Indian Summer

When we use the phrase “Indian Summer” these days, it conjures up images of a long, lazy summer miraculously extending into late September and maybe even the early weeks of October. It is a luxury and a gift of sunshine in the Northern Hemisphere, even as the evenings grow shorter and winter is inevitable. For a few extra weeks, we can bathe in sunshine and delay putting on our cardigans or turning on the central heating.

I used to think that the phrase was derived from a likening of this long summer in the past to the then British colony, India - as in this summer is so long and hot, it’s like being in India. But, no, “Indian Summer” has a more sinister derivation - and it’s not from the East but from the West, from America.

I’ve been reading Daniel Boorstin’s cultural history of America “The Americans” and in the first volume, “The Colonial Experience”, which tells the story of the American colonials from the Pilgrim Fathers to the American Revolution, he explains the derivation of the phrase “Indian Summer”. It goes like this:

Picture the American backwoodsman and his family settled in homesteads in the Eastern States of America from the 1500s through to the 1700s - around Massachussetts and Pennsylvania in the days before the West was discovered. They would be farmers, mainly, living in isolated country, with the occasional garrisoned fort as the main fortification in an otherwise wilderness area. The Native-Americans, then known as Indians, populated that wilderness that had up till the arrival of the white man had been theirs.

The Indians would often raid the homesteads in the summer when the weather was favourable for such activity, much in the same way as armies would fight in the summer and generally bed down in the winter - especially as the American winters could be harsh, with thick snow hampering swift movement. So in the summers, many homesteaders would be fearful for their lives, either holing up in the forts for safety or exposed back at the farm, watchful for attack and exerting limited resources to fight off the Indians. They looked forward to the winters which, although harsh, gave them respite from the Indian attacks.

As the weather turned cool, the homesteaders would return to their homes from the fort and drop their guard, trusting to the snow to discourage the Indian attacks. But when the Indian summer unexpectedly revived the warmth and melted the first snows - those extra weeks of warmth and sunshine gave the Indians fresh opportunities to attack the vulnerable colonials. So when people back then spoke of an Indian summer, they did so with dread and fear.

I won’t be able to use that phrase again without thinking of tomahawks, scalps and the smouldering ruins of log cabins…

Picture: thanks to Harry Richardson from flickr.com (CCL)