The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  30. WJP 3:444, 456, 460–67, 521, 629–30; Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Random House, 1969), 114–15 (“under the nose”).

  31. WJP 4:95.

  32. PGW, Col. 7:230–31, 236–37, 257–60.

  33. Matthew L. Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse: Anglo-Iroquois Politics and the Expansion of Colonial Virginia (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 159.

  34. Bouquet Papers 6:261–63, 315 (“Execrable Race”), 333, 515 (“raging”); “Journal of William Trent,” in Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsylvania, ed. John W. Harpster (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938), 103–4; Elizabeth A. Fenn, “Biological Warfare in Eighteenth-Century North America: Beyond Jeffery Amherst,” Journal of American History 86 (2000): 1552–80, invoice at 1554; Philip Ranlet, “The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?” Pennsylvania History 67 (2000): 427–41.

  35. Bouquet Papers 6:338–40, 342–45 (Bushy Run). For more on the war, see Gregory Evans Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); David Dixon, Never Come to Peace Again: Pontiac’s Uprising and the Fate of the British Empire in North America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); and Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  36. CRP 9:188–92.

  37. EAID 3:685–702; Bouquet Papers 6:649–50, 653–57, 660–62, 665–77, 681–83, 686–87, 690–704; Ian K. Steele, Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013), ch. 10.

  38. Writings of Washington 2:396–97; PGW, Col. 7:205–7.

  39. Bruce A. Ragsdale, “George Washington, the British Tobacco Trade, and Economic Opportunity in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia,” in George Washington Reconsidered, ed. Don Higginbotham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 67–93; T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 81–82, 148–50; 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 (Washington no Custis); Writings of Washington 2:392–96, 398, 404–6, 414–21; PGW, Col. 7:191–97, 201–2.

  40. Anderson, Crucible of War, 593–94.

  41. Anderson, Crucible of War, 592–94; PGW, Col. 7:219–25 (articles of association).

  42. PGW, Col. 7:242–50 (petition to king and letter of justification).

  43. Mississippi Company to Thomas Cumming, March 1, 1767, quoted in Rick Willard Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden: George Washington’s Frontier Land Interests” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), 27.

  44. Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), 47; Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 61–62; Bernhard Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 1732–1775 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964), 90–91.

  45. PGW, Col. 7:269–75; Charles Royster, The Fabulous Story of the Dismal Swamp Company (New York: Vintage, 2004); Ellis, His Excellency, 54.

  46. CO 5/1330:160–61; James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: The Forge of Experience, 1732–1775 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 293.

  47. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015), 230–39.

  48. Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), chs. 5–6; Walter S. Dunn Jr., The New Imperial Economy: The British Army and the American Frontier, 1764–1768 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001); John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 45–46, 52–83; Peter D. G. Thomas, “The Cost of the British Army in North America, 1763–1775,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 510–16; Woody Holton, “The History of the Stamp Act Shows How Indians Led to the American Revolution,” Humanities 36, no. 4 (July/Aug. 2015): 16–19.

  49. WJP 2:879.

  50. Secretary of State Lord Egremont, quoted in Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 20.

  51. Anderson, Crucible of War, 565.

  52. The proclamation is reprinted in Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791, 2 vols. (Ottawa: Historical Documents Publication Board, 1918), 163–68. Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge, eds., Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015), examine its enduring importance in Canada.

  53. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 92–94, 108.

  54. S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), ch. 4.

  55. EAID 5:281–306 (Augusta treaty); John Borrows, “Wampum at Niagara: The Royal Proclamation, Canadian Legal History, and Self-Government,” in Aboriginal and Treaty Rights in Canada, ed. Michael Asch (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997), 155–72.

  56. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 60.

  57. Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, 3:1355–56, 1368–70, 1378–79, 1394, 1411–12, 1480–81; Executive Journals 6:602, 604–5. In May 1765, for example, colonists killed five Cherokees who were traveling with passes from the government; when two of the perpetrators were arrested, a mob broke into the jail and freed them. Fauquier feared “that the people on our Frontiers are rather desirous that we should be at War than in peace with the Indians.” Reese, Official Papers of Francis Fauquier, 3:1234–42 (quote at 1243), 1248–49, 1253–61, 1265–69.

  58. Howard H. Peckham, ed., George Croghan’s Journal of His Trip to Detroit in 1767 with His Correspondence relating Thereto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), 23; Andrea L. Smalley, “ ‘They Steal Our Deer and Land’: Contested Hunting Grounds in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 114 (2016): 303–9.

  59. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 184–85.

  60. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 107–9; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 29–30; Woody Holton, “The Ohio Indians and the Coming of the American Revolution in Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 455.

  61. Ragsdale, “Young Washington’s Virginia,” 55.

  62. Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Holton, Forced Founders, ch. 1; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, ch. 2.

  63. Breen, Tobacco Culture, 80–82, 181; Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Boston: Da Capo, 2016), 60–61.

  64. Ellis, His Excellency, 54–55.

  65. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 101.

  66. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 106.

  67. WJP 5:130.

  68. PGW, Col. 8:3 (“Field before you”), 34–37, 211–15; Charles H. Ambler, George Washington and the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 136–37. On Posey, see Flexner, George Washington: The Forge of Experience, 252–53.

  69. PGW, Col. 6:135n.

  70. Consul W. Butterfield, ed., The Washington-Crawford Letters: Being the Correspondence between George Washington and William Crawford, from 1767 to 1781, concerning Western Lands (Cincinnati: Robert C
larke, 1877), vii; Ambler, George Washington and the West, 137.

  71. PGW, Col. 8:26–29; Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 1–5; Ambler, George Washington and the West, 137–38; Writings of Washington 2:488–70.

  72. PGW, Col. 8:37–40; Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 5–10.

  73. Barnet Schecter, George Washington’s America: A Biography through His Maps (New York: Walker, 2010), 64.

  74. Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 11.

  75. WJP 12:21, 337–40, 360, 456–58; NYCD 8:38–53.

  76. NYCD 8:40, 47.

  77. EAID 3:720–45, quotes at 732, 744; CRP 9:514–43.

  78. EAID 5:326–32; Executive Journals 6:279, 287, 306.

  79. Colin G. Calloway, Pen and Ink Witchcraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 2; William J. Campbell, Speculators in Empire: Iroquoia and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).

  80. Quoted in Holton, “Ohio Indians and the Coming of the American Revolution,” 457.

  81. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 35–38.

  Chapter 9: “A good deal of Land”

  1. PGW, Col. 8:149–53.

  2. Woody Holton, “The Ohio Indians and the Coming of the American Revolution in Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 458; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3.

  3. Thomas P. Slaughter, Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2014).

  4. DAR 1:159, 315, 2:21–25, 28, 87, 105, 166, 169, 203–4, 253–54, 261–62, 3:43, 85, 5:135, 12:189; WJP 7:184, 404–8; CO 5/71:41.

  5. PGW, Col. 8:272–80; DAR 2:201–3, 209; Executive Journals 6:337–38; John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 63–64 (“hints”); Bernhard Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 1732–1775 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1964), 91–93; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), 70; Writings of Washington 2:528–32.

  6. Executive Journals 6:311–12; Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 39–40.

  7. EAID 5:336–40, 346–49, 352–53; JHBV, 1766–69, xxvi–xxxvii, 264–65, 300–301, 335–36; Holton, Forced Founders, 4.

  8. DAR 1:34; 2:28; “(adventurers”), 95 (killing deer); JHBV, 1770–72, xi–xiii; Executive Journals 6:354–57.

  9. DAR 2:210–15, 237–38, 261–62 (land speculators: “self-interested men”); EAID 5:360–75; JHBV, 1770–72, xv–xvi; Executive Journals 6:360, 364–65.

  10. DAR 5:51–53; PTJ 2:78–80.

  11. DAR 6:234.

  12. PGW, Col. 8:241.

  13. CO 5/90:5 (“black clouds”), 78 (”exterminated”); also in DAR 3:254–55, 5:203.

  14. John R. Van Atta, Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 22–23. The population would soar to 220,000 by 1800.

  15. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, ch. 3 (“bought off” at 48); Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), ch. 8; Clarence W. Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, 2 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1917), 2: chs. 4–6; James Donald Anderson, “Vandalia: The First West Virginia?” West Virginia History 40 (1979): 375–92.

  16. Charles H. Ambler, George Washington and the West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 140.

  17. PGW, Col. 8:300–303; Holton, Forced Founders, 11; Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 149; Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 66; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 72–73 (“for a pittance”).

  18. Washington’s journal of the trip is in Diaries of GW 2:277–328; Hugh Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 240–69. Roy Bird Cook, Washington’s Western Lands (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1930), ch. 2, follows the movements of the travelers.

  19. Franklin B. Dexter, ed., Diary of David McClure, 1748–1820 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1899), 108; The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924), 100.

  20. Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 165.

  21. PGW, Col. 8:402–4, 449–50, 513–14, 530; Consul W. Butterfield, ed., The Washington-Crawford Letters: Being the Correspondence between George Washington and William Crawford, from 1767 to 1781, concerning Western Lands (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1877), 18–26; Diaries of GW 2:281–82n; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 69; Charles A. Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 2:66–68.

  22. Diaries of GW 2:292–93; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 246.

  23. Diaries of GW 2:293.

  24. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 70.

  25. Diaries of GW 2:294.

  26. Diaries of GW 2:296–98.

  27. Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 243.

  28. Diaries of GW 2:304, 310; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 258–59, 263; C. Hale Sipe, The Indian Chiefs of Pennsylvania (1927; Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1994), 371; Dexter, Diary of David McClure, 42.

  29. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, ed. Benson J. Lossing (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1860), 301–5.

  30. Diaries of GW 2:315.

  31. Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (New York: Penguin, 1994), 98–99, 102; Diaries of GW 2:310–14.

  32. John G. Fitzpatrick, George Washington, Colonial Traveler, 1732–1775 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 281 (Mingo Town delay); Diaries of GW 2:316; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 264–65.

  33. Cameron B. Strang, “Michael Cresap and the Promulgation of Settler Land-Claiming Methods in the Backcountry, 1765–1774,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 118 (2010): 106–35; Honor Sachs, Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 27–32.

  34. Diaries of GW 2:316; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 265.

  35. “A Narrative of the Transactions, Imprisonment, and Sufferings of John Connolly, an American Loyalist and Lieut.-Col. in His Majesty’s Service,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 12 (1888): 311; Diaries of GW 2:322; Cleland, George Washington in the Ohio Valley, 267–68.

  36. Diaries of GW 2:328.

  37. Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 16.

  38. PGW, Col. 8:396.

  39. PGW, Col. 8:550–55 (“trifle” at 555).

  40. PGW, Col. 8:428, 439–40. A roll of the officers in the Virginia Regiment of 1754 is at 451.

  41. Diaries of GW 3:61n, 67–68n; PGW, Col. 8:534–41, 9:143–48; Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 64–65; Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 94–97.

  42. Chernow, Washington, 148.

  43. James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013) offers a balanced depiction of Dunmore, whose historical reputation was tarnished by the writings of enemies and revolutionaries, especially after his 1775 proclamation promising freedom to the slaves of Virginia rebels.

  44. Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times (New York: Vintage, 1999), 213; Daniel P. Barr, A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744–1794 (Kent, OH: Kent State Univers
ity Press, 2014), 145–51; David, Dunmore’s New World, ch. 3.

  45. PGW, Col. 8:555.

  46. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 146.

  47. Executive Journals 6:438–40, 513–14, 516; Rick Willard Sturdevant, “Quest for Eden: George Washington’s Frontier Land Interests” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), 39.

  48. PGW, Col. 9:55–56.

  49. Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Knopf, 2014), 80–84, 192; Bruce A. Ragsdale, A Planters’ Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990).

  50. Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: Norton, 2016), 118–19.

  51. Strang, “Michael Cresap and the Promulgation of Settler Land-Claiming Methods,” 121; Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 142–44; Barbara Rasmussen, “Anarchy and Enterprise on the Imperial Frontier: Washington, Dunmore, Logan, and Land in the Eighteenth-Century Ohio Valley,” Ohio Valley History 6 (Winter 2006): 1–26; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), ch. 4.

  52. PGW, Col. 9:118–21 (“cream of the Land” at 120); Executive Journals 6:510, 513–14; Knollenberg, George Washington: The Virginia Period, 95; Royster, Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company, 192.

  53. Royster, Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company, 193.

  54. W. W. Abbot, “George Washington, the West, and the Union,” in George Washington Reconsidered, ed. Don Higginbotham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 202–3.

  55. Ambler, George Washington and the West, 152.

  56. Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 65–66; PGW, Col. 9:380 (“best on the hole River”); Butterfield, Washington-Crawford Letters, 34–35; Writings of Washington 33:407; Dorothy Twohig, “The Making of George Washington,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 13.

  57. Ferling, Ascent of George Washington, 65–66; Ferling, First of Men, 73; PGW, Col. 9:380 (“shagreend”); 460–61 (Muse); Paul R. Misencik, George Washington and the Half-King Chief Tanacharison: An Alliance That Began the French and Indian War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 169.