Reading notes on Horace Capron

Source: Memoirs of Horace Capron
(Memoirs of Horace Capron. Vol. 1-2. N.p.: Unpublished, 1884.)

In the last years of his life, Horace Capron wrote his memoirs which consist of letters, newspaper clippings, diary entries, etc. Much of it is rambling and narcissistic, mostly either heaping praise on himself or quoting newspapers and magazines from across the eastern US to get praise from an unbiased source. He is clear that he has a sizable archive in his house of things people have said about him over the years. It seems almost to have been a hobby for the elderly Capron, like the 19th century equivalent of googling yourself. He, perhaps sincerely, presents his father as an ideal settler and quintessential American patriot, himself as the progenitor of industry and reclaimer of wasteland, pioneer of Hokkaido, and civilizer of the Japanese. Full of "firsts" and superlatives, most of which are not worth recording here.

Interestingly, he quotes an "American Farmer" article talking about his "intellectual, moral, and religious instruction" of "females" at his agricultural/industrial colony in Laurel (pg. 60). Elsewhere he describes an official policy of temperance. He brags about having turned lower class workers recruited for factory work at his colony into model middle class Americans (without using the word of course). This is interesting in a Foucauldien way, but also interesting considering the two major colonial projects Capron became directly involved in later. He states clearly his intention for Native Americans in Texas and Ainu in Hokkaido to be assimilated as economically productive citizens of the colonizing states. Like the idea of 未開地 and 未開人, there's an interesting dialogue between colonization of land and people, and places that subtly overlap between gender and class and race, indigenous and exogenous, and subjects who can be included into nation and subjects that must be excluded.

There's also a lot to say about his portrayal of the Ainu. I think most importantly is that he:

1. Follows a number of contemporary Euro-American writers in stereotyping them as gentle and intelligent, far more so than the Texas Delaware, or other American tribes he seemed to favour. The Ainu, while -- Capron states -- are savage, he portrays them as the noblest of all noble savages.
2. He does not consider how "Caucasian" they supposedly appear-- if anything, he refers to them as "swarthy" savages, which is quite unlike many European depictions of the Ainu from this time period. This may be linked to the racialization of the Ainu which accompanied the colonization of the Ainu. Which is to say, through this racist colonialist worldview, it would be hugely scandalous and crime against nature if "Caucasians" were colonized by "Mongoloids", and it's no coincidence that as the colonization of Hokkaido progressed, the Japanese were increasingly portrayed as Western-esque or in the 20th century parlance, "honourary whites" or "model minorities" while the Ainu were increasingly portrayed as Native Americans. 
3. While Capron thinks the Ainu should be assimilated and claims that they are overwhelmingly appreciative of Capron and the Kaitakushi's efforts to colonize them and take their land for some higher purpose, he ceases referring to the Ainu and portrays Hokkaido as "unpeopled". Interesting, because he comes across towns of 1,500 Ainu -- which is not an insignificant number in a mid-19th century rural area -- and has a clear understanding of the Ainu economy and their use of the land. This is clearly the logic of terra nullius.
4. Perhaps most importantly, while he compares the Ainu to Native Americans, he also compares the Japanese to Native Americans, and indirectly thereby equates the Ainu and Japanese. For example, he talks about the Westernization of the Japanese and Westernization/colonization of the Ainu in the exact same terms: he states that they seem like possess and almost childlike natural happiness, and wonders -- as racists often did in the colonial period -- if modern civilization will cause them to lose this trait. Later, Capron refers to Japanese castaways in the United States and theorizes that Native Americans are the descendants of shipwrecked Japanese. This is not an uncommon theory, as the Chinook-Scottish adventurer Ranald MacDonald himself theorized that as a Native American, his trip to Japan was something of a homecoming. 
5. Capron shows his disgust with Japanese agriculture by claiming that it should be more properly called "horticulture". Ie. the Japanese don't have farms, but gardens. In the Lockean view of property law, how land is used is important for rights of ownership. Having been written before widespread industrialization, the use of land for agricultural plots divided by fences guaranteed it being recognized as property, whereas land left unimproved "wasteland" was not. Indigenous land in Japan as around the world was taken as terra nullius on the basis that it was "wasteland" and thereby was not owned by the people living on it, and in cases -- such as agricultural peoples of the eastern United States and Canada -- the fact that they were farmers was disavowed, and their farms were deemed mere "gardens". This is all significant because Capron is "indigenizing" the Japanese much the same way that Europeans and Japanese would indigenize the Ainu (whose agriculture was similarly dismissed). 

But Capron's exact writing on the Ainu is perhaps not as important as his discussion of work in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Texas. He was directly involved in Indigenous removal. What's interesting, however, is he was not part of the efforts to force off their land at gunpoint, and was in fact quite critical of the nature of the American government's "Indian" policy as it existed at the time, especially what Patrick Wolfe identified in the "state of exception" where the American government knowingly turned a blind eye to non-state massacres of Indigenous people by settlers, or official US military extermination campaigns which followed inevitable reprisals for these settler massacres. For example, Capron expressed sympathy for Indigenous people who had killed whites in self-defense, or policies forcing indigenous people off their land without a clear sense of where they should go, feeling they would be forced to become raiders and thieves. In a weird twist, he considered the lower-class uneducated settlers to be a more negative influence on the Indigenous groups than vice versa (so much for "going native"). Capron represented the vanguard of a liberal form of Indigenous management where he sought to pacify groups as frontier buffers through to allow for settlement of whites, and aimed for blanket assimilation of these 'domesticated' tribes as (perhaps) worthy of American citizenship in the future.

However, as critical as Capron is of policies of not just frontier genocide, but of leaving Indigenous people absolutely destitute without any means of survival, is this not the policy he suggests in Hokkaido? I say this in reference to the published Kaitakushi reports where he refers to Ainu hunting methods as barbaric and calls on them to be banned. Kuroda Kiyotaka abides to this, and according to Yamada Shinichi, this leads to famine. With local officials warning Kuroda of this, perhaps based on Capron's insistence, he nevertheless refuses to change course. In effect, Capron is responsible for what amounts to genocide in Hokkaido.

Why would Capron do in Hokkaido precisely what he was so critical of in Texas? While this is no simple question, perhaps we should as if he barely respects the Japanese, why would he waste time to think about the consequences of his policies for the Ainu? Moreover, Capron didn't actually care about Native American peoples he feels he helped-- he saw it as a means to an end, which was white settlement on and American territorial sovereignty over Indigenous land in Texas. Proof of this when he came across a group of Indigenous refugees (which he refers to through the oxymoron "Indian immigrants") that started a settlement on a riverside and had were growing corn. In a Lockean sense of property, and in the sense of Capron's own stated desire for "Indians" to become normative US citizens, this should have been ideal. However, this was not a reservation, so Capron alerted the US army to ethnically cleanse them from their land. His whole view of his role in the BIA seems to have been typical of liberal modes of colonialism as they existed in his lifetime, which was not to oppose colonialism, but as a gesture of truly civilized man, to "soften the blow" of Indigenous peoples' extinction through contact with whites. Moreover, this seen as being a process that was borne not out of violence, but something natural and fated by nature.

Jane Lancaster clearly describes the nature of Capron's role:

The Texans continued to have problems with various other Indian tribes as well. By May 1853, Acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles E. Mix informed Superintendent Thomas S. Drew at Van Buren, Arkansas, that Texas Special Agent Horace Capron had charge of a group of from three to four hundred Indians, including Seminoles, Delawares, Shawnees, Quapaws, and Cherokees, recently dispatched from Texas. These Indians had settled in Texas over a period of several years. Drew was instructed to have these agents in his superintendency accept the Indians turned over by Capron to their respective agencies. They were not to return to Texas.
From Lancaster, Jane F. Removal Aftershock: The Seminoles' Struggles to Survive in the West, 1836-1866. Knoxville: U of Tennessee, 1994. Pg. 90.

It should also be noted that these "Indian immigrants", such as the Delawares (Lenape), who were originally from the New York City area were groups who were ethnically cleansed by earlier white colonization, and were later forced into Oklahoma and Ontario, Canada. This term is not just an oxymoron, but is a discursive strategy to portray them as "Indians", but not indigenous. The effect of this is to legitimize white colonization of Texas while delegitimizing their own attempts at resettlement, even where -- like the Cherokee or other groups -- it took the form of normative European forms of "civilized" agricultural settlement.

Finally, Capron's portrayal of "Mexicans" who remained in Texas and directly assisted Capron in Indigenous removal is telling, in that he did not portray them as altogether uncivilized in a Donald Trump sense, but as effeminate, lacking agency or courage, and simply as extras in the drama that was unfolding. This is unlike how he portrayed "Indians", who were debased but brave and masculine, and the opposite of whie Americans who were portrayed as brave as well as exhalted. This portrayal of Mexicans is extremely similar to how Benjamin Lyman Smith portrayed Japanese in Hokkaido in their triangular relation to whites and Ainu.