The government in London faced mounting difficulties administering its new American empire and dealing with its existing colonies; it was three years before Johnson received the instructions he was waiting for to renegotiate the boundary. Johnson, Croghan, and the traders mounted an intensive lobbying campaign to convince the home government that a new boundary was vital to avert an Indian war and that the tribes were willing to grant land. Both Johnson and Croghan wrote to the Board of Trade, and Croghan and Governor Franklin enlisted the support of Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s agent in London. Croghan told Benjamin Franklin that the Shawnees, Delawares, and other Indians who had robbed and killed traders had informed him “they were not only very willing but anxious, to make a REPARATION to the representatives of the unhappy Sufferers” but they had no way of doing it “except by a Surrender of a part of their Country, which they would most chearfully do, and especially of that part, which lies on this side of the River Ohio (on the back part of Virginia) as it is now, of no use to them, for Hunting Ground.” Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan made sure Benjamin Franklin understood the connection between the boundary line and the land grant: Johnson had done them “an essential piece of service” by getting the Indians to grant part of the land encompassed by the new boundary when the treaty was held, but unless the government authorized a new boundary, the Indians “cannot give us the Land.” Benjamin Franklin never set foot west of the Appalachian Mountains but he wanted to see the West populated with British Protestants rather than French Catholics, just as he would later want it settled by American citizens rather than British subjects. He lost no time in bringing the boundary issue to the government’s attention.46 By Christmas 1766, Samuel Wharton who, in addition to his claim as a “suffering trader” had land schemes in the Illinois country, told William Franklin that he expected to be “Ere long, a Considerable Proprietor of Terra Firma.”47
Meanwhile, Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan kept the pressure on Johnson: “We really blush, to be so free,” they wrote, but a letter from the superintendent to the Earl of Shelburne now could be just what was needed to secure confirmation of the land grant—“the great & long sighed for Object”—to the poor traders.48 In the fall of 1767 William Trent sent Benjamin Franklin a list of the traders’ losses. Croghan and Wharton each wrote to Franklin urging prompt action on the boundary line: an Indian war was imminent unless the government seized the moment to establish a boundary, they claimed, and the Indians had already agreed to it in principle. “Indians, you well know Sir,” wrote Wharton, “are not always in a Temper to dispose of a large Part of their Country. What a Pity is it Therefore, That so fair an Opportunity should be lost, When the Crown might for a small Consideration purchase Land sufficient for Us to settle or hunt On, And at the same Time remove the present unfavorable Disposition of The Natives, by fixing a Line between Them And Us, beyond Which, No Englishman should presume to settle or hunt!”49 Franklin duly pushed the matter in London, over dinner with Lord Shelburne and on the following morning with Lord Clare of the Board of Trade.50 Croghan, meanwhile, was on the road again in his capacity of deputy superintendent: leaving Fort Pitt in mid-October, he reached Detroit a month later and held council with the Great Lakes tribes; by December 9 he was back at Fort Pitt where he held a council with the Shawnees, Senecas, and Delawares.51
Pennsylvania had its eyes on the Wyoming Valley lands along the Susquehanna River. It was contested ground. The Susquehanna Company, a joint-stock company formed in 1753 by Connecticut land speculators, believed that Connecticut’s colonial charter, which granted sea-to-sea land rights, entitled the province to the valley. The eastern Delaware chief Teedyuscung had protested English settlement in the area. He declared “he did not unders[tan]d what the White People meant by settling in their Country unless they intended to steal it from them,” and he warned off colonial settlers and speculators he found on the land. The Crown feared the colonists’ intrusions would provoke “all the horrors and Calamities of an Indian war,” and orders were issued to desist. But the Susquehanna Company “were Determined to Settle Immediately on the Land, to the Amount of a Thousand families and Upwards.” Iroquois, Delawares, and Pennsylvanians all watched with growing alarm as settlers from Connecticut pushed into the Susquehanna Valley. Then, in April 1763, as Teedyuscung lay sleeping in the town of Wyoming on the north branch of the Susquehanna (near present-day Wilkes-Barre), someone set his log cabin on fire. The sixty-three-year-old chief, a veteran of many battles and treaties, was burned to death. Within weeks, colonists from New England, most of them people Teedyuscung had chased away the previous fall, were building cabins and planting fields in the Wyoming Valley. Iroquois delegates complained to the Connecticut Assembly in Hartford. Teedyuscung’s son, Captain Bull, went to Philadelphia to protest. Then, after drunken militiamen murdered his cousin, a baptized Delaware named Zacharias, along with his wife and child, Captain Bull took his revenge, killing twenty-six Wyoming settlers.52
Thomas Penn, the elder proprietor and oldest surviving son of William Penn (and one of the men behind the infamous “Walking Purchase” in 1737), now saw a chance to settle the issue. He wrote to William Johnson in December 1767, urging him to get from the Indians as much land for “us” as he could between the west branch of the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers. To “prevent the possibility of the people from Connecticut giving us any more trouble there,” Sir William should get the Iroquois to agree that “when they incline to sell the rest, they will sell it only to us.”53 Pennsylvania’s interests would be well represented at the Fort Stanwix treaty and the Iroquois looked favorably on Pennsylvania representatives who acknowledged Iroquois authority over the disputed lands.
Benjamin Franklin’s lobbying and the warnings of impending bloodshed in the West paid off. Convinced that a new boundary was necessary “to prevent the fatal consequences of an Indian War,” the Lords of Trade advised Shelburne to send immediate orders to Johnson to negotiate the final settlement of the line. They cautioned, however, that the new line should extend no lower down the Ohio than the Kanawha River; going any farther might furnish colonists with a pretext for settling land that, though claimed by the Six Nations, was occupied by the Cherokees as part of their hunting territory.54 Shelburne, too, thought the new boundary “essential for the Preservation of Peace and Harmony,” and he instructed Johnson in December 1767 “to convey the proper Intelligence to the different Tribes of Indians concerned, that they may be ready to co-operate with you in bringing it to a Conclusion.”55 Johnson was already on it. In November he had sent an Onondaga with a large string of wampum to let the Six Nations know “that I intended a General Meeting with them Some time in ye. Spring.”56 The wampum belt not only summoned the tribes but also informed them of the agenda for the conference. He followed up with a series of meetings with various groups and sent additional wampum through the Ohio Valley. On January 5, 1768, in one of his last actions in office, Shelburne authorized Johnson to negotiate a new boundary line.57
By then, the government had dropped its plan for imperial management of Indian affairs. Political unrest following passage of the Stamp Act and the need to reduce the cost of imperial administration rendered the plan impractical. Shelburne concluded by the summer of 1767 that management of the Indian trade should be returned to the colonies and the following spring the Board of Trade recommended that imperial regulation of Indian affairs be abandoned. But at least Johnson finally had official permission to negotiate a new boundary. According to the historian Peter Marshall, Johnson accepted the decline of his official authority and “turned to the advancement of his private interests.”58 But at Fort Stanwix he managed to promote an imperial as well as a personal agenda.
In January 1768, Lord Hillsborough was appointed to a newly created cabinet-level position, secretary of state for the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was quick to press the boundary issue with the new secretary and Hillsborough confirmed Shelburne’s instructions to Johnson to carry the boundary line to the Great Kana
wha in western Virginia.59 The Lords of Trade recommended to George III “that this boundary line should as speedily as possible be ratified by your Majesty’s Authority” and that the superintendents be “impowered to make Treaties in your Majesty’s name with the Indians for that purpose.” Johnson had secured preliminary Indian agreement three years earlier to the boundary being extended some seven hundred miles lower down the Ohio to the mouth of the Cherokee or Tennessee River, but his instructions, and an accompanying map, made it clear that the Kanawha River was to be the western boundary. The boundary was to begin at Owego on the New York–Pennsylvania border, run south along the Susquehanna River to Shamokin, along the west branch of the Susquehanna to Kittaning, and then southwest along the Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawha. There the northern line negotiated by Johnson would join up with one being negotiated by John Stuart with the Cherokees in the South.60
Negotiating the new boundary required getting the Iroquois and Cherokees to settle their differences. The “Great Warriors’ Path,” the traditional war trail between the Iroquois and the Cherokees, ran through the territory that colonial officials hoped to acquire by pushing the line westward. Attakullakulla, known to the British as Little Carpenter because of his ability to fashion diplomatic agreements, the Great Warrior Oconostota, and other Cherokee delegates sailed for New York in November 1767. After attending a performance of Richard III (Attakullakulla was getting to be a regular theatergoer—he had attended performances at Sadlers’ Wells and the Theatre Royal when he visited London with a Cherokee delegation in his youth),61 they set off for Johnson Hall, arriving at the end of December. The Iroquois delegates did not arrive until March. Bad roads and deep snow delayed them; besides, said Thomas King, the Oneidas’ speaker, making peace with their old enemies the Cherokees was such a weighty issue that they had taken a long time to discuss it before coming to the meeting. The Cherokees presented wampum belts to each of the Six Nations, and “a Belt and a Calumet with an Eagles tail” to Johnson, “that he may always keep it so that any of our friends resorting hither may smoak out of the Pipe, and See that we have been about Peace.” They also brought a belt from the Cherokee women for the Iroquois women, as “they must feel Mothers pains for those killed in War, and be desirous to prevent it.” The Iroquois and Cherokees “buryed the Axe and opened the Road.”62
Johnson assured the Iroquois at the conference that a boundary line to preserve their hunting grounds would soon be settled. The eastern Iroquois were glad to hear it. They had enjoyed relatively harmonious relationships of coexistence and exchange with colonists on their eastern frontier for much of the eighteenth century,63 but the pressure on Mohawk and Oneida lands had increased alarmingly since the end of the French and Indian War. “We and our dependants have been for some time like Giddy People not knowing what to do,” Conoghquieson told Johnson. “Wherever we turned about we saw our Blood.” When they went hunting they found the country covered with fences, the trees cut down, and the animals driven away. If the British were unable to protect the Mohawks’ land, keep their own settlers away from the Ohio, “and keep the Road open making Pennsylvania and Virginia quiet,” the Iroquois would “get tired of looking to you, and turn our faces another way.”64 The stage was set and the issues were clear for the great council to be held at Fort Stanwix: if Johnson hoped to shift the boundary to the west he must protect Iroquois lands in the east. Sir William made a point of cultivating men like Conoghquieson. “I have always made use of a few approved Chiefs of the several Nations, whose fidelity I have had occasion to test on many occasions for above twenty years past, who have never yet deceived me,” Johnson confided to Shelburne in August 1767.65 He was not likely to switch strategy a year later at Fort Stanwix when the stakes were so high.
The meeting between the Iroquois and Cherokees in March “was held in the open Air at a severe season,” and Sir William caught a cold. The next month, on his doctor’s advice, he took a trip to the seaside in Connecticut, “having for some time laboured under a violent disorder of the Bowels, as well as severe pains from his old Wound, with both of which he has been much afflicted for some Years past.” (He would make return trips to the sea for his health in years to come.)66 But his mind was on the upcoming treaty, and interested parties sought him out in Connecticut. Meanwhile, Croghan met with one thousand Indians, primarily western Senecas, Delawares, and Shawnees, at Fort Pitt in April and May, to settle differences and restore the chain of friendship. The Ohio Indians were worried by the presence of British forts and the encroachments of British settlers. Nimwha, a Shawnee chief, said they were “uneasy to see that you think yourselves Masters of this Country, because you have taken it from the French, who you know had no Right to it, as it is the Property of us Indians.” Croghan responded that after the British defeated the French and opened a road into the Ohio country, the Six Nations agreed to it, “and we thought the Six Nations had a Right so to do, as we always understood that they were the original Proprietors of this Country.”67 Croghan was placing on record the justification for purchasing that same country from other people who “had no right to it” less than six months later.
In Johnson’s absence on the coast, Guy Johnson presided over a three-week council at Johnson Hall in June where the Mohawks voiced concerns about encroachments on their land, especially by claimants to the Kayaderosseras patent, some four hundred thousand acres of land west of the Hudson and north of the Mohawk River originally patented more than sixty years before but which, the Iroquois speaker at Albany in 1754 said, “upon inquiry among our old men, we cannot find was ever sold.”68 When Sir William got home, he negotiated a settlement of the contested area, confirming a substantially reduced area of the patent: for $5,000 the Mohawks agreed to “give up all pretensions to this Tract.” In return, the Mohawk chief Abraham made clear, they expected Johnson “to procure some good Strong writing, as a security for the Land we live upon, that we may no more be disturbed.” Johnson assured them he would “endeavor to the utmost of his power to have their Lands secured to them, and their Posterity, in the most effectual manner.”69 The agenda and much of the content for the upcoming treaty was in place well before the participants gathered at Fort Stanwix in the fall.
The Great Giveaway
Fort Stanwix sat at the Oneida Carrying Place or the Oneida Carry, the critical portage between Wood Creek and the Mohawk River that in turn linked the Great Lakes and the Hudson. It took several months for everyone to assemble. Sir William thought it “best for me to Conclude the affair on behalf of the Crown for the whole,” but he had to inform the various colonial governments concerned in the upcoming treaty, consult them “on such points as may effect them,” and invite them to send commissioners to ratify the agreement. He invited Delawares and Shawnees because their proximity to Virginia and Pennsylvania meant they could be troublesome and “makes their perfect Agreement necessary.” But they had fought against the British in the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War and Johnson included them as interested parties and dependants of the Six Nations, “not as Owners of the Land.” He made it clear that he intended to deal with the Six Nations as spokesmen for all the tribes.70
The treaty proceedings were scheduled to begin at Fort Stanwix on September 20 but the Indians drifted in slowly—the Seneca contingent was detained by the death of a chief and the necessary ceremonies of condolence—so the start of the conference was delayed by more than a month. Given the Senecas’ role in Pontiac’s War, it was important that they be there. While the Indians who were already at Fort Stanwix waited, complained Johnson, they consumed enormous quantities of food.71
As soon as Samuel Wharton heard that Johnson had received royal instructions to settle the boundary, he and William Trent, the attorney for the “suffering traders,” set off for Mohawk country. Trent, Croghan, William Franklin, and Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan had organized the Indiana Company to consolidate their claims. Johnson’s ill health delayed things and Wharton and Trent stayed with him at John
son Hall, using the time to promote their cause with the Indians for “a Reimbursement for the Losses, which we and others had sustained, by the Depredation of the Shawanese and Delawares in the year 1763.”72 Johnson left home on September 15 and traveled by boat up the Mohawk River, accompanied by William Franklin and “other Gentlemen,” probably Trent and Wharton. They arrived at Fort Stanwix the day before the conference was due to start, and Trent and Wharton promptly handed Johnson and some of the Iroquois chiefs “an account of the Traders losses in 1763, together with their Powers of Attorney for obtaining a retribution of lands, pursuant to an article of the Treaty of peace in 1765.”73 Twenty boatloads of goods made their way upriver, intended as presents for the anticipated cession of land to the king. Johnson represented New York as well as the Crown. His three deputies, George Croghan, Daniel Claus, and Guy Johnson, were present.74 Croghan had been preparing for the big event for months and now, in the words of one biographer, he was “by far the most active of the speculators who busied themselves in making last minute purchases from the Indians before the Crown obtained title to the ceded area”; in the words of another, he “was busy looking after the interests of the empire, the Penns, the traders, and himself.”75 In addition to serving as the deputy superintendent for the Indians of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, Croghan also represented the “suffering traders”; he, Trent, and Wharton drew up a deed ceding to the king to be held in trust for the traders about 2.5 million acres bounded by the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, the Ohio, the Little Kanawha, and the Monongahela.76
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