The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Dinwiddie had promised to supply the Cherokees with everything they needed, and he bombarded the Virginia Assembly with requests for presents for Indians defending the frontier.41 But when Wawhatchee, the head warrior of Keowee, and 148 other Lower Town Cherokees arrived at Fort Loudon with Andrew Lewis in April 1757, there were no goods for them. “I am sure King George does not know now how we are treated,” Wawhatchee complained to King George’s officers. Captain George Mercer’s feeble apology and promise to do better when they returned did little to appease Wawhatchee. He refused to accept the wampum belt Mercer offered him at the end of his speech and stormed out of the council. Cherokees put little stock in Mercer’s promise, claiming that whereas the French always gave them what they wanted, “they found from every Action, the Great Men of Virginia were Liars.” Mercer implored Washington to do everything he could to push the issue with the government, knowing the Indians would abandon them if they were not properly rewarded.42 The promised gifts had still not arrived a month later when Wawhatchee and a war party brought in four scalps and two prisoners, and the Indians made their feelings clear. Washington made his feelings about them clear to Dinwiddie; they were, he fumed, “the most insolent, most avaricious, and most dissatisfied wretches I have ever had to deal with.” Dinwiddie shared his opinion.43 But Captain Abraham Bosomworth of the 60th (Royal American) Regiment, who had an Indian wife and served as an agent to the Cherokees, cautioned that Wawhatchee was “a very leading Man in the Nation therefor we must take the greatest Care of him.”44

  In invoking French generosity, Wawhatchee employed a well-worn strategy that played on British anxieties. Still, the French, too, were short of supplies and had the same anxieties. They outmatched the English in their appreciation of the role of gifts in sustaining Indian allegiance, but often lagged behind the English in the quality and quantity of goods they produced. They complained just as much about their dependence on Indian allies and the effort and expense the alliance required. “One is a slave to Indians in this country. They are a necessary evil,” General Montcalm’s aide Louis Antoine de Bougainville lamented in his journal. The French could no more do without Indians in the woods of America than they could “without cavalry in open country.” As independent allies, Indians expected to be consulted and rewarded. At the siege of Fort William Henry in 1757, Montcalm explained the surrender terms to his Indian allies before he signed them but after he had negotiated them. The Indians did not feel bound by the terms he had agreed upon. Having given up a season’s hunting to serve with his army, they did feel entitled to plunder, captives, and scalps, which they acquired by assaulting the British garrison.45 Frenchmen were no surer of their Indian allies than Englishmen were of theirs.

  Washington and Croghan attended the interrogation of a captive French ensign in June 1757 who indicated that the French were now recruiting allies from the Great Lakes tribes to carry out raids on the frontiers because Ohio Indians were leaning toward neutrality. Indians from the Great Lakes region had been in the Ohio country for decades and had contributed the majority of the warriors who defeated Braddock. Nevertheless, Governor Vaudreuil worried that the Indians on “the Beautiful River” were receptive to English peace overtures.46

  Like Bougainville, Washington simultaneously recognized and resented his dependence on Indian allies. Unable to give them what they had been promised, he feared losing them altogether. Many Indians left for home when Virginia failed to live up to its side of the bargain. Their options increasingly constrained by an encroaching colonial world, the Catawbas viewed the war as an opportunity to obtain food, clothing, ammunition, and other goods in return for their service as allies.47 Virginia valued their service but was slow to reward it. When the council heard that Hagler and two chiefs had arrived near Williamsburg in March 1757, it dispatched someone to meet them in a coach and escort them to the capitol, where Hagler was introduced to the council chamber, along with twenty-six other Catawbas who had arrived earlier. Hagler said he had left eighty or ninety warriors on the frontier and had come “to learn if you have anything to propose for our mutual Good.” What he really wanted was guns “and everything necessary for war,” which Virginia promised to deliver as soon as possible.48 If the Catawbas thought they got too little for their services, Washington thought they got too much. “The Catawbas have been of little use, but a great expense to this Colony; and are now gone home,” he wrote General John Stanwix in May. “The Cherokees I apprehend will follow their example.”49

  Things hardly improved after the British government reorganized the conduct of Indian affairs. In 1755 Edmond Atkin, a thirty-eight-year-old South Carolina merchant living in England at the time, submitted to the Board of Trade a lengthy report on the management of Indian affairs, which, he said, “was on a wretched footing throughout all America.” “No people in the world understand and pursue their true National Interest, better than the Indians,” he explained. With France competing for their allegiance, there could be no doubt that the prosperity of Britain’s North American colonies depended on good relations with the tribes. Atkin recommended centralizing the management of Indian affairs by creating two regional superintendencies. The board agreed. Sir William Johnson was appointed superintendent in the North, and in 1756 Atkin himself was appointed superintendent in the South.50 The new superintendent assumed jurisdiction over the conduct of Virginia’s Indian relations. “You are no longer to have concern with, or management of, Indian affairs,” Dinwiddie wrote Washington peremptorily in May 1757. Atkin was on his way to Winchester to take over “that extraordinary Service,” and if he had to leave before the Indians returned home, he would appoint a deputy to do business in his absence.51

  Atkin’s appointment only increased Washington’s frustrations with the mishandling of Indian allies, and perhaps provided a target to divert criticisms of his own handling of the situation. Washington agreed that Indian affairs should be consolidated in the hands of one person—too many people making multiple promises and no one delivering on them caused endless confusion, and Indians viewed it as perfidious and deceitful—but he didn’t think Atkin, a merchant rather than a military man and someone known for his arrogance, was the right person. The new superintendent was so slow getting to Fort Loudon that Washington urged Dinwiddie either to have him get a move on or to give orders for distributing the Indians’ presents. “An Indian will never forget a promise made to him,” Washington lectured his governor; “nothing ought ever to be promised but what is performed; and one only person be empowered to do either.” In Washington’s opinion Christopher Gist, who had shown him the ropes on his first mission to the Ohio country and pulled him out of the freezing Allegheny River, was the man for the job, even if under Atkin’s direction. Gist had little grasp of Indian languages, but he was well acquainted with the manners and customs of the southern Indians, and Washington could vouch for his honesty and zeal.52 Robert Hunter Morris agreed that Gist knew more than anyone else in Pennsylvania about Indians and Indian country.53 Dinwiddie’s response, perhaps understandably, was cool. Too many officers had made promises they were not authorized to make and had given in to the Cherokees’ “clamorous, avaritious Demands.” He hoped Atkin would calm things down. Atkin duly appointed Gist as his deputy.54

  Atkin finally arrived in Winchester on June 3. “A person with a readier pen and having more time than myself, might amuse you with the vicissitudes which have happened in Indian affairs since Mr. Atkin came up,” Washington informed Speaker Robinson a week later; “the Indians have been pleased and displeased oftener than they ought to have been.” Wawhatchee’s Cherokees had “gone off.”55

  Other Cherokees, however, stayed, and more arrived. In June 1757 a party of Virginians and Cherokees ambushed a group of French soldiers. A chief named Swallow Warrior was shot in the head. The Cherokees were so incensed at his death that they killed the two Frenchmen they had taken prisoner.56 Later that month, Ostenaco arrived with twenty-seven warriors, and more were said to be on the
way, to act as “a great Scourge to the prowling Enemy.” Although Ostenaco fell ill with fever, his warriors scouted toward Fort Duquesne, gathering intelligence of enemy movements.57

  Keeping the Cherokees with him was vital, but Washington felt hampered in his efforts to do so, and he let Dinwiddie know it. Indian affairs at Winchester, he wrote, had been impeded by “a train of mismanagement,” which, if it continued, “must inevitably produce the most melancholy consequences.” In the fall, Atkin departed to attend to Indian affairs in South Carolina, taking Gist and the Indian interpreter with him. In their absence, Washington had to deal with the Indians, but he had no interpreter, no right to hold conferences with them, nothing to give them, and no authority to procure goods for them. Such neglect could drive them into the welcoming arms of the French. The Cherokees, whom he had repeatedly lambasted as mercenary and fickle, were now brave allies who had heartily embraced Virginia’s cause and deserved better treatment. Had Washington and his officers not “strained a point” to get them things they desperately needed and made extra efforts to keep them contented, the Cherokees would have gone home empty-handed and resentful. Whenever a party arrived, they immediately asked Washington for supplies, which he could not provide, and there was no one to explain the situation to them. Washington was reduced “to such a dilemma as I wou’d most gladly be extricated from.” The way things were going, he warned Dinwiddie, “Our Interest with those Indians is at the brink of destruction.”58

  Dinwiddie expressed surprise at Washington’s complaints. Atkin had assured him he had put Indian affairs in good order and he had left almost £800 in goods for Indians. Dinwiddie would send more, but presents must be handed out with discretion, he told Washington; Gist had submitted a “monstrous” expense account.59 Dinwiddie also took exception to Washington’s absences on private business while he was supposed to be commanding the defense of the frontier. Washington was back in Williamsburg for the winter because of ill health. (Dr. James Craik, the army physician, recommended the change for the dysentery that still plagued him.60) When John Blair (who took over as interim lieutenant governor between Dinwiddie and Francis Fauquier) informed him that seven or eight hundred Indians were on their way to Winchester, Washington replied defensively and sulkily. Despite his poor health, he would go there immediately if he thought it would make a difference. However, as he was not entrusted to manage Indian affairs, other than to direct their raids (and even those were “governed by caprice & whim rather than by real design”), and as there were no arms or supplies to give the Indians when they arrived, he did not see how his being there would help the situation. All that would happen if he were on the spot was that the Indians would blame him, as the commanding officer, for all their disappointments.61

  Washington was on the defensive in more ways than one. Turning the Virginia Regiment from a collection of volunteers into a professional military force was a significant achievement and a milestone in Washington’s maturation as a military leader.62 Nevertheless, his soldiers were still and always outmatched. “No troops in the universe can guard against the cunning and wiles of Indians,” Washington told Speaker Robinson. “No one can tell where they will fall, ’till the mischief is done, and then ’tis vain to pursue. The inhabitants see, and are convinced of this; which makes each family afraid of standing in the gap of danger, and by retreating one behind another, they depopulate the country, and leave it to the Enemy, who subsist upon the plunder.”63 The Indians’ tactics were working; Virginia’s tactics were not. “I am, and have for a long time been, fully convinced, that if we continue to pursue a defensive plan, that the country must be inevitably lost,” he lobbied General Stanwix. The only way to stop the Indian raids was to snuff them out at the source: Fort Duquesne. Otherwise, so long as the French had the Indians at their command, “what have we to expect by leaving it in Our Rear but absolute Destruction[?]”64

  Unstated but clearly implied was that Washington could lead a successful campaign against Fort Duquesne.

  instead, the assignment went to fifty-one-year-old John Forbes, a Scottish officer with almost thirty years of military service and campaign experience in both Europe and North America. In the summer of 1757 the brilliant and temperamental William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, formed a new ministry in London. As secretary of state with responsibility for colonial affairs and international diplomacy, Pitt controlled the conduct of the war. He promptly rebooted Britain’s global war effort, with a renewed focus on winning it in North America. Parliament would vote huge subsidies to European allies who would keep French armies bogged down on Continental battlefields; the Royal Navy would sweep French fleets from the seas, destroying their supply lines to America; and reinforcements of British regulars (almost twenty thousand of them, including nine new regiments raised in the Scottish Highlands65) would join colonial forces in defeating the French in North America. Loudon was recalled. Forbes was appointed brigadier general to command the expedition against Fort Duquesne, while other armies invaded Canada from Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence. Forbes appointed an experienced Swiss officer, Colonel Henry Bouquet, as his second-in-command. In almost constant discomfort and pain from the illness that would kill him—possibly stomach cancer—Forbes focused his attention on Philadelphia as his headquarters for supplying the expedition. Bouquet functioned as his operational or tactical commander at the head of the column. It proved an effective partnership.66

  With Pitt devoting more men, money, and resources to the war in America and footing the bill for recruitment, the Virginia Assembly abandoned conscription and relied instead on a generous enlistment bounty of £10—as much cash as many small planters could bring in during a year—to attract volunteers to the ranks. It also voted to raise a second Virginia regiment and made fifty-year-old William Byrd III its commander, serving under Washington. By June 1758 both Virginia regiments stood at full strength with a thousand men. Virginia never returned to conscription.67 Much to Washington’s satisfaction, Pitt also did away with the regulation that gave regular officers of any rank seniority over provincial officers of every rank; now provincial officers would be junior only to regular officers of equal or superior rank.68

  Hearing a new expedition was about to be mounted against Fort Duquesne, Washington hurried to get in on the action. He left Williamsburg in late March to resume active command of the Virginia Regiment at Fort Loudon. Then he asked General Stanwix to recommend him to Forbes, “not as a person who would depend upon him for further recommendation to military preferment, for I have long conquered all such expectancies … but as a person who would gladly be distinguished in some measure from the common run of provincial officers.”69 Forbes began planning his campaign in the spring. His regular and provincial troops and Indian allies were to rendezvous at Winchester.

  Before William Byrd III was appointed commander of the 2nd Virginia Regiment, the Earl of Loudon had dispatched him to recruit Cherokees for Forbes’s campaign. Byrd spent the spring in Cherokee country but struggled to raise more than a handful. Attakullakulla refused to be rushed, held out for assurances of better trade and more goods than he could get from the French at Fort Massac, and promised to bring more warriors later. Frustrated and “haunted by the Indians” at the Lower Cherokee town of Keowee, Byrd complained to Forbes, “The Squaws are the only good things to be met with here.” Like his father, he evidently missed few opportunities for female companionship. In the end, he was able to bring no more than sixty men because some decided to go to Virginia with the Overhill Cherokees at the last minute. “This change proceeds from a Dream,” Byrd reported to Forbes, with a sigh. In fact, groups of Cherokees had been setting out since early in the year. Some had gone down the Tennessee River, ostensibly to raid French positions, and many had already joined Forbes.70

  Forbes feared an Indian attack on his army more than anything else. “Wee are like people in the Dark, perhaps going head long to Destruction,” he confided to Colonel Bouquet. Indian allies were his best source
of intelligence and best protection against surprise attack.71 He knew that failure to supply them as promised risked losing them. By late April 1758, 652 Indians—604 Cherokees and 48 Catawbas—had arrived at Winchester, and more were on the way. They had come according to their own seasonal schedule for making war but too early for Forbes’s purposes. He was still working on the logistics of supply and had yet to assemble his army. “In short,” he wrote Loudon in April, “necessity will turn me into a Cherokee, and don’t be surprised if I take F: duQuesne at the head of them, and them only.” Indians could be extremely useful if properly looked after, he told General Abercromby, but they were “in want of everything.” The Cherokees were so important that he did everything in his power to make sure they had what they needed.72

  That meant distributing gifts when Indians arrived and when they met in council, outfitting scouts and war parties, provisioning warriors who were far from home, and rewarding them for their services when they returned home. His quartermaster, the still-fractious Sir John St. Clair, who was appointed to the expedition because of his experience in that role crossing the Alleghenies with Braddock, proved barely competent but worked to keep the supplies coming.73 He and Captain Bosomworth purchased goods from Philadelphia merchants and took measures to prevent trouble, keeping the Indian camp separate, off-limits for soldiers, and alcohol-free.74 Throughout the spring and summer of 1758, Forbes’s Cherokee and Catawba allies received prodigious quantities of merchandise: guns, gunpowder, powder horns, lead, thousands of flints, knives, pipes, kettles, hundreds of shirts, match coats, cloth, blankets, hats, ribbon, shoes, deerskins for making moccasins, scissors, razors, awls, wire, garters, thousands and thousands of wampum beads, tomahawks, gorgets, silver broaches, armbands, vermilion, sugar, and tobacco, as well as rations of food and drink.75 The effort and expense of keeping the Indians supplied was never enough to keep them fully satisfied or keep them all with the army, but it demonstrated the importance Forbes attached to Indian allies in the success of his campaign.