The American West

by Robert V Hine

  . . .

  Many politicians, Thomas Jefferson foremost among them, assumed that western lands would move quickly toward full, independent statehood within the Union. After fighting a war to end colonialism, the revolutionaries were hesitant about creating a colonial system of their own. But continuing Indian resistance, squatter infestation, and general western unruliness convinced Congress to reject Jefferson’s plan to grant territories immediate self-rule. The “uniformed and perhaps licentious people” of the West, argued the influential Virginia planter Richard Henry Lee, required “a strong toned government.”10

  With the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress provided a structure of government for the territory “northwest of the river Ohio.” They devised a regime more strict and authoritarian than the colonial governments overthrown by the Revolution. An appointed governor, a secretary, and three judges would rule until the male population reached five thousand, at which time the voters (male property owners) would be allowed to elect representatives to an assembly. But the governor enjoyed absolute veto power. Once the population reached sixty thousand, the territory (or a portion of it) might be admitted into the Union on equal terms with the existing states—the most praiseworthy feature of the ordinance. In the meantime, Congress appointed Arthur St. Clair, a prominent leader of the Ohio Associates, as governor of the Northwest Territory, an early instance of government in the hands of capitalists and developers. With the installation of major players, eastern power brokers announced their intention of keeping violent mobs and frontier roughnecks under supervision. A strong hand, it was hoped, would keep the rubes from reverting to Regulators, Paxton Boys, and Shaysites.

  THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY

  The Northwest Ordinance also outlawed involuntary servitude—slavery—north of the Ohio River. Jefferson’s first territorial plan had called for keeping slavery out of the entire West, but Congress rejected that radical idea. Many northern states had already moved to abolish slavery, and the ban north of the Ohio reflected that trend. But southern politicians envisioned an expanding system of slavery. They acquiesced in the antislavery provision for the Northwest, but insisted that the nation do nothing to impede the spread of slavery elsewhere. In 1790, when Congress created the Southwest Territory from the western claims ceded by the Carolinas, southern representatives beat back an attempt by northerners to include the same antislavery clause. “The result, pregnant with meaning for the future” writes historian Don Fehrenbacher, “was a national policy of having two policies.” The Ohio River became the dividing line between the slave and the free West.11

  . . .

  Americans’ unease with the West and westerners colored their legends as well as their laws. To some, the West offered up homegrown American icons, burly nature-men who epitomized self-reliance and wilderness savvy. Others saw these backwoodsmen as lowdown, shiftless, lazy riffraff. The life and legend of Daniel Boone harnessed these ambiguities.

  Born on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1734, Boone migrated with his parents to the North Carolina backcountry when he was fifteen. There he married the impressive Rebecca Bryan, a strong and commanding woman who rivaled her husband in height, weight, and household authority. In the typical division of frontier labor, she ran the farm and raised their ten children while Boone hunted professionally and worked as a guide. As a teamster with General Braddock’s army during the French and Indian War, Boone heard tales of animal-rich Kentucky, and afterward he found his way there. In 1773 he tried to move his family across the mountains, but Indians perturbed by the flood of Americans into the West attacked the caravan at Cumberland Gap, killing Boone’s eldest son and turning the party back. Two years later Boone led another attempt, this one part of a grand colonization scheme organized by North Carolina speculator Richard Henderson. Boone helped found the settlement of Boonesborough and settled the bluegrass with his family and others. But Henderson’s company failed and Boone lost the lands promised him. During the Revolution, the Shawnees, allied with the British, captured him. He escaped and led the defense of besieged Boonesborough, an episode that cemented Boone’s national reputation.

  His stardom would reach international proportions soon after. Following the war Kentucky became the new “land of promise, flowing with milk and honey,” where “you shall eat bread without scarceness and not lack any thing,” in the words of John Filson, a schoolmaster turned promotional-tract author who in 1784 convinced thousands of settlers to head west through the Cumberland Gap. “What a Buzzel is amongst People about Kentuck,” wrote a Virginia minister. “To hear people speak of it one Would think it was a new found Paradise.” Like hundreds of others, Daniel Boone staked claims to thousands of acres. But most of his claims proved defective. No single authority directed or sanctioned land titles. Kentucky’s true bounty after the war was lawsuits. Boone grew disenchanted with the American West, and in 1799 he and his large extended family crossed the Mississippi and settled in Spanish Missouri. He lived near Saint Charles on the Missouri River for the rest of his life, working as a hunter until his death in 1820.12

  Daniel Boone kills a bear and escapes from the Indians. From Timothy Flint, The First White Man of the West; or, The Life and Exploits of Col. Dan’l Boone . . . (Cincinnati, 1854). Author’s collection.

  The world would have remembered none of this had John Filson not included a stirring account of Boone’s adventures in his book on Kentucky, presenting him as a pathfinder, a child of nature, and a consummate American. Boone’s legend reached astonishingly far. French intellectuals grabbed onto his wilderness image to discuss “natural man” in their toney salons. Closer to home, others saw Boone in the same romantic light. Henry Marie Brackenridge cast Boone and his fellow backwoodsmen as refugees, “placing themselves at a distance from the deceit and turbulence of the world.” Yet Boone’s woodsy panache was not admired by all. A missionary in North Carolina complained that Boone did “little of the work” around his farm, leaving the drudge agricultural labor to his wife and children. “There are many hunters here who work little,” he wrote, and “live like the Indians.” Others argued that Boone was a misanthrope, a man who, as one critic put it, wanted “to live as remote as possible from every white inhabitant.” Was Boone a lazy, free, white American? Was he a hero or a heel? Depending on who you asked, he was all these things, and this haziness made him the ideal pioneer for an equally unsettled American West.13

  . . .

  From just a few hundred American settlers at the beginning of the Revolution, by 1785 the population of Kentucky stood at thirty thousand; it had grown to nearly ninety thousand by the time Congress made the territory a state. Without waiting for the official opening of the Northwest Territory lands, overrunning the public domain and Indian homelands, American farmers pressed north of the Ohio, squatting illegally. This incursion, combined with the arrogance of the new nation’s “conquest” theory—that the Republic’s military victory against Great Britain negated the native rights to land—delivered a clear message to the Indians of the Ohio valley: the Americans were about to dispossess them of their lands.

  Neither a tribe nor a nation, the Ohio Indians were a patchwork confederacy, as much of a product of the frontier as their white opponents. The confederacy included peoples like the Miamis and Potawatomies, who had lived in the valley for centuries, as well as Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingos, newcomers from Pennsylvania and New York who moved west to escape violent conflicts with Americans. They built communities of log cabins, cleared forests for their fields of corn and beans, grazed their herds of horses and cattle in meadows, and hunted in the woods, very much like the American settlers in Kentucky. In the late 1780s, native and newcomer Indians formed a defensive confederacy with a council fire at Detroit, a choice of headquarters encouraged by the British, who offered supplies. Joseph Brant and the Canadian Iroquois, embittered by the Revolution, preached pan-Indian resistance at Detroit. The Indians east of the Appalachians had lost their lands, one Iroquois chief declared, beca
use they fought one another instead of uniting against the Europeans. The Americans, by contrast, had succeeded because of “the unanimity they were prudent enough to preserve, and consequently none of the divided efforts of our ancestors to oppose them had an effect.”14

  Pan-Indian movements existed before Brant’s call, even before the arrival of Europeans. The Iroquois Confederacy proved this. The league strengthened its members by ending internal strife in the name of defeating external foes. In the eighteenth century, both Indians and Euro-Americans developed a new bonding agent that helped unite their diverse peoples. They began to see politics in color. They racialized themselves and their opponents. In Pennsylvania, for example, colonists from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and England, often at odds with one another, latched onto their “whiteness” to express their common opposition to “dark” savages. Native Americans experimented with the term red to declare their difference from Europeans in the seventeenth century. The brutality of the eighteenth-century frontier solidified these racial concepts. By the time Brant rallied the Ohio Confederacy, the notions of “red” and “white” moved large groups of frontier dwellers across cultures to cast their lots together and aim their muskets at a common enemy from another race. Prejudice tricked both sides into seeing the other as fundamentally different. Objectively, whites and reds on the frontier looked remarkably similar. Warriors wore hunting shirts and leggings. Their female partners grew corn and beans. Everybody drank too much whiskey. Hatred masked all that they shared.

  When George Washington assumed office as the first president of the new federal government, the problems of the West troubled him most. The western Indian confederacy seemed unified and determined to stop the United States at the Ohio River. Great Britain continued to maintain a force of at least a thousand troops at northwestern posts like Detroit. They traded furs and supplied the Indians with guns and ammunition. Spain also encouraged and supplied native resistance to the expansion of American settlement in the South, refusing to accept the territorial settlement of the Treaty of Paris and claiming that the northern boundary of Florida extended to the Ohio River. The Spanish secretly employed a number of prominent westerners, including George Rogers Clark, as informants and spies.

  The West threatened to slip from the Americans. Washington and his secretary of war Henry Knox shifted tactics and reformed the nation’s Indian policy. Instead of using the “right of conquest” to squeeze land from the Indians, they suggested a more even hand. Knox had been active in crafting the language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians,” that “their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent,” and that “they shall never be invaded or disturbed unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress. This amounted to a rejection of conquest theory and a recognition of the independent character of Indian nations.15

  In 1790, following Knox’s lead, Congress passed the Indian Intercourse Act, the basic law regulating “trade and intercourse with the Indian tribes.” The act created a legal distinction between the territorial jurisdiction of the states and that region known as Indian Country, a concept taken directly from the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Indians residing within the territory of the United States were not American citizens but rather subjects of their own nations, enjoying jurisdiction over their own homelands, with their own governments and laws. Indian nations retained a form of limited sovereignty. They ruled within their territory, but the United States forbid them from engaging in state-to-state relations, neither with individual states nor with foreign governments—the British in Canada or the Spanish in Florida and Louisiana. The federal government assumed the sole right to negotiate treaties with Indian groups. Treaty-making became one of the nation’s principal tools of conquest, and the desire for legal, peaceful, and clear treaties explains why Washington and Knox wanted Indian sovereignty included in the 1790 act. The United States needed legitimate partners with whom to negotiate. The Constitution, drafted in 1787 and ratified the following year, detailed the government’s treaty-making powers—the president negotiated them, while the Senate retained the power to approve or reject them.16

  Facsimile of federal peace medallion presented to Seneca chief Red Jacket in 1792. From Red Jacket (Buffalo, 1885). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Typical was the first Indian treaty negotiated by the Washington administration, with the “Creek Nation of Indians” in 1790. In exchange for Creek cessions of land and an acknowledgment that they were “to be under the protection of the United States of America, and no other sovereign whosoever,” the government pledged to protect the boundaries of their nation and acknowledged their right to punish “as they please” Americans who invaded their boundaries or violated their laws.17

  The 1790 act declared that it was official federal policy “to promote civilization among the friendly Indian tribes.” The president was authorized to furnish them “with useful domestic animals, and implements of husbandry.” Indians might become eligible for citizenship in the Republic, wrote Knox, once they acquired “love for exclusive property.” Moreover, to eliminate unscrupulous abuses, the government created a licensing system for traders and authorized the creation of subsidized federal trading posts (called “factories”) in Indian Country, where native traders could obtain goods at fair and reasonable prices. Congress pledged to curtail the destructive flow of alcohol to the Indians. These programs, however, were never adequately funded, and the “civilization program” languished.18

  Loose ends infested American Indian policy. On the one hand was the pledge to protect native homelands. On the other was the program to survey, sell, and create new political institutions in those very same lands. As historian Elliott West writes, “A policy that could make such promises, all within the same pair of documents, had moved beyond contradiction to schizophrenia.” Yet, once established, the legal principles endured. In the twentieth century, many Indian tribes successfully appealed for the return of lands taken by the states or private individuals in violation of the provisions of the Indian Intercourse Act.19

  . . .

  Legal niceties and good intentions wrecked against the ruthless pressure of settlers seeking rich farm lands in the Ohio country. Squatters ignored the government’s ordinances and acts along with Indians’ rights. “Though we hear much of the Injuries and depredations that are committed by the Indians upon the Whites,” wrote Governor St. Clair of the Northwest Territory, “there is too much reason to believe that at least equal if not greater Injuries are done to the Indians by the frontier settlers of which we hear very little.” Juries refused to convict whites for crimes against Indians. Injured parties sought their own justice. The leaders of the Ohio confederacy proved unable to restrain and coordinate the passions of its many members. Chiefs could not control their warriors. Indians struck back at Americans with equally indiscriminate violence.20

  In the fall of 1790, General Josiah Harmar of the regular army led an expeditionary force made up largely of militia in an invasion of the Ohio country with the mission of pacifying the Indians and establishing order among the Americans. He met a formidable Indian force under the leadership of Little Turtle, a brilliant war chief of the Miamis. Little Turtle trapped Harmar’s army and badly defeated them. Encouraged by this victory, the British began the construction of Fort Miami in the Maumee valley west of Lake Erie, well within the region ceded to the United States at the end of the Revolution. To make matters worse, the Spanish had closed the port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River to American commerce, threatening to choke off economic development. The West rattled the young nation. Rivals tested the Americans’ grip on the territories that symbolized their country’s future.

  In November 1791, the Americans once again invaded the Ohio country, this time with a large but poorly trained army under the command of Governor St. Clair himself. Little Turtle’s army demolished
them. With a loss of more than nine hundred American dead and wounded, St. Clair’s misadventure would go down as the single worst defeat of an American army by Indian warriors, a far more serious loss than the famous toppling of General George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. Seen from a native perspective, it was the most breathtaking victory of Indian arms in the annals of American history.

  Little Turtle, Miami chief and war leader of the Ohio Confederacy. Copy of a lost painting by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1796. Author’s collection.

  Bloodied and vulnerable, the United States wobbled in the West. President Washington gambled 80 percent of the federal government’s operating budget on a massive campaign against the Ohio confederacy that would show not only the Indians but the British and Spanish as well that his nation was in control of its western territory. He picked General Anthony Wayne to lead the surge. On August 20, 1794, at the Maumee villages, three thousand troops under Mad Anthony (a nickname Wayne earned from his own men, who suffered under his fierce discipline) engaged Little Turtle’s confederated warriors. The Indians drove back the first wave of Americans, inflicting heavy casualties. Wayne brought up his reserves and overwhelmed the warriors as they tried to press their advantage. The Americans outflanked the warriors, and they broke for the safety of Fort Miami. The British officers at the fort watched the retreat and decided to forgo an international incident. They barred the gates, and Wayne’s troops picked off the fleeing fighters. The Battle of Fallen Timbers badly damaged the Ohio confederacy and displayed the determination of the United States to protect its West. The British flinched, demonstrating the emptiness of the promises to their Indian allies. Their supplies dwindled with their bravado, and they abandoned Fort Miami.