In 1996, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington proposed a paradigm for understanding the world of the 21st century. He argued that the major civilizations would inevitably be the source of most major future conflicts because of their very different worldviews and understandings of personal identity and religious meaning. Since the publication of Huntington's book, numerous events have lent support to his thesis: terrorist attacks in the United States, Spain, and England; the concern over Muslim immigration in Europe and Hispanic immigration in the United States; the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict; and the war in Iraq. Of course not all scholars agree with Huntington's perspective; in part, his book was itself a response to Francis Fukuyama's argument that Western liberal democracy was evolving as the dominant form of human government and that the future would see only minor conflicts over peripheral issues.

The issue of the correct lens through which to see both world history and future events is a controversial one, and the book reviewed here, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails, by Michael L. Tate, is not an attempt to provide a big-picture explanation of the forces that generate either cooperation or conflict. Still, Tate's work sheds some light on the question of whether civilizations and different worldviews are ultimately and always in conflict.

Tate examines a specific period in U.S. history and a specific set of events, namely the relationship between the Native Americans and the overland travelers in the heyday of wagon train emigration, from 1840 to 1870. During this period, more than 550,000 men, women, and children moved via wagon trains from jumping-off places such as St. Joseph, Missouri and Omaha, Nebraska to Oregon and California. In his case-study of this experience, Tate provides counter-evidence with respect to prevailing wisdom about how civilizations interact. He argues that popular images of a "clash of civilizations" on the overland trail are vastly overdrawn; indeed, "this vast region along the trails was more of a 'cooperative meeting ground' than a 'contested meeting ground.' "

In the interest of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that Tate's work fits well with my research with Terry L. Anderson, where we also argue the West was not nearly as violent or anarchic as usually pictured.1 We find, as Tate does, that Indians and settlers interacted rather peacefully for a long period of time. We also find that effective systems of internal governance evolved for wagon trains; that the several thousand mining camps in the Sierra Nevadas were able to discover and enforce workable rules for establishing and maintaining claims that did not involve large amounts of violence; and that the movement of cattle from Texas to the northern ranges was primarily an exercise in cooperation rather than conflict. We argue that the evolution of water rights and irrigation institutions was remarkably effective, and that home-grown institutions such as the round-up among cattle ranchers solved most collective-action problems in a relatively peaceful way.

Tate takes up in much more detail, however, a very specific issue with respect to popular conceptions of violence and conflict on the frontier: the familiar assumption that wagon trains making their trek from their points of embarkation to the gold fields in California or the farming land in Oregon faced constant depredation from the Indian population. Tate is a careful scholar and presents considerable evidence that both the members of wagon trains and the indigenous population saw enormous potential for gains from trade through repeated interaction. The differences in wealth levels and knowledge of the two populations meant there were numerous ways in which profitable trades could occur. In many cases, Indians settled along the trail and established themselves as middlemen in the exchange system, trading native goods for manufactured items that were both more valuable to themselves and to remote tribes further from the trail. The Indians also provided ferry service across many rivers that were difficult to ford, acted as guides, and also provided fresh draft animals in trade for worn out ones along the trail.

To be sure, misunderstandings oftentimes stood in the way of beneficial interaction—and most of the misunderstanding and distrust came from the westward travelers. Stories of fearsome attacks and the continual hostility of the Indian population were repeated numerous times and were well-embedded in the consciousness of those making the wagon train journey. Many emigrants expected to be attacked by the Indians, and their ongoing suspicion made commerce more difficult. Nevertheless, over time, the lack of frequent attacks did have an impact on the trekkers and most of them came to trust the Indians as honest entrepreneurs and faithful guides. The emigrants were further persuaded by numerous acts of charity and benevolence on the part of the Indians, who returned lost children, helped to search for strayed livestock, and sometimes risked their lives in rescuing settlers from dangerous rivers when crossings did not succeed.

Tate reports the work of other historians finding that from 1840 to 1860 period, only 362 emigrants were killed by Indians, a mere 18 mortalities per year for the period. By contrast, 426 Indians were killed by whites. These deaths mostly occurred in small skirmishes or as a result of misunderstandings about the true intentions of the Indians. There were few major incidents or even organized plans of aggression. Tate finds that from 1840 to 1870 there were only eight "massacres" in which organized Indian attacks were inflicted upon wagon trains. Most of these took place in the latter part of this thirty-year period as the Indians became more aware of the problem of resource depletion by European settlers and as attacks on Indians by the U.S. Army became more frequent.

One of the interesting issues that Tate does not deal with is how the existence of a standing army changed the balance of power and made it more likely that settlers would simply claim land and other resources rather than engage in honest negotiations with the Indians. Once the standing army was in place after the Mexican-American War, and with its subsequent build-up during the Civil War, there were more full-time officers and military bureaucrats, all of whose careers and budgets were advanced by fighting. Thus, is it not always the case that increased force on one side means more peace: rather it can lead to increased potential for conflict.

It is too much to claim that Michael Tate has provided a new way of thinking about interaction and conflict between civilizations, but his work is certainly important in understanding the dynamics of such encounters. Under certain sets of circumstances, people from very different backgrounds and with disparate understandings of the world have been able to interact peacefully, particularly when there are economic advantages from trading with one another.

This is not to say that cultural understandings and religious worldviews are unimportant; some of the major conflicts between the trekkers and the Indians occurred over misunderstandings of the role of gifts and what signing treaties meant. The ongoing conception of gift exchange and reciprocal obligation meant that the Indians often expected wagon train members to accept an obligation of reciprocity that was many times not understood by the travelers. Likewise, the Indians regarded the discussions surrounding treaty negotiations as an important part of a treaty agreement. Rather than seeing themselves as agreeing only to the explicit terms of the treaty they thought that their signatures meant they had heard all of the arguments on both sides of those engaged in negotiation. Despite these misunderstandings and the rising level of conflict toward the end of the period, Tate has nevertheless provided us with an important insight into a relatively peaceful period of interaction between two very different civilizations. We ought not to be too quick to assume that people of very different backgrounds will always find their interactions laden with conflict.

Peter J. Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College.

1. Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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