Chapter 2
When the first settlers arrived on the Allegheny Plateau in the mid-eighteenth century, the forest they encountered was far from being a “virgin” wilderness, as Americans so often described it. In fact, the plateau had been subject to human occupation for millennia. However, European and, especially, Anglo-American cultural arrogance led to a narrow viewpoint that saw the frontier as a place absent any real “human” settlement. Instead, the Indians who had lived there for centuries were dismissed as being subhuman “brutes,” “savages” and unchristian demons.
For much of the twentieth century, historians stated a commonly held view that by the time settlers arrived in the mid-eighteenth century, the Allegheny Plateau had no real permanent Indian population. They argued that the tribes once living there had long since migrated westward and that the plateau was merely a communal hunting ground for a variety of Native American nations. Therefore, the theory follows, European colonists were really settling on land that was there for the taking. This idea became so pervasive at one point that it was formally incorporated into the West Virginia public school curriculum.66
However, the actual truth is that although the Indian tribes that lived on the plateau had already diminished in number due to the impact of European diseases, intertribal warfare and forced migration to the west, there were still resident populations of Shawnees and Mingos, as well as a few Delawares.67 Further, the plateau also saw Cherokees, Wyandots, Ottawas, Miamis and Iroquois pass through the area while hunting, trading, conducting diplomacy or, more ominously, when participating in war against the Anglo-American colonists. Tragically, this warfare, which would suddenly peak in 1774 and continue virtually unabated until the American victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794, was almost exclusively the product of a lack of cultural understanding and the steadfast refusal by first the British and then the Americans to even try to respect or accommodate the Indians’ view of the world.
A CLASH OF CULTURES
As one historian points out, the American frontier during the colonial period was not so much a “border” with Indians on one side and settlers on the other as “a shifting region of multiethnic villages in which whites and Indians lived in a world of cultural intermingling.”68 Within parts of this frontier, Indians and Europeans had been in social and economic contact for almost two hundred years. It is, therefore, somewhat amazing that they understood one another so poorly. However, as discussed earlier, whereas the French did seem to gain a good sense of Indian culture and were able to create strong economic and political ties with them, the British and their eventual American progeny were another matter.
One of the basic problems with the British understanding of the Indian nations was their insistence on projecting European cultural, religious and even political values and norms onto Native American societies. The various Indian nations were composed of a myriad of individual villages with complex affiliations that were the product of millennia of clan and kinship evolution. Within a distinct Indian nation, such as the Shawnee, each village was only loosely tied to the others. As a result, the Shawnee and every other Native American nation had no concept of the term “nation” as a European would understand it.
Yet despite almost two hundred years of contact, the British continued to arbitrarily define every Indian group that spoke a common dialect as a unified tribal “state.” Furthermore, as the British saw matters, this group also took on the characteristics of a nation-state, although far less sophisticated, of course. These characteristics included a single head of state, in this case the “chief,” whom the British artificially invested with all the powers of both king and prime minister. As such, the chief with whom they dealt must, in the British view, also have powers to decide matters of war, peace, alliance, trade and, importantly, territorial ownership.
Iroquois chiefs meet with a French officer at the council fire. New York Public Library.
Of course, the realities of Indian political leadership could not have been further from the British concept of things. More often than not, each village was, in actuality, considered a “tribe” with its own political leadership. That leadership included someone designated as a chief, but the person holding this lofty office was usually selected to the post, not born into it as a king, and ruled via a very democratic process of consensus. Additionally, in many nations, the village tribes had two chiefs: a “peace” chief, who oversaw what might be called “civil” matters, and a “war” chief, who was responsible for directing the activities of the tribe’s warriors. Furthermore, unlike European society, the women of the village played a critical role in tribal politics as, oftentimes, the selection of a chief in the woodland tribes was the product of a consensus solely among the women.
The only time the Indian nations even remotely approached the European model of a nation-state was when the various nations would formally ally themselves, such as in the Iroquois Confederation, the Wyandot Confederacy or the Six Nations. However, even then, they operated on a strict basis of consensus among the tribes. As a result, the British never seemed to comprehend the situation sufficiently to effectively and fairly deal with the Indians. It is little wonder then that they were surprised when one group within what they perceived as a “nation” refused to abide by the terms of a treaty. From the Indian perspective, if one “tribe” had negotiated an agreement with the British, the terms only applied to the village that had concluded it. However, what is most surprising is that this misunderstanding persisted not only after the American colonies gained their independence from Great Britain, but it also continued into the late nineteenth century. American officials dealing with the Comanche and Sioux in the 1870s and 1880s appear to have possessed no better understanding of Indian tribal organization than those of the 1780s.
In general, the culture of the various Indian nations tended to be one that sought internal harmony within each village. The creation of conflict was looked down on, and tribal traditions, customs and laws were based on ensuring harmonious tranquility within the tribe. One frontier settler who was taken captive at Braddock’s defeat and subsequently adopted by the Indians developed a great admiration for their way of life, praising them for “living in love, peace and friendship together, without disputes. In this respect, they shame those who profess Christianity.”69 Moreover, while every tribe had its warriors and there was conflict between nations, prior to coming directly into contact with Europeans, few would have described them as being “warlike.” During his first visit to the Shawnee in 1673, the famous Jesuit explorer Father Marquette commented, “They are not at all warlike” and “cannot defend themselves,” being “like flocks of sheep.”70
Within the autonomous villages of the Allegheny Plateau and the Ohio Valley beyond, each community controlled its own territory using two systems of coexisting land tenure. First, as a collective group, the inhabitants of each village owned a large area of “hunting territory,” which could be used by anyone from the village to hunt game, fish in the nearby streams, gather up firewood or pick berries.71 At the same time, members of each extended family, usually under the leadership of a matriarch, farmed their own individual parcel of land, with family fields sometimes separated by either fallow fields or trees. These fields remained in the possession of a particular family so long as they continued to cultivate them. Once a family abandoned a field, the ownership reverted to the entire community and the village council would assign it to a family matriarch as a new piece of farmland. Essentially, the Indians viewed “ownership” as being a temporary condition that existed only as long as a family made use of the land for their benefit.72
Although this system was far removed from the traditional English concept that formed the basis of the colonists’ view of ownership, the idea that one could sell perpetual ownership of the land was even farther from the Indians’ belief system. All Native Americans enjoyed a spiritual relationship with not only the land but also all the creatures that shared it with them, bestowing the idea of a soul to each and every thing, both animate and inanimate, seeing all as equals in the universe, as gifts from their creator. In the words of Black Hawk, a chief of the Sauk nation, “Land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other [Indian] people have the right to settle upon it.”73
In this sixteenth-century engraving, Indians are shown planting their fields with corn and beans. Library of Congress.
As a result, the British never understood that, on those occasions when the Indians saw fit to bestow land as a gift or token of friendship, they were not surrendering the land in perpetuity. Instead, they believed they were granting their British friends the temporary right to make use of the land, just as their own village councils did for members of their tribe. In their minds, the British had very limited rights to the land granted to them. One of the few colonists to truly comprehend this arrangement was Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony. He correctly pointed out that even though he had given a “gratuity” to a sachem of the local Narragansett Indians for the use of two islands for grazing hogs, no transfer in land ownership had actually taken place.74Therefore, in the Indians’ minds, if a settler stopped farming the land given to him by the tribe or if he failed to abide by the terms of their agreement, the land reverted back to the village, just as it would for any member of the tribe. Thus, what many British and American settlers saw as a land sale was often merely a limited, rent-free loan of the land.
However, the pinnacle of British arrogance lay in their belief that they could colonize and rightfully seize land based on their monarch’s divine right and “superior” religion. Employing religious dogma that had existed since the time of the Crusades, the English, like other European monarchies, believed that any Christian king possessed the right of eminent domain over any lands held by a non-Christian “heathen” people. However, the British took matters one step further than their Catholic French and Spanish competitors. While the French and Spaniards both based the legitimacy of their land appropriations on the need to convert the native races to Christianity, the English Protestants believed that merely being Christian entitled them to appropriate the lands of the Indians.75
Further, as Anglican minister Richard Eburne explained the matter, the passage in Genesis 1:28, which reads “…and God said unto them, be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it,” provided additional justification for the British to seize the land from Indian hands. According the Eburne, this commandment from God to Adam awarded Christianity a grand charter with the “privilege to spread themselves from place to place, and to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy any region or country whatsoever which they should find either not occupied.”76 Of course, the Indians might argue against the idea that their lands were “unoccupied,” but the British had an answer for that as well. To them, if you were not using the agricultural techniques employed by English and other European farmers, you were not “replenishing” the land and therefore had no rights to it.
Moreover, not only was the idea of ownership an issue, the stewardship of the resources on the land was also very different between whites and Indians. Cornstalk, a chief of the Shawnee, said, “When God created this World he gave this Island [America] to the red people…who live by Hunting and cannot subsist in any other way.”77 The Indians took what was required to live, plus perhaps a small surplus to trade with other villages. Meanwhile, the settlers, who began to arrive in large numbers in the 1770s, took much more, often using wasteful hunting practices. For example, William Haymond wrote that whenever he was in the woods and saw a deer, he could “not resist the temptation to shoot it.”78 Within a generation, the toll from such attitudes began to increase, and one settler would lament, “The buffalo and elk have entirely disappeared from this section of the country. Of the bear and deer but very few remain…The wild turkeys, which used to be so abundant…are now rarely seen.”79
One can easily understand how baffling this behavior had to be to the Indians who not only relied on the same resources for their own survival but also had a deep, spiritual affinity for the animals being slaughtered by the settlers. To them, the settlers, who now seemed to fill their beloved forests, were ravenous thieves who desecrated the gifts of the Creator. The entire frustration of the Indians regarding both the raping of the land’s resources, as well as the land itself, was summed up by the Shawnee Chiksika, who proclaimed, “The whole white race is a monster who is always hungry and what he eats is land.”80 Therein lay the fundamental causes for the great cultural conflict that led to war on the Virginia frontier: the complete disconnect between the two races in terms of what was meant by land “ownership,” and the settlers’ inability to control their appetite for ravaging the resources it provided, both of which threatened the Indians’ very survival.
WARRIORS, TACTICS AND MORALITY
The Indian warriors of the woodland tribes were a very different breed than their European counterparts, and in fact, their entire approach to war was decidedly at odds with that imported to the New World from the Old. As a result, just like the other cultural differences between the two races, European settlers and soldiers alike did not understand or appreciate the Indian style of warfare. However, they did pay an often heavy price for their inability to see it as anything but yet another example of the savage’s ignorance and cowardice.
War was a distinct part of Indian society, with its own set of common practices and fundamental beliefs. In general, wars between Indian nations were relatively short-lived and far less brutal than those in Europe. A few conflicts, such as the Iroquois Confederation’s war against the Wyandot in the seventeenth century, were fought for territorial gain and trade advantage. However, most were either an extension of a blood feud for an alleged wrongdoing that resulted in the death of a tribal member, what was often referred to as a “mourning war,” or were fought to gain captives from the opposing side that could be adopted into the tribe to replace losses from war or disease.
One of the more disparaging views Europeans commonly held against Indian warriors was that they were cowardly and undisciplined. However, as one contemporary colonist pointed out, “I have often heard the British officers call the Indians undisciplined savages, which is a capital mistake—as they have all the essentials of discipline…Could it be supposed that undisciplined troops could defeat Generals Braddock, Grant, etc.?”81 In fact, Indian warriors were actually highly disciplined, but their entire approach to discipline and military tactics was the exact opposite of their British opponents.
Indian discipline was based on the concept of individual honor as opposed to corporal punishment inflicted by a superior. Warrior leaders were chosen through a consensus reached on their courage, bravery and military experience, as opposed to the British practice of leadership via purchase or privilege. Indian war chiefs always tried to save their men’s lives, and in Indian culture, no victory could ever justify heavy casualties. As a result, there was no disgrace in calling for a retreat until the odds were more in their favor. In addition, rather than adhering to a set of textbook or traditionally prescribed tactics, Indian leaders practiced a sophisticated and highly adaptive brand of warfare that emphasized situational tactics based on weapons and terrain. In this sense, they were the probably among the finest guerilla fighters in history.82
While the warrior culture had its own practices and weapons, the Indians were quick to see the tactical advantage of using firearms. Contrary to the image of the sharpshooting frontiersman from popular culture, the buckskin-clad hero who could outshoot his Indian opponent, the Indians actually became highly skilled sharpshooters. Native American culture drew little distinction between hunting and warfare, and as a result, warriors were trained to be expert shooters in either environment. By adding the proficient use of European weaponry to their already lethal woodland guerilla tactics, the Indians became truly deadly opponents.
As one frontier Indian fighter observed, “The principles of their military action are rational, and therefore often successful…In vain may we expect success against our adversaries without taking a few lessons from them.”83 The Indians’ tactical principles usually involved moving their men through the woods in dispersed, scattered order, instead of rigid, grouped formations, to avoid being surrounded. At the same time, this approach offered them the best chance to surround the enemy and gain the superior advantage provided by the available ground. Meanwhile, their troops, the warriors of the tribe, came to battle in superb physical condition. These warriors, who practiced running and marksmanship, were trained to endure hunger and hardship on behalf of their people. Although the Indian culture of war sought to avoid unnecessary casualties, the Native Americans were, in their own unique way, a very martial people, “ready to sell their lives dearly in defence [sic] of their homes.”84 It was, perhaps, this deeply moral foundation among the warrior class that allowed them to resist their European and American opponents for so many decades despite the latter’s overwhelming numbers and technological superiority.
This fanciful 1789 drawing depicts an Indian warrior holding a scalp. Library of Congress.
Woodland Indians make a night attack on a frontier settler’s cabin. New York Public Library.
Whenever a force of British colonial troops approached a village, the typical Indian response was to fight a delaying action and evacuate the village. Indians learned early on in their fight against the Europeans that trying to defend a village was a recipe for military disaster. Conversely, if they and the villagers retreated to the woods, their enemy would have to be content with burning lodges and food supplies. Although this might often create great hardship, it was better than the alternative, which was the almost certain slaughter of all the village’s inhabitants. In response to these kinds of attacks, the Indians would typically follow up with a series of ambushes and raids against isolated farms and settlements.
This also meant that Indians seldom, if ever, conducted frontal attacks on fortified positions. During their alliances with the French, they had seen firsthand that such attacks were seldom successful unless you had cannon to knock down the stockade walls. Furthermore, even if a fort was seized, the advantage allowed to the stockade’s defenders resulted in an unjustifiable number of casualties. Instead, the Indians often would resort to wholesale burning of nearby crops and homes, which caused the fort’s inhabitants to sally forth in an effort to save their farms, allowing the Indians to lure them into easy ambushes.
One of the more confusing aspects of the Indian execution of warfare against European settlers is the use of what seems barbarous cruelty, and this a difficult issue for a modern observer to truly understand. As discussed above, fighting between Indian warriors seldom resulted in many casualties. Often rather as not, Indians preferred to take their enemies captive, especially noncombatants. These people were usually adopted into the tribe as a means of maintaining population levels under stress from disease, famine or warfare.
Indian ritual and custom also played a large part in their treatment of prisoners. The fate of all captives was the prerogative of the tribe’s collective matriarchs, the Clan Mothers. In most cases, women and children were automatically adopted, as were most men. However, when a captive was sentenced to die, which happened far more often to opposing Indian prisoners than settlers, there was always a clear adjudication of the crime prior to execution, with both those condemning the accused as well as his supporters given an equal opportunity to speak. It came as a great surprise to Native Americans when Europeans condemned this practice. One Lenape responded to his colonial critics, saying, “You white people also try your criminals, and when they are found guilty, you hang them or kill them, and we do the same among ourselves.”85
A colonial soldier tries to stop Indians from torturing a captive in this nineteenth-century drawing. Library of Congress.
While those condemned to die usually faced a painful death by ritual torture or burning at the stake, an adoptee also was processed into the tribe through rituals, which were intended to accord them full status as a member of the tribal family. One settler, Thomas Grist, who was captured near Fort Duquesne in 1758, was fortunate enough to be adopted into an Indian family as a replacement for a deceased family member:
I was led into the house where I was to live, there strip’d [sic] by a female relation, and then led to the river. There she wash’d [sic] me from head to foot, leavin[g] none of the paint itself on me. We then returned to the house, where was gather[ed] all my relations and I believe few men has so many. Such hug[g]ing and kissing from the women and crying for joy, I never saw before. The men acted in a different manner; they looked very serious, shook my hand, and spake [sic] little. As soon as this ceremony was over I was clad from head to foot; then there was an interpreter brought to tell me which of my kin was nearest to me. I think they re[c]onded [sic] from brother to seventh cousins.86
Another important cultural element of the woodland Indians prosecution of war was what is commonly referred to as the Law of Innocence. Evidence indicates this law dated from at least the twelfth century, and it protected all noncombatants, especially the elderly, women and children, as well as “Messengers of Peace,” the couriers who carried peaceful or neutral messages. Further, under its tenets, women, children, elders and noncombatant males might be taken captive and adopted, but they were never to be killed, scalped or tortured. In addition, the Law of Innocence firmly prohibited rape. Rape was considered an utterly reprehensible act by all the woodland nations and was seen as literally unthinkable in these societies, which deeply revered women and afforded them such high status. In fact, one historian points out that, among these eastern tribes, “the concept of sexual violation was a grotesque aberration, held to be on the same level as wanton child murder.”87 Therefore, one must question why, given these various cultural imperatives, Indian warriors did indeed scalp and kill white women and children.
Several factors influenced what must appear to be utterly aberrant behavior. First, one must remember that Indian warriors were fighting a guerilla war, with operations sometimes ranging deep into “enemy” territory. As a result, military expedience might dictate the elimination of captives who were either not useful or might otherwise slow down the warriors’ successful retreat back to their village. It also appears that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indians did not perceive enemies or any non-member of their tribal group or community as fully human. Further compounding these views is the fact that the Indians did not perceive a distinction between war and murder, as Europeans might. In historian Richard White’s study of colonial-period Great Lakes Indians, he found that the Algonquian peoples believed there were two kinds of killings: those perpetrated by enemies and those committed by allies. If someone’s killer belonged to an ally, the victim’s family and community expected that the dead would be “covered” by appropriate compensation and ceremony. If this did not happen, the killer became an enemy and a blood feud began. The Indians did not, however, see the battlefield as a unique cultural zone in which killing was sanctioned to the exclusion of other acts of killing that whites might define as murder. Therefore, while Europeans believed murder to be a crime requiring blood revenge, Indians maintained that killings by enemies demanded such revenge whether in or out of battle.88
Despite this, however, the largest single factor influencing warrior behavior in this regard was the wanton, brutal killings carried out by Anglo-American colonists from virtually the moment they arrived in America. The Puritans were the first, employing a philosophy that “nits make lice,” their cold, racist rationale for the purposeful killing of Native American women and children.89 Furthermore, the British borrowed heavily from European practices of the Thirty Years War, as well as their own legacy of “search and destroy” operations in both Scotland and Ireland, all of which included the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. As a result, the British provided the lessons of conducting “hard war” to the Native Americans—not the other way around. In fact, it must be said that the British, as well as the Americans who followed them on the frontier, were, in reality, more brutal than their “savage” opponents because their atrocities were usually intentional and the result of carefully calculated plans and policies.
The best and, without doubt, most horrible example of this kind of warfare by the white colonists occurred on the Ohio frontier in 1782. Late the year before, several groups of Christian Delaware Indians, who had been converted by Moravian missionaries, were ordered by Major Arendt DePeyster, the British commander in Detroit, to move west for their own protection, away from their villages along the Tuscarawas River in eastern Ohio. These Christian Delawares were forced to leave their homes on short notice and had to leave behind not only many of their possessions but also crops that would be badly needed during the coming winter. By February, the Delawares’ plight was becoming serious, as the food supplies in their new village on the Sandusky River were inadequate. Fearing starvation, they begged the chief of their Seneca hosts, Half King, to allow them to return to their villages and harvest the corn that was still standing in their fields. Although Half King had his doubts about the idea, he allowed them to go out of pity. The next day, about 120 hungry men, women and children began their trek across central Ohio, leaving a pathway through the deep snow that covered the wooded hills and open prairie. Upon reaching the Tuscarawas, 96 of the party went to their main settlement at Gnadenhutten and began to harvest their frozen crops.
About the same time the Christian Delawares were arriving in Gnadenhutten, an Indian raiding party made an unusual winter attack on isolated settler homesteads in western Pennsylvania. The settlers believed the Christian Delaware villages had somehow been involved in these attacks, when nothing could have been further from the truth. As a result, a group of one hundred American colonial militiamen under the leadership of Colonel David Williamson gathered at Mingo Bottom, about seventy-five miles downriver from Fort Pitt, and set out for the Tuscarawas River villages.
These converted Delawares were dedicated pacifists and posed no threat to anyone. Further, they had maintained a long and friendly relationship with the region’s white settlers. Evidently, that did not matter—they were Indian, and that was all Williamson needed as proof of their complicity in the attacks. Late in the afternoon of March 6, 1782, Williamson and his militia arrived at Gnadenhutten and encircled the town. As they approached, they came upon six Delaware men and women working in the fields and immediately killed them, despite the fact that they were all wearing European-style clothing and clearly were not warriors.
When the remainder of the village saw Williamson’s men approaching, they did not attempt to flee, believing they had nothing to fear. In fact, some of the Delaware recognized a few militiamen as neighbors with whom they had shared food and shelter in the past. Williamson told them that he and his men had come to take them to Fort Pitt, where they would be provided food, shelter and protection. The Delaware had no reason not to trust the militia commander and willingly handed over their hunting weapons. Indeed, some thought this was a good offer, as, given their history of friendship with the Americans, they believed they would receive far better treatment at Fort Pitt than the British had provided on the Sandusky. However, what they received in return for their honest friendship and faith was a savage betrayal.
Williamson proceeded to herd the men and older boys into one cabin, while he locked up the women and children in another. He then announced to their leaders that he was certain they had perpetrated the attacks in Pennsylvania, and, as a result, he would execute every member of the village. Of course, the Delawares protested their innocence and pleaded for their lives, but it was to no avail. Williamson held a council with his officers not to formally agree on whether or not to kill all the Delawares but rather to decide how best to carry out the process of execution. Some men actually protested and refused to be a party to the killings. As one militiaman recalled, “They wrung their hands—and calling God to witness that they were innocent of the blood of these harmless Christian Indians, they withdrew to some distance from the scene of slaughter.”90 When told of their impending deaths, the Delawares asked for time to prepare themselves, to which the cold-hearted Williamson agreed. The air was soon filled with the sounds of wailing and prayers, and a mixture of Delaware death songs and Christian hymns. Saddest of all, however, were the tearful goodbyes that echoed out in the chilly night air, as husbands, wives and children called out to one another between the two buildings in which they were imprisoned.
At dawn on March 8, the killing began. First, the militia dragged the women and girls out into the snow and systematically raped them. Then, they began a cold, methodical process of brutal murder using two additional cabins, which they designated as “slaughterhouses.” Two or three captives were hauled into the cabins at a time, where a militiaman would cave in their skulls with a large wooden cooper’s mallet. When the first executioner’s arm tired, he was eagerly replaced by another militiaman.
None of the Delaware resisted, but a few did try to run and were quickly shot down, falling forward into the snow, their blood staining the cold white powder. Meanwhile, the rape and murder continued unabated until eighty-eight of the remaining Indians were dead, of which some thirty-five were children. Then Williamson’s men piled the corpses high in the slaughterhouses and set the entire mission village afire. Within a few hours, the village of Gnadenhutten, whose name meant “Houses of Grace,” was reduced to ashes along with the remains of its peaceful residents.
Unbeknownst to the militia, however, two of the Delaware boys they scalped and left for dead survived and fled to spread the news of what had happened. The outrage it produced throughout the Indian nations was virtually without precedent. To be sure, the Indians had seen similar depredations by the settlers and their soldiers over the decades since the first Englishmen arrived in North America. Nevertheless, this was different—these were Indians who had converted to the European’s Christian god, renounced the warrior culture and made a supposed permanent peace with the settlers. If these Indians were not safe and could not trust the settlers, then no one could. The only answer for the rest of the woodlands nations was to continue their war against the American settlers and respond to white atrocities with the same brand of brutality exacted at Gnadenhutten.
Colonel David Williamson’s Pennsylvania militia murder the innocent Christian Delawares of Gnadenhutten. Ohio Historical Society.
Yet despite this and unlike their white counterparts, the woodland Indians never adopted wanton slaughter of noncombatants as “policy” or employed it as a standard strategy or tactic. While it might occur as a matter of military expedience, there were only rare cases where the killing and scalping of women and children was actually the planned outcome of an attack. Rather, during the American Revolution, Indian leaders sometimes found themselves at odds over the Law of Innocence when dealing with their British allies. For instance, during discussions of an upcoming frontier campaign, one senior British officer casually instructed his Wyandot counterpart that his warriors were to “Kill all the rebels,” to “put them all to death, and spare none.” The Wyandot war chief objected strenuously and requested a clarification. Surely, the British really “meant that they should kill men only, and not the women and children.” However, the response he received from the British commander was as ironic as it was perverse: “No, no,” he was told, “Kill all, destroy all; nits breed lice!”91
ANGLO-AMERICAN-INDIAN RELATIONS AND THE ALLEGHENY PLATEAU: GERMS, TREATIES AND LIES
While widespread, direct confrontation between settlers and Native Americans on the Allegheny Plateau would not begin in earnest until the middle of the eighteenth century, the effects of a European presence on the plateau’s tribes began almost as soon as the British colonists arrived at Jamestown in 1607. Like ripples moving outward from a pebble dropped in a placid pool, the Jamestown colony triggered calamity and upheaval beyond the Alleghenies that would continue for almost two hundred years.
Even before the first white trapper had set foot on the Allegheny Plateau, his germs had already arrived, providing the first link in a disastrous and tragic chain of events. The Shawnee, Moneton, Monongahela and Fort Ancient tribes were struck by what became known as “virgin soil” epidemics. Having never been exposed to diseases such as measles and smallpox, hundreds of plateau Indians died. Today’s archaeologists believe it likely that Susquehannock Indians from eastern Maryland and Virginia first contracted these diseases from the English colonists and then inadvertently transmitted them during hunting and trading expeditions into the Indian lands west of the Alleghenies.92 For example, evidence of widespread death from disease was found at the site of a seventeenth-century village in the Kanawha Valley where archaeologists discovered several mass graves, with the largest containing close to forty bodies. Given that the remains exhibited no evidence of trauma, researchers concluded that these Indians had most likely died from diseases imported from the new British settlements east of the mountains.93
The next event that put pressure on the Indian tribes of the plateau, as well as those of the upper Ohio Valley, came from war. However, it was not war against the new colonists but war with the Iroquois nation. Interestingly, this, too, was a product of the growing European presence in North America. Not long after the French arrived on the upper St. Lawrence, they established a vibrant fur trade with the Iroquois, with beaver skins being the most highly prized product. These luxurious pelts were soon in such demand in European markets that the Iroquois could not provide too many. In addition, the Iroquois quite naturally began to crave the European goods they received in exchange for the furs. With items such as guns, powder, lead, cloth, blankets, colorful wool stockings and small brass kettles being especially valued, the Iroquois’ cravings quickly turned into dependence. As a result, they harvested more and more beaver, and the voracious appetite for the pelts drove the beaver population in what is now upper New York to near extinction. In the Iroquois’ minds, their only recourse was to expand their hunting grounds into the territories of neighboring nations.
Beginning around 1640, the Iroquois launched a series of “Beaver Wars” that saw the Iroquois Confederation attack tribes from Lake Huron to the Ohio Valley and the Alleghenies, one after another. The first target was the great Wyandot Confederacy, whom they savagely drove from their homeland around Georgian Bay and Lake Huron, scattering them southwest toward the Detroit region. After that, they simply moved like locusts through the woodlands and, by 1662, they were raiding Shawnee villages in the upper Ohio Valley and, within a few years, began attacking the villages of the Allegheny Plateau. By the end of the seventeenth century, with the unrelenting pressures of disease and war pressing down on them, the Shawnee had dispersed across the map from Illinois to South Carolina, with only a few hundred still along the Ohio River and on the Allegheny Plateau.94
Not surprisingly, the Iroquois became the dominant nation of the northwest, and in the mid-eighteenth century, when the British began negotiating for lands and the French looked for allies against English incursions, it was primarily the Iroquois with whom they dealt. Historians have long seen fit to describe the Iroquois and the other Indian nations within their sphere of influence as “pawns” or, worse, “puppets” in the wars for empire between Britain and France. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. During this time, the Iroquois, who used their dominion over the other tribes to speak for them, were adept at playing one European power against the other. In some cases, they merely desired an alliance in order to restock supplies of guns, lead and powder. However, in other situations, they desired to conduct what one historian describes as a “parallel war,”95 in which they concluded a temporary alliance that suited their immediate need to fight a common foe.
As discussed in an earlier chapter, the French and Indian War was a seminal event on the frontier that forever altered the fabric of life there. The Indian role during the war as French allies is the ideal example of the “parallel war” concept. The Indian nations clearly saw the difference between the French and British approaches to their colonization of North America, and that left them with an obvious choice in terms of an ally. While British settlers voraciously seized every bit of land in their path and threatened the Indians’ very way of life, the French asked for nothing but good trade. In 1758, an “old Indian on the Ohio” named Ackowanothio gave a speech to the colonists in Pennsylvania that provided a clear, unambiguous explanation for why the Ohio Valley Indians had allied with the French:
You wonder at our joining with the French in this present War. Why can’t you get sober and once think Impartially? Does not the law of Nations permit, or rather Command us all, to stand upon our guard, in order to preserve our lives, the lives of our Wives and Children, our Property and Liberty?…I will tell you, Brethren, your Nation always shewed [sic] an eagerness to settle our Lands, cunning as they were, they always encouraged a number of poor people to settle upon our Lands: we protested against it several times, but without any redress or help. We pitied the poor people: we did not care to make use of force, and indeed some of those-people were very good people, and as Hospitable as we Indians, and gave us share of what little they had, and gained our affection for the most part; but after all we lost our hunting Ground, for where one of those people settled, like pigeons, a thousand more would settle, so that we at last offered to sell it, and received some consideration for it: and so it went on ‘till we at last jump’d [sic] over Allegeny [sic] Hills, and settled on the waters of Ohio. Here we tho’t [sic] ourselves happy! We had plenty of Game, a rich and large Country, and a Country that the Most High had created for the poor Indians, and not for the White People. O [sic] how happy did we live here! but alas! not long. O! your covetousness for Land at the risque [sic] of so many poor souls, disturb’d [sic] our peace again. Who should have thought, that that Great King over the Water, whom you always recommended as a tender Father to his People, I say, who should have thought that the Great King should have given away that Land to a parcel of covetous Gentlemen from Virginia, called the Ohio Company, who came immediately and offered to build Forts among us, no doubt, to make themselves Master of our Lands, and make slaves of us.96
During the course of the war, the Indians proved to be a valuable fighting force for the French, albeit one not as easily controlled as some in Paris might have preferred. The Indians considered themselves allies of the French but definitely not subordinates. They could not be ordered to undertake a military operation; rather, they had to be consulted with and convinced of its soundness in terms of both purpose and planning. Its outcome had to be presented as having some benefit for the Indians, and of course, a risk of high casualties was never acceptable.
However, by 1758, Indian support for France began to wane as the British cleverly undertook a series of actions designed to close the frontier to settlement, beginning with the Council of Easton. No sooner was the ink dry on that treaty’s paper than the British sought to spread the word of its provisions restricting settlement. Immediately after the council, they sent Frederick Christian Post and the Delaware sachem Pisquetomen from Easton across Pennsylvania to Fort Duquesne, where the French and Indians were preparing to attack advancing British forces under General John Forbes. The two men carried a message from Forbes urging the Indians to withdraw immediately from Duquesne:
I Embrace this Opportunity by our Brother Pesquitomen, who is now on his return Home with some of your Uncles of the Six Nations from the Treaty at Easton, of giving you Joy of the happy Conclusion of that great Council, which is perfectly agreeable to me, as it is for the mutual Advantage of our Brethren the Indians, as well as the English Nation!
I am glad to find that all past Disputes and Animosities are now finally settld [sic] and amicably adjusted, and I hope they will be forever buried in Oblivion, and that you will now again be firmly united in the Interest of your Brethren the English. As I am now advancing at the Head of a large Army against his Majesty’s Enemies the French on the Ohio, I must strongly recommend to you to fend immediate Notice, to any of your People who may be at the French Fort, to return forthwith to your Towns, where you may sit by your Fires with your Wives and Children, quiet and undisturbed, and smoak [sic] your Pipes in Safety. Let the French fight their own Battles, as they were the first Cause of the War, and the Occasion of the long Difference which hath subsisted between you and your Brethren the English; but I must intreat [sic] you to restrain your young Men from crossing the Ohio as it will be impossible for me to distinguish them from our Enemies, which I expect you will comply with without Delay, left by your Neglect thereof, I would be the innocent Cause of some of our Brethren’s Death. This Advice take and keep in your own Breasts, and suffer it not to reach the Ears of the French.97
When the Shawnee and Delaware gathered at the fort read Forbes’s message and realized that the new treaty closed the frontier to further settlement, they quickly abandoned the French and terminated the alliance. For the Indians, the objectives of the war with Great Britain had been achieved, and there was no further reason to fight. With almost all of their Indian support crumbling, the French destroyed Fort Duquesne and abandoned the mouth of the Ohio, surrendering control of the Allegheny region to the British.
Over the course of the next five years, as the British moved steadily toward victory over the French, British colonial officials moved to uphold the treaty and maintain peace with the Indian nations, who told them any breach of the treaty’s provisions would bring a new war west of the Alleghenies. To this end, the prominent Delaware sachem Keekyuscung (also known as Ketiushund) sent a friendly warning to the British:
That all the Nations had jointly agreed to defend their Hunting Place at Allegheny, and suffer no body to settle there; and as these Indians are very much inclined to the English Interest, for he begged us very much to tell the Governor, General, and all other People not to settle there. And if the English would draw back over the Mountain, they would get all the other Nations into their Interest, but if they staid and settled there, all the Nations would be against them, and he was afraid it would be a great War, and never come to a Peace again.98
The British heard the Indian message very clearly and continued to tell the Indians precisely what they needed to hear. Only a few days after Forbes and his army seized the mouth of the Ohio, Colonel Bouquet sent a message to the Delawares, telling them, “We have not come here to take possession of your hunting Country…but to open a large and extensive Trade with you…to serve you in every necessary you want, and on the cheapest Terms.”99 However, as previously seen, British efforts to close the frontier were subverted by land speculators and corrupt colonial officials, and the settlement flood was quickly underway.
The French cession of their North American empire in the Treaty of Paris came as a great shock to the Indian nations that had allied themselves with France against Britain. In their minds, the French had always shared the land with the Indians, and therefore it was not theirs to give away. Although many must have felt deeply betrayed, some had begun to suspect that the French relationship with the Indians was changing in the years leading up to the war. The French had begun to build more forts and import soldiers from France to the frontier, leading some tribes to see their alliance with the French as the lesser of two great evils.
While the initial British actions to close the frontier satisfied most Indian leaders, the British policies on dealing with the Native American nations that soon emerged did not. The British officer assigned to deal with the nations of both the Great Lakes region and Ohio Valley, General Jeffrey Amherst, did not take the Indians seriously, regarding them as mere savages who needed to learn their place as His Majesty’s subjects. Contrary to their promises to abandon the Ohio Country at the end of the war with France, the British maintained Fort Pitt and began to build a network of forts from the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela to Lake Erie and along its shores all the way to Detroit. Further, Amherst dismantled the French practice of negotiating trade rights by providing generous gifts to the Indians, replacing that process with a strict insistence on receiving the market value for goods. In his mind, Great Britain had “won” the ownership of the Indian lands by right of conquest and could now simply impose trade practices on the Indians that suited the British government.
The militarization of the Ohio Country and Amherst’s arrogance led to a new war, this time involving a broad alliance of the Indian nations. Despite the fact that the war became known as “Pontiac’s Conspiracy” and “Pontiac’s War,” Pontiac was not by any means the single leader of the alliance. Pontiac was, however, a great military leader, and he led the first attacks of the war by assaulting the British garrison at Detroit in May 1763, only three months after the Treaty of Paris was signed. The Indians under Pontiac, who lived along the Great Lakes, had different motives for fighting than those of the Ohio Valley. Pontiac and his followers hoped to resurrect the French alliance, while the Ohio Indians sought to stop the flow of settlers from the east.
The British response to this new Indian threat included some unconventional and immoral tactics. Amherst, seeing the Indians as a subhuman species, delivered what one historian calls “one of the most extraordinary suggestions ever made by a British officer.”100 On May 4, 1763, Amherst wrote to Colonel Bouquet at Fort Pitt, saying, “You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians ‘with smallpox,’ by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.”101In his reply on July 13, Bouquet demonstrated as vile a moral posture as that of Amherst when he added a postscript in his response to Amherst’s instructions saying, “I will try to inoculate the [Indians] with Some Blankets that may fall in their Hands, and take Care not to get the disease myself…As it is a pity to expose good men against them I wish we would make use of the Spanish Method to hunt them with English Dogs supported by Rangers and Some Light Horse, who would I think extirpate or remove that Vermin.”102
Although the Indians would win most of the battles of Pontiac’s War and seize virtually all of the isolated British outposts, they did not have the resources to achieve a complete military victory. The casualties required for victory were, again, too high, and while it is unknown if any of the infected blankets arrived in Indian villages, smallpox did once more ravage their villages, sapping the will and resources required to fight. In 1765, the Indian nations agreed to return all prisoners, including those adopted by the tribes, and the British wisely abstained from making any demands for additional land. The British also saw that Amherst was a disaster as commander and replaced him with Thomas Gage, who employed a more conciliatory and respectful approach with the Indians on trade. However, even Gage could not slow the flow of settlers, and by 1774, the frontier was again engulfed in a new round of warfare that would continue without pause for twenty years.
General Jeffrey Amherst, the British officer who ordered Colonel Bouquet to “inoculate the Indians with smallpox.” Library and Archives Canada.
The surge in settlement west of the Alleghenies led to steadily increasing hostility in the Indian villages of the Allegheny Plateau and Ohio Valley, especially among the Shawnee. As early as February 1773, Welsh Baptist missionary David Jones ran headlong into the rage building within the Shawnee villages of Ohio. In the course of a single evening, Jones faced two open threats. First, one warrior threatened him with a large knife over an unfulfilled request for the missionary’s tobacco, and only intercession by the warrior’s mother prevented Jones from being killed. Later, another angry warrior named Old Will entered the lodge where Jones was sleeping, and he was warned by a comrade to hide beneath some blankets in the loft, as Old Will seemed bent on doing him harm. “Presently in comes Old Will,” Jones recalled, “making inquiry for me, with terrible threats in such a rage, that he soon began to cry with venomous anger. Often he repeated, ‘Oh! If I could get one stroke, one stroke!’”103
Within a year of Jones’s encounters, the number of violent acts committed by both sides began to increase rapidly. First, in mid-1773, a mixed party of Shawnee, Delaware and Cherokee warriors raided into southwestern Virginia, where they tortured and killed Henry Russell and James Boone, one of Daniel Boone’s sons.104 Not long thereafter, Shawnee warriors captured seven men as they made camp along the Ohio, and while they made threats against them, cooler heads prevailed and the men were released. However, as the settlers were headed home, another group of more than twenty-five Shawnees recaptured them, took their possessions and sent them on their way with a warning to all Virginians: stay off the Ohio or be killed. In April 1774, matters began to escalate toward general warfare when a small Cherokee raiding party attacked three traders, leaving one trader dead and another wounded.105
For their part, the settlers were not innocent in the least, perpetrating several brutal attacks against the Indians. On April 27 and 30, 1774, two separate groups of Virginians, whom the Indians now referred to as the “Long Knives,” added significantly to the level of frontier violence. First, a party led by Michael Cresap killed two Indian employees of trader William Butler, murdered and scalped two other Indians and then attacked a Shawnee encampment located along Captina Creek near present-day Wheeling.
Next, a body of hunters and some “ruffians” led by Daniel Greathouse lured a Mingo hunting party into their camp and then ambushed them, killing nine. Greathouse’s attack was especially bloodthirsty and had far-reaching implications. Among the Mingo casualties were the mother, brother and sister of the Mingo chief, John Logan. Logan, who had always been an avowed friend of the settlers and a voice for peace among the tribes, now swore he would avenge these deaths. After sending the surviving members of his camp to the Shawnee village of Kispoko Town, Logan, along with eight warriors, unleashed his vengeance on the frontier settlements of Virginia in a classic mourning war. Once he had killed nine colonials, he ended his campaign and went home.106
In this nineteenth-century drawing, Chief Logan, a man who always supported peaceful relations with the settlers, finds that Daniel Greathouse and his men have killed members of his family. Library of Congress.
However, the damage done by these attacks, both Indian and settler, could not be undone. Although many key Shawnee leaders did their best to restrain their war chiefs and preserve some semblance of peace, voices in the settler community called out for a war of vengeance. As a result, John Murray, the Fourth Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, assembled a militia army and moved against the Shawnee in what became known as Dunmore’s War. Lord Dunmore and his army advanced into the Ohio Country in October, and the war ended quickly after the Shawnee defeat at Point Pleasant. The resulting treaty called for the Shawnee to return prisoners and agree to remain north of the Ohio River, thus surrendering Kentucky to the Virginians.107
However, the treaty did little to stop what became a constant, enduring campaign of guerrilla warfare along the frontier, and the coming of the Revolutionary War only intensified matters. Some of the Indian nations elected to remain neutral in the war between Great Britain and its American colonists, but the vast majority of those who fought allied themselves with the British. From their point of view, the British had at least tried to stop new settlements, and they knew if the Americans proved victorious, they would never cease their relentless movement west.
When the rebellious colonies did finally defeat the British, the Indians never paused in their raiding along the frontier. Meanwhile, the Americans, for their part, moved immediately to seize lands in the Ohio Country and Kentucky. Even before the war was over, Washington ordered a series of brutal raids on the Iroquois villages in Ohio. As a result, to this day, the Iroquois’ common name for George Washington is one that translates as “Town Destroyer.”108 These attacks were followed by a series of treaties executed by the fledgling American government between 1781 and 1789, each of which took more Indian land while promising to reserve what was left to the Indians. Each, in turn, was quickly broken by the settlers and the government, making them utterly meaningless. The Indian response was to continue raiding the settlements in the vain hope of stalling the Americans’ westward invasion.
As a result, the fear of Indian attack became a painful, terrifying fact of life for settlers on the Allegheny Plateau. More refuge forts were built, and “forting up” often became the rule rather than the exception in frontier life. The Indian raiders, who sometimes roamed far from their home villages, even hundreds of miles, came looking for captives, or on occasion, they attacked to avenge wrongs done to their tribes. Eventually, this protracted, bloody conflict, which was the product of decades of cultural and imperial warfare, would arrive on Phebe and Thomas Cunningham’s doorstep.