It’s a story familiar to anyone who reads the news. A nation is invaded by a foreign power. To defend itself, that nation sells its natural resources on the open market and buys firearms to resist the invader.
This story isn’t in Syria or Afghanistan. It’s in Southeast Alaska, and it’s the one told by a new book, “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America.”
Professor David Silverman of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. spent five years researching how firearms spread across North America. In chapters stretching from New England to Florida, the Missouri River and the Pacific Northwest, Silverman explains how Native nations traded with Europeans and Americans for weapons, then used those weapons to resist colonialism.
“In most of North America, colonial powers trade with Native people for furs, whether you’re talking about beaver or buffalo, or sea otter in the Pacific Northwest,” Silverman said.
In exchange for those furs, “indigenous people want all kinds of goods … but what they want most of all is guns, powder and shot,” Silverman said.
If colonial powers refused to trade those things — as the Russians did — they found themselves shut out by Native traders.
“It speaks to Native savviness, it speaks to Native power and influence,” Silverman said. “They control valuable economic resources that the gun traders want access to.”
East of the Mississippi River, British and French colonial officials often had to give firearms as gifts, simply to open trade.
“Colonial states such as Britain, France, Spain and sometimes individual colonies provided Native people with firearms as gifts … in such volume that Native people didn’t have to trade for them. That surprised me to no end,” Silverman said.
When they agreed to provide firearms, they strengthened anticolonial resistance.
“They’re cultivating friends even as they’re strengthening enemies,” Silverman said. “And we might be engaging in the same sort of thing right now in Syria. The person you’re arming one day might be your enemy the next day.”
Invading Russians
In Southeast Alaska, the Russians were the invaders. Through the first two decades of the 19th century, fur traders attempted to implement the same policies they had enacted in Siberia: forced labor. In the Aleutians, Kodiak archipelago and the shores of the Kenai Peninsula, they required Natives to hunt for them and pay tribute in furs.
In 1792, Alexander Baranov, leader of the largest trading firm in Alaska at the time, met the Tlingit at the entrance to Prince William Sound.
“During the darkest hours of the night, before daybreak, we were surrounded by a great number of armed men. They began to stab and cut down the natives who were with me,” he wrote in a July 1793 letter. “On their heads they had thick helmets with the figures of monsters on them, and neither our buckshot nor our bullets could pierce their armor. In the dark, they seemed to us worse than devils.”
The Russians used cannons to force the Tlingit to retreat, but 10 years later, it was the Russians who retreated. In the first Battle of Sitka, Tlingit attackers — many armed with firearms — overwhelmed and burned a Russian fort. Another attack ambushed and killed a hunting party, and a Russian post at Yakutat was destroyed about the same time.
One of the keys to the Tlingit victory was armament bought from American and British traders.
During the late 18th century and early 19th century, Alaska was at the center of a vast triangular trade between Europe, the Pacific Northwest and China.
Alaskan sea otter fur was prized in China, and Chinese products were valued in Europe and the new United States. To get the sea otter furs they needed, the Americans and British were happy to trade firearms.
Busting myths
In the archives of New England, Silverman uncovered the records of traders who dealt with the Tlingit. It was part of a research journey that took him across the country, to two dozen archives and libraries and to talks with Natives across the United States.
The stereotypical myth is that unscrupulous traders would unload war-worn surplus weapons and cheap products on Natives who didn’t know any better.
Silverman found the Tlingit — and Natives in general — certainly did know better, and they demanded only the best weapons for their trade.
“Native people would not take whatever they could get,” Silverman said. “They’re not getting junk guns from traders, which I think is a widespread assumption.”
Earlier in his career, Silverman worked at Jamestown National Historic Park in Virginia and became familiar with the smoothbore black-powder firearms used from the 17th through 19th centuries.
“It seemed to me these weapons were much easier to use; they fired more quickly than most accounts I had read,” he said.
Scholars tended to discount the impact of smoothbore firearms, saying they weren’t much more effective than bow-and-arrow hunting and warfare at long range.
“I don’t quibble with that point, but Native people are very rarely firing on people from long range; they’re firing on people from short range,” he said. “It becomes easier to understand why Native people adopted firearms so quickly. Getting hit with a lead musket ball … it brings a deer down quickly. It brings a human being down quickly.”
More deadly
In 1804, the second Battle of Sitka was fought to a standstill between the Russians and Tlingit until the Russians successfully prevented the defending Tlingit fortress from resupplying its gunpowder stores.
Even afterward, the Tlingit so outgunned and outnumbered the Russians that the Europeans perennially felt besieged. As late as 1818, the Russians wrote that they were outgunned by the Tlingit.
By then, however, the sea otter trade was collapsing. Overhunting had made the animals almost impossible to find, and the same trade routes that brought guns to Southeast Alaska also brought disease.
“As they’re acquiring guns, they’re acquiring terrible epidemic diseases that unleash incredible destruction on their communities,” Silverman said.
Furthermore, as trade shifted to the inland pursuit of beaver fur, Tlingit neighbors began to acquire weapons of their own.
When that happened, traditional tribal and clan warfare became much more deadly.
“There’s a historical lesson and cautionary tale” when talking about firearms in Native America, Silverman said. “Indigenous people in North America transformed their lives with firearms,” he said.
Tribes and people who owned them and traded them became powerful leaders able to defend themselves from imperial powers, who then have to deal with them diplomatically, as equals.
There’s a downside to the firarms trade, too.
“It becomes a much more violent world,” Silverman said. “This book offers a glimpse into that world where everyone is armed. When everyone is armed, more people die.”
• Contact reporter James Brooks at james.k.brooks@juneauempire.com.
Alaska State Museum curator of collections Steve Henrikson holds a trade musket in front of a gun case containing various firearms collected by the Alaska State Museum on Friday, Dec. 2, 2016. Alaska is known for its firearms culture today, but that culture has roots stretching to the 18th century, when Alaska Natives took up firearms to defend their homes and villages from Russian fur traders.
