Famous Messages

Famous Messages: Myles Standish and the Bundle of Arrows

Posted on October 21st, 2011 by Bill
arrows

A very clear message

Nowadays, not too many people know who Myles Standish was. Those of an older generation will likely remember him as the military captain who was instrumental in the survival of Plymouth Colony. However, Standish seems to have been left out of most American History classes in the last thirty or so years, garnering at best a passing nod.

 

In the next month, schools across the nation will put on Thanksgiving pageants. Although a bunch of happy Pilgrims wearing belt-buckles on their shoes will be there standing next to a grinning Squanto holding up an ear of corn, it is doubtful that many kids will play the part of Captain Standish. This is a shame, because without Standish the Pilgrims likely would not have survived. Also, the man knew how to send a message, loud and clear.

 

 

Standish was not a Pilgrim. He was a military officer who had served in the Eighty-Years War and agreed to be the Pilgrim’s militia captain. As the military leader of a pacifist group living among American Indians who didn’t like them, Standish had a difficult job. The Indian confederacies that surrounded Plymouth (The Wampanoag, Narragansett, andMassachusetts) were understandably concerned about the foundling colony hugging the shore-line. Although it isn’t well known nowadays, the fact is that English boats had been fishingCape Codfor decades before the Pilgrims ever showed up. The Indians of the Northeast knew full well that the strange sickness that killed an estimated nine of ten people in the area had arrived at the same time that the Europeans had. Furthermore, those Europeans sometimes kidnapped the Indians. Squanto himself spent five years as a slave inEurope—that’s why he spoke perfect English when he walked intoPlymouthfor the first time in 1621, astounding the Pilgrim on-lookers.

 

 

As for the Pilgrims, they abhorred violence of any sort. It was a quality that did not help them much, given their situation. Luckily, they had Myles Standish. Although the Pilgrims could not have known it, the surrounding Indians were not just an odd conglomeration of Savages, but rather a culture with completely different—alien—social and political arrangements from what the Pilgrims were used to back inEngland.

 

 

In Britain, for instance, people showed their disdain for your politics by knocking on your door at midnight and hauling you away to a prison cell and an eventual miserable death.  The Indians of the northeast seaboard however, preferred to send a warning first. In fact, the warnings that they sent to each other were integral to keeping up the peace between the various tribes, clans, and war groups. American Indian culture consisted of an ever-changing set of social alliances that occupied a shifting geography of traditionally held territories. With all of the friction between these moving parts, conflict was inevitable. To prevent this conflict from becoming deadly, the northeast Indians developed a system of gift-giving. These gifts were important messages to the various tribes that allowed them to keep the peace. That isn’t to say that tribes didn’t occasionally drag people through the woods and do horrible things to them until they died—it’s just that they sent a greeting card first. They had to back up their talk, after-all. In all, it was a very good system of communication that allowed tribes to keep the peace: heed the warnings or suffer the consequence.

 

 

The Pilgrims received such a message, a big one. The Massachusetts tribe sent them a greeting card that basically said, “If you don’t leave, we are going to kill all of you.” For this, they used the traditional gift of a bundle of arrows tied together by a rattlesnake skin. It was delivered by a war chief accompanied by the strongest fighters. The Massachusetts knew how to send a message.

 

 

Although the majority of Englishmen there that day in 1621 would have had no clue what the gift meant, Myles Standish did. He had been too close to war for too long not to. He had survived the Siege of Ostend sixteen years before—some say the bloodiest siege in history. He knew that the Massachusettsmeant business, and he knew just how to respond. He took the bundle of arrows and snapped it in half with his knee. He then poured a handful bullets into the snake skin and handed it back to the war chief. It was about as simple, pure, and immediate as a message can be. Plymouth Colony survived.

 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Famous Messages: Custer’s Last Stand

Posted on September 27th, 2011 by Bill
General George Armstrong Custer

General George Armstrong Custer

The history books are chock full of famous messages. Indeed, without the correspondences between people in the past, historians would have very little to write about; such sources provide us the information upon which our historical stories are based. Some messages have had great impact because they were so successful. Who can forget President Eisenhower’s beautifully simplistic, effective campaign slogan, “I Like Ike?” However, some messages are important because they failed at accomplishing their purpose. A great example of this is General George Armstrong Custer’s last dispatch before his Seventh Cavalry was wiped out in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The message read:

 

”Come on. Big Village. Be Quick. Bring packs.”

 

Though brief, this message conveyed a lot of information. Captain Frederick Benteen, in command of Custer’s left flank, would have instantly recognized the importance of the message: a large number of aggressive enemies had been encountered, and Custer needed Benteen’s men and the ammunition packs that they possessed. Why, then, did the communiqué fail to save Custer? Historians, professional and amateur alike, have argued about this. Some have laid the blame on Benteen, others have said that the Sioux were just to powerful for Benteen to obey the orders. One thing, however, is beyond dispute: Custer’s lack of foresight in regard to messaging.

 

In short, Custer did not give much thought about messages between units before it was too late. Coordination between the various components of the Army had already begun to break down as long as a week before the battle. At that time, Custer had failed to receive any messages from his forward patrols. Instead of pausing due to the lack of communication, Custer moved forward. Furthermore, on the first day of the battle he had three different commands in the field—his, Benteen’s, and Major Marcus Reno’s. All were spread out along the Little Bighorn in about a four-mile line. Despite this, Custer retained only two messengers to communicate to his subordinates. For whatever else went wrong on that fateful day, the lack of a clearly effective communication system seriously aggravated the circumstances.

 

In a very direct way, Custer met his end because he did not pay heed to the importance of messaging until the Sioux were already shouting their war cry and crossing the river. At that point, a terse, eight-word message could not be decoded by Benteen in a way that could have helped Custer and his men. Had Custer not approached messaging as an after-thought, things at the Little Bighorn may have worked out very differently for him.