Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  Even before the Peace of Paris in 1763 officially ended the great Anglo-French conflict, colonists were encroaching on eastern Iroquois lands in growing numbers. “We have sometime past heard that our Brethren the English were wanting to get more Lands from us,” said an Oneida chief named Conoghquieson. The Iroquois had sold their English brothers land as long as they had any to spare but they no longer had enough left for hunting; they would not consider further cessions until all that land was fully settled, and any future land deals would have to be made with the consent of all the Six Nations. “We have had our lands from the beginning of the World, and we love them as we do our lives,” said Conoghquieson. He handed Johnson a six-row wampum belt to keep at his home so “that when any person shall be desirous of purchasing any more you may shew them thereby, that the six Nations are all determined not to part with more of their Lands on any account whatsoever.”13 Conoghquieson (also spelled Kanaghwaes, Kanaghqweasea, and Kanongweniyah, and meaning “standing ears of corn”) appears to have been one of the fifty league chiefs. Johnson already knew him. He was present in 1755 when the Oneida chief was ceremonially “raised up” in the place of his deceased predecessor and given the same name.14 Three years later Conoghquieson asked Johnson to put a stop to “the selling of any Strong Liquors to our People” because it “disturbs us in our Meetings & Consulations where the drunken People come in quarelling” and it caused many deaths.15 Despite his strong voice in defense of Iroquois lands, Conoghquieson would continue to talk with Johnson about selling Indian lands. Their conversations would culminate with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

  The Iroquois strategy of claiming, and sometimes selling, other peoples’ lands reduced their influence among the western tribes at a time when the focus of British-Indian relations was shifting westward, undermining the League’s once-pivotal position. Indian peoples who had migrated into the Ohio country earlier in the eighteenth century—not just the Delawares and Shawnees but also western Iroquois who became known as the Mingos—increasingly asserted their independence from the Confederacy.16 The British had assured Ohio Indians that their lands would be protected when the Seven Years’ War was won, and the surrender terms at Montreal in 1760 stated that France’s Indian allies were to “be maintained in the Lands they inhabit.”17 The victorious King George III had it “much at heart to conciliate the Affection of the Indian Nations, by every Act of strict Justice, and by affording them His Royal Protection from any Incroachment on the Lands they have reserved to themselves, for their hunting Grounds, & for their own Support & Habitation.”18

  The king had to afford his protection sooner than he expected. The Peace of Paris in 1763 redrew the map of North America. More American territory changed hands than at any other treaty before or since. France handed over to Britain Canada and its claims east of the Mississippi. Louisiana went to Spain, mainly to keep it out of the hands of the British. Britain now had to try and govern its hugely expanded empire in North America, regulate the frontier, and deal with powerful Indian nations formerly allied with the French. British garrisons occupied French outposts and many British officers treated the Indians as a defeated people. Alarmed by the presence of British garrisons and offended by the absence of British gifts, Indians took action even before the war was officially over. As early as 1761 the Seneca chief Guyasuta (or Kayusuta) carried a red wampum belt to Detroit and “under the nose of the British commandant” exhorted the Indians in the region to take up arms against the redcoats. In 1763, Guyasuta, the Ottawa Pontiac, and other war chiefs of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes tribes launched assaults that destroyed every British fort west of the Appalachians except for those at Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt. The Senecas inflicted a bloody defeat on a British convoy at Devil’s Hole near Fort Niagara. Once the fighting was over, Sir William Johnson demanded that the Senecas cede the Niagara portage route to the Crown as reparation.19 General Amherst advocated using germ warfare and when Indian emissaries came to Fort Pitt a trader named William Trent confided in his journal that the British “gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”20 Backcountry settlers fled east to escape Indian raiding parties and Indian hating escalated: in December, Scotch-Irish frontiersmen in Pennsylvania known as the Paxton Boys slaughtered peaceful Conestoga Indians and marched on Philadelphia to vent frustration at their colonial government’s failure to defend the frontier.21

  The imperial response to the Indians’ war of independence triggered a series of unanticipated events that culminated in another war of independence a dozen years later.22 The government hoped to bring peace and order to the frontier by separating Indians and Europeans. In October 1763 King George signed a proclamation establishing the Appalachian Mountains as the boundary between British settlement and Indian lands. The Royal Proclamation also stipulated “that no private Person do presume to make any Purchase from the said Indians of any Lands reserved to the said Indians within those parts of our Colonies where We have thought proper to allow Settlement.” Only Crown representatives acting in formal council with Indian nations could negotiate land transfers, and only licensed traders would be permitted to operate in Indian country. By such measures, the government sought to prevent “all just Cause of Discontent, and Uneasiness” among the Indians in the future.23 In the winter after the proclamation was issued, Indian delegates carrying copies of the document and strings of wampum traveled Indian country from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi, summoning the tribes to meet Sir William Johnson in council at Niagara. “At this Treaty,” Johnson informed General Gage, “we should tye them down according to their own forms of which they take the most notice, for Example by Exchanging a very large belt with some remarkable & intelligible figures thereon, expressive of the occasion which should be always shewn at public Meetings, to remind them of their promises; and that we should Exchange Articles with the Signatures of the Chiefs of every Tribe.” At Niagara, in the summer of 1764, Sir William read the terms of the proclamation to two thousand Indians from two dozen nations, and they sealed the agreement with an exchange of gifts and wampum.24 In Canada, the principles and protections established by the proclamation made it “the single most important document in the history of treaty-making,”25 and it is recognized in section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the first part of the Constitution Act of 1982. In the area that became the United States, it produced a rather different outcome.

  The proclamation attempted to bring order by running a line through a morass of competing, intersecting, and overlapping colonial, tribal, and individual claims. Many non-Indians already lived west of the mountains (and many Indians still lived east of them) and it failed to keep colonists off Indian lands. Four years after the proclamation, Indians complained that settlers were making “more incroachments on their Country, than ever they had before.”26 By concentrating land purchasing in the hands of the government, the proclamation transformed the land market. Squatters could ignore the proclamation; land speculators could not: their ability to make profits in the West depended on being able to convey clear title to the lands in which they invested and now they could not buy and sell western lands legally. The new measures “infuriated Virginia land speculators” who saw tyranny in the Crown’s attempt to monopolize granting and acquiring land and in Britain’s interference with their freedom to make a fortune. In their eyes, a new British and Indian barrier had replaced the old French and Indian barrier.27

  But the imperial government had no intention of permanently halting the westward expansion of the colonies; the boundary line was a device for regulating and not eliminating frontier expansion. Eventually the line would be abolished as old colonies grew and new ones were created. Once the barrier was moved west, deeds of Indian land could be converted into clear title. Between 1763 and 1768, under the authority of superintendents Sir William Johnson and John Stuart, Britain and the various tribes negotiated a series of agreements that attempted to define
a new boundary line.28

  Johnson, like Stuart, believed strongly in regulating the frontier and he supported the proclamation line as a blueprint for peace in British North America, although he never expected that it should be permanent or restrict his own land-dealing activities. In November 1763 he recommended that the Board of Trade establish a boundary “beyond which no settlement should be made, until the whole Six Nations should think proper of selling part thereof.” He recommended himself as the person to carry it out. “I am certain, I can at any time hereafter perswade them to cede to His Majesty more land, if it may be found wanting from encrease of people,” he said. If such a boundary was needed, Johnson stood ready to “make the Indians acquainted therewith, and settle the same in such manner, as may prove most to their satisfaction, and the good of the public.”29 In Johnson’s view a clearly defined boundary, moved periodically by “fair purchase” of land from the Indians, in treaties that he orchestrated and carried out with the Iroquois, would permit peaceful imperial expansion.30

  To help implement and maintain the proclamation line, the Board of Trade in 1764 circulated among colonial governors and Indian superintendents a plan for the future management of Indian affairs. Imperial officials, rather than the individual colonies, were to be responsible for conducting Indian relations. Johnson had advocated such a move for years, urging that his department should function as an independent administrative branch, reporting only to the imperial government. The Indian department, not the army or the colonies, should control Indian affairs; the superintendents should call Indian councils, conduct political relations with the tribes, and exercise jurisdiction over Indian country and the traders who did business there.31

  In Johnson’s world the Indian department was a personal and, almost literally, a family affair. Johnson and three other men effectively managed Indian affairs north of the Ohio. The Deputy Superintendent for the Indians of Ohio and Pennsylvania was George Croghan, an Irish emigré like Johnson and of the same age. He married the daughter of a Mohawk chief named Nickus in 1757 and his Mohawk daughter, Catherine (in matrilineal Mohawk society, the child of the mother was Mohawk, no matter the identity of the father), later married Joseph Brant, the brother of Sir William’s wife, Molly. Deputy agent Guy Johnson was Sir William’s nephew and son-in-law: he married one of Johnson’s daughters by Catherine Weisenberg. In 1768 the Deputy Superintendant for Canadian Indians was Daniel Claus, a German emigré who had accumulated a wealth of experience in Indian affairs and knowledge of Mohawk, and he married Johnson’s other daughter by Catherine Weisenberg. With these three close associates Johnson dominated British-Indian relations north of the Ohio.

  Croghan was almost a replica on the Ohio and Pennsylvania frontier of what Johnson was on the New York frontier. “No colonial fur trader earned greater respect from Indians, or traveled farther on that respect,” notes James Merrell, and “no one was more enamored of Indian lands.” The historian Alan Taylor describes Croghan as “the most avid, indeed manic,” land speculator in colonial North America.32 Croghan migrated from Ireland in 1741 and worked as a trader in western Pennsylvania and in the Ohio Valley from about 1745 to 1754. In 1749 three Iroquois chiefs granted him some two hundred thousand acres of land around the Forks of the Ohio (a gift the Iroquois would confirm in 1768). Croghan said it was in recognition of his services but a huge quantity of goods changed hands as well. In 1753 Scarouady, the Oneida chief and “Half King” representing the Ohio Six Nations, named Croghan to speak for the Indians in their dealings with the governor of Pennsylvania. Croghan was with General Edward Braddock and George Washington at the rout of Braddock’s army on the Monongahela in 1755, and he accompanied General John Forbes at the capture of Fort Duquesne (rechristened Fort Pitt) in 1758. Appointed Deputy Superintendent for the Ohio and Pennsylvania Indians in 1756, he operated primarily out of Fort Pitt, regulating the Indian trade there, traveling extensively in the West, and exerting his influence to undermine French-Indian alliances.33 No one exerted greater influence on affairs in the West. Johnson relied on the old trader’s knowledge of Indian affairs and Croghan occasionally interpreted for him.

  Croghan was not known for his honesty and integrity. He was a heavy drinker and on one occasion he suffered from such a severe case of venereal disease that he took to wearing a Scottish kilt to ease his discomfort.34 He was easygoing and generous, but, in the words of one biographer, he was “a born actor, a master of the poker face,” “devious and dangerously speculative.” He knew how to talk people into loaning him money but he “did not keep his promises; he was not candid; he misrepresented; he lied.”35 He was notorious in government circles for his lavish expenditures on Indian presents.36 He was also up to his neck in land speculations in the West and he needed to have the proclamation line moved to make his land purchases “legal.” The proclamation offered a land bounty to each soldier who had served in the French and Indian War. The highest amount offered to any officer was five thousand acres, but Croghan sent a memorial to the Board of Trade in 1765 asking for a grant of twenty thousand acres in New York as a reward for his services; he received a grant of ten thousand acres but in 1768 submitted another memorial for the additional ten thousand acres, which were granted.37 In addition, he sought compensation for losses that his trading operations had suffered in the Indian wars. Croghan “almost always positioned imperial assignments to act as vehicles to settle personal debts and speculate in trade and land.” After 1763, his future “depended on the careful readjustment of the Indian boundary.”38

  Like Johnson, Croghan had kinship ties in Iroquois society through his Mohawk wife and also had kinship ties to many of the men who had their eyes on Indian land. His brother-in-law, the Pennsylvania merchant William Trent, was on hand when smallpox blankets were given to Indians visiting Fort Pitt; his half-brother, Edward Ward, built the original Virginia fort at the forks of the Ohio; his nephew William Croghan married the sister of an Indian fighter named George Rogers Clark who would later serve as a US treaty commissioner; his cousins Thomas Smallwood and William Powell were leading merchants of early Pittsburgh.

  Croghan and Trent “figured conspicuously” among a group of traders who had lost merchandise during the Indian wars. Samuel Wharton, a merchant from Philadelphia (figure 2.2), in partnership with John Baynton, George Morgan, and Croghan, had attempted to gain control of the Indian trade of the Ohio Valley but Pontiac’s War brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Wharton, “characteristically, enlarged his ambitions in the face of adversity.” He directed Trent, his agent, to buy up the claims of other traders for the losses they had incurred between 1754 and 1763. Then, calling themselves “the suffering traders,” Wharton and his fellow merchants sought compensation for their losses.39

  They tried first to obtain reimbursement from the British Treasury and, after a meeting at the Indian Queen Tavern in Philadelphia, chose Croghan to go to England to represent their claims. Croghan’s trip was financed by a company headquartered in Burlington, New Jersey, and headed by William Franklin, the governor of New Jersey and illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. Croghan carried letters of introduction from Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. He set sail from Philadelphia in December 1763, was shipwrecked off the coast of France, but reached London early in 1764. After waiting for three months, he declared he was “sick of London” and ready for home: “there has been Nothing Don Sence I Came to London by the Grate ones butt Squebeling & fighting See who will keep in power,” he wrote to Johnson; “it will Larn Me to be Contented on a Litle farm in America if I Can gett one when I go back.” Back in America, the memory of that lesson quickly faded. Finding that direct payment of their claims for compensation would require a special act of Parliament, the suffering traders tried instead to get a compensatory grant of land from the Indians when the boundary negotiations began. In February 1765 they presented their claims to Sir William who promised to do the group “an essential Piece of Service” when he next met with the Indians to renegot
iate the boundary line.40

  FIGURE 2.2 Samuel Wharton. From a woodcut of a miniature painted in England. (The Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

  Johnson and Croghan made themselves indispensable in the negotiations. Promoting the notion that many of the western tribes were dependents of the Iroquois, Johnson “felt that the intended partition of much of North America could be worked out exclusively between himself, as the King’s representative, and the Iroquois, as the owners of the land.”41 Croghan was the pivotal link in the West, “the man who could go among the western Indians, sit down with them, and discuss indemnity to the merchants as well as the Indian-white boundary.”42 With his finger in land schemes that had to fall on the eastern side of the new boundary, he was not above using his position to try and whip up fears of an Indian war to help speed up the government’s plans for moving the boundary westward.43

  In April and May 1765, Johnson held a conference with some nine hundred Indians—Six Nations and Delawares—at Johnson Hall and broached the subject of working out a new boundary. The Onondaga speaker responded that they thought it was “very necessary, provided the White People will abide by it.” Having been cheated so often in the past, they were suspicious. “We were always ready to give, but the English don’t deal fairly with us, they are more cunning than we are, they get our names upon paper very fast, and we often don’t know what it is for.” Croghan, not long returned from London, conducted negotiations with the western nations at Fort Pitt. In July, Shawnee, Delaware, and Iroquois delegates convened at Johnson Hall and agreed to the terms that had been worked out in principle in the spring meetings.44 These were preliminary agreements without official authorization, but if implemented they would transfer vast amounts of territory to colonial hands, most of it from non-Iroquois nations who, in Johnson’s view, deserved to pay for their part in the recent wars. Johnson next sent Croghan to initiate peace talks with the nations of the Wabash and the Illinois country. It was a perilous journey and Croghan’s mission almost ended in disaster when a war party of Kickapoos and Mascoutens attacked them, and killed and wounded several people, including three of the Shawnee delegates accompanying Croghan as escorts. Croghan himself took a hatchet blow to the head (“but my Scull being pretty thick,” he later joked to Johnson, “the hatchet would not enter”) and was taken captive. But once the Kickapoos realized they had killed Shawnees and might bring down vengeance on their heads, they hastened to make amends and allowed Croghan’s party to proceed.45