This is a short series of blogs inspired by Ben Newmark and Mike Stuchbery's #youreallyshouldteach hashtag. Each blog will be an story which might help teachers delivering the C19th America / American West courses. Each story aims to offer a novel window onto a key topic - in this case the Indian Wars and Indian policy of the 1870s. This would make an excellent comparison to the more well-known stories of Red Cloud's War or Sitting Bull and the Little Bighorn.

You can find downloadable versions of these resources over on the C19th America blog HERE. If you want to find out more about Chief Joseph, I can highly recommend Elliot West's excellent book: The Last Indian War, or Ken Burns' documentary: The West.

Chief Joseph:
Fight No More Forever

It was late Spring when Chief Joseph looked back over his beloved Wallowa Valley for the last time. The new, green leaves promised a beautiful summer to come. In the past they would have reminded Joseph of the hunting season on the Plains. This time, he saw them differently; fragile and temporary, soon to fall in the stiff Autumn breezes. They reminded him that nothing, not even his own homeland could last forever, and that soon his own people would fall like the leaves in the gale of white settlement.
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Land and exploitation
The Nez Perce had historically had good relations with white explorers and settlers, but decades of settlement since the 1840s had strained the relationship as whites came in search of the American Dream. Tensions rose further still when gold was discovered in the 1860s.

In 1863, the government demanded the Nez Perce sign a new treaty, giving away 90% of their lands, including the Wallowa valley. The Nez Perce were divided over the treaty and many refused to move to the reservation. When Joseph became the chief of the Wallowa Nez Perce in 1871, he also refused to give up his ancestors’ vision of a free-ranging life. But this lifestyle was increasingly leading to conflict with white settlers who feared the presence of the Nez Perce, or wanted access to the gold fields.

In 1877 Joseph was called to a meeting with the US Army General, Oliver Otis Howard. Howard had already written to his superiors to say “I think it is a great mistake to take from Joseph and his band of Nez Perce Indians that valley...and possibly [should] let these really peaceable Indians have this poor valley for their own.” The government were not convinced. Joseph in turn repeated his stock response, that the land was the home of his people and not his to sell. Howard could almost see the writing on the wall when he came to the meeting with Joseph, but Joseph would not sell the land.

An unwanted conflict

Ever wondered what it was like to cross the Great American Desert? Ever wanted to know the experiences and hardships faced by pioneering families? 

During the Summer of 2012 I live tweeted the experiences of one emigrant family, from the diary of future women's rights activist, 17 year old Abigail Jane Scott, as they would have happened 160 years ago in 1852. Don't worry if you missed it because all the details are still here. 

• Find out more about the family by visiting the link HERE and some of the back story HERE.
  
• You can also download a Google Map of the journey in which I have embedded the diary extracts. This is available at the end of this section! 

• abigail_scott.kmzDownload File
  

The Aftermath

• Rev. Neill Johnson and his wife Esther Roelofson (Abigail's aunt and uncle - photo from later years) http://goo.gl/g35xw
  
• John Lawrence Johnson (Abigail's cousin) in later life http://goo.gl/e43uM
  
• Find out what became of Tucker Scott after his relocation to Oregon http://goo.gl/NeRtd
  
• In 1853 she married Benjamin Charles Duniway, "a sober and provident husband" as Abigail called him. More here goo.gl/QrGXk
  
• From 1871, after working as a school teacher and boarding house mistress, Abigail edited the "New Northwest" newspaper in which she campaigned for women's rights http://goo.gl/b4lc4 http://goo.gl/LNsGB . Her husband was also injured in 1862 and could no longer work so she was the major bread winner.
  
• Abigail Scott received her first voter registration card in 1913 after a long suffrage campaign http://goo.gl/fqvXl
  
• Of course one of the sadder results of the Scott emigration was the growing tensions in Oregon itself. Both Tucker and Harvey Scott ended up fighting in the Yakama Indian War in 1855 http://goo.gl/EhBBR http://goo.gl/IIVIw By 1858, the Yakama had lost 90 percent of their traditional lands and were confined to a reservation. 24 chiefs were hanged or shot. According to accounts, some of those who had surrendered were summarily executed by the US Army. The Yakama Indian guerilla Qualchan turned himself in and was promptly put to death http://goo.gl/2Mk5x

One of the most fascinating books I have picked up recently is Edward Baptist's "The half has never been told: slavery and the making of American capitalism". Baptist makes a powerful reassessment of the role played by slavery in the development of America. He takes particular issue with the orthodox view of slavery as an outdated mode of production, effectively brought to a timely end by capitalism and the rise of the free market.

In many ways, Baptist's book brings to mind Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" in that it makes every attempt to put the African and African American experience right at the heart of the story. Each chapter for example begins and ends with the story of one or more people who were brought into slavery. The chapters in the book follow the different aspects of the slave body (hands, feet, heads, hearts, blood etc.) and the impact of slavery on each. The tale is both powerful and full of anger at the mistreatment of human beings, but also with the sanitized way in which the history of this period has been told. As such, the line of narrative is sometimes a bit harder to follow than in a standard history of slavery and its abolition. I have therefore decided to split this report on the book into a number of sections.

In this first section I want to explore Baptist's main lines of argument of how and why slavery, especially cotton slavery, expanded in the new southern and western territories of the USA after the Revolutionary War. Here Baptist argues, a whole new variety of slavery was born, a modern form of slavery, driven by capitalism and its flows of money, goods and people. I will return at another point to focus on the lives of the enslaved...

I am only really intending to make this a brief review as I plan to revisit some of the claims made here in more detail soon. Never-the-less, I could not finish a book like this and not write anything. 

In many ways Baptist does for the story of slavery what Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" attempted to do for the story of the American Indians in 1970. His view is clear from the outset: "Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden." (loc.229). The book recasts the whole of the story of slavery to see it through the experiences of those it affected. Baptist also goes on to show how the results of slavery continue to influence capitalism today. There is an almost Marxist overtone to his final section, quite unusual in an American history:

The AndAllThat.co.uk teacher blog is moving from WordPress onto the main website. From now on you will find non-topic related content here. 

You can still access the archives from the WordPress site by visiting http://andallthatweb.wordpress.com . I will endeavour to transfer the content over the next few months.

Mr F

For those of you who missed David's talk on Friday. This really is an excellent talk and will mean that we need to do much less in terms of content for the Business and Industry section. A must watch I think!

Mr F

For those of you interested you can also buy David's book: "The American West: The Invention of a Myth" here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-American-West-Invention-Myth/dp/1860570127/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330874685&sr=8-1