long. The movement required an immense commitment of labor, carried out in thin mountain air that must have left the first unadapted arrivals gasping. Andeans moved stone and earth to create mountainside terraces where they could farm in safety. By the sixth century AD, the walled city of Kuélap looked down even on the clouds, a breathtaking example of labor converted into defense. Its cut-stone walls soared some sixty feet in height. Inside them, the inhabitants immediately became more advanced than their unwalled contemporaries and even performed the world’s first bone surgery. Not far away, some forgotten Peruvian state established a line of border forts and then constructed the sixty-mile Great Wall of Peru. Eventually, the Andes bristled with fortified cities, such as Chan Chan, which had twenty-six-foot-high walls, and Hatunmarca, which was girded by three successive stone walls. When the Incas consolidated the region, they established yet another great wall, 150 miles long.
In Mesoamerica, workers contended against the jungle, and, in so doing, developed the patience to construct cities of stone. There, where nature swallows even pyramids and towns, history seeks to hide. Whole civilizations have dressed in camouflage and disappeared into the forest, becoming indistinguishable from the vegetation. Fortunately, archaeology has come a long way since 1839, when John Lloyd Stephens paid a skeptical local $50 for the ruins of Copán. Stephens hacked through vines with machetes to reveal a wondrous wall. Nowadays, laser mapping technologies hack away the jungle electronically, penetrating dense canopies to unveil what lies hidden beneath the tangle of earth, roots, vines, and branches. The new images disclose structures that were not supposed to exist: miles-long ramparts and ditches dating back to the Olmec and early Maya period. It seems that, contrary to what was once believed, the Mesoamericans required all the same protection as their counterparts across the Atlantic.
Fortifications of all types accompanied the rise of civilization in Central America. We now know that by the time Guatemala’s El Mirador had grown to become the apparent capital of the first state in the western hemisphere, around the same time that Nebuchadnezzar was constructing the walls of Babylon, the city featured sixty-foot-high perimeter walls. El Mirador’s inhabitants were still driven from their homes, but not before staging a ferocious last stand, fought atop a pyramid. In the meanwhile, settlers moved atop Monte Albán, fortified the flanks of the hill with a wall almost two miles long, and established the Zapotec civilization, which was instrumental in the spread of writing in Central America. A proliferation of walled cities accompanied the efflorescence of Mayan culture. When city walls were not sufficient, the Mayans established segmented border walls by fortifying the regions between hills and placing watchtowers on the hilltops.
* * *
The walls of Central and South America weren’t found farther north, and neither were the mathematicians and astronomers. In North America, the tides of prehistory pushed in an entirely different direction. By the time of European discovery, the builders of heavily walled pueblos in the Southwest had largely been wiped out, remembered only as Anasazi, “enemy ancestors” or “ancient ones.” Like the Andeans, they had once been committed to a life of labor. Those who built pueblos atop mesas had to tote supplies and even water up the steep slopes to their homes. Only a few survived to greet the Spanish.
At Cahokia, Illinois, another ancient nation, also long forgotten, constructed a one-and-a-half-mile palisade augmented by bastions. Like the Mesopotamians of ancient Iraq, these inhabitants of the lost “Mississippi Culture,” whose city peaked around 1200 AD, covered their wall with plaster. Inside it, they left all the telltale fingerprints of an enormous civilian labor force, including the fourth-largest pyramid in the Americas, and some mysterious mounds, the largest of which once rose as high as a ten-story building. From time to time, other North American sites developed wooden palisades, but proper walls were rare. Of the nearly four hundred palisaded sites known, few consisted of anything more than screens of posts, carelessly spaced apart so that a determined invader could squeeze through.
On this vast continent, unwalled but for porous palisades, diversity prevailed, in the form of hundreds of distinct tribes, each with its own ways. The tribes spoke a variety of languages, wore a variety of clothes, and, having adapted to diverse habitats, practiced various ways of producing and acquiring food. They were as different from one another as the ancient German was from the Gaul, Hun, Mongol, or Turk—which is to say, they were hardly different at all. They were all warriors, just like their unwalled counterparts in Eurasia, and utterly unlike the wall builders of South and Central America.
* * *
Thomas Forsyth, who lived with the Sauks and Foxes, once made an observation on his hosts, that would have applied, without correction, to any of the unwalled warrior peoples of Eurasia. “Young Indians,” he wrote, “are always fond of war, they hear the old warriors boasting of their war exploits and it may be said, that the principle of war is instilled into them from their cradles.”
Forsyth’s comment—by no means isolated—directs us to a history long buried, an image only now being rescued from that same ideological jungle that once resisted the hacking of anthropologists such as Keeley and Chagnon in their struggle against the entrenched belief in primitive pacifism. The thickets of a dubious orthodoxy—the myth of the peaceful “noble savage”—has long grown over the Native American past. The grip of the ideal has been so strong that even those Native Americans who seek to take pride in their warlike heritage have been largely ignored, an embarrassment to those who prefer the pacified image invented by white primitivists. But here we are, looking at a very different image recovered from the jungle: the unwalled Native Americans sharing the same warlike values as the Mongols and Huns.
Mulling over the American evidence, comparing it to that from another side of the globe, one wonders if we may have detected a glimpse of that skittish unicorn so fervently hunted by the social scientists: a hint of universality, evidence that perhaps human societies everywhere tend to fall into the same patterns of development. Independently, separated by miles of ocean, the New World had evolved along the same divergent paths as the Old. One path, beginning with walls, had led to writing, architecture, astronomy, and math. The other, open and unwalled, led only to militarism.
The centrality of war to the unwalled natives of North America was once noted even by their most ardent admirers, at least among those with firsthand knowledge. Henry Schoolcraft, the author of many an encomium on the Indians, and a man who spent years living among the tribes and was himself married to an Ojibwa wife, summed up with some force:
Success in war is to the Indian the acme of glory, and to learn its arts the object of his highest attainment. . . . The whole force of public opinion in our Indian communities is concentrated on this point: the early lodge teachings (such as the recital of adventures of bravery), the dances, the religious rites, the harangues of prominent actors made at public assemblages (such as that called “striking the post”),—whatever, in fact, serves to awaken and fire ambition in the mind of the savage is clustered about the idea of future distinction in war. Civilization has many points of ambitious attainment. The Indian has but one prime honor to grasp: it is triumph in the war path; it is rushing upon his enemy, tearing the scalp reeking from his head, and then uttering his terrific sa-sa-kuon (death-whoop).
The observations of Schoolcraft and Forsyth find corroboration in countless other firsthand recollections by white and Indian alike. Warrior customs prevailed in nearly all native North American societies, extending across the full spectrum of habitats, economies, and language groups. It didn’t matter if a tribe lived in forest, desert, or plain. It was enough simply that they occupied an open and insecure environment, in communities without walls. The importance of war to the unwalled societies of North America can be seen in the customs of the eighteenth-century Inuit, who drank the blood of their Cree enemies and gave breast-feeding babies a taste of blood “so as to instill in them the barbarism and ardour of war from the tenderest years,” and those of the Mohave, who lashed and scratched their boys or pushed them into bees’ nests to determine if they had the right stuff to mature into elite warriors. The Natchez Indians presented bows to their boys at the age of twelve and entered them into archery contests to determine who would receive the honor of being called “young warrior,” or failing that, “apprentice warrior.” Powhatan mothers refused to give their sons breakfast until they’d passed a morning archery test by hitting something that had been thrown in the air. When a Native American boy reached physical maturity, the passage to adulthood everywhere entailed a painful proof of endurance, the most famous of which, the Mandan O-Kee-Pa, culminated in being gouged with serrated knives, then suspended from sticks inserted in the wounds. There were dances to prepare for battles, colored feathers to commemorate kills, and sticks for “counting coup”—a way of demonstrating valor. Martial songs and folktales roused the warlike spirit. Bundles of charms provided sacred protection. Scalps provided proof of service. Tribal military societies, such as the Big Dogs, Crazy Dogs, and, for men who had become tired of life, Crazy Dogs Wishing to Die, created peer pressure to perform well in battle. If this weren’t enough, young males who had not yet proven their courage were prevented from seeking a mate. Aging Cheyenne, interviewed in the 1960s, recalled how mothers would guard their daughters, querying would-be suitors about what deeds they had performed in battle. Girls would humiliate young men who had shown cowardice.
To the European, who came from a world where the way of the waller had prevailed over that of the warrior, it was all very strange. He couldn’t make sense of those men who didn’t define themselves by their work. The Indian male, it seemed, even to admirers such as Schoolcraft, was lazy. He was often observed standing around, smoking a pipe, and telling war stories, while the women did all the work. But, then, the Indians weren’t especially impressed by these newcomers who couldn’t fight their own battles and who busied themselves all day with women’s work.
* * *
The confused reactions of Europeans and native North Americans to their initial interactions only hinted at the misunderstanding and conflict to follow. In many ways, that conflict wasn’t new. It was a late and unwelcome encore to a long-running tragedy that had already shaped civilization on five continents. The wallers and the warriors had never understood one another, and there is little evidence that they ever had either the hope or the expectation of coexistence. Long before the arrival of European colonists, the conflict between native wallers and warriors had apparently already precipitated the decline of Mayan civilization, as well as that of the pueblo builders. That conflict—the origin of so many ancient border walls around the world—reached its bizarre, perverted apotheosis when, in a reversal of historical patterns, great masses of wallers, generally inept at warfare despite their access to gunpowder weapons, invaded an unwalled continent inhabited by warriors.
Being the only trained warriors in an age of conflict has immense disadvantages. There were plenty of wars to go around during the colonial period, and the Native Americans fought in all of them. They fought in their own intertribal struggles, which already crisscrossed the continent, and when the English and French imported Europe’s intertribal wars to North America, the natives fought in those, too. Frequently, when the spread of European immigrants had become too great, the natives launched attacks on the newcomers. Invariably, they found the going pretty easy against the unwarlike settlers, until another faction of natives, eager for action, would join the whites and turn the tide. During King Philip’s War (1675–76), the Wampanoags and their allies had all but driven the hymn-singing Puritans of New England into the sea until colonial governors hired Mohegan and Pequot to defend the settlers. A few decades later, when the Tuscarora nearly annihilated North Carolina in 1711, Colonel John “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell rode to the rescue with a force of 30 whites and 925 Indians—typical numbers for these early conflicts and a critical reason for the rapid demographic decline of the tribes who were supplying soldiers for both sides of every conflict.
* * *
George Washington, who learned a great deal while fighting against and alongside Native Americans in the French and Indian War, once made a comment that, while rarely quoted, marks, as well as any stone monument, a turning point in history. Observing the rapid disappearance of the Native Americans, the first president suggested to his secretary of state that the United States might need to build a “Chinese wall” to protect the Indians from further encroachment.
Washington’s remark was not intended as a policy proposal. He preferred that Indian men should learn farming, reckoning this would transform warriors into workers and reduce conflict with farming settlers. In a broad sense, the comment belongs in the same category as Johnson’s nostalgic ruminations on the Highlanders, who had “in contempt of walls and trenches” lived in “fearless confidence.” The two eighteenth-century men both knew that an ancient way of life was becoming extinct, even if one romanticized it somewhat more than the other. They had seen the last of the unwalled, or very nearly so.
The remorse expressed by Washington and Johnson would only grow as the world’s great walls, battered by wind and rain and robbed of their stone by farmers, receded into the landscape. As the walls gradually disappeared, so, too, did their histories. Ancient conflicts were forgotten, and perhaps that was for the best.
Ironically, the Native Americans, who had played little part in the history of walls, became, in the popular imagination, symbols for all the outsiders who had once inhabited the world beyond the pale. Romanticized by Elizabethan poets, Restoration playwrights, eighteenth-century novelists, essayists, and travel writers, Enlightenment philosophes, early-American political philosophers, and the authors of early Broadway plays, the Native Americans were endowed in literature with an aura so great that its excess light spilled over even onto the unwalled outsiders of ages past.
A fascination for the lost world beyond the walls consumed Western thinkers during the Romantic era, with its love for all things natural and exotic. Enthralled and often titillated by glamorized images of the brooding nomad, a series of Western travelers, most of them women, set out for dusty, faraway lands in hopes of observing the very peoples whose ancestors had once terrorized the ancient cities, forcing the construction of the great walls. Despite the experience of being robbed or made witness to robberies, murders, and raids, Isabella Bishop, Mrs. E. R. Durand, and Vita Sackville-West penned romantic, adulatory encomiums on the nomads of Persia. Several other women, meanwhile, sought out nomads in Arabia, where Lady Hester Stanhope, Jane Digby, and Lady Anne Blunt arrived as enchanted admirers of the Bedouins. Digby married a sheikh. Far to the east, Beatrix Bulstrode sought out the Mongols, her fervent wish being for “primitive life among an unmistakably primitive people.” If she could have found Gog and Magog, she would have paid them a visit as well.
By the 1920s, the parade of intrepid ladies had paved the way for the arrival of those redoubtable silent-era documentarians Ernest Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, whose Grass introduced the tent-dwelling Bakhtiari to film audiences. The movie was accompanied by a book, which includes, among other things, a wistful soliloquy by the Bakhtiari khan, in which he explains how he would gladly trade his chiefly rank for the opportunity to live in New York. He had briefly attended school in Manhattan, and he remembered it as a place of theaters and pretty girls. “You come be boss of Baktyari,” he said. “I go dance on Broadway.” Grass was a groundbreaking film, but it wasn’t Schoedsack and Cooper’s masterpiece. Eight years later, the adventurous duo produced another movie, this one fictional, about an island where the inhabitants had constructed a giant wall to restrain a great primitive beast that lived on the other side. The movie was remade in 1976, then again in 2005, then again in 2017.
A particularly fond childhood memory of mine was formed on a day that several friends and I were crammed into a Volkswagen Bug, then dropped off at the old Tennessee Theatre in downtown Knoxville, where we watched a special matinee of the original King Kong. Happy as only nine-year-olds can be in that ornate old movie palace, we cheered heartily when Schoedsack and Cooper’s great ape, which had just killed dozens of innocent New Yorkers, swatted down a biplane that had taken to the air to defend the city. Nine years old and we already knew we were supposed to root for the primitive over the civilized. We didn’t give a damn about New York. We just wanted to see the other side of the wall, where dinosaurs fought giant gorillas.
When had it become so ingrained to dream of the other side of the wall? Was it when the artist Gauguin sailed off to Tahiti “to see no one but savages”? Or when Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents to inform us that we were all, despite what we might think, miserable, as long as we lived the civilized life? Or had it begun much earlier, perhaps around the time Johnson rued the subjugation of the unwalled Highlanders?
For the first time in our story, we have arrived at that point where the protagonists begin to remind us of ourselves. They have emerged victorious over the forces they once walled out, and it has filled them with remorse. They worry that they may have lost more than they ever won. Having forgotten the reason for the old walls, they regret ever having built them. Rebelling against the models of the past, they might have stopped building walls altogether. But it wasn’t yet time for that.