"Indian Courage" Topic

In my ongoing research into the colonial Australian frontier I've been reading Edward M Curr's amateur but fastidious anthropological study, 'The Australian Race: Its Origins, Languages, Customs', published in 1886 (available in full online at Archive.org). In the section of the book on Aboriginal warfare Curr compares Aboriginal martial character with that of Native Americans. As an example, he cites a scenario in which a settler with a loaded long-arm is defending the door of a hut(cabin), asserting that he'd be safe from a physical attack from any number of Aborigines as long as his weapon remained loaded because no Aboriginal warrior would willingly sacrifice himself to achieve the collective objective (this doesn't preclude the throwing of missiles and taunts designed to make the settler fire his weapon), whereas a Native American war party would be prepared to rush the settler and lose a warrior or two in the process if it meant they could kill him and plunder and/or burn the cabin, and any one Indian would willingly sacrifice his life.

While obviously Curr's information on Native Americans was second-hand, so too was his understanding of Aboriginal martial behaviour, because, despite having ten years' experience as a pastoralist in Victoria surrounded by Aboriginal clans living in their traditional way, he was one of the few squatters who managed to live peacefully, and for the most part cordially, with his indigenous neighbours. Virtually* his only direct exposure to Aboriginal martial behaviour was as a witness to traditional tribal warfare. For instance, he doesn't mention the fact that settlers assigned varying degrees of martial ardour (more or less warlike) to different tribes, and that they believed that, as a general rule, tribes had more 'pluck' the further north on the continent they were located.

Do those of you with a through knowledge of Indian martial psychology and behaviour agree with Curr's assessment of Native American courage? Was it homogenous over the whole continent, or did it vary from tribe to tribe?

*In his 1883 'Recollections of Squatting in Victoria' Curr describes the only occasion when he engaged in hostilities with the local Bangerang tribe, when he went out with a party of Border Police to punish them for stealing his sheep, but despite his firing at and wounding one warrior the incident was mostly farcical.

It is very tribal dependent – among the 500 or so tribal cultures in North America there was a very wide variation; the Crow highly valued individual courage and loved to go one-on-one, but the Apache held no such compunctions

There is a very, very wide range in Native American culture and traditions

Living in the middle of Indian country, and having friends and students who are members of various tribes, I can assure you that native attitudes concerning martial matters differed greatly from tribe to tribe. Some, particularly Kiowa, continue to take great pride in their warrior heritage. That said, some of my Indian friends and I have toyed with the idea of developing a set of miniatures rules that reflect the different attitudes and tactics adopted by various tribes, as well as those employed by differing groups of settlers.

Thanks for the feedback thus far, gentlemen; I appreciate it.

Are you able to relate your knowledge to, and comment specifically on, Curr's scenario?

Didn't Chris Peers publish a supplement to one of his skirmish rule sets that mandated different tabletop behaviour by tribe?

The farcical element of the incident mentioned above occurred when the Border Police attempted to charge and one trooper's horse took him on a wild ride in the wrong direction, while another trooper ended up lodged in the branches of a tree. Horsemanship was clearly not a strong point of this organisation.

Just a brief aside for those who might be interested in delving further:

The section 'Captain Dana'* in chapter 4 of the book 'Edward M Curr and the Tide of History', available free online, contains an interesting comparative analysis of Curr's version of this incident and related events and those of others involved, including Dana's official report.

*Henry Dana commanded the Port Phillip Native Mounted Police. Given that two of the police present were from the NMP you'd have to call this a combined operation.

I never did understand the Hollywood scenes of mounted American Indians riding in circles around and around a wagon train or what have you, fully exposed -- getting picked off left and right, at will???? Is there one single known case of this ever hapenning?