The slips went on and on detailing European and Indian cultural differences and their effects, and as the slips had grown in number a secondary, corollary thesis had emerged: that this process of diffusion and assimilation of Indian values is not over. It’s still with us, and accounts for much of the restlessness and dissatisfaction found in America today. Within each American these conflicting sets of values still clash.
This clash, Phædrus thought, explained why others hadn’t seen long before what he had seen at the peyote meeting. When you borrow traits and attitudes from a hostile culture you don’t give them credit for it. If you tell a white from Alabama that his Southern accent is derived from Negro speech he is likely to deny and resent it, although the geographical congruity of the Southern accent with areas of huge black population makes this pretty obvious. Similarly if you tell a Montana white living near a reservation that he resembles an Indian he may take it as an insult. And if you’d said it a hundred years ago you might have had a real fight on your hands. Then Indians were fiends from hell! The only good one was a dead one.
But even though Indians were never given proper credit for their contribution to the American frontier personality values, it’s certain that these values couldn’t have come from anyone else. One often hears frontier values spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers or the trees of the frontier, but trees, rocks and rivers do not by themselves confer social values. They’ve got trees, rocks and rivers in Europe.
It was the people living among those trees, rocks and rivers who are the source of the values of the frontier. The early frontiersmen such as the Mountain Men deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source, or if they did, denied it and credited it to their own hard work and isolation.
But the clash between European and Indian values still exists, and Phædrus felt he himself was one of those in whom the battle was taking place. That was why he had the feeling of coming home at that peyote meeting. The division he’d felt within himself and thought was something wrong with himself was not within himself at all. What he was seeing was a source of himself that had never been formally acknowledged. It was a division within the entire American culture that he had projected upon himself. It was in many others too.
In one of his long contemplations of this subject the name of Mark Twain appeared. Twain was from Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi, the great dividing line between the American East and West, and one of his most fearsome villains was Injun Joe, who personified the Indian the settlers feared at that time. But Twain’s biographers had also noted a deep division in his own personality that shaped his choice of heroes. On the one side was an orderly, intelligent, obedient, clean and relatively responsible young lad whom he fictionalized as Tom Sawyer; and on the other, a wild, freedom-loving, uneducated, lying, irresponsible, low-status American he called Huckleberry Finn.
Phædrus noticed that the division of Twain’s personality fitted the cultural split he’d been talking about. Tom was an Eastern person with the manners of a New Englander, much closer to Europe than to the American West, but Huck was a Western person, closer to the Indians, forever restless, unattached, unbelieving in the pompousness of society, wanting more than anything else just to be free.
Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics his slips on Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.
And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality self-evident, it is not at all self-evident. Scientific evidence and the social evidence of history indicate the opposite is self-evident. There is no self-evidence in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history to a time when it was self-evident that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the Noble Savage.
The idea that all men are created equal is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life. That’s what Ten Bears was trying to tell them.
Phædrus thought the Indians haven’t yet lost this one. They haven’t yet won it either, he realized; the fight isn’t over. It’s still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality. It’s dominated American history from the beginning and continues to be a source of both national strength and weakness today. And as Phædrus' studies got deeper and deeper he saw that it was to this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order, that his study should be directed.
4
After Phædrus left Bozeman he saw Dusenberry just twice: once when Dusenberry came for a visit and had to rest because he felt strange; a second time in Calgary, Alberta, after he had learned that the strangeness was brain cancer and he had only a few months to live. Then he was withdrawn and sad, preoccupied with internal preparations for his own end.
Some of his sadness was caused by the feeling he’d failed the Indians. He’d wanted to do so much for them. He spent so many years accepting their hospitality and now there was nothing he would ever do in return. Phædrus felt he’d failed Dusenberry’s plea to help analyze all his data, but Phædrus was involved in enormous problems of his own and there was nothing he could do about it, and now it was too late.
But six years later, after publication of a successful book, most of these problems had disappeared. When the question arose of what would be the subject of a second book there was no question about what it would be. Phædrus loaded his old Ford pickup truck with a camper and headed back into Montana again, to the eastern plains where the reservations were.
At this time there was no such thing as a Metaphysics of Quality and no plans for one. His book had covered the subject of Quality. Any further discussion would be like a lawyer who, after swinging the jury in his favor, keeps on talking and talking until he finally swings them back the other way again. Phædrus just wanted to talk about Indians now. There was plenty to say.
On the reservations he talked to Indians he had met when he was with Dusenberry, hoping to pick up the threads Dusenberry had left. When he told them he was Dusenberry’s friend they would always say, Oh yes, Dusenberry — he was a good man. They would talk for a while, but before long the conversation would become difficult and die down.