That Dark and Bloody River

by Allan Eckert

  Recognizing the power of the Shawnees, the Miamis made peace with them and offered them Ohio country land to live upon temporarily in the largely uninhabited valleys of such major Ohio River tributaries as the Scioto and Muskingum rivers. This was to be in exchange for the Shawnees using their fierce skills against the New York tribes if and when they attempted further invasion of the Ohio country or navigated the Ohio River en route to strike the southern tribes. The Shawnees agreed with alacrity, and the result was a series of pitched battles with individual war parties of one or another of the New York tribes. Without exception the Shawnees emerged victorious, which encouraged the Miamis to evict the New York bands that had rooted themselves along the Iroquois and Kankakee. The Five Nations of New York, unaccustomed to being thwarted, much less defeated, dubbed the Shawnees with the disparaging name Ontoagannha, meaning People of Unintelligible Speech, but name-calling did not alter the fact that they had more than met their match. Within only a few short years, the tribes, in their own languages, had begun calling the beautiful Ohio River by another name: the River of Blood.

  To combat this new menace, the Five Nations of New York met in a great council at a centrally located village called Onondaga and, after considerable discussion, formally established themselves into a highly democratic and tightly knit confederation in which the good of one was the good of all. Now, an attack against any band of the Five Nations would be taken as an act of war against the entire confederation. They named their strong new alliance the Mengwe, or Iroquois League.1 It did indeed make them all the more powerful in respect to neighboring (and even distant) tribes, but the Shawnees were neither awed nor overcome by their formally confederated foes. They continued to emerge victorious in virtually all encounters, including an intense war in the valley of the Susquehanna River in 1607.

  The struggle might have continued to escalate but for an unexpected intervention. The Iroquois suddenly found themselves busy fighting off a new threat—the incursion of a persistent group of whites who had ascended the St. Lawrence River. They called themselves Frenchmen, and most unfortunately for them, before they fully understood the implications of what they were doing, these whites made the mistake of allying themselves to several tribes who were mortal enemies of the Iroquois. They provided these enemies of the Iroquois with goods and weaponry that nearly enabled them to demolish their great and powerful enemy—until the Iroquois themselves were able to become similarly armed and the pendulum swung back even more in favor of the Iroquois League.2 The result was that the Iroquois now considered the French as adversaries.

  So far as the mercenary Shawnees were concerned, however, once again with a challenge more or less overcome, their nomadic instincts came to the fore, and gradually the tribe split apart into its five basic septs or clans and migrated elsewhere.3 The larger faction moved southward, fighting and defeating the southern tribes they encountered, including even the proud Cherokees and Creeks. Part of that faction settled in Cherokee territory along a broad, winding river in present Tennessee that the Cherokees called Pelisipi but that was soon being called the Shawanoe River, in honor of the nomadic warrior tribe.

  The other portion of this Shawnee contingent continued southeastward, finally settling down again at the mouth of a great black river that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico and that they promptly named after themselves—calling it the Shawanee, which, over the years, evolved to be called the Suwannee River.4 It was here, at the village located practically on the broad Gulf beach at the mouth of the Suwannee that a boy was born and named Chiungalla—Black Fish. He was destined to become the principal chief of the Shawnee tribe’s Chalahgawtha sept.

  Back in the Ohio country, a smaller but still significant faction of the tribe moved eastward and took up residence among a docile tribe, the Susquehannocks, who lived along a major Pennsylvania river named after themselves, the Susquehanna. Here this faction of Shawnees lived in peace, not only with the Susquehannocks but with a neighboring tribe far to the east along the Delaware River. That tribe was the Lenni Lenape who, in a vain effort to try to live in harmony with the growing number of white colonists called the British, even changed their tribal name in honor of the Virginia colonial governor, Lord De La Warr, and were henceforth called the Delaware tribe. These Delawares were a powerful tribe—so strong that in precolumbian times they had evicted the Cherokees from the Pennsylvania area as punishment for their treacherous attack on an ally of the Delawares—but even the Delawares had been cowed by the much more powerful Iroquois League. Now, however, with their fierce new Shawnee friends to back them up, some of their erstwhile courage returned, and they became much less deferential to the Five Nations. This infuriated the League, but it was a matter that, for the time being, they ignored as they concentrated on their problems with the French.

  The final contingent of Shawnees still in the Ohio country left there under their war chief, Opeththa, in 1683 and journeyed to the Illinois River. Here they established themselves not far from present Starved Rock, where La Salle had only the previous year erected Fort St. Louis. They had no trouble with him and his men but were not comfortable with his presence there. All too soon, with the Ohio River Valley clear of Shawnees, the Iroquois once again began to use the river as a principal route for incursions against other tribes and for bringing the spoils of their raids back to their own villages, though in a more limited manner than before.

  All the tribes were having troubles to some degree with this new breed of pale-faced humans that had entered their country. Their problems were aggravated by the fact that the whites were themselves divided into factions called French, English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Swedes and that they constantly bickered and fought over what they seemingly wanted and valued more than anything else, territory to claim as their own. America’s easternmost tribes had initially welcomed the newcomers and aided them where possible, but they had soon discovered that if they aided one white group, this would place them in opposition to another, and somehow, no matter which side they chose, it was always Indian land that was lost and passed into possession of the whites.

  War between Indians and whites had broken out on several occasions, but the primitive weaponry of the tribes deeper in the interior could not withstand the onslaught of modern weaponry. What Indians were not killed in the resultant warfare were quickly whittled away or sometimes even exterminated by epidemics of the dreadful diseases that the whites brought with them and for which the tribes had built up no immunity—measles, whooping cough, smallpox, chicken pox, typhoid fever and cholera. The worst of the earlier plagues to hit the tribes occurred during 1616–17 and wiped out tens of thousands of Indians all along the Atlantic coast.5

  In spite of these disasters, some of the tribesmen continued to fight for their territory, but they were quickly overwhelmed and taken into captivity, placed aboard ships and sold as slaves in the West Indies. At the same time the whites were bringing to America their own slaves whose skins were black. The first shipments of these unfortunates were brought to Jamestown for sale by the Dutch in 1619. Within two decades the British realized what a lucrative trade slavery was, so they ousted the Dutch slave traders and, in 1639, established their own Royal African Company to make massive raids on the native villages of the Dark Continent and bring the chained captives to America to satisfy the ever-growing demand for slave labor.6 In all such matters, the human cruelty inflicted on people of either red skin or black was of precious little concern to the imperious British.

  By the middle of the seventeenth century, virtually all major rivers flowing into the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico had become reasonably well explored, if not settled. Yet with the exception of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, all these streams had their origins east of the Alleghenies, that mountain chain extending from southern Canada and New England all the way down to northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

  The Spanish, having established themselves in Florida shortly after its discovery by Juan Ponce de L
eón in 1513, went on to explore, conquer and colonize Latin America, but an offshoot expedition under Hernando de Soto landed at Tampa Bay in 1540 and began to explore to the north and west. The following year he discovered the Mississippi River and ascended it to Arkansas. Some biographers have claimed he went as far upstream as the mouth of the Ohio; if true, this would make him the first white man to view that great stream.

  Within 50 years of their first landing in America, the adventurous French had explored and established themselves to conquer, claim and proselytize not only in the St. Lawrence Valley but in the farthest reaches of all five of the Great Lakes and beyond. By 1632 the black-robed Jesuits were already winning converts among tribes well west of Lake Superior, more than a century before most British colonists were even aware of the existence of the Ohio River, apart from vague, unconfirmed rumors of a great stream system existing somewhere beyond the crest of the Alleghenies—a mysterious river that was said to flow through a land inhabited by savage tribes. In 1658 Pierre Radisson found the upper Mississippi River in the wilderness of present Minnesota and Wisconsin, almost a century before the British colonists began plying the waters of the Ohio.

  Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette noted the mouth of the Ohio in 1673 as they passed down the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Arkansas—and again as they returned upstream—but they paid it scant heed and went up the Illinois River instead, leaving their paddle marks on history’s pages in the area of Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and other Lake Michigan locales. Inconclusive evidence indicates that Robert Cavalier de La Salle may have briefly touched upon the Ohio River in the vicinity of the low rapids called the Falls of the Ohio in late 1669, but if he did see the Ohio, he did not linger.7

  French explorers and traders undoubtedly traversed the Ohio in increasing numbers during the next half-century, since they established trading posts on such major Ohio River tributaries as the Beaver, Kanawha, Scioto, Great Miami and Wabash rivers, yet they made extraordinarily little mention of the Ohio itself, until the first map depicting its location was drawn by the French geographer Franquelin in 1688. It was a fairly accurate map, considering what little was known about the Ohio River, and it was better, in fact, than a few maps that were published some years later.8

  The most signal accomplishment of the Franquelin map was to bring the English colonists to the uncomfortable realization that while they had been occupied with their own concerns in the relatively narrow strip of land between the Atlantic and the Alleghenies, the French were energetically—and with alarming rapidity—laying claim to a vast empire beyond those mountains: everything north and west of the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, as well as the entire Mississippi River Valley. Already they were establishing a line of forts and posts to protect these claims from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi. Fort Frontenac was situated at the mouth of Lake Ontario, Fort Niagara at the mouth of the Niagara River, Fort Pontchartrain on the Detroit River, Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac, Fort La Baye at the head of Green Bay and, on the Mississippi, Fort de Chartres. These six forts encompassed a vast territory about which almost nothing was known, but all of which the French felt was in their possession.9 It was a territory the French were determined to exploit to the utmost, and to this end they gradually bisected the region and established subsidiary trading posts on five major portage routes leading southwestward from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.

  The first, easiest and by far most frequently used route started at Green Bay, ascended the Fox River of Wisconsin, passed through Lake Winnebago and continued up the Fox to a three-mile portage at its headwaters that connected to the Wisconsin River, which in turn flowed into the Mississippi.10 The second was at the head of Lake Michigan, at the marshy area the Indians called Checagou, up the river of the same name to its difficult portage through the shallow, extensive Mud Lake, connecting with the Fox River of the Illinois country; that river in turn merges with the Kankakee River to form the Illinois River and subsequently empties into the Mississippi.11 The third route was also at the head of Lake Michigan but some 30 miles farther southeast, up Salt Creek some 14 miles to a tough portage over four or five miles of sandy ground to the headwaters of Crooked Creek and down that winding stream to the Kankakee, encountering it some 100 miles upstream from the Illinois.12 The fourth route was a passage used by La Salle and the Franciscan priest Louis Hennepin, encountered some 40 miles northeast of the Indiana route, on the eastern side of Lake Michigan—from the mouth of the St. Joseph River upstream about 50 miles and then on a somewhat easier portage southwestward over hard ground for five miles to the headwaters of the Kankakee and thence downstream some 150 miles to the Illinois and, eventually, the Mississippi.13

  The fifth route was accessible from the western end of Lake Erie, where an ascent of about 100 miles up the Maumee was made extremely difficult by the 15-mile-long Maumee Rapids, involving an arduous portage that discouraged all but the most hardy, to where the river is formed by the confluence of the St. Marys River and another river called St. Joseph, then continuing up the St. Marys about five miles to the start of a portage path that went westward across a moderate portage to the headwaters of Lost Creek, down that stream to the Little River, and then downstream to where it joins the upper Wabash River; then westward on the Wabash to the French post of Ouiatenon, where the stream turns southward, flows past the French trading center called Post St. Vincent, and reaches the Ohio River some 140 miles upstream from its mouth at the Mississippi.14

  As part of the program of building a string of forts to guard its communication between Quebec and New Orleans, the French, in 1711, built a small fort on the Illinois bank of the Ohio River 40 miles upstream from the Mississippi, ostensibly as a headquarters for missionaries and to protect river-traveling French traders from raiding Cherokees descending the Shawanoe River. This was the first military installation ever built on the Ohio River.15

  Now there were murmurings that a much easier (though far more dangerous) route was being investigated by these enterprising Frenchmen. This passage would take them from the eastern end of Lake Erie to a direct connection with the Allegheny, and from that point some 150 miles downstream to where it merges with the Monongahela River to form the Ohio River, 1,000 miles above its mouth at the Mississippi.16

  The French were claiming all this encompassed territory and cared not at all that their claim included lands granted through charter by the British Crown to English colonists. That the territory involved was inhabited by native tribes of dangerous warriors—Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Seneca, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Chippewa, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Winnebago, Illinois, Kickapoo and their various subsidiary tribes—was largely considered little more than an annoyance that would be attended to in due time.

  Because of their propensity for close intermingling with the natives and often for intermarrying with their women, the French by and large got along well with the tribes, except for the Five Nations of the Iroquois League. There were occasional flare-ups between them, but these rarely lasted long, mainly because the Indians realized that, having been suddenly projected out of the Stone Age and into an era of modern weaponry that included steel knives, tomahawks, firearms, fabrics, paints, blankets, liquor and other desirable commodities, they had quickly become dependent upon the trade goods brought to them by the French.

  Suddenly, to the consternation of the French, competition for the incredibly lucrative Indian trade reared its head as some of the more enterprising British traders made their way to the tribes with goods that were both better in quality and far less expensive for the Indians to obtain in trade. The French realized at once that it was time to establish in more definite terms their claims to the trans-Allegheny west.

  The search by English colonists for access to the Ohio River basin was haphazard and lackadaisical at first. Among the first of the British to embark on the quest was Ralph Lane, governor of Walter Raleigh’s ill-fated Roanoke Colony. He followed the Roanoke River upstream in 1586 i
n the belief that it would lead him to the great Western Sea, which was believed to lie just beyond the mountains, but the river played out as a navigable stream within 100 miles, and Lane and his party turned back.17 The next attempt was by Capts. Christopher Newport and John Smith who, in 1606, explored up the James River to the falls, but they too were disheartened by the labors involved in portaging and turned back hardly before beginning to ascend the eastern slope of the Alleghenies.18 The following year, Newport tried the James River ascent again and managed to get 40 miles farther upstream than before, but once again the difficulties discouraged him and he returned. Several other exploring parties later followed both the James and the Roanoke rivers practically to their headwaters, but none passed over the crest of the Alleghenies. That feat was not accomplished until nearly half a century after Newport’s trip, when, in 1654, a hardy pioneer named Abraham Wood, resident near the Falls of the Appomattox, ascended the Roanoke with a party of men under commission from Gov. Sir William Berkeley and succeeded where Lane, Newport, Smith and others before him had failed.19 He crossed the Blue Ridge and Allegheny divide into the Ohio drainage and discovered a river that was first named Wood’s River after him but soon became known as the New River; this is the same stream as the Great Kanawha but is still known by the name of New River above the mouth of the Gauley River. Wood hadn’t followed it very far downstream when he encountered hostile Indians—most likely a Cherokee war party on a raid against the Xualaes—and fled for his life.