FROM HIAWATHA TO TECUMSEH

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30094, 30 March 1963, Page 3

FROM HIAWATHA TO TECUMSEH

The Patriot Chiefs. By Alvis M, Josephy Jnr. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 356 pp. Bibliography and Index. The author has done a service to history by recording in this book the successive risings of American Indian tribes against the encroachments of white men over a period of three centuries. It is a lamentable chronicle in which the cold-blooded cruelty of the red man is matched by the unscrupulousness, deceit, and bad faith of the invader, and it demonstrates the hopelessness of trying to create a bridge of understanding between two races whose codes of honour and fair dealing could find no common denominator. Of the nine Indian chiefs studied here, seven were lastditch fighters in defence of their tribal homes and hunting grounds, but two —the almost legendary Hiawatha, and. two centuries later, Tecumseh. showed both vision and statemanship. The Spanish incursions into North America at the end of the 16th century moved Hiawatha, chief of the Iroquois to unite five mutually suspicious tribes into ti

brotherly bond which foreshadowed the democratic ideal. He desired to live at peace with the world, a conditions made impossible by the religious bigotry of the Spaniards, Who aimed only at destroying the Indians or converting them to Christianity. Truly Hiawatha was the incarnation of the noble savage, and two centuries later his sagacity was to be matched by Tecumseh, a Shawnee chief, who also eschewed cruelty and barbarity in favour of an attempt to reach mutual understanding and amity with the increasingly militant white men. The 1 alters’ contempt for Indian simplicity together with their greed for land and gold led to their making treaties based on chicanery, which infuriated the red people when they dicovered, as they had to do. that they had been tricked. The Indians were disunited, but when moved to defend their territory they fought with blood-curdling ferocity. Small wonder that the spurious paternalism which styled the President their "White Father” inspired bitterness when the paternal promises so often proved to be false ones. Two of the chiefs, Osceola, the Seminole and the valianrt Crazy Horse, leader of the Oglala, died in durance to which they had been lured under a flag of truce.