An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

COLONIAL EXPANSION

  Having cleared the Indigenous populations from much of the coastal region from New England to the Carolinas, another wave of settlers employed the same kind of warfare in establishing the colony of Georgia beginning in 1732. Technically, it was the part of Spanish-occupied Florida called Guale. From the time the first settlers squatted on Indigenous land in Georgia, rangers were in the forefront of ethnic cleansing, clearing the region for British settlement. Brigadier General James Oglethorpe, commander in chief of the Georgia colony, tried but failed to turn his own small regular army into rangers, so he commissioned Hugh Mackay Jr. to organize the regulars into a Highland ranger force. A settler agent for the Georgia colony, Mackay was a former British army officer and a Scots Highlander. The Highlanders were reputed to be tough, fearless fighters—in other words, brutal killers. It was unusual at the time to put a local militia officer in command of army regulars.28

  The Indigenous population of Georgia consisted primarily of the Cherokee Nation. The colonizers realized it would be impossible to persuade the Cherokees to accept or defend Georgia settlers if war broke out between Britain and Spain over British encroachment into Spanish Guale. Traders from Carolina had already brought smallpox and rum to the Cherokees, which had killed many in their villages and made them suspicious of all English people. Oglethorpe himself visited Cherokee towns but was rebuffed. Meanwhile Spanish agents were also trying to win over the Cherokees to fight on their side against the British. In the fall of 1739, on the verge of war, Oglethorpe won commitment from some Cherokee villages in exchange for corn, but he was aware that, like other Indigenous nations, the Cherokees would likely play one colonial power against the other for their own interests and could change sides at any moment. In December, English invasion farther into Spanish territory began. Anglo and Scots rangers and their Indigenous allies destroyed Spanish plantations and intimidated the Maroon communities in northern Florida composed of local Indigenous families and escaped African slaves from the British colonies. The rangers sacked and looted, burned and pillaged, while hunting scalps of Spanish-allied Indigenous people and runaway slaves. Lasting nearly a month, the operations ravaged Florida, in part because the Spanish put up little fight. During the 1740s, the British War Office and Parliament commissioned two companies of colonial rangers and authorized more than a hundred men for full-time duty in the Highland Rangers in Georgia.29 Ranging, looting, and scalp hunting continued.

  WAR THAT TURNS THE TIDE

  The decade leading up to the outbreak of the French and Indian War (1754–63), known in Europe as the Seven Years’ War, saw conflict on the British-French frontiers in New England, New York, and Nova Scotia, all of which were well populated with Indigenous villages of various nations as well as French settlers called Acadians.30 A clash of interests among British settlers, Indigenous communities, and Acadians in the region of the present-day Canadian Maritime Provinces led to a four-year conflict that the British called King George’s War. Although Britain had gained nominal possession of Nova Scotia, it could not control the population of Acadians and the mixed communities of intermarried Acadians and Mi’kmaq and Malisset people. The Acadian-Indigenous villages insisted on neutrality in the British and French disputes, and the powerful Haudenosaunee confederacy supported them in that stance. But British imperialists wanted the land, and they permitted Anglo-American settlers to play a prominent role in the fighting, which included ranging and scalp hunting. By the end of the war, settler-rangers dominated the British military presence in Nova Scotia, setting off sustained Acadian-Indigenous resistance against British rule.31

  At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, while the British regular army and navy focused on French imperial positions in the Maritimes, the settler militia forces continued ranging against the Acadian-Indigenous villages, which led to an expulsion of the Acadians, sometimes known today as the Great Upheaval. In a period of weeks, British army forces and colonial militias forced four thousand noncombatants out of Nova Scotia, and at least half that number died in the Acadian diaspora. Some eight thousand escaped deportation by fleeing into the woods. The Acadians thus became the largest population of European settlers in North American history to be forcibly dispersed. This feat was accomplished with slaughter, intimidation, and plunder. By this time, there was no hesitation on the part of Anglo settlers to consider unarmed civilians of all ages as appropriate targets of violence.

  Major General Jeffery Amherst—after whom Amherst, Massachusetts is named—commanded the British army in the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War. In 1759, Amherst appointed Major Robert Rogers, the seasoned leader of New England’s Rogers’s Rangers and perhaps the most famous and admired ranger in frontier lore, to lead a force of settler-rangers, British volunteers, and allied Stockbridge Indigenous scouts—all to be handpicked by Rogers. Amherst ordered them to attack a resistant Abenaki village in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Although Amherst ordered Rogers not to allow torture or killing of women or children, the commander would have known about these rangers’ reputation of sparing no one in their blood-drenched raids on Indigenous villages. In commissioning Rogers, Amherst effectively sanctioned settler-ranger counterinsurgent warfare. In general, the British military not only tolerated but made use of the settlers’ dirty war, in the Cherokee war, the subsequent French and Indian War, and in the effort to crush Pontiac’s Rebellion of 1763, in which Amherst is best known for his support of using germ warfare against Indigenous people.32 “Could it not be contrived,” Amherst wrote to a subordinate officer, “to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” The colonel promised to do his best.33 Amherst then gave orders “to bring them [Pontiac’s forces and allies] to a proper Subjection” until “there was not an Indian Settlement within a thousand Miles of our Country.”34

  In the southern part of the French and Indian War, the British in 1760 found their war-making capacity overwhelmed by the Cherokee Nation. So here too they turned to rangers. In the spring, when the Cherokee Nation challenged British authority, Amherst rushed regular regiments to Charleston under the command of Colonel Archibald Montgomery with orders to punish the Cherokees as quickly as possible so the soldiers could return north and join in the imminent attack on Montreal. In previous wars against Indigenous nations, British commanders had assigned ranger groups specific missions, but in the Cherokee war, the British military forces, including regulars, would target noncombatants. A few months earlier, the North Carolina governor had conjured the strategy that would be used:

  In Case a War must be proclaimed, the three Southern Provinces of Virginia and the Carolinas should exert their whole force, enter into and destroy all the [Cherokee] Towns of those at War with us, and make as many of them as we should take their Wives and Children Slaves, by sending them to the Islands [West Indies] if above 10 years old … and to allow 10 lbs sterling for every prisoner taken and delivered in each Province.35

  This was the plan adopted. Commander Montgomery was well aware that even with irregular warfare the military could not defeat the Cherokees in their own country and that he would need settlers and Indigenous allies serving as scouts and guides. He added to his troop strength three hundred settler-rangers, forty local militia members, and fifty Catawba allies. The Cherokee Nation had not succeeded in forming a confederation with the Muskogees or Chickasaws, so their villages were vulnerable. The first target was the autonomous Cherokee town of Estatoe, comprising some two hundred homes and two thousand people. Montgomery’s forces set all the homes and buildings afire, picking off individuals who tried to flee, while others who hid inside were burned alive. One after another, towns were set ablaze until the Cherokees organized a resistance strong enough to drive out the attackers. The British claimed to have crushed Cherokee resistance, but they had not, and the Cherokees laid siege to British forts. A year later, British forces struck again, this time even harder, and overwhe
lmed the Cherokees in their capital of Etchoe and destroyed it. The British then moved on to the other Cherokee towns, burning them too. During the month-long, one-sided battle of annihilation, the British razed fifteen towns and burned fourteen hundred acres of corn. Five thousand Cherokees were made homeless refugees, and the number of deaths remained uncounted.36

  Another weapon of war was alcohol, accelerating in the eighteenth century. In 1754, a Catawba leader known as King Hagler by English colonists petitioned the North Carolina authorities:

  Brothers, here is one thing you yourselves are to blame very much in; that is you rot your grain in tubs, out of which you take and make strong spirits.

  You sell it to our young men and give it [to] them, many times; they get very drunk with it [and] this is the very cause that they oftentimes commit those crimes that is offensive to you and us and all through the effect of that drink. It is also very bad for our people, for it rots their guts and causes our men to get very sick and many of our people has lately died by the effects of that strong drink, and I heartily wish you would do something to prevent your people from daring to sell or give them any of that strong drink, upon any consideration whatever, for that will be a great means of our being free from being accused of those crimes that is committed by our young men and will prevent many of the abuses that is done by them through the effect of that strong drink.37

  King Hagler continued to petition for years for an embargo on liquor without succeeding.

  Britain’s victory at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 led to English domination of world trade, sea power, and colonial holdings for a century and a half.38 In the Treaty of Paris (1763) France ceded Canada and all claims east of the Mississippi to Britain. In the course of the war, Anglo settlers had gained strength in numbers and security in relation to Indigenous peoples just outside the British-occupied colonies. Even there, significant numbers of settlers had squatted on Indigenous lands beyond the colonies’ putative boundaries, reaching into the Ohio Valley region. To the settlers’ dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King George III issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of the Allegheny-Appalachian mountain barrier, ordering those who had settled there to relinquish their claims and move back east of the line. However, British authorities did not commit enough troops to the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indigenous lands.

  By the early 1770s, terror against Indigenous people on the part of Anglo settlers increased in all the colonies, and speculation in western lands was rampant. In the southern colonies especially, farmers who had lost their land in competition with larger, more efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These settler-farmers thus set, as Grenier writes, “a prefigurative pattern of U.S. annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer-settlers led by seasoned ‘Indian fighters,’ calling on authorities/militias of the British colonies, first, and the U.S. government/army later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of U.S. ‘democracy.’”39

  The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger for independence of the settler population, in which the distinctly “American” nation was born. This mythology was expressed in the 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, in which the author—land speculator James Fenimore Cooper—created a usable settler-colonial history. Blockbuster Hollywood adaptations of the book in 1932 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940 film, based on the best-selling novel Northwest Passage, which is considered a classic and remains popular due to repeated television showings, goes even further in portraying the bloodthirsty mercenaries, Rogers’s Rangers, as heroes for their annihilation of a village of Abenakis.40

  THE OHIO COUNTRY

  The settlers’ war for independence from Britain paralleled a decade of “Indian wars” (1774–83), all with settler-rangers using extreme violence against Indigenous noncombatants with the goals of total subjugation or expulsion. The British governor of Virginia, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore, sided with British settlers who wanted land in the Ohio Country (in part because he was himself a land speculator). In his view, no royal policy could prevent settlers’ seizure of Indigenous land. In early 1774, the Shawnee Nation in the Ohio Valley region responded to settler encroachment on its farmlands and hunting grounds by raiding illicit settlements and chasing out land surveyors. The settlers seem to have been waiting for just such an excuse to retaliate viciously. Dunmore commissioned 150 Virginia settler-rangers to destroy Shawnee towns, and he mobilized the Virginia militia to invade the Ohio Valley and to “proceed directly to their Towns, and if possible destroy their Towns and magazines and distress them in every other way that is possible.”41

  During “Lord Dunmore’s War,” Shawnees and other Indigenous peoples in what the Anglo separatists would soon call the Northwest Territory realized that they were in a life-or-death struggle with these murdering bands of settlers who were led by a wealthy land speculator, intent on destroying their nation and wiping them from the face of the earth. This realization led to another recurrent factor in the onslaught of European colonial ventures: the appearance of an accommodationist faction within the Shawnee Nation that accepted a humiliating peace agreement. Dunmore demanded all the Shawnee hunting grounds in what would later become, following US independence, the state of Kentucky.42 Although Virginia did not get all the land Dunmore demanded, Dunmore’s War was only the beginning of a three-decade war against the Shawnee Nation and its allies. That alliance was led militarily in its resistance by the great Tecumseh, born in 1768, who had grown up in the midst of unrelenting warfare against his people, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet and the movement’s spiritual leader.43

  Dunmore’s War pushed the Shawnees into an alliance with the British against the separatists in 1777. Indigenous warriors struck scattered squatter settlements throughout the Upper Ohio Valley region, driving hundreds of settlers from Shawnee territory. But the tide of war between the British and the separatists turned, allowing the Continental Congress to focus on the Ohio Country and organize an offensive to annihilate the Shawnee Nation. Five hundred separatist fighters, composed of both militiamen and regulars, waged a genocidal war. Rampaging against combatants and noncombatants alike, the ranger force fell on the staunchly neutral towns of the Delaware Nation, torturing and killing women and children. In one particularly twisted incident, the settler troops slaughtered a Delaware boy who had been bird hunting alone. A near-riot ensued among the troops over who had the right to claim the “honor” of the kill. The Continental Congress sent a thousand more fighters with orders to “proceed, without delay, to destroy such towns of hostile tribes of Indians as he [Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh] in his discretion shall think will most effectually chastise and terrify the savages, and check their ravages on the frontiers.” The Shawnees moved out of the way of the raiders to avoid the attacks, but the killing went on unabated.44

  The settlers’ escalation of extreme violence in the Ohio Country led to perhaps the most outrageous war crime, which showed that Indigenous conversion to Christianity and pacifism was no protection from genocide. Moravian missionizing among the ravaged Delaware communities in Pennsylvania had produced three Moravian Indian villages in the decades before the war for independence had begun. Residents of one of the settlements, named Gnadenhütten, in eastern Ohio, were displaced by British troops during fighting in the area, but were able to return to harvest their corn. Soon afterward, in March 1782, a settler militia from Pennsylvania under the command of David Williamson appeared and rounded up the Delawares, telling them they had to evacuate for their own safety. There were forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children in the group of Delawares. The militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon, then announced that they were all to
be killed, accusing them of having given refuge to Delawares who had killed white people. They were also accused of stealing the household items and tools they possessed, because such items should only belong to white people. Condemned to death, the Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, Williamson’s men marched over ninety people in pairs into two houses and methodically slaughtered them. One killer bragged that he personally had bludgeoned fourteen victims with a cooper’s mallet, which he had then handed to an accomplice. “My arm fails me,” he was said to have announced. “Go on with the work.”45 This action set a new bar for violence, and atrocities that followed routinely surpassed even that atrocity.46

  A year earlier, the Delaware leader Buckongeahelas had addressed a group of Christianized Delawares, saying that he had known some good white men, but that the good ones were a small number:

  They do what they please. They enslave those who are not of their color, although created by the same Great Spirit who created us. They would make slaves of us if they could, but as they cannot do it, they kill us. There is no faith to be placed in their words. They are not like the Indians, who are only enemies while at war, and are friends in peace. They will say to an Indian: “My friend, my brother.” They will take him by the hand, and at the same moment destroy him. And so you will also be treated by them before long. Remember that this day I have warned you to beware of such friends as these. I know the long knives; they are not to be trusted.47

  HOW THE SETTLERS WON INDEPENDENCE

  Both the British and their settler separatist opponents realized that the key to victory on the southern frontier of the thirteen colonies was an alliance with the Cherokee Nation. Despite constant attacks on its villages and crops, and with refugees and disease, the enormous Cherokee Nation remained intact with a well-functioning government. To win the Cherokees to their side, British authorities provided weaponry and money to Cherokee towns while separatist representatives tried to persuade the towns to remain neutral by threatening their complete destruction. Neutrality was the most the settlers could hope for. The settlers’ viciousness toward Indigenous people caused them to be despised and spurred some Cherokees to take sides against them. A few Cherokee towns that had been hit hardest by settler-rangers responded by attacking squatter settlements, destroying several in the Carolinas in 1776. Following such attacks, separatists quickly announced their determination to destroy the Cherokee Nation. The North Carolina delegation to the Continental Congress declared, “The gross infernal breach of faith which they [the Cherokees] have been guilty of shuts them out from every pretension to mercy, and it is surely the policy of the Southern Colonies to carry fire and Sword into the very bowels of their country and sink them so low that they may never be able again to rise and disturb the peace of their Neighbors.”48