Getting Out of the White Settlers’ Way: Re-telling the Arrival of Settlers on the Prairie

The second post in this guest series returns to the theme of rural memories of Native Americans and presents a contrasting characterization of early interactions between white settlers on the plains and the tribes that had lived there for centuries. While the first post in this series explored the vilification of a Native American warrior who refused to surrender to white settlers, this post explores white efforts to perpetuate the opposite narrative—the peaceful departure of Native Americans who recognize the superiority of newly arrived white settlers.

In 1920, a collection of communities on the plains of Iowa and South Dakota celebrated their first 50 years on the prairie with a dramatic historical reenactment of their communities’ origins. They called it the Golden Jubilee Pageant. As a historian, this is one of those archival gold mines, offering revealing glimpses into how these rural settlers remembered nineteenth-century settlement and early interactions with Native Americas.

The play presents a dramatic re-imagination of the communities’ earliest days, celebrating the bravery and perseverance of its founders. Fittingly, the drama begins with much fanfare as embodiments of History and Progress with a legion of attendants process onto the stage. “The debt we owe to the past becomes too soon a debt on paper only and we feel too little obligation of the heart,” History declares, “We players now present our tribute here. With reverence and devotion we are come to turn the page of history back a bit.”[1]The pageant’s explicit purpose is to bathe the community in nostalgia—a communal effort to venerate the men and women who preceded them.

While the performance is rife with material for analysis, the second act in particular presents a tidy picture of how these white settlers understood their early interactions with the Native Americans who possessed the land before them. Importantly, the playwright did not pretend that these communities took root in an uninhabited region. He explicitly acknowledged that the white settlers took possession of the land from the Native Americans and wrote a fictional scene to capture the essence of the land exchange that took place. In reality, though, by the time that these communities appeared in the 1870s, the tribes that previously inhabited the lands had either been defeated in the Sioux Wars of the 1860s or moved to even more remote lands.

At the opening of the scene, Native women and children mill about the stage before a band of warriors arrives, giving thanks to the Native deity “Gitchie Manitou the Mighty” for the spoils of a successful hunt. Laden with the bounty of a successful hunt that promises to feed the tribe for many days, the chief calls the community to a time of thanksgiving.

In addition to an abundance of the food, he celebrates, “All our enemies are vanquished. Left us are the fierce Dakotas, Left us and departed westward, fearing well our bows and arrows.”[2]This proclamation establishes “the West” as a site for defeated Native tribes. While the tribe revels in its victory, the Dakotas appear from the West. After a brief skirmish, the chief declares, “Once again we come victorious. Vanquished are the craven cowards. Nevermore will they molest us. Now these fertile hills and valleys evermore will be our portion.” These Native Americans have fought for their land and intend to cultivate it into perpetuity. They will not join the defeated in the West.

These dreams of claiming these fertile hills and valleys are short lived. Immediately after the chief’s triumphal announcement, a medicine man enters and announces that he cannot affirm the chief’s proclamation. The chief had focused his attention on the raiding tribes to the West, the medicine man chides. He, on the other hand, had looked eastward and saw “four paleface strangers” heading their way. These four strangers, the scouts for a band of hundreds of white settlers destined for the area, were nearing the village.

The medicine man roots his claim in the divine. “Gitchie Manitou the Mighty in a vision bade me greet them,” he informs the chief, “and he bade me treat them kindly. All these rolling hills and valleys which your eyes delight to feast on are decreed to be their portion.” By the divine intervention of the Native Americans’ own deity, the land is to be transferred to white hands. The medicine man continues, “They will plow and they will till it. All these lands will feed the hungry of all nations, climes, and people.” No longer will the land be used to care for its original inhabitants. Now, it is needed to feed the world.

The medicine man ends his soliloquy by claiming that the tribe “must follow the Dakotas. We must westward take our journey.” As the white settlers arrive on stage, the medicine man hails them, “Lo, behold the paleface strangers. Even now are come amongst us—Farewell, O ye fertile prairies—Your new masters now have claimed you.” Without any objection from the Native men and women on stage, the scene ends with the medicine man greeting the settlers and the Native Americans striking camp before moving off stage, never to be heard from again.

This artifact from this celebration starkly contrasts the memories of fierce resistance to white settlement, ably representing the type of interaction that white settlers thought they deserved from Native Americans. Warriors who resisted invasive white settlement were remembered as villains, but those that left peacefully (even if they were a figment of a playwright’s imagination) were heralded as paragons. In presenting this counter narrative, this brief scene highlights several crucial themes meant to shape how the descendants of these white settlers understood how they acquired their land from Native Americans.

First, the settlers take the land on a divine mandate. Throughout the remainder of play, the white settlers anchor motivations in their own Christian beliefs, but in this scene, they also appeal to Native American spirituality. The writer of the pageant communicated to his audience that the Native Americans had a spiritual reason for departing from their ancestral homes. Gitchie Manitou the Mighty instructed them to leave the land they had defended for centuries. Such a divine mandate could not be denied, even if these Christian settlers would not have affirmed the validity of this divine being.

The drama also sets up a stark contrast in how these two groups intend to use the land. The Native Americans only hunt on the land and when they do so, they only provide enough for their own tribe. The scene omitted any reference to the agricultural practices that many plains tribes pursued. In contrast, it argues that the white settlers needed to take possession of the land so that they could be a blessing to the world. Rather than economically motivated, the white settlers root their agricultural ambitions in humanitarian terms. While the Native tribes only use the land for themselves, the settlers intend to “feed the hungry of all nations, climes, and people.” Not only did they have a divine mandate to reside on the land, these settlers also had a humanitarian mission to pursue once they took possession of it.

One final theme that is worth noting, though many more exist, is the expectation that the Native Americans would back down when the white settlers walked on stage. This may, in some ways, resonate with the frenzy surrounding the conflict between white high school students and a Native American veteran at the Lincoln Memorial in recent weeks. In this scene, the white settlers do not speak. They merely walk onto stage and stand still. The medicine man sees them on the horizon and immediately knows that the tribe must acquiesce in the face of the white settlers’ superior designs for the land. As soon as the four white pioneers set foot on stage, the Native Americans retreated, allowing the white man to stand on their land undisturbed to pursue their divine and humanitarian mandate. All that was left for the tribe was to head west to join the vanquished.

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[1]Andrew J. Kolyn, Golden Jubilee Pageant, Act 1, Episode 1, September 30, 1920, Orange City, IA, Orange City History Collection, Box 1, Northwestern College Archives, Orange City, IA.

[2]Kolyn, Act 2.