Indians in eastern North America possessed no alcohol at the beginning of the colonial period. By 1800, so much alcohol flowed through the Indian villages east of the Mississippi that each community was forced to a decision: would its members drink, or would they abstain? No other European-produced commodity created the difficulties among Indians that alcohol, particularly rum and brandy, caused throughout the East. What is more, when the descendants of the colonists moved westward, they brought liquor, and its often tragic consequences, along with them.
There were, to be sure, Indians who produced and consumed alcohol long before Europeans brought beer, rum, and brandy to the Western Hemisphere. In the Southwest and throughout Central America, Indians fermented local plants to produce alcohol. But no such customs existed in eastern North America when the earliest recorded instances of drinking among Indians occurred during the sixteenth century. No substantial trade in alcohol had yet arisen; Europeans still provided wine only to select Indians. The few Indians who drank, according to observers, did so to the point of intoxication, an experience they apparently enjoyed; one European writer noted that the Indians came back for more. But not all Indians wanted alcohol or the experience it brought. Pierre Pastedechouen, a Montagnais, told Jesuits in the early 1630s that Indians had earlier believed that French explorers "were dressed in iron, ate bones, and drank blood." It is impossible to know how many Indians shared the revulsion that some felt against wine.
In British North America, the alcohol trade began in earnest after 1650, or about one to two generations after the establishment of permanent settlements by the English along the Atlantic Coast. The trade started then because colonists in the West Indies recognized the profits that could be made from transforming sugar into rum. After 1650, distillers in the Caribbean and on the mainland began to produce increasing quantities of rum. Enterprising colonists, many of them town dwellers who otherwise had limited contact with Indians, began to sell rum to Indians. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, more or less full-time traders began to transport liquor farther into the hinterland of colonial settlements. These colonists were responsible for hauling liquor to many Indian communities and to colonial trading posts, where Indians came to purchase it. With the expansion of white settlement westward during the nineteenth century, descendants of Europeans came to dominate the liquor trade even in regions where Indians had a tradition of fermenting local beverages.
Though it is often impossible to determine why Indians chose to drink, surviving evidence provides compelling clues. In the first place, Indian communities in early America had suffered a series of destabilizing shocks long before the liquor trade began. Epidemic diseases had decimated their communities, and colonists quickly tried to gain their lands, a process that at times became violent. These crises preceded the liquor trade, and quite possibly made Indians more inclined to drink. If Indians chose to drink out of frustration and despair, they were not alone; as social scientists have made clear, whenever Western societies undergo periods of rapid transition, rates of drinking increase. Perhaps many Indians chose to drink because they welcomed the respite from the disorienting forces that constantly besieged their world. Documentary evidence also suggests that some Indians enjoyed the heightened sense of power that seemed to accompany drunkenness.
Yet many Indians in eastern North America also welcomed the sensations of drunkenness for other reasons, and even felt it necessary to share these feelings with others. Some believed—as did Indians in the Southwest and Mexico—that the disorientations of intoxication had sacred dimensions. Some Indians in the Great Lakes region, for example, integrated alcohol into their existing ceremonies, notably mourning rituals. Other groups recognized the importance of alcohol by including it in hospitality rituals. This is exactly what Powhatan did when, after encountering some colonists in the 1610s, he pulled out a valued bottle of sack and doled out precise amounts to his visitors. Widely divergent groups—including the Montagnais in the St. Lawrence Valley, the Passamaquoddies in Maine, and the Teton Sioux—thought alcohol possessed spiritual power or came from supernatural forces.
Recognizing alcohol's power did not mean liking its taste. Some Indians complained about the taste of alcohol, and, as one colonist wrote in 1697, "they wonder much of the English for purchasing wine at so dear a rate when Rum is much cheaper & will make them sooner drunk." For Indians in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, the primary reason to drink was to get drunk. On occasion groups of Indians who did not possess enough alcohol to get everyone drunk gave their liquor to a few individuals to ensure that at least some would become intoxicated.
However welcome drunkenness was to some, almost all observers recognized that intoxication was dangerous. As soon as the liquor trade began in earnest, Indians throughout the eastern woodlands knew that such commerce could destroy their communities. Time and again, according to countless Indians who bore witness to drinking parties, members of Indian communities drank to the point of intoxication and then proceeded to act violently. Surviving records reveal that Indians killed one another when inebriated and wounded each other in drunken melees. Families also suffered, especially when young men sold the furs and skins from the hunt for alcohol, thereby impoverishing their relatives, who needed food and durable goods. Domestic violence, accidental falls into fires or off cliffs, and bouts of exposure when the inebriated passed out in cold weather all contributed to the suffering of Indian communities.
Given the varied ravages associated with alcohol, it was not surprising that Indians from throughout the eastern woodlands approached colonial officials to protest the trade. The officials, almost always wanting to maintain good relations with nearby Indians, made efforts to prevent traffic in alcohol. Virtually every colony outlawed the commerce at one point or another, although the laws were often short-lived. But the lack of any effective constabulary force limited colonists' attempts at preventing the trade, a fact that traders knew well when they transported their wares to remote Indian villages. Even some Indians became carriers of alcohol, often transporting it long distances to remote villages.
The success of the trade depended, of course, on the desire of Indians to drink. If community leaders, men and women, could have convinced the young men who drank most often to quit, the trade could have been eliminated. Some groups managed to ban it from their towns, threatening to destroy any casks of rum that traders brought. But in spite of the horrors associated with liquor, prohibition never occurred in any widespread, organized form. From the time the trade began until the present, Indians from a wide variety of villages and cultural backgrounds have chosen to drink. For liquor sellers, the profits on the trade were always worth any risks. And the trade was profitable, especially when traders added water to the alcohol before selling it. From the colonial period into the twentieth century, there has never been a shortage of people willing to engage in the traffic even when it was illegal.
Ever since the colonial period, efforts by Indians and whites to stop the trade have failed. President Thomas Jefferson, recognizing that federal laws could prevent the trade only in federal territory, asked territorial and state governors to ban the commerce in 1808, but his efforts made little difference to the trade. Various acts by the federal government throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth also failed to stop the liquor trade. Even when government officials succeeded in banning alcohol on reservations, their reports noted that local Indians traveled beyond the limits of the reservation to purchase alcohol and that some of these western Indians, like Indians in the colonial period, brought alcohol back to their communities to resell it. In 1953, during the age of termination, the federal government removed the surviving prohibitions on Indian drinking; thereafter reservation governments possessed the power to ban sales in their communities.
Tribal governments also often failed to stop drinking in territory under their jurisdiction. The availability of alcohol on reservations remains a source of controversy today. Yet even though many communities realize its dangers, the commerce in alcohol continues. The three centuries or so of the alcohol trade suggest only one scenario: if Indians want liquor, then someone will be willing to sell it to them even if such sales are illegal or dangerous.
See also
Alcoholism, Indian.
Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Chicago: Aldine, 1969); Peter C. Mancall, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 "'The Bewitching Tyranny of Custom': The Social Costs of Indian Drinking in Colonial America," no. 2 (1993): 15-42; Jack O. Waddell and Michael W. Everett, eds., Drinking Behavior among Southwestern Indians: An Anthropological Perspective (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980).
Peter C. Mancall
University of Kansas
