“Yes, but do you have a flag?”

A comprehensive, if sometimes dense, history of George Washington’s interactions with indigenous peoples of America across his life as surveyor, British subject, Soldier, Revolutionary general, and President.

Calloway’s 2018 survey of Washington and the Amer. Indians is less about Washington himself than it is about the Revolutionary generation’s interactions with the dozens of tribes and hundreds of tribal leaders they encountered from the 1750s through the end of the century. Washington’s experience serves as a representative sample of how the landed gentry viewed the various tribes and their relationships with them.

Let’s just say it was complicated. It’s simplistic and juvenile to lump all colonists together with a uniform view of the indigenous tribes just as it’s simplistic and juvenile to assume all tribes acted the same. Some colonists/revolutionaries were very sympathetic and honorable towards the various tribes, many were not. Some recognized the tension between honoring treaty obligations and property boundaries with a populace that saw little problem with squatting on fertile open land (in part because nobody was within miles of it). Some tribes were peacable and wanted to attempt to coexist with the Europeans, others wanted to wage war, others wanted to leverage the European presence to their own advantage in their own internecine battles with other tribes.

Calloway does a decent job laying out these internal and external conflicts with Washington and the myriad tribal leaders (though he is far too credulous with stories of “the settlers kidnapped by war parties loved tribal life so much they didn’t want to leave!” when there’s ample evidence on the other side of the ledger).

Washington himself comes across as REALLY REALLY REALLY interested in land speculation and the profits to be gained by it. This does not diminish Washington as a man or leader (his early “skills” as a General are something else entirely — let’s face it — he wasn’t that good and Calloway recounts his troubles very well), but places him firmly within his class and time. In a land with billions of open acreage, it’s natural for a population that revered real property and title to think they hit the motherlode. And they kind of did….but for the people that were there.

And that’s where the inevitable and irreconcilable conflict between the Europeans and indigenous tribes comes in. A culture that valued real property and land title and agriculture vs largely nomadic tribes that subsisted on farming. To be pithy, the foreignness of the tribal view towards ownership is like the guy in the gym that is working on one machine but claims he’s using 10 other machines as part of his “circuit.” The two approaches are so opposed, one had to adapt to the other, and one side did (though not without cost).