The Indian World of George Washington Read online

  Virginia and South Carolina competed for their business. In his History of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, written in 1728 (although not published until 1841), William Byrd II asserted that Virginians had been trading with the Cherokees before the colony of Georgia “was thought of.” South Carolina, however, being closer to the Cherokee towns, quickly assumed the lion’s share of the business and attempted to monopolize it. Virginia tried to insert itself into the Cherokee trade, and Cherokees looked to Virginia to provide more trade options and better terms than they got from South Carolina. Prompted in part by disputes with South Carolinian traders, Cherokees sent a message to Virginia in 1734 asking for trade. The Overhill Cherokee chief Attakullakulla or Little Carpenter, who as a youth had accompanied a Cherokee delegation to London in 1730, led a delegation to Williamsburg in 1751 to pursue closer commercial and diplomatic ties with Virginia. The move drew protests from Governor James Glen of South Carolina, which jealously guarded its Cherokee trade. “It is absolutely necessary for us to be in friendship with the Cherokees,” wrote Glen. He estimated the Cherokees “to be about 3,000 Gunmen, the greatest Nation that we now have in America, except the Chactaws. And while we can call them Friends they may be considered as a Bulwark at our Backs, for such Numbers will allways secure us on that Quarter from the attempts of the French.” Glen realized that he could not keep the Cherokees in line by threatening to cut off trade, as that might push them into the arms of the French.77 Cherokees may have depended on European goods, but they were not politically dependent on any one of the European powers that competed for their trade and allegiance. As W. Stitt Robinson concluded more than half a century ago from his review of the intercolonial contest for their trade, Cherokees were more influential in shaping Virginian Indian policy than Virginians were in influencing Cherokee politics.78

  Indian people responded to the presence and pressures of colonial settlers, traders, missionaries, and imperial rivals in various ways. Sometimes they adapted to new situations without abandoning old values and managed to strengthen rather than weaken their communities, cultures, and chances of survival. Nevertheless, new demands, new opportunities, and new threats produced tensions and divisions between and within communities. Indian people were always in motion, but now Indian country was a world of perpetual movement. People trying to escape violence, slave raids, disease, and the pressures of settler colonialism took refuge in other areas and in other communities. People in search of richer hunting territories moved away from colonial settlers; people seeking access to guns, gunpowder, and goods moved toward colonial traders and took advantage of new economic opportunities. The “tribal” map broke down where groups, families, and individuals moved and merged with other peoples, creating composite communities and multitribal collections of villages. In the lower Susquehanna Valley, for example, Shawnee, Delaware, Nanticoke, and Conoy migrants joined Susquehannocks and other peoples who had taken refuge in the area after Bacon’s Rebellion. Then, when colonial settlement began to crowd the valley, they left the Susquehanna and headed west across the Allegheny Mountains. Tuscaroras migrated from North Carolina and joined the Iroquois; other peoples moved away from Iroquois domination. Virginians struggled to control the traffic of raiding parties on the Warriors’ Path and prevent Indians from crossing the Potomac. For the Shawnees, described by one trader as “the Greatest Travellers in America,” recurrent movement became almost a way of life and a marker of identity.79 Indian leaders covered great distances to visit colonial capitals; colonial governments struggled to keep up with the “who’s who” of Indian country in a constantly shifting political landscape.

  Upheaval and catastrophe reflected loss of spiritual power that could be explained as a result of weakened traditional culture and declining observance of necessary rituals. In Washington’s lifetime, Indian peoples periodically sought to revive their spiritual power in movements of cultural rejuvenation that grew into or merged with political movements to throw off colonial control. If Washington heard of such developments in Indian country, like most of his contemporaries he little understood them; yet they would profoundly affect the course of his life and that of the country he would lead.80

  Chapter 2

  The Ohio Company and the Ohio Country

  In many ways and for most of his life, George Washington’s Indian world was the Ohio country. Virginia’s expansion and his ambitions led there, his formative experiences with Indians occurred there, and his vision for personal fortune and the nation’s future focused there. His actions, campaigns, and policies would help transform the Ohio country from a Native American world to an Anglo-American world. To the English, the Ohio country seemed a wild place that needed the tending hand of settlers and civilization to cultivate its bounty. But the Ohio country already had its own settlers and civilizations. Ohio Indians saw the Appalachian Mountains as a buffer against English encroachment, and they knew that the forces unleashed by colonial intrusion and the actions of surveyors, speculators, and empire builders—men like Washington—were what made the Ohio country a wild and volatile place.

  International, intercolonial, intertribal, and private competition destabilized the region years before Washington appeared on the scene. Virginia considered the Ohio country to be within its boundaries as set by royal charter and believed that Treaty of Lancaster made with the Iroquois in 1744 confirmed and guaranteed its right to the area. But Pennsylvania, France, and multiple Indian nations all had something to say about that. Prior to the Lancaster Treaty, Pennsylvanians dominated the Indian trade in the Ohio Valley; most Virginians followed the valleys that led to the southwest to trade with the Cherokees and other nations.1 But when Thomas Lee and William Beverley returned from Lancaster with a massive cession of Indian territory, land fever infected the Virginia elite. The gentry who dominated the government granted millions of acres west of the Appalachians to the gentry who owned the land companies. In the first session of the Virginia Assembly after the Treaty of Lancaster, Lieutenant Governor William Gooch approved a grant of 100,000 acres on the Greenbrier River in present-day West Virginia to the Greenbrier Company, a syndicate headed by John Robinson Sr., Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and 100,000 acres on the Kanawha River to the Wood’s River Company, headed by James Patton, commander of the Augusta County militia. In the next nine years the governor and council authorized thirty-six grants west of the Alleghenies.2

  In 1747 Thomas Lee and a group of influential men from the Northern Neck formed the Ohio Company of Virginia, setting events in motion that would shape Washington’s first experiences in Indian country. The company petitioned Lieutenant Governor Gooch and the council for a grant of lands in the territory allegedly ceded by the Iroquois at Lancaster. To advance its case the company promised to open trade with the various Indian nations, settle a given number of people on their lands, and build forts to protect them. The company’s membership changed over time but consistently included leaders of Virginia’s aristocracy, men closely related by family ties as well as business, political, and social connections.3 Thomas Lee was a member of the council. The thirteen original members included Lee, his three sons and a son-in-law, Lawrence and Augustine Washington Jr. (whose daughter married one of Lee’s sons), and the frontier trader Thomas Cresap. Lawrence Washington was the first chairman of the company. Cresap lobbied for the petition in Williamsburg and presented it to the governor and his council. When Gooch postponed action on the petition and referred it to the Board of Trade, the company secured the services of John Hanbury, a well-connected London merchant, to lobby on their behalf and use his political influence to present the petition directly to the Privy Council. Hanbury was offered a share in the company and became its fourteenth member and main promoter in London.4

  Hanbury secured an audience with King George II and submitted a petition that was a mixture of half-truths, wishful thinking, and grandiose ambition. It asked for a grant of 200,000 acres near the Forks of the Ohio, and an additional
300,000 acres once the company met the terms of the original grant by settling one hundred families on the land and building a fort to protect the settlement. The grant would encompass parts of Virginia and parts of Maryland, almost all of what is now western Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania. The petition conveyed the kind of assumptions and agendas that influenced Washington at an early age and shaped his personal and public plans for Indian country.

  The Ohio Company derived its claim from the Six Nations, who claimed all the lands west of Virginia by right of conquest. At the Treaty of Lancaster the Six Nations had ceded “all the said Lands west of Virginia with all the right thereto, so far as your Majesty should at any time thereafter be pleased to extend the said colony.” Since most of the Indian nations in the Ohio country were allies of the Six Nations and the British, and had requested trade from Virginia, the company was ready and willing to seize the opportunity. Conveying goods by easy passage and at little expense from the Potomac to the Ohio country, it would establish trading relations with the Indians so “they may be forever fixed in the British Interest and the prosperity and safety of the British Colonies be effectually secured.” Establishing a fort and settlements would strengthen the frontier and dramatically increase Britain’s share of the fur trade. At the same time, it would promote the consumption of British manufactures, expand commerce, increase shipping and navigation, “and extend your Majestys Empire in America.”5 In other words, the Ohio Company advanced the Crown’s imperial interest by pursuing its own self-interest. The Board of Trade and Privy Council agreed and recommended granting the petition. The king signed the instructions empowering Gooch to make the grant. In July 1749 Gooch and his council granted the company permission to take up 200,000 acres in the unsettled parts of Virginia beyond the Alleghenies, in the vicinity of the forks of the Ohio.6

  Thomas Lee sent George Washington in 1749 to survey lands for the company in the region where Fifteen Mile Creek joins the Potomac and on the Great and Little Capon, and sent the Maryland trader Hugh Parker and Thomas Cresap to survey the Ohio country.7 They had to be discreet. When Indians saw surveyors, they knew the Ohio Company was after their land—knowledge that might well push them into the arms of the French, which was exactly what the Crown hoped to avoid.

  As the Ohio Company saw it, the country was a land speculator’s dream. Company resolutions described rivers stocked with fish and wild fowl; woods abounding with buffalo, elk, deer, wild turkey, and other game; and fertile lands “far exceeding any Lands to the East of the great Mountains,” containing “Timbers of all kinds and Stone for building, Slate, Limestone Coal, Salt Springs and various Minerals.” It was, in short, “a Countrey that wants nothing but Inhabitants to render it one of the most delightful and valuable Settlements of all his Majesties plantations in America.”8

  But the Ohio country had multiple claimants, and Virginia had more than one land company. The same day the Ohio Company received its 200,000-acre land grant, Gooch’s council granted the Loyal Land Company—organized by Dr. Thomas Walker, Peter Jefferson, Colonel Joshua Fry, and other speculators—800,000 acres along the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina west of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Ohio Valley. Walker headed west on a four-month expedition to survey the territory. He renamed the Shawnee River in honor of the Duke of Cumberland, who three years earlier had brutally suppressed the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, and passed through what became known as the Cumberland Gap into what became known as Kentucky.9

  Traders from Pennsylvania who had followed their Indian customers west were already active in the Ohio country. Virginians who wanted Indian land more than they wanted Indian trade faced a tough challenge in dislodging them. Pennsylvania traders warned Ohio Indians that if the Ohio Company built a road across the mountains, the Catawbas would use it to raid them and that a settlement would drive away game. Thomas Lee complained to the Board of Trade in October 1749 that so many Indians had been led to suspect the company’s goal was to ruin them, not trade with them, that “without a treaty and presents we shall not be able to do anything with them.” A month later, he complained to Deputy Governor James Hamilton that his Pennsylvanian traders had rendered execution of the king’s grant impracticable by convincing the Ohio Indians that the fort was “to be a bridle for them” and that the real purpose of roads the company planned to make was to bring the Catawbas down on them. “Yet,” Lee asserted, “these are the lands purchased of the Six Nations by the treaty of Lancaster.” The western boundary of Pennsylvania, and the question as to whether the Forks of the Ohio fell within Virginia or Pennsylvania, remained in dispute for years.10

  Like Virginia and Pennsylvania, France felt it had a legitimate claim to the Ohio country, dating back to 1682, when René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, claimed the entire Mississippi River drainage basin by right of discovery and named it Louisiana. French officials saw the Ohio River as the vital link between their colonies in Canada and the lower Mississippi Valley. In 1749, alarmed by the activities of British traders in the region, the comte de La Galissonière, the governor of New France, dispatched Captain Pierre-Joseph de Céloron de Blainville from Montreal with more than two hundred Canadians and thirty Indians into the Ohio country. Céloron was to reassert France’s claim—which he did by nailing to trees a series of tin or copper plaques bearing the French royal arms and burying in the ground below lead plates inscribed with the French claim—impress the Indians with his show of military force, and assess the growing English threat.11 The French dismissed English attempts to justify their pretensions on the basis that the Iroquois had rights to the country and the Iroquois were subject to the British crown: just having set foot on a territory did not give the Iroquois title to it, they said, and as for the Iroquois being British subjects, it was well known they refused to acknowledge any sovereign.12

  Gooch resigned and returned to England in 1749. Thomas Lee, as president of the Virginia Council, took over as acting lieutenant governor, and in that position advanced the interests of the Ohio Company, of which he was also, of course, acting president. When Lee died in November 1750, Lawrence Washington took over as head of the company until his death; he willed his shares to his younger brother George. Interim lieutenant governor Lewis Burwell was not particularly accommodating to the company’s plans, fearing that its expansion into the Ohio country would spark French and Indian hostility. Consequently, even before Robert Dinwiddie arrived as the new lieutenant governor in November 1751, the Ohio Company made him a shareholder and secured his support. As both lieutenant governor of the colony and a major stakeholder in the company, Dinwiddie was determined that Virginia should play a leading role in the expansion of the British Empire in America. He aggressively asserted Virginia’s claims to the Ohio country against those of Pennsylvania and pushed forward plans to help the Ohio Company plant a settlement at the Forks of the Ohio.13

  The Ohio Company now had the green light from the home government to begin developing and securing the region for the empire. In the bitterly contested Ohio country, however, government approval even at the highest level was only a first step toward making good on a claim. The company’s plans would come to nothing without the consent and cooperation of the Ohio Indians themselves.

  Native people inhabited the Ohio country for at least ten thousand years before George Washington set foot in it, and they had seen their share of conflict. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the region had become a refuge for displaced peoples and a crossroads of cultures. The Shawnees seem to have originated in the Ohio Valley. They may have descended, at least in part, from a people known to archaeologists as the Fort Ancient Culture, who lived from about 1400 to 1650 in an area that embraced southern Ohio, southern Indiana, western Virginia, and northern Kentucky. Shawnees left to escape the reverberations of war and disease in the mid-seventeenth century but returned in the early eighteenth century and settled in the Scioto and Miami Valleys. The Shawnees traditionally comprised five divisions, or s
ociety clans, each with its own area of responsibility for the welfare of the tribe. The Chillicothe and Thawekila divisions took care of political matters and generally supplied tribal political leaders; the Mekoches were concerned with health and medicine and provided healers and counselors; the Pekowis were responsible for religion and ritual; the Kispokos generally took the lead in preparing and training for war and supplying war chiefs. These divisions were semiautonomous, had their own chiefs, occupied particular towns (often named after the division), and sometimes conducted their own foreign policies with other tribes.14