The Natives and the English: Crash Course US History #3 episode transcript - U.S. History by Crash Course
View all full transcripts of U.S. History by Crash Course on the blog: view now
Do you like podcasts? Go to PodExtra AI homepage (podextra.ai) to play and view complete AI-processed content of podcasts: summaries, mindmaps, topics, takeaways, transcripts, keywords and highlights.
The Natives and the English: Crash Course US History #3
From: U.S. History by Crash Course
In which John Green teaches you about relations between the early English colonists and the native people they encountered in the New World. In short, these relations were poor. As soon as they arrived, the English were in conflict with the native people. At Jamestown, Captain John Smith briefly managed to get the colony on pretty solid footing with the local tribes, but it didn't last, and a long series of wars with the natives ensued. This pattern would continue in US history, with settlers pushing into native lands and pushing the inhabitants further west. In this episode, you'll learn about Wahunsunacawh (who the English called Powhatan), his daughter Pocahontas, King Philip's (aka Metacom) War, and the Mystic Massacre. By and large, the history of the Natives and the English was not a happy one, even Thanksgiving wasn't all it's cracked up to be.
Full Transcript
The Natives and the English - Crash Course US History 3
speaker01 00:00:00
Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we're going to talk about one of the worst relationships in American history. No thought bubble, not my college girlfriend in me Green Green, your relationship with your high school girlfriend, me from the past UI, both know that I didn't have a high school girlfriend. No I'm talking about the relationship between Native Americans and English settlers.
speaker01 00:29:00
So as you'll no doubt remember from last week, the first English settlers came to the Chesapeake area, now Virginia, in 16 oh 7. The land the English found was, of course, already inhabited by Indian tribes, unified under the leadership of Chief wahoon Sonica. And I will remind you that mispronouncing things is my thing. The English called this chief pohatu because, of course, mispronouncing things was also their thing, pohatu was actually his title and the name of his tribe. But to say that the English blacked cultural sensitivity would be an understatement. So pohatu didn't get to be the leader of over 30 tribes by being a dummy and quickly realized that, one, the English were pretty clueless when it came to not dying of starvation. And two, they were useful because they had guns. So he decided to help them in.
speaker01 01:06:00
The English were indeed grateful. In fact, colony leader John Smith went so far as to order the colonists to stop stealing food from the Indians.
speaker01 01:14:00
In the book business, this is known as foreshadowing, so as previously noted, relationships, whether between individuals or collectives, tend to go well when they are mutually beneficial, and for a while, both the English and the Indians were better off for these interactions. You know, post smallpox, the Virginia Company existed to make money, and since the Chesapeake lacked gold or silver, making money required trade. OK, let's go to the thought bubble. We tend to think of trade between Europeans and natives as being a one way exchange, like savvy, exploitative Europeans tricking primitive, pure indigenous people into unfair deals. But that isn't quite accurate. Both sides traded goods that they had in surplus for those they did not. The English were happy to give up iron, utensils, tools, guns, woven cloth in exchange for furs, and especially in the early days, food which the Indians could easily part with because they had plenty.
speaker01 02:05:00
Soon, though, there were problems. In order to keep up trade relations, Indian men devoted more time to hunting and less to agriculture, which upset traditional gender balance in the society, and European ideas about land use started to overcome traditional Indian ways of life, and that led to conflict. The English liked to fence in some of their land, which kept the Indians off it, and also the English let their pigs and cattle roam freely, and the animals would eat natives, crops, and as Europeans appetite for furs grew, Indian tribes began to fight with each other over access to the best hunting grounds, leading to intertribal warfare, which suddenly included guns. But this was still a relatively calm time. Yes, at 1 point John Smith was captured by the Indians and had to be saved by Poha and's daughter Pocahontas, but this was probably all a ritual planned by Poha and to demonstrate his dominance over the English. Pocahontas never married John Smith by the way, but she was kidnapped by the English, and held for ransom in 16000. And she did eventually married another Englishman, John Rolf. She converted to Christianity and went to England, where she became a sensation and died of disease, stupid disease, always deciding the course of human history.
speaker01 03:10:00
Anyway, despite not marrying Pocahontas, John Smith is still important to the story when he left Virginia for England after being injured in a gunpowder explosion, things between the Native Americans and the English immediately began to deteriorate. How well the English went back to stealing Indians crops and also began stealing their lives by a massacre. Thanks thought bubble man, you guys sure know how to end on a downer, although to be fair, there are not a lot of uppers in this story, so after a period of peace following pocahontas's marriage to John Rolf in 1000 and 614 dramatized here, things finally came to a head in 1000 and 620 two-two when chief oppa chan could have led a rebellion against the English, it had become abundantly clear that more and more English were going to show up and they weren't just there to trade, they wanted to take Indian land, but the English struck back as empires will and the uprising of 1000 and 620 two-two ultimately failed, and after another failed uprising in 1640 two-four the 2000 and remaining Native Americans were forced to sign a treaty that consign them to reservation in the West, the West of Virginia at but the 1622 uprising was the final nail in the coffin of the Virginia company, which was a failure in every way it never turned a profit, and despite sponsoring 6000 colonists by 1006 hundred and forty-fourth Virginia became a royal colony, only 1200 of those people were still alive, proving once again that governments are better at governing than corporations up in New England, You'll recall that the Pilgrims probably wouldn't have survived their first winter without help from the Native Americans, which of course led to the first Thanksgiving and then centuries of mutually beneficial trade and generosity, just kidding while some of the Puritans who settled in New England, notably Roger Williams tried to treat the Indians fairly in general, it was very similar to what we saw in the Chesapeake settlers thought Native Americans could be replaced because they weren't properly using the land.
speaker01 04:44:00
Now John Winthrop who you'll remember from last week, at least realized that it was better to buy land from Indians than just take it to a Puritan. Land purchases usually came with strings attached, the main string being that the Native Americans had to submit English authority.
speaker01 04:56:00
Now, the Puritans had a rather conflicted view of the Indians. On the one hand, they saw natives as heathens in need of salvation, as evidenced by the Massachusetts seal, which features an Indian saying come over and help us. On the other hand, they recognize that the Native American way of life, with its relative abundance and equality, especially when it came to women, might be tempting to some people who might want to go native. This was such a concern that in 1042, the Massachusetts General Court prescribed a sentence three years hard labor for anyone who left the colony and went to live with the indigenous people. There was even anti-sinn propaganda in the form of books, captivity narratives in which Europeans recounted their desire to return to Christian society after living with the India were quite popular, even though some like the famous sovereignty and goodness of God by Mary rowlandson they admit that the Indians often treated their European captives quite well.
speaker01 05:45:00
New England's native population lacked an overarching leader like pohatu, but by 1637 the inevitable conflict between the English and the Indians did happen. It was called the Pequot War, after some pequots killed an English fur trader soldiers from Massachusetts, the newly formed colony of Connecticut, some Narragansett Indians who saw an opportunity to gain an upper hand over the pequots attacked a Pequot village at Mystic, burning it and massacring over 500 people. The war continued for a few months after this, but to call it a war is in a way to give it too much credit. The Indians were overmatched from the beginning, and by the end, almost all of them had been massacred or sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The war opened up the Connecticut River to further settlement. It also showed that Native Americans were going to have a tough time resisting because they were outnumbered and they had inferior weapons of the massacre and mystic shocked even some Puritans like William Bradford who wrote it was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, but despite the odds New England natives continued to resist the England in 1000 and 675 of Native Americans launched their biggest attack on New England colonies, 2000 in what would come to be known as King Philips War.
speaker01 06:44:00
It was led by a Wampanoag chief named medicom, which is why it is also sometimes called medicom's war, the English called metacom King Philip due to their fantastic cultural sensitivity. The conflict was marked by brutality on both sides, nearly ended English settlements in the Northeast. The fighting itself lasted two years. Indians attacked half of the 90 towns the English had founded, and 12 of those towns were destroyed, about 1000 of the 50000, 2000 Europeans and 3000 of the 20000 Indians involved died in the war.
speaker01 07:11:00
As I mentioned before, the war was particularly brutal. The Battle of the Great Swamp was really just a massacre of Indians by the English, and when King Philip was finally killed, ending the war, his decapitated head was placed on a stake in the Plymouth Town Square, where it remained for decades and on the other side to Daniel Salton Stall, who lived through the war. The heathen rarely gave quarter to those that they take, but if they were women, they first forced them to satisfy their filthy lusts and then murdered them. Salton Stall went on to describe a particularly brutal way that natives would kill colonists, cows cutting their bellies and letting them go several days trailing their guts after them, that indigenous people would reserve such brutality for livestock says something really important about this war. The Indians correctly saw European colonization as a threat to their way of life. That included the animals who trampled Indians land and whose grazing patterns required English to take more and more territory.
speaker01 08:01:00
Some of the stories told about Native American brutality also suggest the symbolic nature of this war. Like one English colonist was disemboweled and had a Bible stuck in his body cavity. Supposedly, the natives who buried him explained New English.
speaker01 08:13:00
Two, 2000. And you came into this country have grown exceedingly above the ground. Let us see how well you grow when planted into the ground. But it wasn't just the Indians who felt their way of life being threatened.
speaker01 08:22:00
It's time for this week's mystery document. The rules here are simple. I read the mystery document. I try to guess its author. If I'm right, I don't get shocked with the shock pen. If I'm wrong, I do.
speaker01 08:34:00
The righteous God hath heightened our calamity and given commission to the barbarous heathen to rise up against us and to be come smart rod, and a severe scourge to us in burning and depopulating several hopeful plantations, murdering many of our people of all sorts, and seeming, as it were, to cast us off here by speaking aloud to us to search and try out our ways and turn again unto the Lord, our God, from whom we have departed with a great backsliding. Okay, I don't know this one, so I'm gonna have to piece it together. We have a plural narrator that's important, seemingly monotheistic, feels like the heathens in this context. Likely the Native Americans have been sent as a score surge as it is apparently properly pronounced.
speaker01 09:18:00
I'm from Alabama, I don't know how to say a ton of words, I just recently that you don't check your Yahoo mail. You check your Yahoo mail and Yahoo's over already. So plural narrators scourge great lighting. The laws of war passed by the General Court of Massachusetts in $1975, are you kidding? From now on, the mystery document must always be written by a single human in person.
speaker01 09:42:00
I hate this, I hate this so much. It's worse now because I've had it before, so I know it's going. This shows us the way the Puritans understand the world, but it also shows us that within 50 years of its founding Puritans already felt that the mission of their colony to be a great Christian community was already kind a failure. If they'd been as righteous as they were supposed to be God wouldn't have sent the Indians to burn their homes and kill them. So it's important to understand that this was a war to preserve a way of life for both the Indians and the English.
speaker01 10:10:00
And that brings us to another question. What's the point of even telling these blue stories about massacres and atrocities? Point is to remind ourselves that much of what we learn about American history, like all history, has been cleaned up to conform to our mythological view of ourselves. Native Americans have been so successfully marginalized, both GE graphically and metaphorically, that it's easy to either forget about them or else to view them merely as people to be pitied or reviled. But it's important to know the ways that they resisted colonization, because it reminds us that Native Americans were people who acted in history, not just people who were acted upon by it. And it also reminds us that the history of Indigenous people on this land, masss, isn't separate from American history. It's an essential part of it.
speaker01 10:52:00
Thanks for I will see next week Crash Course is produced, directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisors may danco the associate producer is Danica Johnson. The show is written by my school history, Raul Meer myself. Graphics bubble. If you questions about today, video them in comments will be answered. Our team of histor by the way of histor A of historians, a team of Hiss who Kaine thanks for watching. As we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.