Taming the "Savagery" of Michigan's Indians.

When immigrants from New England and western New York began streaming into Michigan ha the late 1820s, they voiced great alarm about the perceived barbarism and wildness of the territory's first inhabitants. Although Michigan's Native Peoples had developed complex, sophisticated cultures, Yankee-Yorkers viewed them as primitive savages who existed without ethical or spiritual boundaries, worshipped false gods, drank excessively, delighted ha violence, and lived like animals. Consequently, Yankees insisted, Native Peoples failed to achieve the technical, moral, or intellectual progress that distinguished civilized from savage societies. Michigan's French residents seemed nearly as barbaric as its Native Peoples to these Anglo settlers. In their opinion, the French had relinquished their civilized ways for savage Indian customs rather than trying to tame Indian wildness.

Appalled by Native Peoples' behavior, Yankee-Yorkers sought to eradicate what they viewed as savagery and to avoid the late that had supposedly befallen the French. To accomplish these goals, they established two types of boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable behavior: both types of restraints would help to establish order and to stabilize group identity by transplanting New England norms to the West. The first control entailed establishing formal legal boundaries, including laws to reduce Native drinking and treaties to place tribes on reservations of to force them out of Michigan. The limits that followed were informal cultural boundaries, which consisted of books and articles ha local newspapers that sought to persuade Michiganians to reject the lure of Native ways.

When this effort to civilize Native Peoples was at its height ha the late 1820s and early 1830s, Michigan contained roughly eight thousand Native inhabitants and some thirty thousand white settlers. (1) Most of the former were Algonquian speakers who belonged to one of three tribes--the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, of Odawa. They engaged ha hunting, fishing, and agriculture, supplementing their income by trading furs for European manufactured goods. In addition, Michigan's Native Peoples had established what scholars describe as a borderland culture. This culture arose after the French claimed Michigan in the seventeenth century. As Native Peoples and Europeans mixed, they exchanged values, customs, and material goods, creating a hybrid of borderland culture that fused Indian and European elements into new cultural forms. (2) Destroying these practices, Yankee-Yorkers believed, would enable them to preserve the purity of New England culture, instilling in Michiganians such important Yankee values as sobriety, industriousness, commitment to one's calling, and adherence to the tenets of evangelical Protestantiastism.

In examining this "civilizing" process, which occurred primarily during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, this article seeks to bridge the literature on state formation, which in the past has focused mostly on formal legal boundaries, and the "new western history," which concentrates on informal cultural borders. Thus, it will demonstrate the importance of multiple boundaries in both "taming" Native Peoples and establishing republican polities on the frontier. Additionally, this article joins a growing list of works that sheds light on a relatively neglected feature of borderlands--the methods that anxious elites used to destroy them. (3)

Eradicating borderland culture in Michigan, however, turned out to be a daunting task. Rather than simply reestablishing Yankee norms in the West, Michigan leaders created hybridized boundaries that differed in significant ways from those in the East, fostering a local culture that granted women and other groups more power and autonomy than they possessed in New England. Thus, the battle to contain wildness resulted not in a pure transplantation of eastern culture, but in the creation of new regional forms that differed somewhat from the Yankee norms on which they were based.

Of course this was not the outcome that Yankees expected when they initiated efforts to civilize Michigan's Indians in the 1820s. Prompting this crusade were fears that Indian wildness threatened white communities in two ways. First, Indians might make effective cultural missionaries and convert a growing number of settlers to their way of life. Second, Michigan leaders feared that the drunken and violent behavior of Indians could destabilize the new order they sought to establish on the frontier. This specter of violence not only represented a threat to the safety of settlers, but also could deter easterners from immigrating to Michigan and hamper the territory's economic development.

But Yankee-Yorker hostility to Michigan's Native Peoples also stemmed from other factors: Anglo Americans hoped to replace Michigan's fur trade with an agricultural economy. Native Peoples, who possessed most of the territory's land, represented a major obstacle to this goal. Yankees also viewed Indians as backward because they equated civilization with agricultural societies, placing clear boundaries between these cultures and those that relied on hunting. Underestimating the productivity and importance of Indian agriculture, Yankees viewed indigenous people only as hunters, who represented an earlier, more primitive stage in cultural evolution. (4) Viewing Indians in this way, moreover, helped to stabilize Yankee identity, enabling New Englanders to define themselves in opposition to perceived Indian barbarism. Michiganians also suspected Indians of disloyalty, fearing the ease with which local tribes crossed international boundaries and maintained close ties with British officials in Canada. Further fueling antagonism to Nauve Peoples were long-held English fears of cultural outsiders. The English, Ronald Takaki observes, castigated the Irish and Native Peoples of America for their "tribal organization," unfamiliarity with "God of good manner," indolence, and lack of self-control. (5)