The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  24. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 165.

  25. EAID 3:342, 346–73; Anthony F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 168–75; Daniel P. Barr, “ ‘This Land Is Ours and Not Yours’: The Western Delawares and the Seven Years’ War in the Upper Ohio Valley, 1755–1758,” in The Boundaries between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850, ed. Daniel P. Barr (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 38.

  26. Forbes HQ Papers, reel 2, items 176 (“terrible pannick”), 350, 351.

  27. CRP 8:135–36; C. Hale Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Telegraph Press, 1929), 358.

  28. Walter T. Champion Jr., “Christian Frederick Post and the Winning of the West,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 3 (1980): 308–25; James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999), 242–49. The journal of Post’s first trip is in Forbes HQ Papers, reel 2, item 376. Post was born in East or Polish Prussia but a naturalized British citizen; EAID 3:343.

  29. “The Journal of Christian Frederick Post,” in Early Western Journals, 1748–1765, ed. Reuben G. Thwaites, rpt. of Early Western Travels, vol. 1 (1904; Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), quotes at 199, 200, 212, 214–16; Pennsylvania Archives 3:520–44; EAID 3:414–16.

  30. “Journal of Christian Frederick Post,” 213–14; John W. Jordan, ed., “James Kenny’s ‘Journal to Ye Westward,’ 1758–59,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 429; Michael N. McConnell, “Pisquetomen and Tamaqua: Mediating Peace in the Ohio Country,” in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 273–94 (“sunset” quote at 287).

  31. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 180–81; Forbes HQ Papers, reel 3, item 477; Bouquet Papers 2:383. On the efforts of Forbes, Post, and the Pennsylvania Quakers to secure peace, see Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 375–404; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), ch. 28.

  32. Executive Journals 6:109; James, Writings of General John Forbes, 203 (quote).

  33. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 219–20, 225, 237–38; Bouquet Papers 2:499–504, 508–9, 517–21; PGW, Col. 6:38–48; Scoouwa: James Smith’s Indian Captivity Narrative, 119.

  34. C. Hale Sipe, The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania (Butler, PA: Zeigler, 1927; rpt. Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1994), 372–73; CVSP 1:280.

  35. Cubbison, British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania, 139–40, 191; NYCD 10:888.

  36. Bouquet Papers 2:471–73.

  37. Kelton, “British and Indian War,” 787; James, Writings of General John Forbes, 230 (quote), 233, 235 (“consummate Dog”); Bouquet Papers 2:562.

  38. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 248; Bouquet Papers 2:584–85.

  39. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 221 (five hundred Indians; “God knows”); Boyd Stanley Schlenther, “Training for Resistance: Charles Thomson and Indian Affairs in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania History 50 (1983): 202–3; WJP 3:4 (“Much Divided”); EAID 3:259 (507 Indians), 427–66 (list of nations at 428–29); CRP 8:175–223; Susan Kalter, ed., Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the First Nations: The Treaties of 1736–62 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 291–333; Matthew C. Ward, Breaking the Backcountry: The Seven Years’ War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 178–82.

  40. EAID 3:344, 467–68.

  41. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 251–53; EAID 3:467–68; Anderson, Crucible of War, 279–80.

  42. PGW, Col. 6:105. Later orders added that “any Single Indians wearing a blue and red badge about their Heads as well as a Yellow one” were to be “received as friends” (6:148). Forbes likewise ordered that friendly Indians wear yellow headbands or armbands; Bouquet Papers 2:224; James, Writings of General John Forbes, 125, 149, 152.

  43. EAID 3:345.

  44. David A. Clary, George Washington’s First War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 241.

  45. Anderson, Crucible of War, 258.

  46. Bouquet Papers 2:475; Scoouwa: The Indian Captivity Narrative of James Smith, 118; James, Writings of General John Forbes, 194, 239–40; Pennsylvania Archives 12:393; Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015), 191, 193.

  47. Cubbison, British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania, 150–51.

  48. PGW, Col. 6:121n–122n; Fred Anderson, ed., George Washington Remembers: Reflections on the French and Indian War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 23, 127; David Humphreys, “Life of General Washington,” with George Washington’s “Remarks,” ed. Rosemarie Zagarri (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), xlii–xliv, 21–22; Clary, George Washington’s First War, 256–57; John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 43.

  49. “Journal of Christian Frederick Post,” 255–56.

  50. Years later Washington claimed that he commanded the leading brigade; in fact, he was given command of the third of three brigades, which Forbes moved forward by leapfrogging one ahead of the others. Humphreys, “Life of General Washington,” with George Washington’s “Remarks,” 21; Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 69; Cubbison, British Defeat of the French in Pennsylvania, 157–58, 163.

  51. Bouquet Papers 2:610, 612–14.

  52. NYCD 10:905; Pennsylvania Archives 8:232.

  53. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 262–64, 267.

  54. EAID 3:477–79; Bouquet Papers 2:621–26.

  55. James, Writings of General John Forbes, 287, 291n.

  56. Bouquet Papers 2:608, 611 (quote).

  57. Bouquet Papers 3:164.

  58. Bouquet Papers 3:164–65, 416–18, 470, 493, 502–3.

  59. EAID 3: ch. 6; Bouquet Papers 3:27–31, 507–11.

  60. PGW, Col, 6:158–62; Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 1:115–18; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 221–20.

  61. Bouquet Papers 3:192, 4:7.

  62. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, ed., Memoirs on the Late War in North America between France and England by Pierre Pouchot (Youngstown, NY: Old Fort Niagara Assoc., 1994), 415–16; WJP 10:55.

  63. Anderson, Crucible of War, 330–38; Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 414–19; Timothy J. Shannon, “War, Diplomacy, and Culture: The Iroquois Experience in the Seven Years’ War,” in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 87–88. French accounts of the siege are in Dunnigan, Memoirs on the Late War, 200–231, 503–28.

  64. Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 49.

  65. Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 410.

  66. On Custis’s plantations and business operations, see Lorena S. Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 440–47.

  67. JHBV, 1761–65, 111, 117.

  68. PGW, Col. 6:343.

  69. PGW, Col. 6:361.

  70. Dorothy Twohig, “The Making of George Washington,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 17.

  71. PGW, Col. 7:55 (“a Story too stale”), 80 (“great Continent”).

  72. Executive Journals 6:122; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 102–3; Jessica Yirush Stern, The Lives in Objects: Native Americans, British Colonists, and Cultures of Labor and Exc
hange in the Southeast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 106, 108.

  73. Samuel Cole Williams, ed., Adair’s History of the American Indians (1930; New York: Promontory Press, n.d.), 259–61; Preston, “ ‘Make Indians of Our White Men,’ ” 299–300; James, Writings of General John Forbes, 256–57; CO 5/386:178; Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 1:89–90 (killings and repeal of scalp bounty), 292–94 (hostages); Executive Journals 6:94–96, 112, 124–30 (“heal all Wounds” at 125); Kelton, “British and Indian War,” 789–90; Hatley, Dividing Paths, 100–114; David H. Corkran, The Cherokee Frontier: Conflict and Survival, 1740–62 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), ch. 11.

  74. Bouquet Papers 3:544, 4:17n.

  75. James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192–95, 203; Daniel J. Tortora, Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 205), 83–84; Paul Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 114–17.

  76. Williams, Adair’s History of the American Indians, 266.

  77. John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756–1763 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); PGW, Col. 6:361.

  78. Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 1:158; Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684–1776, 2 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 2:669 (quote), 671, 717.

  79. PGW, Col. 6:453.

  80. Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 1:397, 409, 411.

  81. Tortora, Carolina in Crisis, chs. 6–10; Hatley, Dividing Paths, ch. 10; Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, chs. 4–5; Corkran, Cherokee Frontier, ch. 17; Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs, 134–36; Tyler Boulware, Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation: Town, Region, and Nation among Eighteenth-Century Cherokees (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), ch. 6; “Journal of the March and Operations of the Troops under the Command of General Grant,” Papers of James Grant of Ballindalloch, microfilm ed. at the David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, PA, reel 32, 8–21.

  82. Tortora, Carolina in Crisis, 142, 152; Duane H. King and E. Raymond Evans, eds., “Memoirs of the Grant Expedition against the Cherokees in 1761,” Journal of Cherokee Studies, special issue (Summer 1977): 322 (Silver Heels’s drunken violence).

  83. Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 2:578–82, 586–87, 592–94.

  84. PGW, Col. 7:58–59, 80 (“gaping Mouths”), 96–97 (“poor Wretches”).

  85. Executive Journals 6:185, 199, 204, 206; Edith Mays, ed., Amherst Papers, 1756–1763, The Southern Sector: Dispatches from South Carolina, Virginia and His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs (Westminster, MD: Heritage Books, 2006), 260–62, 293–300; Tinling, Correspondence of the Three William Byrds 2:743–45, 748; Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, ch. 6; King and Evans, “Memoirs of the Grant Expedition against the Cherokees,” 280 (Attakullakulla quote); EAID 5:243–49; CO 5/1386:19–22; Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 2:685–88.

  86. JHBV, 1761–65, xvii; Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 2:727.

  87. Executive Journals 6:214–16; Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 191–93, 208.

  88. Executive Journals 6:216–17; Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 2:726–31.

  89. EAID 5:250–56; Duane H. King, ed., The Memoirs of Lt. Henry Timberlake (Cherokee, NC: Museum of the Cherokee Indian, 2007), 55–72; John Oliphant, “The Cherokee Embassy to London, 1762,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27 (1999): 1–26; Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005), 51–60; Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 165–75; Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 157–63; Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 84–96.

  90. EAID 14:200–202.

  91. James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 131.

  92. Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 164–65.

  93. John E. Ferling, “School for Command: Young George Washington and the Virginia Regiment,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 195–222; Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 77–80; Anderson, Crucible of War, 289–92.

  94. GW to Stephen, July 20, 1776, NYPL, GW, reel 4; PGW, Rev. 5:408–9.

  Chapter 8: Confronting the Indian Boundary

  1. When Lawrence Washington owned Mount Vernon, his most important rooms faced the Potomac, and beyond that the Chesapeake, the Atlantic, and England. Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 52–53, suggest that reorienting the house to the West “symbolically may have been the most important of all the changes” Washington made at Mount Vernon.

  2. Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Vintage, 2005), 53.

  3. PGW, Col. 7:236–37, 257.

  4. John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 57–59; PGW, Col. 6:343 (“no Stone”).

  5. Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 136–37.

  6. Bruce A. Ragsdale, “Young Washington’s Virginia: Opportunity in the ‘Golden Age’ of Planter Society,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 50–52.

  7. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986), 25–28; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: Norton, 2016), 56.

  8. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 87.

  9. JHBV, 1761–65, xii–xiii; Bouquet Papers 4:532–36.

  10. CRP 8:269, 296, 389, 766–67; Pennsylvania Archives, ser. 1, 3:572–74; Bouquet Papers 2:621–22 (quote).

  11. Bouquet Papers 3:30; “The Journal of Christian Frederick Post,” in Early Western Journals, 1748–1765, ed. Reuben G. Thwaites, rpt. of Early Western Travels, vol. 1 (1904; Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), quotes and Croghan’s refusal at 274, 278, 283.

  12. John W. Jordan, ed., “James Kenny’s ‘Journal to Ye Westward,’ 1758–59,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 424, 433.

  13. Jordan, “James Kenny’s ‘Journal to Ye Westward,’ 1758–59,” 427–29.

  14. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000), 284–85, 328–29; David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 221, 245–46, 251–52.

  15. Anderson, Crucible of War, 524–26; Bouquet Papers 5:355, 437, 844 (Bouquet’s proclamation), 847, 6:39–40, 44–45; Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), 614–15; Executive Journals 6:205
; George Reese, ed., The Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, 1758–1768, 3 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980–83), 2:663–66.

  16. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 151–53.

  17. Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier 2:774–75.

  18. Alfred Proctor James, ed., The Writings of General John Forbes relating to His Service in North America (Menasha, WI: Collegiate Press, 1938), 283, 290.

  19. WJP 10:660 (no right); NYCD 7:665 (“free people”).

  20. John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913): 187.

  21. NYCD 10:974.

  22. EAID 3:573–74.

  23. WJP 10:649, 652.

  24. Bouquet Papers 6:157 (“very Jealous”); WJP 10:680 (“every bad report”), 683.

  25. Jordan, “Journal of James Kenny,” 171–72, 175, 186, 188; Guy Soulliard Klett, ed., Journals of Charles Beatty, 1762–1769 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 65 (“evil ways”), 69–70.

  26. Jordan, “Journal of James Kenny,” 169, 172, 178.

  27. WJP 10:477–78, 964, 971; Jordan, “Journal of James Kenny,” 174, 196.

  28. Jordan, “Journal of James Kenny,” 24 (“against ye Wall”), 25, 34, 154 (Delaware George), 158 (Shingas’s kindness), 160–61, 168 (“not so Cheerful”); Michael N. McConnell, “Pisquetomen and Tamaqua: Mediating Peace in the Ohio Country,” in Northeastern Indian Lives, 1632–1816, ed. Robert S. Grumet (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 292; WJP 13:233, 236, 254–55.

  29. Naming wars after Indian leaders—King Philip’s War, the Black Hawk War, Red Cloud’s War, and so on—is problematic because it implicitly attributes blame for the war to them. Historians have struggled to find a good alternative name for this one, adopting such awkward titles as “the War Called Pontiac’s.” Back in 1929, C. Hale Sipe used “the Pontiac and Guyasuta War,” which at least diffuses the leadership role. Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, PA: Telegraph Press, 1929), 427.