While Wayne was at Pittsburgh and vicinity from the fall of 1792 to early 1793, Guyasuta—“old Quiashuta, Chief of the Allegheny”—visited him several times to talk and once, in company with Cornplanter and others, to dine. Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami chiefs also came with tentative peace offers, which Wayne suspected were designed to gain time to gather in winter provisions and withdraw their women and children “from pending destruction” as well as reconnoiter his positions and numbers.71 At that point, Washington, too, wanted to delay things. The army was not nearly ready, officers were still enlisting boys and riffraff, and he feared that if the United States did not convince the Indians of its just intentions toward them, it would face “a powerful opposition from their Combined force.” Put another way, negotiating in good faith could help divide that opposition. He recommended that Wayne keep six or eight Chickasaws and Choctaws with him and treat them well as an inducement to attracting more if needed.72 Knox (Pickering had not yet taken over as secretary of war) suggested to Alexander McGillivray that one or two hundred Creek warriors might be employed to good advantage with the army, but McGillivray did not bite.73 Piominko, on the other hand, sent Chickasaw warriors and tried to get the Choctaws to fight the Kickapoos “for the benefit of the Americans.”74
Wayne moved his army from Fort Washington up the Miami River to Fort Jefferson, where he awaited the outcome of the peace talks at Sandusky. When the express message arrived from the commissioners in early September that the talks had failed, Knox (writing Washington from the outskirts of Philadelphia, as there was still yellow fever in the city) hoped Wayne would advance his whole force from Fort Jefferson by October 1. Wayne now had a trained and disciplined force of 2,200 regular infantry augmented by 1,500 mounted Kentucky militia under General Scott. It was a force equal to what all the tribes between the Great Lakes and the Ohio could muster, said Knox; “God grant him success.”75 Washington’s annual message to Congress in December, however, cautioned that the lateness of the season would delay the expedition until the next year.76
Wayne spent the time constructing Fort Greenville as his new headquarters, about six miles from Fort Jefferson. From there, he could protect convoys and frontier settlements from Indian attacks and strike against the Miami villages.77 He sent a detachment of men forward to St. Clair’s battlefield, where they buried the remains of the dead and built a fort named Recovery. A company of artillery and a company of riflemen occupied it for the winter.78
Meanwhile there was much saber rattling. Washington’s old comrade Louis Cook participated in a delegation from the Seven Nations of Canada to Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, the governor of Quebec, that winter. Dorchester told them he would not be surprised if Britain and the United States were at war within the year, in which case the boundary line “ought then to be drawn by the Warriors.” In March 1794 Washington received from George Clinton a copy of a speech made to him by Cook and a copy of Dorchester’s speech. Anticipating war, Cook contemplated removing his wife and children from St. Regis, the Mohawk community of Akwesasne on the border of New York and Canada. Some people who refused to believe that Britain had any hostile intentions toward the United States thought the speech spurious, but Washington had no doubts about its authenticity or the British government’s efforts to keep the Indian nations stirred up in an effort to alter the border between Canada and the United States.79
Wayne shared Washington’s sentiments and anticipated conflict with Britain, although Knox warned him to avoid any action that could be construed as American aggression against a foreign nation.80 That spring British troops began building Fort Miamis at the rapids on the Maumee River. This was more than holding a fort on the basis that the United States had not met its Peace of Paris commitments; it constituted armed occupation of a site within the Republic’s territorial borders. It seemed to the Indians that the redcoats were ready at last to provide open assistance against the Americans. As Wayne advanced, Indians made repeated requests to the British to honor their promises and lend support because time was running out.81
The Indian confederacy was no longer the force that had defeated St. Clair. American diplomacy and divergent tribal agendas had divided its councils. Putnam’s treaty with the Wabash tribes at Vincennes had effectively detached the western flank of the confederacy.82 At the end of June, Blue Jacket ambushed a party of dragoons from Fort Recovery, but when the Ottawas led an assault on the fort itself, the American artillery drove them off. The Ottawas had had enough, and most headed for home. Many Ojibwas and Potawatomis followed. The confederacy lost about half its warriors. Little Turtle saw the writing on the wall. In July he visited Detroit to find out what assistance to expect from the British. The Indians could not keep fighting as they had; if the British did not assist them, they would not be able to stop the American army. The British commander thought Little Turtle “the most decent, modest, sensible Indian I have ever conversed with,” but his hands were tied.83 Little Turtle began to advocate making the best peace the Indians could get.
As Wayne’s army marched along the Auglaize River, Indian families abandoned the villages that had served as the core of the resistance movement. People loaded canoes and ponies and hurried away with small children; old women burdened with heavy packs struggled after them.84 In August, Wayne built Fort Defiance at the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers. The fortunes of war were uncertain, Wayne wrote, but “that great & good man Our Virtuous President” would have no reason to regret the trust he had shown him.85
The Indian force diminished further on the eve of its showdown with Wayne. Taking advantage of an area strewn with uprooted trees after a tornado at a place called Fallen Timbers, Blue Jacket drew up his warriors to fight on August 19. When Wayne’s army halted and the expected battle did not take place that day, warriors who had fasted in ritual purification prior to combat began to disperse in search of food. Wayne’s army appeared the next morning.
The Indians fought in the crescent formation that had proved so effective in engulfing St. Clair’s army, with the Shawnees on the left wing. As at St. Clair’s defeat, their initial assault put to flight a unit of mounted volunteers advancing in front of the main army. This time, however, the ranks behind steadied and held. The American cavalry turned the Indians’ flanks, and the infantry’s bayonet charge drove the warriors from the battlefield. They fled to Fort Miamis, where they expected to receive sanctuary if not outright assistance from the British garrison. But the gates of the fort remained barred. That dispirited the Indians more than the outcome of the battle, said John Norton. They had fought with inferior numbers, in a disadvantageous position, and had not suffered great casualties. They could have fought another day and reversed the defeat, but the British betrayal “they did not know how to remedy.”86
Wayne and the British commander exchanged heated words but no gunfire. London was far more concerned about events in Revolutionary France than about its Indian allies, and the commander was not about to start a war with the United States. Wayne’s army was in no position to start assaulting British posts. Nevertheless, although a British garrison remained on their soil, Americans anxious to establish themselves as an international power interpreted the showdown at the fort as a significant assertion of sovereignty: for the first time, the young nation had demonstrated the ability to enforce its will by force of arms.87
As in Sullivan’s campaign during the Revolution, the American victory lay in crops destroyed more than warriors killed. Wayne’s soldiers burned the vast Indian cornfields that stretched along the banks of the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers. In his report of the battle, Wayne said he had never “beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Putting them to the torch destroyed “the grand emporium of the hostile Indians of the West.” With the Indians’ towns and crops laid waste and American troops on their hunting grounds, Wayne estimated there were seven or eight thousand hungry mouths to feed, far beyond the capacity of the British to provision th
em.88 According to William Clark, later of Lewis and Clark fame but then a lieutenant in Wayne’s army, the destruction of the Indians’ homes and cornfields while the redcoats watched in silence convinced them the British had neither the power nor inclination to protect them.89 According to Alexander McKee, Wayne’s soldiers “left Evident marks of their boasted Humanity”; they not only scalped and mutilated the Indians who were killed in the battle but also dug up Indian graves and drove stakes through the decomposing corpses.90
In September, Wayne built a fort—Fort Wayne—on the site of Kekionga. The news of his victory reached Washington on September 30.91 Nothing changed popular sentiment like success, Edmund Randolph wrote Washington three days later. People who had formerly spoken about Wayne in derogatory terms now said they knew all along “that the President would never appoint an incompetent man to the command of the army.”92 Wayne’s victory did not silence criticism of Washington, but after Harmar and St. Clair’s disasters, it saved his reputation. The federal government and its new army had finally answered westerners’ calls and defeated the Indians.
On the heels of the victory, the government asserted its authority in ways westerners had not bargained for. In his annual message to Congress in November 1794, two dozen paragraphs, Washington devoted more than a paragraph to only two domestic issues. He covered Indian affairs in two paragraphs.93 Before that, he spent two-thirds of the entire address on the Whiskey Rebellion, when settlers in western Pennsylvania refused to pay the tax the federal government levied on whiskey, invoking similar arguments to those they voiced on the eve of the Revolution. For a time it looked as if a settler revolt like that which had occurred in 1776 might occur again.94 The Whiskey Rebellion threatened to spread across the Ohio Valley, and it surpassed the Indian war in the concerns and correspondence of Washington and his ministers that summer. The morning after he received the news of Fallen Timbers, Washington set off for the Pennsylvania frontier to help organize an army to quash the rebellion and enforce compliance with the whiskey tax.95 He and Hamilton personally led the army of thirteen thousand men for a time.96 As George Nicholas noted to Madison, the armed force the government dispatched against the Indians paled in comparison with that it dispatched against its own citizens; it was, he said, “a spectacle which I never expected to have lived to see.”97 The display of military power was all that was needed—in fact, more than was needed—for the rebellion to crumble. The assertions of federal military power in western Pennsylvania and northern Ohio both demonstrated the determination of the Washington administration to secure control of the West. “Lawless banditti,” whether Indian or white, must respect the authority of the United States.98
even as wayne waged war, Washington tried, as he said, “to tranquilize the Indians by pacific measures.”99 Keeping the Six Nations from joining the western tribes fighting Wayne was essential; with British agents at work and Iroquois lands under assault, it took some effort. General Israel Chapin, the agent to the Iroquois, was instructed to employ every means to keep the Six Nations favorably disposed toward the United States “and to buy Captn B[ran]t off at almost any price.”100 To assuage Iroquois resentment about American encroachments, Washington asked Pennsylvania governor Thomas Mifflin to suspend his state’s plans for a settlement at Presque Isle on Lake Erie, which Mifflin reluctantly agreed to do.101
Six Nations chiefs understood they had leverage and played their cards well. In council with Chapin at Buffalo Creek in July 1794, Cornplanter voiced concern about Pennsylvania’s encroachments and Presque Isle. His stance perhaps hardened by the rebuke he had received from the western tribes the previous year, he called on the president to give them justice and protect their land, warning, “Brother, If you do not comply with our request, we shall determine on something else, as we are a free people.” Knowing Washington’s tendency to blame Indian difficulties on British intrigues, he cautioned the president not to think their minds were corrupted by a foreign power: “You know, General Washington, that we, the Six Nations have always been able to defend ourselves, and we are still determined to maintain our freedom. … The only thing that can corrupt our minds is not to grant our request.” Chapin assured the Iroquois that Washington was their “firm friend” and promised to forward their speech to him as soon as possible.102 Timothy Pickering described Cornplanter’s speech as “rude & threatening” and said the principal chiefs were displeased by it, although they allowed it to be sent to the president. “It is not a new thing, I presume,” Pickering could not help adding, “for the majority of an Assembly silently to acquiesce in a measure repugnant to their sentiments.”103
In September, not yet aware of Wayne’s victory and with Knox still secretary of war, Washington had dispatched Pickering to negotiate with the Six Nations. While American soldiers were building Fort Wayne, more than 1,500 Iroquois, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Handsome Lake, and other prominent leaders, gathered to meet with Pickering at Canandaigua, a Seneca village burned by Sullivan in 1779 and now an American town of forty houses.104 Brant stayed away. He gave as his reason a previous commitment to meet with the Great Lakes tribes, but in a letter to Chapin he complained “the President of the United States does not seem to come to the main point in question (the line that was proposed) however attentive he may be in other matters.” If Washington would agree to the proposed line and to a meeting at Buffalo Creek, Brant would do all he could “to complete the good work of peace.”105 Brant and Cornplanter pursued different paths, but they had few illusions about their situation. “You know my friend,” Cornplanter wrote Brant during the negotiations at Canandaigua, “that we are despised by the whites on both sides, that we are a poor, tho’ independent people[;] the reason we are despised by both parties is because they both want to be the greatest people.” Many Iroquois suspected Cornplanter was Washington’s man and were uneasy at his frequent meetings with Pickering during the negotiations, telling him that as a war chief he should leave the business of treaty-making to the sachems. But they identified Pickering as the president’s representative and, as Red Jacket said, “took General Washington by the hand” and addressed their speeches as if they were speaking to him.106
Pickering told the Iroquois he had come “to heal the wounds which have been given by disposing of your lands, and to point out the way in which you can avoid future strife.” The Oneidas felt especially wounded. After assisting Washington in the Revolution they had seen their homeland shrink from 5 or 6 million acres to one-quarter of a million acres. They “had much to say about the many deceptions which had been practiced upon them by the white people.” Pickering acknowledged that some white people imposed on the Indians, exploiting their ignorance in computing the value of their lands, plying them with alcohol, and getting them to sign papers that had not been properly interpreted. The best way to avoid trouble in the future, he suggested, was for the Iroquois to adopt white ways and become literate; then they would be able to match white men and avoid being cheated.107
Pickering’s immediate goal was to keep the Iroquois out of the war that was winding down in the West. News of Fallen Timbers reached Canandaigua in September before negotiations had started.108 When the Treaty of Canandaigua was finally signed on November 11, the United States confirmed Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga lands in New York and even restored some lands to the Senecas.109 Three weeks later, Pickering signed a second treaty with the Oneidas, awarding them, and their Stockbridge and Tuscarora allies, compensation for their services during the Revolution.110
Washington asked Congress to authorize making a large wampum belt to symbolize his new friendship with the Six Nations. Six feet long, five inches wide, and containing ten thousand beads, the George Washington Covenant Chain Belt, as it became known, depicted two figures at the center standing on either side of a house, representing the Mohawks and Senecas as keepers of the eastern and western door, respectively, of the Longhouse, their arms linked to those of thirteen other figures in an alliance of peace with the orig
inal states.111
The treaty had rather different meanings for Washington and for the Iroquois. Washington saw it as resolving problems the United States faced in its dealings with the Northwestern Confederacy and with the Six Nations. For Iroquois people it was, and remains, a clear recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and the seminal document in their relationship with the United States. An annual commemoration and celebration of the treaty occurs each November 11 in Canandaigua with both US and Iroquois dignitaries present; the covenant belt is displayed, and the treaty goods promised in the treaty, including treaty cloth, are delivered. “In light of the history of other roads taken, some of which are among the most tragic and dishonorable in American history,” wrote the late Seneca scholar John Mohawk, “the Canandaigua Treaty stands as a symbol of what might have been almost as much as it is a symbol of what came to be.”112 Washington recognized Pickering’s services by promoting him to replace Knox as secretary of war. Unfortunately, Philip Schuyler and other powerful New Yorkers continued to erode the Iroquois homeland in defiance of federal law and treaties.113
The Indian war was over, but the causes of conflict remained. Unscrupulous traders and land speculators continued to operate in Indian country. Only “the strong arm of the Union” and robust laws could prevent their abuses, Washington said. Peace with the Indians required fair trade and fair treaties, and by “fair treaties” he meant “that they shall perfectly understand every article and clause … that these treaties shall be held sacred, and the infractors on either side punished exemplarily.”114
In Ohio, Indian delegations trickled in over the course of the winter and sounded out the possibilities for such a treaty. Secretary of War Pickering conveyed to Wayne the president’s ideas about this impending treaty, along with his detailed instructions about the conduct of the negotiations, the amount of gifts and how they should be distributed, the general boundary line, and what Wayne could yield on and what he could not.115
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