I was several chapters into The Skulking Way of War, Patrick M. Malone's "micro-history" of King Philip's War in colonial New England, before I realized why I was enjoying it so little. As a longtime amateur student of military history and a fan of guns and tools in general, I had looked forward to an in-depth exploration of a conflict about which I knew practically nothing. The uprising of Massachusetts and Connecticut Indians (1675-77) offered a fascinating display of radically divergent tactics--the colonists' well-drilled regimentation versus the Indians' guerrilla warfare--which prefigured the clashes between British forces and American revolutionaries a century later. Through their effective use of quick-firing flintlock rifles and, especially, their command of forest partisanship (the eponymous "skulking"), the Indians inflicted terrible losses on their colonial enemies. Though ultimately victorious, the New Englanders would not soon forget the tactical value of a small band of partisans employing stealth, freedom of movement, and familiarity with the landscape. As Mr. Malone notes, "Lessons learned from Native Americans have significantly influenced the American military and the conduct of all its clashes, from colonial wars to twentieth-century conflicts."
In addition to its outsized impact, King Philip's War was not without its larger-than-life characters. There was of course Philip himself, the charismatic Wampanoag sachem who forsook his birth name (Metacomet), dressed in Western clothing, and moved to Boston--yet who also united rival tribes in revolt against the English. Philip's brilliant leadership greatly prolonged the doomed insurrection and exacted a bloody toll on the colonists. His great military opponent, Captain Benjamin Church, was a fearless innovator who quickly adapted the Indians' sniping, stalking, and ambush techniques to his own mixed unit of colonists and Indians. And the member of Capt. Church's company who finally dispatched Philip was a "praying Indian," one John Alderman, who preserved the sachem's hand for decades and charged for exhibitions of the gruesome relic.
Unfortunately, as I began to suspect on about the fortieth page, Mr. Malone does not deliver on the promise of such colorful characters and momentous consequences. His narrative, meticulously researched and lavishly illustrated, fails to establish any sort of emotional connection with the events or people under study. (Not so with the aforementioned illustrations by David Macaulay and Lyn and P.D. Malone. The ink drawings are simple and unpretentious, yet wonderfully evocative.) Even more problematic, he focuses ad nauseam on a few skirmishes while entirely omitting such details as the proximate cause of the war, the opening battles, and the peace treaty that followed Metacomet's death. The most rewarding passages of the monograph (at least for this reader) were the not-infrequent technical detours into the difference between a flintlock and a matchlock, the mustering practices of colonial militias, the intricacies of the illicit prewar arms trade, and so forth.
The lack of connection would be less problematic in a survey of, say, an entire century, or of a broad category such as guerrilla warfare. In a micro-history ostensibly dedicated to a clear exposition of a small area of the past, Mr. Malone's dry and disjointed prose falls dreadfully short.
All of which is not to say that he does not have a clear, coherent narrative in mind. In fact, that is precisely the root of the problem: in an all-out effort to support his particular thesis about the conflict, the author casts aside all attempts at character development or chronological narration. The thesis, in brief, is as follows: (1) The Indians possessed a successful society outside the paradigm of capitalism and conquest before the English arrived. (2) The English oppressors corrupted and ultimately destroyed that successful alternate paradigm. (3) The lengthy rebellion by technologically advanced Indians reiterates the first point, evincing a society that was in certain ways more flexible and modern in its use of weaponry than the very makers of the weapons themselves.
Several serious problems arise in the course of this narrative. In his effort to paint the tribes as morally superior to their opponents, Mr. Malone explains that "The Indians...had been exposed to the merciless concepts of European total warfare...In their desperate attempt to save their culture and to take back their lands, the Indians abandoned most of the self-imposed restraints that had limited the death and destruction in their traditional patterns of warfare" (100). Yet the tribes of the Massachusetts Bay area had feuded violently with each other since time immemorial, with the death tolls limited mainly by their crude weaponry and not by any "self-imposed restraints." And while it is certainly true that the introduction of European rifles made battles both among the Indians and against the colonists much deadlier, many tribes boasted long and entirely homegrown traditions of violence against noncombatants and cruelty to prisoners--as in the case of North Carolina naturalist-explorer and longtime Indian ally John Lawson, who was captured in 1711 by his erstwhile friends among the Tuscarora and slowly roasted alive. Total war, indeed.
Nor does Mr. Malone provide any hard evidence to support his underlying claim that the Indians interacted with technology in fundamentally different ways from the Europeans. Of particular note is his discussion of money, a concept that the Indians supposedly knew nothing of. He asserts that wampum, the shell bead used as currency by Indian traders along the Eastern Seaboard, was "worn as ceremonial jewelry, used in rituals of tribute and consolation...and sometimes offered in exchange for other items. In 1627, the Dutch induced the Pilgrims of Plymouth to use wampum in trade, and by the 1630's it was legal tender" (38)(emphasis mine). The notion that Indians "sometimes" traded with these beads, only to be co-opted by the greedy Europeans into the capitalist paradigm, is sheer historical fantasy--identical in character to David E. Nye's ludicrous assertion in the supplementary reading that Native Americans cannot "fairly be considered within such modern European categories as 'production' and 'consumption'...Native Americans engaged in trade but did not maintain a market economy; their objects did not have abstract monetary value" (Consuming Power 16). Aside from the utter falsity of this statement (given that many forms of currency did exist in Native American cultures), it demonstrates a shocking ignorance of basic economic realities--e.g. that being "engaged in trade" is the fundamental activity of a market economy, whether or not it is conducted through money as a medium of exchange.
But such impertinent facts ought probably to be kept safely in their "modern European categories," so as to allow Mr. Malone and Mr. Nye to pursue their vague vision of a lost society. They present a world in which technological savvy, specialization, and trade could somehow flourish without the taint of such silly and vicious nonsense as currency, property rights (the Indians "recognized a temporary right...to use land...but not absolute individual ownership," says Mr. Nye), or Christianity (Mr. Malone recounts an Englishman's claim that "the mass slaughter of both warriors and noncombatants was justified by biblical [sic] precedent," then offers the scintillating observation that "[The Indians] must have been amazed and horrified by the idea of destroying an entire village") (Nye 16, Malone 78).
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