The Treaty of Fort Stanwix promised to protect the lands of the Oneidas and Tuscaroras who had supported the Americans during the war. But New York was anxious to extinguish Indian title to western lands before other states advanced rival claims. At the Treaty of Fort Herkimer in 1785, Governor Clinton of New York bought a large tract of land along the New York–Pennsylvania border from the Oneidas, pushing the 1768 Fort Stanwix treaty line west to the Chenango River. Good Peter, the Oneida chief, at first refused to part with so much territory but the commissioners kept up the pressure, lobbying and dividing the Oneidas in private evening meetings until eventually they caved. “We have several times spoke, and sometimes near each other,” said Good Peter. “It often happens that in the Course of a Night People’s Minds get altered.”18 In a series of shady deals, New York State representatives and rapacious land company agents proceeded to gobble up Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca lands, sometimes over protests by the Iroquois that they believed they were leasing the lands, not selling them. Iroquois diplomatic rituals traditionally served to bring people together with good minds, and their council protocols usually allowed time for consideration and consensus building. “Possess your Minds in Peace, that we decline making an Answer at present,” an Oneida sachem named Oneyanha (or Beech Tree) told the New York commissioners. “A good Mind is necessary in deliberating on Things of Importance.” But New Yorkers in a hurry to get their hands on Oneida lands did not possess peaceful minds, and they pressured and divided the Oneidas. “Our minds,” said Good Peter, “were much agitated, and drawn various ways.”19
The Indians having their women along may have limited such agitation and distraction. At a treaty council held at Denniston’s Tavern in Albany in February 1789, “female Governesses [clan mothers] and other Women” accompanied the Iroquois chiefs and warriors. The Indians told the New York commissioners why they were there: “Our Ancestors considered it a great Transgression to reject the Council of their Women, particularly the female Governesses. Our Ancestors considered them Mistresses of the Soil. Our Ancestors said who bring us forth, who cultivate our Lands, who kindle our Fires and boil our Pots, but the Women. Our Women say, they think their Uncles had of late lost the Power of Thinking, and were about sinking their Territory.” In other words, the women were not happy with the land cessions made by the men. On this occasion, the men had “much Conversation with our Sisters” before any agreement was made. “It is an acknowledged Truth that our Sisters are the principal Inhabitants of the Earth,” Good Peter explained to the governor. “The Earth from whence spring the Articles necessary to sustain Life is theirs, and it is thereupon necessary we should hearken to their Advise.”20 But women were not immune to the pressures and tactics applied to acquire Oneida lands and they were unable to stem the tide of dispossession. As New Yorkers secured the land by treaty and chicanery, Samuel Kirkland, who had a hand in many of the deals, reported that it became commonplace for Indians to say “cheat like a white man.”21
The United States dictated treaties by right of conquest to most of the Ohio tribes. At Fort McIntosh, at the confluence of the Ohio and Beaver rivers (present-day Beaver, Pennsylvania), the treaty commissioners Butler, Lee, and George Rogers Clark addressed the Indians “in a high tone” and told them they were a conquered people. Because the English king had made no provision for the tribes, they were “therefore left to obtain peace from the U. States, & to be received under their government and protection, upon such conditions as seem proper to Congress, the Great Council of the U. States.” The commissioners brushed aside the Indians’ objections that these lands had been handed down to them by their ancestors and that they still regarded them as their own: “The detail of these claims and title may appear to be of consequence among yourselves. But to us & to the business of the Council Fire to which we have called you, they have no relation; because we claim the country by conquest; and are to give not to receive.”22 The commissioners demanded southern and eastern Ohio as the price of peace.
A year later, 150 Shawnee men and 80 women of the Mekoche or Maquachake division—traditionally responsible for matters of mediation and peacemaking—arrived at Fort Finney at the mouth of the Great Miami River. “Painted and dressed in the most elegant manner,” they entered the grounds of the fort “in very regular order; the chiefs in front, beating a drum, with young warriors dancing a peculiar dance for such occasions.” The two head dancers each carried the stem of a pipe painted and decorated with wampum and bald eagle feathers as symbols of peace. Behind the warriors came the women and children. The Indians sang, the Indians and Americans each fired a salute, and the American commissioners entered the council house and took their seats. Then the Indians filed in; the men “entered at the west door, the chiefs on our left, the warriors on our right and round on the east end until they joined the chiefs; the old chief beating the drum, and the young men dancing and waving the feathers over us, whilst the others were seated; this done, the women entered at the east door, and took their seats on the east end, with great form.” The Shawnee speaker rose to address the commissioners and urged them to be of good mind; then, holding a string of wampum, he ritually cleared their ears, wiped their eyes, and “removed all sorrow from [their] hearts.”23
But the American commissioners had little patience with such protocols and were in no mood for conciliation. Richard Butler had been a trader among the Shawnees, spoke their language, and had two children by a Shawnee woman, but he had fought against the Shawnees in 1764. This was also his third treaty council in three years and it was time to wrap things up. Clark had made a name for himself as an Indian fighter during the Revolution; he had led assaults on Shawnee villages in 1780 and 1782 and operated on the assumption that the only thing Indians understood or respected was force. His idea of Indian diplomacy was to hold out a red or black wampum belt in his right hand and a white one in his left and say, “Hear is a Blody [sic] Belt and a white one take which one you please.”24 Samuel Parsons, a Harvard graduate, Connecticut lawyer, and former officer in the Continental Army, was intent on opening Indian country to veterans—or to men like himself who bought up the veterans’ land bounties at a fraction of their value. The Americans demanded that the Shawnees cede all land east of the Great Miami and give hostages as a guarantee of compliance. The Shawnees protested: “God gave us this country, we do not understand measuring out the lands, it is all ours.” They insisted on the Ohio River as the boundary and refused to give hostages. When the Shawnee speaker offered the wampum belt on which he spoke, the American commissioners refused to accept it. Butler picked up the belt “and dashed it on the table.” Clark pushed it off the table with his cane and ground it into the dirt with his boot. The Americans then withdrew “and threw down a black and white string” of wampum, symbolizing the choice between war and peace, promising destruction for the Shawnees’ women and children if they failed to comply. The Mekoche chief Moluntha urged his people to reconsider. When the council reconvened the Shawnees gave the commissioners a white belt and begged them to have pity on the women and children. They then grudgingly accepted the American terms and ceded their tribal lands east of the Great Miami, which meant they gave up most of southern and eastern Ohio.25 But the Mekoches did not necessarily speak for the rest of the Shawnees and the treaty did little to restrain Kentucky militia who had become accustomed to crossing the Ohio and attacking Shawnee villages during the Revolution. Before the year was out, Moluntha’s village lay in ruins and the old chief lay dead, a Kentuckian’s axe in his skull and his fingers still clutching a copy of the treaty he had persuaded his people to sign.
The national assault on Indian homelands got under way more slowly in the South. The southern states posed a more immediate threat than Congress. The United States signed its first treaties with the major southeastern tribes at Hopewell in northwestern South Carolina. US commissioners Benjamin Hawkins, Andrew Pickens, Joseph Martin, and Lachlan McIntosh met with nine hundred Cherokees in November 1785 and the
n gathered with Choctaw and Chickasaw delegates in January 1786. The Indians produced their British medals and commissions and asked for American ones in exchange. Corn Tassel, the chief of Chota, reminded the Americans that the Indians were the first inhabitants of the land and the white people were now living on it as their friends. “From the beginning of the first friendship between the white and red people, beads were given as an emblem thereof: and these are the beads I give to the commissioners of the United States, as a confirmation of our friendship.” The Americans wanted to reaffirm tribal boundaries, but even so Tassel seemed to lose land. He drew a map detailing Cherokee territorial claims, reviewed the treaties they had made, and dismissed the Henderson treaty of 1775 as fraudulent. “I know that Richard Henderson says he purchased the lands at Kentucky and as far south as Cumberland, but he is a rogue and a liar, and if he was here I would tell him so.” Henderson had asked only for some grazing land on the Kentucky River; he must have concocted the deed and added the chiefs’ names himself. But the commissioners would not budge:
You know Colonel Henderson, Attacullacula, Oconostoto, are all dead; what you say may be true; but here is one of Henderson’s deeds, which points out the line, as you have done, nearly til it strikes Cumberland, thence it runs down the waters of the same to the Ohio, thence up the said river as it meanders to the beginning. Your memory may fail you; this is on record, and will remain forever. The parties being dead, and so much time elapsed since the date of the deed, and the country being settled on the faith of the deed, puts it out of our power to do anything respecting it; you must therefore be content with it, as if you had actually sold it, and proceed to point out your claim exclusive of this land.
Reluctantly, Tassel agreed to “say nothing more about Kentucky, although it is justly ours.” The US commissioners read the treaty out loud and the Cherokees then signed it. Georgia and North Carolina had not ceded their western lands to the federal government, and their commissioners and agents who were present immediately lodged a written protest against the treaty as “a manifest and direct attempt to violate the retained sovereignty and legislative right” of their states. The agent for North Carolina was William Blount, whose reputation for land grabbing earned him the name the “dirt king” among the Indians.26 In the face of state opposition, the federal government lacked the power to honor the boundaries it had reaffirmed. “We have held several treaties with the Americans, when Bounds was always fixt and fair promises always made that the white people Should not come over,” Tassel complained three years later, “but we always find that after a treaty they Settle much faster than before.”27
Choctaw delegates arrived at Hopewell the day after Christmas in 1785 after a seventy-seven-day journey from their Mississippi homeland. In addition to the physical difficulties and dangers they encountered, the delegates also likely traveled at a deliberate and ritualistic peace, as befitted a mission that was both diplomatic and spiritual. They did not go there to give up their land or their sovereignty; they went to talk about trade, establish peaceful relations, and instruct the American commissioners about Choctaw ways of conducting diplomacy.28 The Americans were not particularly interested in learning Indian protocol. They were interested in Indian land, although they did not yet have the power to coerce compliance with their demands.
As the tribes recovered from the shock of the Peace of Paris, resistance stiffened. Indians who were not present at the treaties dictated by the United States denounced those who were and refused to accept the terms. As 1786 drew to a close, delegates from the Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, Hurons, Ojibwes, Potawatomis, Ottawas, Piankeshaws, Weas, Miamis, and Cherokees gathered in council near Detroit and adopted a united stance. In a forceful message to Congress they declared that the previous treaties were invalid and that they would only recognize land cessions “made in the most public manner” and approved by the united tribes.29
Faced with the prospect of an all-out war with still-formidable Indian nations, Congress had little choice but to retreat from its high-handed policy of dictating treaties by right of conquest. Knox recommended returning to the British practice of purchasing Indian lands in open council, and the Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, proclaimed that the United States would observe “the utmost good faith” in its dealings with Indian people and that their lands would not be taken from them without their consent or would be invaded except in “just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” But Congress did not retreat very far. The ordinance also laid out a blueprint for national expansion: the Northwest Territory was to be divided into districts that, after passing through territorial status, would become states. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin eventually entered the Union as states carved from the Northwest Territory. The same year, prepared to purchase Indian claims to lands that had been ceded in the treaties at Forts Stanwix, McIntosh, and Finney, Congress authorized and financed Arthur St. Clair, the newly appointed governor of the Northwest Territory, to convene the tribes in a general council and get them to confirm the land cessions. He was to establish peace with the tribes but not depart from the earlier treaties “unless a change of boundary beneficial to the United States” could be obtained. And while purchasing Indian land was not the primary goal of the treaty, he was not to “neglect any opportunity that may offer of extinguishing the Indian rights to the westward, as far as the river Mississippi.” About two hundred Indians met St. Clair at Fort Harmar near present-day Marietta, Ohio, in December 1788. But they demanded the Ohio River be restored as the boundary, making the negotiations “both tedious and troublesome” for St. Clair. He resorted to the haughty language employed by American commissioners in earlier treaties, telling the Indians that Britain had ceded their lands and that the United States was generous in its restraint. He eventually browbeat the delegates into signing. The two treaties signed on January 1789 were, yet again, essentially dictated treaties.30
Most of the Indians stayed away from Fort Harmar. They had already had their fill of American treaty making. An Ottawa war chief named Gushgushagwa, Augooshaway, or Egushawa reviewed and denounced the Americans’ diplomatic tactics to his Indian listeners a couple of years later. The United States had invaded their country, built forts, assembled the rum-loving Indians, told them a long story about how having conquered the English they had conquered the lands of all the Indians, and then presented them with papers to sign. The Americans had said that their papers, writings, belts, and messages were proof of their desire for peace, but “they were not presented with the dignity which the importance of the subject required, or comformably to the wise customs of our ancestors, but flung at you with threats.” Egushawa reminded his audience how the Virginian commissioner at Fort Finney had picked up the Shawnee wampum belt and “threw it off, contemptuously, with his cane!” A few Indians from various tribes attended the Fort Harmar treaty, “although their chiefs forbad them; knowing well that our elder brethren would require more of that pen and ink witch-craft, which they can make speak things we never intended, or had any idea of, even an hundred years hence; just as they please.” The Americans professed to want peace but they were the aggressors, said Egushawa: “notwithstanding their pen and ink work,” they attempted “to make dogs of all the nations who have listened to them.”31 Indian resistance, in large measure, was a protest against the treaty-making tactics of the Americans.
As the young nation consolidated its government it established the machinery and basic policies by which it conducted relations and negotiated treaties with the Indian tribes. The US Constitution, adopted in 1789, affirmed federal control over Indian affairs. Article 1 gave Congress the power to regulate commerce with the Indian tribes, and Article 2 authorized the president to make treaties, subject to ratification by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The secretary of war was responsible for supervising the negotiation of Indian treaties. The president appointed commissioners to carry out negotiations on his behalf, and the commissioners and the Indian lea
ders signed the treaty. Not all treaties were ratified and Congress modified others—cutting the amount of annuity payments to the Indians, for instance. The revised version of a treaty then had to be taken back to the tribes for acceptance. By the time that happened, things could be very different in Indian country, leaders could have changed, and the original signers would have acquired a rather jaundiced view of American pledges and promises. Once a treaty was ratified, the president signed it. From the initial negotiation to proclamation could take several years.32
Pen and Ink Witchcraft Page 16
