The Indian World of George Washington Page 8

  Pushed out of eastern Pennsylvania by English pressure, some Delawares migrated to the Susquehanna Valley. Others moved west and settled along the Allegheny River and its tributaries, establishing villages at Kittanning, Venango, and Kuskuski, formerly an Iroquois settlement, on Beaver Creek and the Shenango River near present-day New Castle, Pennsylvania. Some moved farther west to the upper Muskingum Valley. Wyandots or Wendats, remnants of the once-powerful Huron confederacy, had established communities near Detroit and Sandusky. Splinter groups from the Iroquois confederacy—primarily Senecas and Cayugas—migrated west and settled in the area between Lake Erie and the Allegheny River, where they became known to the English as Mingoes, derived from the Delaware word for them, Mingwe. When Shawnees and other peoples began returning to the Ohio country in the early eighteenth century, the Iroquois claimed they were their dependents. Miamis, Weas, and Piankashaws relocated to the Wabash Valley from Michigan, as did Kickapoos and Mascoutens from the Illinois Country. The roughly two thousand people clustered around the mouth of the Cuyahoga River (present-day Cleveland) in 1742 included Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, Mahicans, Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Abenakis from northern New England and Quebec. The Ohio Valley, said one Cayuga, was “a Republic composed of all sorts of Nations.”15

  The French, the British, and the Iroquois all claimed to control the region, but none did. France and Britain both knew they could only exercise sovereignty there through Indian proxies. Ohio Indians increasingly sought to assert their independence from the Iroquois, as well as to preserve their land and independence from both the French and the English, often by playing one against the other. Noting how few Shawnees had attended the Treaty of Lancaster, Deputy Governor George Thomas of Pennsylvania observed “that the closer our union has been with the Six Nations, the greater distance they have kept from us.”16

  In the looming imperial contest, the central council of the Iroquois Confederacy, located at Onondaga near present-day Syracuse, New York, continued to pursue the strategy of neutrality its diplomats had initiated in 1701 at the Treaty of Montreal with the French and the Treaty of Albany with the English. But Onondaga’s authority petered out west of the Alleghenies, and Ohio Indians sometimes had other ideas. In November 1747, during the Anglo-French conflict known in America as King George’s War, a delegation of ten Indian warriors from the Ohio traveled to Philadelphia and met the provincial council, which advised the governor and acted as the upper legislature. It was unusual for warriors to take such a step, and they explained their reasons. They were “of the Six Nations,” they said, meaning they were Mingoes, but they were breaking with Iroquois policy. Despite repeated English requests to join them in fighting the French, the “old Men at the Fire at Onondaga” had stuck to their policy of neutrality. Finally, said the warriors, the young men and the war chiefs “consulted together & resolved to take up the English Hatchet against the will of their old People, and to lay their old People aside as of no use but in time of Peace.” They asked Pennsylvania to furnish them with better weapons—wooden clubs were of little use “against the hard Heads of the French,” they said—and left armed with guns, powder, lead, steel knives, and tomahawks.17 Deputy Governor Hamilton of Pennsylvania put his finger on what had happened: “by suffering their young Indians to go and settle” in the Ohio country, the Six Nations had helped to generate a “new interest” that challenged the Confederacy’s claims to hegemony over the region.18

  Onondaga designated emissaries—the English called them “half kings”—to represent its interests in Indian towns outside Iroquoia. Half kings could speak and negotiate for the Confederacy but could not make binding decisions without approval from Onondaga. In the Ohio country, where Onondaga was trying to maintain its waning influence over nations that were trying to maneuver their own course among the English, French, and Iroquois, half kings had to bolster an appearance of authority with large doses of diplomatic ability. Their authority in the region rested in large measure on how well they represented Ohio Indians’ interests. They were also prepared to bypass Onondaga and open direct relations with the English colonies when they saw the interests of the Iroquois in Ohio diverge from those of the Iroquois in New York. “It is not at all clear,” notes the historian Richard White, that the half kings “obeyed any instructions from Onondaga that they did not want to obey.”19

  One half king exerted enormous influence on the life of George Washington. Tanaghrisson seems to have been Catawba by birth, captured with his mother in an Iroquois raid. As was common practice to bolster falling populations and replace lost kin, a Seneca family adopted him, at which point he became a Seneca. He did not appear in the written records until quite late in his life. He and an Oneida chief named Scarouady were appointed half kings to the Ohio country sometime before September 1748, when they told Pennsylvania’s interpreter Conrad Weiser they “had nothing in their Council Bag, as they were new beginners” and asked him for gifts because “they often must send Messengers to Indian Towns & Nations, & either to recompense a Messenger or to get Wampum to do the business.”20 Scarouady, also called Monacatootha, was known as “a Person of great Weight” in Indian affairs and functioned as the half king for the Shawnees.21 Tanaghrisson was half king for the Ohio Delawares and Mingoes and the resident delegate at Logstown.

  Located near present-day Ambridge, Pennsylvania, Logstown was a multitribal village and an important trade center. It also functioned as a council fire—a designated meeting place—for the Indian peoples living in the upper Ohio Valley and was fast surpassing Onondaga in regional importance. It was here that Indians from throughout the Ohio country met in council and then sent ten warriors to Philadelphia to inform the government of Pennsylvania that they would no longer swallow Onondaga’s policy of neutrality. Logstown served as headquarters for many English traders who exchanged merchandise and developed personal ties with the Indians living there, and it was a center of anti-French sentiment.22 Captain Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville stopped at Logstown during his expedition to assert French sovereignty in the Ohio country. He found the village inhabited by Iroquois, Shawnees, and Delawares, as well as some Mohawks from Kahnawake and Lake of the Two Mountains (present-day Oka), Abenakis, Nipissings, and Ottawas. Céloron also found they had their own ideas about sovereignty. Four flags—three French and one English—flew above the village. Either different groups within the village were displaying their allegiances or the villagers were hedging their bets. They evaded Céloron’s requests to oust English traders by claiming the chiefs who could make such a decision were absent, which they may well have been, and deliberately so. Céloron described it as “a bad village,” which the English had turned against the French with “cheap merchandise.”23

  Virginia lieutenant governor Dinwiddie and the Ohio Company knew they would have to deal with Logstown. To secure their claims to territory in the Ohio country, they needed to establish alliances with Indian nations to expel the French, secure confirmation of the Lancaster Treaty by chiefs who were not present at the treaty and would not have ceded their territory if they had been, and obtain consent to building a trading house on the claimed lands. Ohio Indians told George Croghan, a Pennsylvania trader and Indian agent, that they did “nott Like to hear of there Lands being Setled over the Allegany Mountain, and in particular by the Virginians.”24 As at the Treaty of Lancaster, the Virginians chose to deal with the Iroquois, but representatives from Onondaga could not be prevailed upon to travel to Virginia. (Iroquois chiefs who declined an invitation to visit Virginia in 1750 said that they lost so many men every time they traveled to Philadelphia that it seemed “the evil Spirits that Dwell among the White People are against us and kill us,” and they could only assume that traveling deeper into the colonial settlements would be even more dangerous.25) With the French increasing pressure, time was of the essence. Dinwiddie and company chose the expedient of dealing with the Six Nations representative in the Ohio country. That meant negotiating with Tanaghriss
on at Logstown.

  To further its plans of opening a route from the Potomac and establishing trade with the Ohio Indians, the Ohio Company first built a storehouse at the head of canoe navigation at the mouth of Wills Creek, near present-day Cumberland, Maryland, where the Warriors’ Path between the Iroquois and the southern Indians crossed other paths that led to the Ohio country. The company instructed Thomas Cresap to blaze a trail from Wills Creek to Redstone Creek, a tributary of the Monongahela River, which he did with the help of a Delaware guide named Namacolin. The Pennsylvania trader William Trent built a storehouse at the confluence of the Redstone and Monongahela. Located near the site of a massive pre-Columbian earthwork, Redstone became the strategic center for Virginia’s trading operations into the Ohio Valley.26

  The Ohio Company dispatched Christopher Gist on two expeditions to explore the territory, select the land to be included in the grant, and gain the support, or at least assuage the concerns, of the Indians. Before Thomas Lee died in 1750, the company instructed Gist to take a party of men “as soon as possible to the Westward of the great Mountains … in Order to search out and discover the Lands upon the River Ohio, & other adjoining Branches of the Mississippi down as low as the great Falls thereof,” at present-day Louisville, Kentucky. Gist was to note the passes through the mountains and the width and depth of the rivers, “take an exact Account of the Soil, Quality, & Product of the Land,” survey the stretches of good level land he found, and make a map of the country he passed through. In addition, he was to observe what Indian nations lived there, their numbers, whom they traded with, and what they traded for.27

  Gist set out on the last day of October 1750, following an old Indian trail up to the Juniata and then across the Allegheny. Delayed by sickness and snow, he took refuge in Indian camps, and at one point when he was very sick “sweated myself according to the Indian Custom in a Sweat House, which gave Me Ease and my Fever abated.” At the Delaware town of Shannopin, near modern Pittsburgh, while he recovered and his party rested and fed their horses, Gist did some surreptitious surveying. At Logstown a few days later, the people “began to enquire my Business, and because I did not readily inform them, they began to suspect me, and said, I was come to settle the Indian’s Land, and they knew I should never go Home again safe.”28

  At Logstown Gist teamed up with George Croghan and an interpreter, Andrew Montour. Montour, known to the Indians as Satellihu or Eghnisara, was the son of an Oneida war chief and Isabelle Montour, a French-Indian interpreter and culture broker known as “Madame” Montour. He had grown up among the Oneidas in New York and the Delawares and Shawnees on the Susquehanna River, and lived among the Six Nations in the country between Lake Erie and the Ohio. He spoke French, English, Mohawk, Oneida, Wyandot, Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee. He worked as agent and interpreter for Pennsylvania, and Tanaghrisson said the Iroquois were pleased to have him as an interpreter because he was “one of our own People” and they could be “sure our Business will go on well & Justice be done on both Sides.” Montour dressed the part: he favored elaborate European clothes while wearing Indian face paint, applied with bear’s grease, and brass pendants hanging from his ears.29 Individuals like Montour who moved easily between Indian and colonial society often aroused English suspicions, but men like Croghan, Conrad Weiser, and Thomas Cresap who worked with him generally trusted him and vouched for his honesty and integrity as well as his ability.30

  Leaving Logstown, the trio traveled deep into Indian country, holding councils and gathering information on the dispositions of the different tribes for Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie. The Wyandots were divided between French and English factions and warned Gist to stay away from the Ottawas, “a nation of French Indians.”31 The Delawares, on the other hand, consisted of “about five hundred fighting Men all firmly attached to the English Interest.” They were “not properly Part of the Six Nations but are scattered about, among most of the Indians upon the Ohio, and some of them among the six Nations, from whom they have Leave to hunt upon their Lands.”32 At Lower Shawnee Town, a community of three hundred warriors and 140 houses at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers near present-day Portsmouth, Ohio, Gist, Groghan, and Montour met the Shawnees in “a Kind of State-House of about 90 Feet long, with a light cover of Bark.” The Shawnees had been “formerly at variance” with the Six Nations but were “now reconciled,” and good friends to the English. Distant enough from Europeans to safeguard their autonomy, they permitted Pennsylvania traders to establish trading houses.33 When Gist reached the Miami towns, he was at the far western edge of British contact with the Indian world. The Miamis, he reported, were “accounted the most powerful People to the Westward of the English Settlements, & much superior to the six Nations with whom they are now in Amity: their Strength and Numbers are not thoroughly known, as they have but lately traded with the English.” Other tribes farther to the west regularly came to the Miami villages, “& ’tis thought their Power and Interest reaches to the Westward of the Mississippi, if not across the Continent.” Although Gist exaggerated the extent of the Miamis’ power, he thought they were well disposed to the English and favored an alliance with them.34 They wanted to increase their English trade. Gist, Croghan, and Montour held councils with them to promote an alliance and counteract French influence. As he traveled, Gist also made note of areas of land that were level, well watered, well timbered, rich in game, and “full of beautiful natural Meadows.” “In short,” he wrote of one area, “it wants Nothing but Cultivation to make a most delightful Country.”35

  Croghan and Montour were back at Logstown in May 1751, representing Pennsylvania’s interests. The resident Six Nations, Delawares, and Shawnees welcomed them “by firing Guns and Hoisting the English Colours.” Two days later, forty Iroquois warriors from the headwaters of the Ohio arrived with Captain Philippe-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire, who was the son of a French father and a Seneca mother. Joncaire requested an answer to the speech Céloron had made two years before, demanding that the Indians turn away the English traders. Following Indian protocol, he presented a large belt of wampum. One of the Six Nations chiefs, who would likely have been Tanaghrisson as the ranking half king at Logstown, answered that the Indians had no intention of turning away the traders. “Go and tell your Governor to ask the Onondaga Council If I don’t speak the minds of all the Six Nations,” he said, and returned Joncaire’s wampum belt. Croghan urged the Indians to renew their friendship with the English and continue doing business with Pennsylvania traders. He gave them gifts from the governor of Pennsylvania to help seal the deal. The Indians received Croghan’s wampum belts “with the Yo-hah,” or shout of approval. Finally, in open council, the Six Nations chief spoke to Joncaire “very quick and sharp with the Air of a Warrior.” Why were the French disturbing the peace? he asked. What right did Onontio, the governor of New France, have to their lands? “Is it not our Land?” he demanded, “Stamping on the Ground and putting his Finger to John Coeur’s Nose.” Joncaire should go home and tell Onontio that the Six Nations would not put up with it. The chief said he expressed “the Sentiments of all our Nations” and emphasized his statements by handing Joncaire four strings of black wampum.36 Croghan maintained that Tanaghrisson, Scarouady, and an Iroquois chief called Kaghswaghtaniunt or Tohashwughtonionty, also known as Belt of Wampum or just the Belt, all told him in Montour’s presence that they and Onondaga agreed to permit a trading house.37

  Gist returned from his first expedition in the spring of 1751. He set out on his second the same year. Departing from Wills Creek the first week of November, he crossed the mountains through Sandy Gap. Again he was looking for good land, but this time also collecting samples of minerals. Again the Indians were suspicious. On his return journey a Delaware who spoke good English told him that their chiefs the Beaver (Tamaqua) and Captain Oppamylucah “desired to know where the Indian’s Land lay, for that the French claimed all the Land on one Side the River Ohio & the English on the other Side.” Oppamylucah had
asked Gist the same question when he had stopped at his camp on the first leg of the journey. “I was at a Loss to answer Him as I now also was,” Gist confessed.38

  The Ohio Company was satisfied that Gist’s journeys had dispelled the prejudices against Virginia that Pennsylvania’s traders, if not its government, had “artfully propagated” among the Indians. The Indians saw they could trade with the company on more favorable terms than with Pennsylvania traders, but since Gist had not obtained the Indians’ approval for building a settlement on the Ohio, that issue remained to be dealt with the following spring.39 Gist, Croghan, and Montour had persuaded the tribes to meet Virginian commissioners and make a treaty at Logstown.

  It was a significant step. Previously, the Six Nations had monopolized colonial relations with the supposedly subordinate tribes of the Confederacy. The Ohio Indians were “but Hunters and no Counsellors or Chief Men,” the Iroquois said, and “had no right to receive Presents that was due to the Six Nations.”40 In other words, diplomacy and gifts went through the Six Nations at Onondaga. By dealing directly with the Ohio Indians at Logstown, Virginia initiated, or recognized, a shift in Indian relations that diverted influence away from the Iroquois. Virginia officials may not have fully grasped the significance of the departure from established protocol, but seasoned operators in Indian country like Montour and Croghan surely did. The Ohio Indians now occupied the pivotal position in the Anglo-French rivalry for continental supremacy. Tanaghrisson and Scarouady took advantage of the new situation to make themselves indispensible intermediaries between the English and the Ohio Indians. They claimed authority over the Ohio tribes as representatives of the Six Nations but increasingly functioned as an alternative source of leadership for the Ohio Indians in dealing with the Six Nations. The Ohio nations took advantage of the widening fissure between the half kings and the Six Nations as they distanced themselves from Onondaga.41