Crucible of War

by Fred Anderson

  The Iroquois were only too happy to turn the geopolitical anxieties of Britain and France to their own advantage. This they did by insisting that the Ohio Country was theirs, by right of conquest: a claim for which the wars of the first half of the seventeenth century provided a plausible basis. Following the depopulation of the Ohio Country, the westernmost Iroquois nation, the Senecas, used the upper Ohio drainage as a vast hunting ground; eventually, westering Senecas known as Mingos set up permanent residence in the area between Lake Erie and the Allegheny River. Moreover, from the late 1720s onward, the Ohio Valley proper was being settled by Iroquois dependents, bands of Shawnees and Delawares moving west from Pennsylvania under growing pressure from European immigration into the Susquehanna Valley. Onondaga designated resident Iroquois village headmen as its representatives on the Ohio and authorized them to speak for the local dependent peoples as well as the Mingos. These representatives, known as “half-kings,” had the power to negotiate and receive diplomatic gifts, but they could not make binding treaties without Onondaga’s assent. Tanaghrisson, the adoptive Seneca who was living as village headman at Logstown (on the site of modern Ambridge, Pennsylvania) as early as 1747, was one such half-king; an Oneida chief named Scarouady was another, acting as regent over the Ohio Shawnees. In reality, Iroquois control over the Ohio Country rested entirely on the degree to which the Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware residents were willing to cooperate with the half-kings, and thus on the willingness of Tanaghrisson and Scarouady—whose authority depended on their ability to retain local followings—to follow policies determined at distant Onondaga. Despite the tenuousness of their real influence, the Grand Council’s chiefs were able to take the carefully constructed illusion of control and use it to play off the British and the French against one another in the great game of North American imperial politics. 12

  By controlling, or seeming to control, the Ohio Country, Onondaga made itself the fulcrum upon which relations between the French and British achieved the delicate balance that lasted for the first half of the eighteenth century. By shifting, or threatening to shift, its position to favor one side over the other, the Confederacy compelled the French and the British to bid for its friendship, or at least its continued non-alignment. The British, lacking effective connections with any northern Indians other than the Iroquois, were particularly susceptible to the Confederacy’s claim to control vast numbers of warriors through its alliances with the Far Indians. At a time when all Iroquoia held only about 1,100 warriors, for example, and when the Shawnees and Delawares in the Ohio Valley counted perhaps 350 warriors between them, the most knowledgeable of Pennsylvania’s Indian experts reported that the Iroquois could command the allegiance of 9,300 fighters among the Far Indians.13

  Cartographic imperialism. Henry Popple’s Map of the British Empire in America with the French, Spanish and Hollandish Settlements adjacent thereto (1751) was, according to its explanatory note, undertaken “with ye Approbation of the Rt Honourable LORDS COMMISSIONERS of TRADE and PLANTATIONS” and reflects the notions of imperial dominion current in London after King George’s War. By depicting the boundaries of British colonies expansively—Virginia’s southern border extends beyond the Mississippi and New York’s northern boundary reaches the Saint Lawrence—and by demoting all other European colonies to mere “settlements,” Popple anticipated expansion into the interior of the continent. Notwithstanding a commendation of the map’s “great Accuracy” by “y e Learned Dr EDM. HALLEY, Professor of Astronomy in ye University of Oxford,” Popple was able to depict that interior in only approximate terms, derived from French reports. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

  To secure Onondaga’s cooperation, both the French and the British strove to maintain friendly diplomatic relations on the Confederacy’s terms, by the giving of gifts. Gift-giving in the form of ritual presentation of strings or belts of wampum beads had been a part of the ceremonies of the Great League since time immemorial; wampum, a sacred medium, was necessary to reinforce and ratify the words spoken in council. Beaded strings and belts also formed the ritual centerpiece of intercultural negotiations between the Iroquois and the Europeans, but as time passed trade goods greatly supplemented these ritual gifts. By the mid-eighteenth century, the conclusion of treaty negotiations could entail the delivery of a ton or more of European goods, including cloth, tools, firearms, ironware, ammunition, and liquor. Such gifts “brightened the chain” of friendship, providing manufactures and consumable commodities to peoples who would have found it hard to survive without them, and supplying the medium of trade by which Iroquois middlemen could obtain high-quality beaver pelts from groups north of the Great Lakes. The Confederacy therefore used its strategic value to make up for its lack of direct access to marketable furs, as well as to help preserve control over its own affairs and lands.14

  For the eighteenth-century Iroquois, then, everything depended on the ability to maneuver between the two European colonial powers and to avoid becoming dependent on either. In Queen Anne’s War (1701–13), this meant negotiating frequently with both Montréal and Albany, assuring both sides of their goodwill and cooperativeness but avoiding entanglement in the fighting whenever possible. When it became impossible, as it sometimes did, to deny the demands of the English for military aid, the Iroquois chose one of two prudent paths. In 1709, they cooperated minimally and delayed a planned invasion of Canada until it had to be aborted. In 1711 they showed ostensible enthusiasm for another expedition, while quietly sending word of what was afoot to the French; thus they thwarted the second invasion as effectively as the first. During the thirty years’ peace that followed the end of Queen Anne’s War, Onondaga’s diplomats met regularly with both French and British officials, maintaining trading relations with both and allowing the Europeans to brighten the chain of friendship with gifts. 15

  Between 1713 and 1744, while peace endured between empires, the Iroquois gained strength by admitting the Tuscaroras to the Great League as a sixth nation, enhanced their formal claim to the Ohio Country by sanctioning the settlement of Mingos, Shawnees, and Delawares in the upper Valley, and extended the scope of their direct relations with British colonies beyond New York and Pennsylvania. Ironically, the very growth of Onondaga’s self-assurance would cost the Confederacy its ability to maneuver between the rival empires and end the era of Iroquois neutrality. Although no one at the time saw it clearly, the events that seemingly marked the zenith of the Great League’s influence would prove to have been the harbingers of its long decline—a change of fortune that owed as much to Iroquois hubris and greed as to the growth of European power.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Erosion of Iroquois Influence

  1736-1754

  IN 1742 REPRESENTATIVES of the Six Nations solemnly confirmed a prior land sale to the Penn family, by which the Delaware Indians were dispossessed of two-thirds of a million acres of eastern Pennsylvania territory. The Delawares had lived on that tract, in the valley that still bears their name, since pre-Columbian times, centuries before they had become clients of the Iroquois. Everyone involved knew that the original sale— the so-called Walking Purchase of 1737—had been a spectacular fraud. The spokesmen of the Six Nations nevertheless confirmed it at the Treaty of Easton in 1742 because to do so offered irresistible advantages to the Great League. Despite its tragic consequences for the Delawares, the transfer of their lands to the Penn family cemented an understanding between Pennsylvania and Onondaga: henceforth the Six Nations would act as sole agents for the sale of Indian land-rights within the province.

  But the Walking Purchase would prove to be another kind of turning point, too. As white farmers began arriving in the late 1730s, the eastern Delaware bands relocated to the Susquehanna’s north branch, settling in a remote region called the Wyoming Valley alongside Shawnees who had been there for several decades. At Wyoming, powerless to retaliate against their betrayers, they nursed a sense of grievance against both the Six Nat
ions and the settlers who had taken their homeland. Meanwhile, the Iroquois sellout spurred the removal of other Shawnee and Delaware groups to the Ohio Country. Despite the continued pretense that they were Iroquois dependents, once they reached the valley the Shawnees and Delawares were beyond Onondaga’s effective control. Iroquois influence in the Ohio Country would inevitably diminish as the numbers of refugees grew.1

  But the single event of greatest consequence to the erosion of the Six Nations’ neutrality was a great treaty negotiated at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744, when Iroquois diplomats met with representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. On its face, the Treaty of Lancaster marked the high point of Iroquois influence in dealing with the English colonies. In return for what at the time seemed minor concessions, the league received gifts that included eight hundred pounds in Pennsylvania currency and three hundred pounds in gold, as well as all three governments’ acknowledgment of Onondaga’s suzerainty over several southern Indian tribes, on whose behalf it could henceforth speak, as it spoke for the Delawares and the Shawnees. Perhaps most important to the league was Virginia’s recognition of Iroquois warriors’ right to pass through the province to attack the Cherokees and Catawbas, a concession that evidently included an agreement to provision war parties while in transit.2

  If all these benefits seemed to expand Iroquois power, the Treaty of Lancaster in fact foretold its end, for the Confederacy’s part in the bargain ceded all its remaining claims to land within the boundaries of Maryland and Virginia. Although it is quite clear that Canasatego, the Onondaga headman who negotiated on behalf of the league at both Easton and Lancaster, thought that he was giving up only a fictive Iroquois claim to the Shenandoah Valley, he was in fact trading away the whole of the Ohio Country. More than mere reticence made the Virginia commissioners refrain from mentioning that their colony’s charter assigned the Old Dominion a western boundary on the Pacific Ocean (including “the ‘island of California’ and all other islands” within a hundred miles of the coast) and a northern limit that extended along a line roughly from the northern bank of the Potomac to the western shore of Hudson Bay.3

  Canasatego’s concession was no trivial oversight. By the spring of 1745, the Virginia House of Burgesses had granted nearly a third of a million acres on the Ohio to a syndicate of about twenty rich land speculators from the Northern Neck (the area between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers). Although the outbreak of King George’s War temporarily delayed their activities, it would be only a couple of years more before the speculators, now calling themselves the Ohio Company of Virginia, would begin to press their western claims in earnest. They intended to sell lands at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela to settlers who, they believed, would soon cross the Appalachians.

  Transappalachian white settlement—horrifying to Onondaga, whose neutrality policy rested on the illusion of control over the Ohio Country—would in fact be postponed. But the delay would have less to do with Iroquois maneuverings than with the developing competition of Virginians, Pennsylvanians, and Canadian French interests for control in the west. With the waning of the Confederacy’s influence over the region and its supposedly dependent peoples, the Ohio Country would become the scene of intercolonial and international competition. The Great League, which had so recently acted as the diplomatic equal of the British and French empires, would over the course of the next decade become largely irrelevant to the imperial antagonists.

  The fighting in King George’s War—in Europe, the War of the Austrian Succession—lasted only until 1748, when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle restored all conquests to their prewar owners. But the Iroquois would never regain the influential position they had occupied at Lancaster in 1744. The conflict had cracked open what had long been a fissure in the Confederacy’s solidarity when the Mohawks, easternmost and most consistently Anglophile of the Six Nations, abandoned neutrality in favor of direct cooperation with New York. They chose a most inopportune time to do so.

  Unlike the fervently anti-Catholic New Englanders, who quickly mounted an expedition against Louisbourg—the fortified town and naval base on Cape Breton Island that was the strategic key to the Gulf of the St. Lawrence—and actually conquered it in 1745, New Yorkers felt little enthusiasm for fighting the French. Their governor, George Clinton, very much a servant of the Crown, appealed to the Mohawks for help, and at his instigation they undertook raids on Canada in 1746, 1747, and 1748; but the merchants who dominated the assembly, led by the powerful, Albany-based De Lancey family, would consent to no military measures beyond the building of a few forts. Indeed throughout the war Albany’s fur merchants traded enthusiastically with their counterparts in Montréal via Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Richelieu River, even as the Mohawks’ mounting losses made them ever more suspicious of New York’s good faith. King George’s War thus proved a disaster for the Mohawks specifically and gravely diminished the coherence of Confederacy policy-making. This in turn weakened Iroquois neutrality and accelerated the pace of Anglo-American trading and land speculation in the Ohio Valley.4

  The war’s effects on the Pennsylvanians and Virginians already active in the west had been predictable. As always in wartime, the insecurity of persons and property caused farmers and Indian traders to flee the frontier for the comparative safety of eastern settlements. As the war wound down, however, land speculation and trading ventures erupted into the Ohio Country as never before. The traders were mainly Pennsylvanians who had long lived among the Shawnees and Delawares on the Susquehanna, and who simply followed their customers to the Ohio Country in the 1730s. For these the fall of Louisbourg and the closure of the St. Lawrence to French shipping created a bonanza, as Indians from all over the interior began looking to English sources for the manufactures they needed. Offering English goods at prices no French trader could match, the aggressive Pennsylvanians expanded their trade to include commerce with tribes that lived far to the west, eventually reaching even the Miamis and Wyandots, who had never traded with any but French partners.5

  As early as 1747 one particularly flamboyant Pennsylvania trader, an Irish immigrant named George Croghan, could be found on the site of modern Cleveland trading with the Mingos and luring “Northern Indians”—French allies—across Lake Erie by offering “goods on much better terms than the French.” By 1749, Croghan and his associates had set up a big trading post on the upper Great Miami River, in what is now western Ohio, at a Miami Indian settlement called Pickawillany. This promising village stood near several important portages and trails, and— to Croghan, most importantly—had a chief, Memeskia, who was willing to send wampum belts to groups as far off as Michigan, inviting them to come to Pickawillany. Within a year or two, Memeskia’s invitations and Croghan’s emporium drew hundreds of families to the settlement, and the enterprising Irishman could see opportunities blossoming in every quarter. Soon he was trading with Shawnee bands as far down the Ohio River as the site of modern Louisville and sending boats up the Kentucky River. The French could hardly afford to be indifferent to such avid poaching on what had been their exclusive commerce; as they knew better than anyone, trade goods and gifts held their alliance system together. So, not forgetting that he had been a thorn in their side during the last war, the French put a price on George Croghan’s head.6

  Croghan treated the news that his scalp had acquired a market value as a joke, but in fact it offered a highly accurate gauge of the growing French fear that the English were about to seize control of the Ohio Valley. From the perspective of the increasingly jittery officials in Québec, Pennsylvania traders infesting the Ohio Country seemed to be a spearhead of aggression that had to be deflected—by force, if necessary. The imperious naval officer who was serving as governor-general of New France, the comte de La Galissonière, therefore dispatched a military detachment to make a circuit of the Ohio Country in 1749. La Galissonière gave the command to Captain Pierre-Joseph de Céloron de Blainville, an officer long experienced in Indian
relations; he set off from Montréal in June with a party of more than two hundred Canadians and about thirty Indians. Céloron carried three instructions: to renew the ancient French claim (by right of La Salle’s discovery) to the Ohio Country, to gather intelligence on the degree of English influence, and to awe the Indians by demonstrating France’s ability to send soldiers into the heart of their country.

  Céloron returned in November, having paddled and portaged a great circle of three thousand miles: up the St. Lawrence and across Lakes Ontario and Erie; along the Allegheny, Ohio, Great Miami, and Maumee Rivers to Detroit; and finally back down Lakes Erie and Ontario to the St. Lawrence and Québec. In a gesture of almost touching futility, he and his party buried small lead plates at intervals along the way—“as a monument,” their inscriptions read, “of the renewal of possession that we have taken of the said River Ohio and of all those that fall therein and of all the lands on both sides, unto the sources of these said rivers.” Céloron had treated with the Indian tribes he met, offered gifts to renew their devotion to their father Onontio, and warned them that as faithful children they must henceforth send home any Englishmen who appeared among them. In general, he noted, the Indians received this news coolly. On at least one occasion their reaction was so evidently “unsatisfactory” that he and his men were obliged to beat a hasty retreat.7

  That much an old Indian hand like Céloron could hardly have found surprising. What unsettled him more was how many Pennsylvania traders he encountered, including parties leading pack trains of fifty horses, laden with pelts. He had warned them that they were trespassing on lands belonging to Louis XV, had written letters for them to take back to their governor, and had explained that their presence in the Ohio Country was unwelcome. But even the dutiful Céloron knew that such warnings would have no real effect. When he made his report to the new governor-general, the marquis de La Jonquière, he assessed the situation pessimistically. The Miamis had become estranged and were corrupting other groups, even the loyal Wyandots. Without permanent French trading stations in the Ohio Country, and without a subsidized flow of trade goods that could compete with the astonishingly cheap manufactures of Great Britain, the Indians of the region would inevitably gravitate to the British.8