Views On American Indians
While travelling overland throughout the American West, Jedediah's policy with the Native Americans was to maintain friendly relations with gifts and exchanges. However, if Jedediah felt Indians were being hostile to his party, he would make a demonstration by having one or two Natives killed with a rifle. This was done to discourage any further tribal aggression against him and his party. Smith punished his men for indiscriminately shooting Indians without any perceived threat to his party. Smith's reluctance to kill American Indians was due to his Methodist faith and training. Smith held contemporary beliefs that Native Americans were for the most part intellectually inferior to whites and considered untrustworthy. Smith stated that Indians were "children of nature"; a link between animals and humans.
Read more about this topic: Jedediah Smith
Famous quotes containing the words views, american and/or indians:
“No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been sometimes abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)