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Hiking in Clan and Tribal Country

CENTURIES AGO, there was a society that lived close to the land, in tune with the rhythms of nature. The people had food aplenty and prospered in their way, but it was a feudal society, with strong allegiances to the chief. The men were often conscripted to follow him into battle against rival clans. Many great warriors died, and tales of their deeds were handed down across the generations to become part of oral history.

After many hundreds of years, the clans buried their differences and banded together to fight a superior neighbour who spoke a different language, but they were overrun. Their homes were burned to the ground, their customs and traditions pro­scribed, their livelihood taken from them and their land given over to incomers with new methods of exploiting it. Survivors who did not adapt to the new reality were driven from their homeland to seek new lives elsewhere.

In the succeeding years, the descendants of those who stayed behind became assimilated into the new society that evolved. But nostalgia for the old days remains. Some still campaign for independence and look back on the old chiefs as almost mythical heroes.

No, this land is not Highland Scotland, it is North America, and the society in question is that of the indigenous Americans who lived there before the white man came and called them Red Indians. Comparisons with the Highlands are striking. In 2008, the Scottish Crofting Foundation even produced a report asking the United Nations to grant Highlanders the same rights as Native Americans by recognising them as the ‘indigenous peoples of the Highlands and Islands’.

Apaches and Comanches hated each other as much as Campbells and Macdonalds but, unlike in Scotland, the vast open spaces of North America provided room for all and food for all. The bulwark of this society was the buffalo, as plentiful as herring once were off the west coast of Scotland. A single herd could number millions and take days to pass. To catch them, braves would ‘run’ them on horseback to a cliff and drive them over the edge to their deaths. The tradition is commemorated at heritage sites such as Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump in Alberta.

The nearest Scottish equivalent to the buffalo was the red deer, which was also hunted in huge numbers across the Highlands. Deer survive to this day on the great sporting estates, but the great herds of buffalo fared less well. In the course of little more than a decade in the 19th century, disease, fire, drought and outright slaughter reduced their numbers from millions to a few hundred. It was this, as much as the white man’s western expansion, that put an end to the traditional Native American way of life.

Out of choice or necessity, many Scots left home and found adventure in the American West. Sir William Stewart of Murthly, for instance, decorated for bravery at the Battle of Waterloo, became a prominent mountain man who spent many years hunting and trapping in the Rocky Mountains. He even shipped buffalo back to the grounds of his Perthshire estate, together with three Native Americans who found the local firewater an unexpected challenge. One drunken evening, they fixed wheels to a large rowboat, hitched buffalo to it and galloped through the streets of Dunkeld with whooping war cries. What a sight that must have been to the god-fearing townsfolk.

James Mackay from Sutherland discovered the source of the Mississippi River. Robert Stuart from Callander became the third person to canoe across the breadth of the continent. James Macleod from Skye helped found Canada’s Northwest Mounted Police. William Keith from Aberdeenshire became a great painter of the Californian wilderness. His friend John Muir, from Dunbar, loved the Rocky Mountains so much that he became instrumental in the formation of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872.

In 1876, Native Americans made their last great stand at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, where General Custer was killed. Less than 20 years later, in a surreal twist of fate, legendary frontiersman Buffalo Bill was re-enacting the battle in Glasgow. The ‘redskins’ were cast as the villains and their number included Native American chiefs such as Kicking Bear and Short Bull, who had taken part in the actual battle.

So successful was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show that he returned with an even bigger extravaganza in 1894, when it is recorded that he attended a Glasgow Rangers football match and Annie ‘Get Your Gun’ Oakley learned to ride a bike. Such is progress.

Large tracts of land in North America are still owned by various tribes, who nowadays are more exercised in building casinos to relieve the white man of his cash rather than his scalp. On a lesser scale of enterprise, ‘friendly Indian’ stores dot the dusty western highways, selling Native American artefacts. Go to an historic site such as Canyon de Chelly, where ancient rock dwellings stand in natural alcoves half-way up sheer canyon walls, and you are likely to be approached by a denim-clad Navajo who, for a certain sum, will offer to guide you to a secret location littered with old arrowheads he swears are genuine.

Thanks to the size of the country, the lack of development on most Native American land, and the expanding number of national parks, much of the American West remains inviolate and is a magical place to explore on foot. The Rocky Mountain rambler will occasionally come across old mines and dwellings, but they have been assimilated into the vast landscape. Hiking in the more confined glens and corries of the Scottish Highlands has a different vibe. Reminders of former, more populous, times are everywhere, from ancient trails to battle sites, from dilapidated crofts and shielings to grand castles that are still inhabited.

As Steven Pinker demonstrates in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, the world is a nicer place now, with less war and less killing. It is now possible to wander the wild places of Scotland and the American West, and revel in their peace and solitude, without fear of speaking English. But what should never be forgotten is the tragic history that has made these lands as they are. As Dr Johnson wrote after visiting the Highlands in 1773: ‘Far from me be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery or virtue.’