Indian nations, like the new American nation, had to deal with internal divisions and competing policies. During the Revolution, Chickasaw chiefs had defiantly rejected American threats and overtures and generally supported Britain. But King George did not stand by them, and the withdrawal of British trade after 1783 compelled them to look elsewhere for supplies and allies. Some turned to the United States; others turned to Spain. Both powers sought Chickasaw friendship to bolster their efforts to gain control of the lower Mississippi Valley, and they competed to secure Chickasaw permission to establish trading posts on the bluffs overlooking the river. The Chickasaws sought to take advantage of both powers, but the diplomatic shuffling intensified divisions within the nation.105
In July 1782 the principal Chickasaw war chief, Piominko, also known as Piomingo or Mountain Leader, and other headmen initiated peace talks with Virginia.106 A year later, they sent their first message to Congress, asking why it had not reached out to them when so many others had. They had received invitations to trade from Spain, Georgia, and the Illinois country; the Virginians wanted to make a treaty with them for part of their land, and they expected the settlers on the Cumberland River also would demand land soon, “as we are informed they have been marking Lines through our hunting Ground.” Receiving so many talks from so many sources was confusing, the Chickasaws said: “We are told that the Americans have Thirteen Councils composed of Chiefs and Warriors. We know not which of them we are to listen to.” If the president of Congress was “the head Chief of a grand Council which is above these Thirteen Councils,” why had they not heard from him? They hoped Congress would stop the encroachments on their land and provide the trade they needed. They could always trade with the Spaniards, of course, but they preferred not to, “as our hearts are always with the Americans.”107 Piominko and a delegation of chiefs made a treaty with Virginia at French Lick near Nashville in November 1783. One of the chiefs, Red King, blamed their past conflicts with the Americans on bad advice from the English, “Like Two puppies thrown together and provoked to Fight.” Piominko declared that peace was settled and claimed that he “was the first that proposed it.”108
An emerging rival, Ugulayacabe or Wolf’s Friend, and other Chickasaw delegates, together with Choctaws and Upper Creeks, made a treaty with Spain at Mobile in June 1784, in which they secured continued access to manufactured goods by granting Spain a monopoly on their trade. At Hopewell two years later, Piominko and his party granted the same trade monopoly to the United States.109 Piominko and Ugulayacabe were both determined to preserve Chickasaw land and independence; they differed over how to do it.
Indian nations’ conflicts with other Indian nations complicated their relations with non-Indian nations. In aligning with the Americans, Piominko alienated the Creek chief Alexander McGillivray and the alliance he was building with Spain. After a Creek war party killed Piominko’s brother and nephew as they were returning home from a mission to New York in the summer of 1789, Piominko’s Chickasaws engaged in open conflict with the Creeks. Ugulayacabe sometimes collaborated with McGillivray to undermine Piominko and advance the Spanish-Indian alliance he opposed.110
The more numerous Choctaws farther down the Mississippi faced a similar situation and the same choices, their predicament heightened by the precipitous decline of the whitetailed deer population as Choctaw hunters harvested thousands of deerskins to purchase manufactured goods and rum.111 A chief named Franchimastabé led a delegation to the Mobile treaty with Spain; another chief, Taboca, led the delegation that traveled hundreds of miles over two months to Hopewell and made a treaty with the United States. Taboca went on to visit Philadelphia and New York in the summer of 1787. “General Washington treated him with great civility,” the Spanish governor of Natchez informed the governor of Louisiana. “The general’s house was open to him at all hours and he was made welcome at the most private times.” Taboca returned home laden with gifts. When Stephen Minor, a Pennsylvanian working for Spain, sat down to eat at Taboca’s home several years later, “a Spanish flag was waving over us,” but the chief “also had portraits of General Washington, of his wife, of Governor Penn and various others.”112
Southern Indians recognized the potential for playing off Spanish and American rivals, as they had once played off French and British rivals. The United States represented one source of trade and protection; Spain offered another. American and Spanish officials trying to follow shifting tribal foreign policies saw only the tips of intratribal politics as one party or another extended feelers and made agreements.113 The United States had called the treaty conference at Hopewell partly in response to the Spanish treaty at Mobile. But the advantages offered by American allegiance were always tempered by American land hunger, and Indians knew it. With three thousand settlers ensconced in the fork between the French Broad River and the Holston, the question the Cherokee chief Corn Tassel posed to the US commissioners at Hopewell was surely rhetorical: “Are Congress, who conquered the King of Great Britain, unable to remove the people?” Corn Tassel was under no illusions about the purpose and effectiveness of American treaties: “We always find that your people settle much faster shortly after a Treaty than Before. It is well known that you have taken almost all our Country from us without our consent,” he noted wryly in 1787. “Truth is, if we had no Land we should have Fewer Enemies.”114
the federal government first embarked on a program of national expansion in the lands north and west of the Ohio River. The region became the testing ground for a new republic to build a new kind of empire.115 Various states had claims to these lands, but Maryland had insisted that the landowning states cede their claims to Congress—in effect making the land “public land”—as a condition of its ratifying the Articles of Confederation. The states gradually agreed. Virginia, which claimed almost 177 million acres of western land, more than any other state, ceded all its territory north and west of the Ohio in 1784 “for the common benefit,” except for 4 million acres between the Scioto and Little Miami, known as the Virginia Military District, which it reserved to honor the land bounties it had promised its soldiers in the Revolution. Connecticut, which had competing claims with Pennsylvania, relinquished its claims except for 3.25 million acres in northern Ohio that became known as the Western Reserve. The states’ cessions created a single public domain under the control of the federal government, which not only shaped western land policy and patterns of settlement but also speculated itself in western lands.116 Selling the lands northwest of the Ohio to its citizens gave Congress the opportunity to pay off its debts and generate much-needed revenue. The rich lands and rivers of Ohio were the key to settlers’ hopes, land speculators’ fortunes, and the nation’s future.
Instead of unleashing a chaotic land rush, the government envisioned extending the nation westward in an orderly process: lands would be systematically surveyed in townships and then sold and settled by the “right” sort of people. That process involved coordinating national and private interests, a model that Washington himself had perfected. Well-placed and well-heeled speculators used their political connections and financial clout to get a head start. Congress collaborated with them in their pursuit of profits, and the government forged a reciprocal relationship with land companies in developing the Ohio country as it did with railroad companies in developing the trans-Mississippi West in the second half of the nineteenth century.117 Speculators purchased vast tracts of land on credit, in anticipation they could quickly resell lands to settlers and generate the cash for future payment. They also bought up at a fraction of their face value the unpaid notes of the Continental Congress, veterans’ land bounties, and military warrants and used them to buy land. Military warrants—scrip for claims to western land—had been used as war bounties and incentive payments to encourage soldiers to reenlist during the Revolution. Many veterans who lacked the opportunity or the means to move west sold their warrants, often for a pittance, to wealthier men who offered ready cash.
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4 the Confederation Congress set up a committee, chaired by Thomas Jefferson, to consider plans for distributing the national domain and formulate a blueprint for the future development of the territory west of the Ohio. Washington did not serve on the committee, but members sought his advice and opinions, and his experience and interests in the West carried weight.118 The committee recommended that after the land was acquired from the Indians, it be surveyed and divided into territories. Once its population reached twenty thousand, a territory could begin the process of becoming a state on a par with the original thirteen states. The federal government thus laid out a plan for filling the nation’s coffers and paying off its crushing war debt as territories were settled, townships grew, and new states joined the union.119
Washington wanted to implement a process of “compact and progressive Settling” that would strengthen the Union and “admit law & good government.” Sparse settlements scattered across several states or a large territory would have the opposite effects, he explained to both Henry Knox and Hugh Williamson in the spring of 1785, opening the field “to Land jobbers and speculators, who are prouling about like Wolves in every shape”(the same image he had conjured up for Indians in his letter to Congress) and injuring “the real occupiers & useful citizens; and consequently, the public interest.” Fearful that a country on the move might fly apart, he wanted an orderly national advance in which the territory designated for a new state would be laid out and a certain amount of the land settled, or at least granted, before the process of surveying and distributing land for the next state began.120
Congress incorporated Washington’s basic ideas into the Northwest Ordinance of 1785.121 The ordinance again prohibited illegal intrusions and ordered squatters to depart. It provided for the survey and sale of lands once the United States acquired title from the tribes. Unlike the method of metes-and-bounds surveys in place south of the Ohio, where settlers claimed irregular areas and marked their boundaries by landscape features such as streams and rocks, the country north of the Ohio would be surveyed and divided into squares before it was occupied. Starting at the western boundary of Pennsylvania, running north to Lake Erie, and running west from where the Pennsylvania borderline intersected with the Ohio River, the ordinance stipulated the West would be divided into square townships measuring six miles by six miles; townships would be further divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile, or 640 acres. Townships were arranged in north-south rows called ranges; ranges, townships, and sections were all systematically numbered. The surveyors were to measure the lines by chains, mark them on trees, and describe them exactly on plats. Thomas Hutchins, the US geographer, and surveyors from the various states surveyed the first tracts of land in eastern Ohio, known as the Seven Ranges. The secretary of war was to choose by lot one-seventh of the land to compensate veterans of the Continental Army. The remaining lots were to be sold at auction. The ordinance established a pattern of land settlement and land ownership by which the United States surveyed, measured, and divided the continent into squares as it marched west.122
Washington’s attitude to the passage of the ordinance was “better late than never.”123 Nevertheless, it gave him occasion to share his vision for the West with Lafayette:
I wish to see the sons & daughters of the world in Peace & busily employed in the more agreeable amusement, of fulfilling the first and great commandment—Increase & Multiply: as an encouragement to which we have opened the fertile plains of the Ohio to the poor, the needy & the oppressed of the Earth; any one therefore who is heavy laden, or who wants land to cultivate, may repair thither & abound, as in the Land of promise, with milk & honey: the ways are preparing, & the roads will be made easy, thro’ the channels of Potomac & James river.124
In order for Congress and the land companies to secure control of those fertile plains and set the nation on its orderly path of expansion, the government had to deal with the noncompliance of its own citizens who squatted there and the resistance of the Indians who lived there. Federal troops burned squatters’ cabins and crops and ordered squatters back across the river, but too few troops and too many squatters scattered over too much territory rendered the task impossible.125
The Indians presented a more formidable obstacle. Having acquired the claims of the Six Nations to the Ohio Valley at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the United States turned its attention to the tribes who actually lived there.126 At the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in January 1785, US commissioners Richard Butler, George Rogers Clark, and Arthur Lee demanded large cessions from most of the Ohio tribes. When the Indians objected that the king of England had no right to transfer their lands to the United States, the commissioners brushed their objections aside and dictated terms to them as a defeated people. The Shawnees did not attend, and there could be no peace without them. Washington rated the Shawnees “among the most warlike of the Ohio Indians,” but with other tribes making peace, he predicted “their spirit must yield, or they might easily be extirpated.”127
The Mekoche division of the Shawnees met with Butler and Clark at Fort Finney at the mouth of the Great Miami River in January 1786. Butler during the Revolution had a reputation as a hothead, given to fistfights and exchanging black eyes with fellow officers.128 Clark’s idea of diplomacy was to let the Indians know he would just as soon tomahawk them as talk with them. The two men were not inclined to negotiate. Instead, they demanded all land east of the Great Miami. Years of conflict had taken a toll on the Shawnees: “Many of the young fellows which have grown up through the course of the war, and trained like young hounds to blood, have a great attachment to the British,” Butler noted in his journal of the treaty; the chiefs were averse to war but lacked the influence to restrain their warriors. The Shawnees objected to the Americans’ demands and asked that the Ohio River remain the boundary. “God gave us this country, we do not understand measuring out the lands, it is all ours,” they said. But when the Shawnee speaker offered the wampum belt on which he spoke, the 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 the heel of his boot. The Americans then threw down a string of black and white wampum, symbolizing the choice between war and peace. The Americans had defeated the British, and the country now belonged to the United States, they declared. The Shawnees could have peace on American terms or destruction by American arms.129 Moluntha, Painted Pole, and other chiefs grudgingly ceded the land and gave hostages but complained: “This is not the way to make a good or lasting Peace to take our Chiefs Prisoners and come with Soldiers at your Backs.”130 They were right: before the year was out, Moluntha, holding a copy of the peace treaty, was tomahawked in cold blood when Benjamin Logan and a force of Kentucky militia attacked and burned his village.131
Butler was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the Northern District in August 1786. His bullying at Fort Finney stood in stark contrast with the conduct recommended that same year to the British superintendent of Indian affairs in the list of “Instructions for the good Government of the Indian Department” sent by Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester: “As these People consider themselves free and independent and are in fact unacquainted with control and subordination they are alone to be governed by address and persuasion and they require the utmost attention to Ceremonies and external appearances with an uncommon share of patience[,] good temper and forbearance.”132 The contrast was not lost on the Indians, who long remembered the insult to the wampum belt.
Washington wrote to Butler conveying his “sincere regard” for him and his pleasure at his appointment as superintendent. He wanted to know more about the situation in the Ohio country, he said: “the real temper & designs of the Western Indians,” the politics of the people, and navigation on the waterways. He also asked Butler to assist him in meeting a request from Lafayette on behalf of Catherine the Great of Russia for a vocabulary of the languages of the Ohio Indians. Butler, who had traded among the
Shawnees and had a Shawnee wife, complied. In November 1787 he sent Washington a vocabulary of Shawnee words compiled by himself and Delaware words done by John Killbuck, “an Indian of that nation who has been Educated at Princetown College at the Expence of the U.S. & patronage of Congress.” Along with the vocabulary, Butler sent Washington what little information he had been able to gather from oral tradition and their old men on the origins and history of the Shawnees.133 Washington forwarded the vocabulary to Lafayette for Empress Catherine, together with a shorter vocabulary of southern Indian words compiled by Benjamin Hawkins and a copy of a Delaware-English spelling book produced by Rev. David Zeisberger for use in the Moravian mission schools on the Muskingum River.134 (The following year, George Morgan sent Washington a Shawnee grammar and vocabulary that he had had composed, together with the Lord’s Prayer in Shawnee, for the Russian empress, who had “ordered a universal dictionary to be made of all languages.”135) Washington thanked Butler for his observations on Indian history and traditions, and allowed himself a rare moment of reflection on the indigenous past: “Those works which are found upon the Ohio and other traces of the country’s being once inhabited by a race of people more ingenious, at least, if not more civilized than those who at present dwell there, have excited the attention and enquiries of the curious to learn from whence they came, whither they are gone and something of their history.” But what excited Washington’s attention and curiosity, he made clear, was the land, the distances between rivers, and trade and navigation routes in the Ohio country.136
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