Liquor and the Ethnic Cleansing of North America

Abstract

Chapter 10 continues the focus on Native American temperance by highlighting the tension between US government goodwill and fair trade with native tribes on the one hand, and predatory capitalists—including John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company—who used liquor to subjugate the tribes on the other. William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) became an important mediator in this conflict between native pleas for prohibition and white profits. The role of distancing from predatory white liquor traders gives new perspectives on the Trail of Tears in the South, while the role of disputes over illegal white liquor peddling initiated the Black Hawk War to the North. As native tribes both north and south were relocated to the unsettled lands west of the Missouri and Arkansas territories, they found unscrupulous liquor dealers—including American Fur—waiting to take their tribal annuities in exchange for addictive liquor.