The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  114. ASPIA 1:350.

  115. Simcoe Correspondence 2:17–20; Lincoln, “Journal of a Treaty,” 164–67; ASPIA 1:356–57; Wallace, Thirty Thousand Miles with John Heckewelder, 319 (“impertinent”).

  116. ASPIA 1:359; Pickering Papers 60:179.

  117. CO 42/97:147; Simcoe Correspondence 2:68–69, 102–3.

  118. Simcoe Correspondence 2:35.

  119. Simcoe Correspondence 2:49, 59–60 (quote at 59), 101–2.

  120. Simcoe Correspondence 2:102, 116, 3:239, 5:45.

  121. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 271.

  122. PTJ 26:287, 393, 27:450 (quote).

  123. PGW, Pres. 14:465.

  Chapter 18: Achieving Empire

  1. PGW, Pres. 9:519; Kevin Kokomoor, “Creeks, Federalists, and the Idea of Coexistence in the Early Republic,” Journal of Southern History 81 (2015): 803–42.

  2. Peter H. Wood, “George Washington, Dragging Canoe, and Southern Indian Resistance,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 259–77; Jon W. Parmenter, “Dragging Canoe (Tsí yu-gûnsí ni), Chickamauga Cherokee Patriot,” in The Human Tradition in the American Revolution, ed. Nancy L. Rhoden and Ian K. Steele (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 117–37; Colin G. Calloway, “Declaring Independence and Rebuilding a Nation: Dragging Canoe and the Chickamauga Revolution,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, ed. Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael (New York: Knopf, 2011), 185–98, draws less explicit parallels between Chickamauga and American struggles for independence.

  3. PGW, Pres. 11:343.

  4. ASPIA 1:255 (“friendly half breed”), 263, 271.

  5. IALT, 29–32; ASPIA 1:124–25 (treaty), 203–4 (Bloody Fellow quote); Territorial Papers 4:60–68; Alice Barnwell Keith et al., eds., The John Gray Blount Papers, 3 vols. (Raleigh, NC: State Department of Archives and History, 1959–65), 2:170–71 (Blount quote); David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 151–53.

  6. PGW, Pres. 9:178–80; Territorial Papers 4:60–68.

  7. PGW, Pres. 9:447–52; Territorial Papers 4:111–17, 120–21; ASPIA 1:203–6 (Bloody Fellow quotes at 204–5; common hunting ground at 204 and 273).

  8. PGW, Pres. 9:470, 519 (“of a nature”); ASPIA 1:203, 247 (Shaw appointed); IALT, 32–33 (treaty amendment).

  9. ASPIA 1:268 (“honorable name”); Stanley W. Hoig, The Cherokees and Their Chiefs: In the Wake of Empire (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 76; Charles A. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791–1795 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 85–86.

  10. ASPIA 1:271. Hugh Williamson said the Cherokees appeared to be “in a very good Temper” when they left; Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:183.

  11. PGW, Pres. 14:150.

  12. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 24, 85–86, 89, 203–6; William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986), 162, 166; ASPIA 1:288–91; Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794: Translations of Materials from the Spanish Archives in the Bancroft Library, 3 pts., vols. 2–4 of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946–49), vol. 4, pt. 3, 96, 101; PTJ 26:316 (Cherokee speech to Carondelet).

  13. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 164, 176.

  14. Gilbert C. Din and Abraham P. Nasatir, The Imperial Osages: Spanish-Indian Diplomacy in the Mississippi Valley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 102–27, 164–78; Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 94, 119 (Chickasaw chief quote), 143–46, 148–49, 155, 299–300, 321.

  15. ASPIA 1:205.

  16. PGW, Pres. 9:451; Territorial Papers 4:114.

  17. ASPIA 1:248–49; Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 4–5; James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 152–54, identifies the two other chiefs as William and George Colbert.

  18. PGW, Pres. 9:519.

  19. Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:195; the proceedings of the Nashville conference are in ASPIA 1:284–88; PTJ 26:265 (“evil eyes”).

  20. ASPIA 1:465.

  21. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 104.

  22. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 140–43, 164–67, 223–27 (Treaty of Nogales); Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 230–32.

  23. ASPIA 1:458, 468.

  24. L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963–2011), 10:209 (“assisted in smoking”); John Quincy Adams diary 20, July 11, 1794, 5–6, in The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2004), http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries; PGW, Pres. 16:383, 402 (commissions); 332–33; 424; Territorial Papers 4:349–50; Richard Green, “Chickasaws Visit President Washington (1794),” Chickasaw Times, July 2009; Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, 164–66; Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 326 (document).

  In 1956, street construction disturbed what is believed to have been Piominko’s grave. The grave contained the peace medal Washington had given him in 1792. It also contained a map displaying the boundaries of the Chickasaw nation. Piominko esteemed his relationship with Washington, but he knew he needed to be vigilant in protecting Chickasaw land. (Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, 154. I am grateful to Rick Thompson for the information on the map.) The sculptural/maritime artist William Rush asked Piominko to pose for the figurehead on a “state of the art” merchant ship, the William Penn, launched in Philadelphia the year after his initial visit. Using Piominko as the model may have been a significant gesture to an important ally. I am grateful to Ed Hamilton of Corinth, Maine, for bringing the William Penn’s figurehead and Piominko’s role as model to my attention.

  25. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 313–14.

  26. PGW, Pres. 10:614.

  27. PGW, Pres. 11:509–10.

  28. PGW, Pres. 12:124–25; ASPIA 1:429, 431, 449, 452, 457; JPP, 46; Territorial Papers 4:237–38, 248–51, 255–56, 260; Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:231, 244, 277.

  29. CVSP 6:409–10, 412–13, 418, 435–36, 460; ASPIA 1:459. Hanging Maw’s wife later petitioned Congress for compensation (unsuccessfully); ASPIA 2:621.

  30. ASPIA 1:459–60; Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 198–99.

  31. ASPIA 1:468, 2:622; CVSP 6:575; Charles H. Faulkner, Massacre at Cavett’s Station: Frontier Tennessee during the Cherokee Wars (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013).

  32. Weeks, Paths to a Middle Ground, 216.

  33. ASPIA 1:431.

  34. Territorial Papers 4:282 (Smith); ASPIA 1:408 (Seagrove), 464; JPP, 154–55, 171–75, 178–80.

  35. ASPIA 1:418.

  36. Territorial Papers 4:274, 303 (“yellow Brethren” quotes); Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:212, 221.

  37. PGW, Pres. 13:170–71.

  38. PGW, Pres. 13:213–14, 281–84, 290–91, 309, 340, 357–61, 440–41; Territorial Papers 4:283–89, 291–98.

  39. Jeff W. Dennis describes Pickens as “a backcountry George Washington”; Dennis, Patriots and Indians: Shaping Identity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), ch. 5.

  40. PGW,
Pres. 13:360.

  41. PGW, Pres. 13:226–27.

  42. PGW, Pres. 13:3–4; Territorial Papers 4:266–67; PTJ 26:156–57 (cabinet split).

  43. PGW, Pres. 13:588–89; ASPIA 1:365–66; JPP, 137, 140, 166 (“disagreeable”); PTJ 27:32 (cabinet); Harold C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961–87), 14:507–8 (cabinet).

  44. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 223–27.

  45. PGW, Pres. 16:222–23; JPP, 309–10; Territorial Papers 4:346–48; AISP 2:543; IALT, 33–34.

  46. Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:414, 421.

  47. ASPIA 2:529–30, 535, 632 (quote); Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 344–45.

  48. Territorial Papers 4:360–61.

  49. ASPIA 2:534, 537.

  50. Territorial Papers 4:380–81.

  51. Territorial Papers 4:386–92 (quotes at 387, 389).

  52. PGW, Pres. 18:270, 295–96, 554–55, 559, 576–78 (speech); A. L. Crabb, “George Washington and the Chickasaw Nation, 1795,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 19 (1932): 404; Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People, 175–76; Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 2:594. The text of his talk to the first delegation has not been found.

  53. PGW, Pres. 18:698, 704; GW to Pickering, Sept. 16, 1795, GWPLC.

  54. PGW, Pres. 18:662–64.

  55. PGW, Pres. 17:391–402, 19:221–22.

  56. ASPIA 2:501–2; Kokomoor, “Creeks, Federalists, and the Idea of Coexistence in the Early Republic,” 829–30.

  57. ASPIA 2:551–55; David A. Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians: Power and Policy in Early National Georgia, 1780–1825,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 (2001): 210–11, 213.

  58. PGW, Pres. 18:xxvi; GW to Senate, June 25, 1795, GWPLC.

  59. “Journal of the Proceedings of the Commissioners Appointed to Ascertain and Mark the Boundary Lines Agreeably to the Treaties between the Indian Nations and the United States,” in The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810, ed. H. Thomas Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 138–62; ASPIA, 586–616 (terms at 586–87; Fusatchee Mico at 608); PGW, Pres. 18:661; Leonard J. Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2009), 165–75; Kokomoor, “Creeks, Federalists, and the Idea of Coexistence in the Early Republic,” 831–37.

  60. Keith et al., John Gray Blount Papers 3:107–8.

  61. William Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017); ASPIA 1:199; “Organization of the Army in 1792,” in American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Class 5: Military Affairs, selected and ed. Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, 7 vols. (Washington: Gales & Seaton, 1832), 1:40–41; Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press, 1975), 123–27; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 92; Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 28; William H. Bergmann, The American National State and the Early West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 53–55.

  62. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, ch. 7; Harlow Giles Unger, “Mr. President”: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office (New York: Da Capo, 2013), 138–39, 237.

  63. PGW, Pres. 10:71, 74–79 (Washington quote at 74); PTJ 23:242 (Jefferson quote).

  64. Simcoe Correspondence 1:131–32.

  65. DHFFC 16:702, 747, 786 (quote).

  66. Alan D. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 23–24; PGW, Pres. 10:186.

  67. PGW, Pres. 10:266–68, 273–74.

  68. Richard C. Knopf, ed., Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms: The Wayne-Knox-Pickering-McHenry Correspondence (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1960), 28, 67.

  69. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 71.

  70. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 61, 66, 71–72, 77.

  71. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 97, 122, 223, 230; JPP, 105, 289.

  72. PGW, Pres. 11:26.

  73. ASPIA 1:255.

  74. Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi Valley, pt. 3, 280 (quote), 284, 297.

  75. PGW, Pres. 14:96.

  76. PGW, Pres. 14:465.

  77. PGW, Pres. 15:14–15.

  78. Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, 2 vols. (Cincinnati: C. J. Krehbiel, 1908), 2:232.

  79. Dorchester’s speech is in CO 42/98:104–5; Simcoe Correspondence 2:149–50; PGW, Pres. 15:417–19 (Cook and Clinton), 474–75, 512, 527–28.

  80. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 253–54, 255–56, 319, 335, 337–38.

  81. Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Resistance to General Anthony Wayne,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962–63): 269–90; Simcoe Correspondence 2:249–45, 357; McKee Papers, National Archives of Canada, MG19, F16, 2–3.

  82. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 462.

  83. Simcoe Correspondence 2:334.

  84. Dresden W. H. Howard, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers as Told by Chief Kin-Jo-I-No,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 20 (1948): 39.

  85. Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 350.

  86. ASPIA 2:491 (Wayne’s report to Knox); Carl F. Klinck and James J. Talman, eds., The Journal of Major John Norton, 1816 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970), 186.

  87. ASPIA 2:493–94; John C. Kotruch, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers: An Assertion of U.S. Sovereignty in the Atlantic World along the Banks of the Maumee River,” in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, ed. Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 263–83; Hogeland, Autumn of the Black Snake.

  88. ASPIA 2:490–91; Knopf, Anthony Wayne, 354–55, 357.

  89. “William Clark’s Journal of General Wayne’s Campaign,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 1 (Dec. 1914): 432.

  90. Simcoe Correspondence 3:7–8.

  91. PGW, Pres, 16:750.

  92. PGW, Pres. 17:11–12.

  93. PGW, Pres. 17:xxiii, 181–88.

  94. François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 666.

  95. John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 452.

  96. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Scribner, 2006).

  97. William T. Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–91), 15:393.

  98. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “Radicals in the ‘Western World’: The Federalist Conquest of Trans-Appalachian North America,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 88.

  99. PGW, Pres. 17:360.

  100. PGW, Pres. 15:512.

  101. PGW, Pres. 16:xxii, 119–21, 219, 227–31, 353–54, 373–75, 412–13, 17:187, 360.

  102. PGW, Pres. 16:360–61; ASPIA 2:522–23.

  103. PGW, Pres. 17:171.

  104. Michael Leroy Oberg, Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jack Campisi and William A. Starna, “On the Road to Canandaigua: The Treaty of 1794,” American India
n Quarterly 19 (1995): 467–90. Pickering’s journal of the treaty proceedings is in Pickering Papers 60:198–241. Other journals were kept by Quaker observers: “The Savery Journal: The Canandaigua Treaty Excerpt,” in Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794: 200 Years of Treaty Relations between the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States, ed. G. Peter Jemison and Anna M. Schein (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 260–93; William N. Fenton, ed., “The Journal of James Emlen Kept on a Trip to Canandaigua, New York, September 15 to October 30, 1794, to Attend the Treaty between the United States and the Six Nations,” Ethnohistory 12 (1965): 279–342.

  105. PGW, Pres. 17:39n.

  106. Simcoe Correspondence 3:154 (Cornplanter to Brant); Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794, 276, 281–82, 285.

  107. Pickering Papers 60:221–22, 224–25; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 74 (Oneida land-loss figures).

  108. PGW, Pres. 17:33–34, 36.

  109. Pickering Papers 60:207–8. The treaty is in IALT, 34–37.

  110. IALT, 37–39.

  111. Richard W. Hill Sr., “Linking Arms and Brightening the Chain: Building Relations through Treaties,” in Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations, ed. Susan Shown Harjo (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2014), 56. William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 237, thought Congress commissioned the belt in 1775 or 1789, when thirteen rather than fifteen figures represented the states in the Union, but it may have been given to the delegates in Philadelphia in 1792.

  112. Oberg, Peacemakers, 132, 138, 144, 160–63; Jemison and Schein, Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (John Mohawk quote at 62).

  113. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 74, 80.

  114. PGW, Pres. 17:425–26.

  115. PGW, Pres. 18:41n–44n.

  116. Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 99.

  117. IALT, 39–45 (signatories at 44). The negotiations are in ASPIA 2:562–82.