Kentucky became a battleground where two worlds and worldviews collided. Backcountry settlers hunted, supplementing their crops and livestock, and adopted Indian hunting techniques, but they did not adopt Indian hunting values. They felt no kinship with animals; they ignored rituals that Indians believed were necessary to harvest plant and animal life and keep the world in balance, and they slaughtered game wastefully. Indians fought to preserve their hunting territories; invading settlers fought to transform them into fields and pastures. They felled trees with fire and axes, fenced and plowed fields, brought in pigs and cattle, and tried to hold the land they seized as private property. They changed the landscape and many of its meanings. Colonists called the Indians savages; Shawnees called the invaders who disrupted the balance of their world “crazy people [who] want to shove us off our land entirely.”157
And the crazy people kept coming. Pioneers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland followed in Boone’s footsteps. “You told us that we should have no more Disturbance or trouble about our Lands after the Boundary line was run. But trouble still continues with us,” the Cherokee chief Oconostota complained. “We think the Virginia People don’t hear your talks nor mind, nor do they seem to care for King George’s talks over the great Water.”158 The country around Pittsburgh was “in great Confusion,” said Croghan, “on account of the Governour & Council of Virginia granting patents to Col. Washington for 200,000 acres of Land on Ohio & the Great Kanahwa,” and the Indians were alarmed to see surveyors and colonists heading downriver “to Settle a Country wh[ich] they were Informed by the Kings Messages was not to be settled.” If reports of sixty thousand people settled between Pittsburgh and the mouth of the Ohio by the end of 1773 were true, wrote Croghan, “the policy of ye People in England delaying ye Grant of ye New Colony in order to prevent Emigration answers not their purpose.”159 As Johnson explained to the Earl of Dartmouth, “These settlers generally set out with a general Prejudice against all Indians and the young Indian Warriors or Hunters are too often inclined to retaliate.”160 Shawnees who found “the Woods covered with White People” and surveyors marking the land said they “had many disagreeable Dreams” about it that winter.161 “Being Sure the White People intended to take all our Country from us, and that very soon,” the Shawnees urged other tribes to be ready to “defend it to the last Drop of blood.”162
The British employed divide-and-conquer tactics to dismantle the coalition the Shawnees were building: “we must either agree to permit these people to Cut each other’s Throats or risk their discharging their fury on Our Traders & defenceless Frontiers,” Johnson wrote to Hillsborough. Johnson worked on the Iroquois, Stuart on the Cherokees, and Croghan among the western tribes, to keep them out of the impending conflict. Shawnee delegates who tried to rally the tribes met rebuffs. In one instance the Iroquois threw the Shawnees’ wampum belt back at them.163
Croghan kept borrowing money to buy Indian land and kept hoping for word from London that the government had approved his purchases. But the world in which he had lived and operated for years was coming to an end as fast as that of the Shawnees. In 1772, Croghan buried his old friend Andrew Montour, who had been murdered by a Seneca. In the historian Patrick Griffin’s words, Croghan and the Indians who attended Montour’s funeral near Fort Pitt “were remembering more than a man. They were paying homage to a moment now passed on the frontier and to a process of cultural accommodation that underscored the viability of the imperial plan.” That plan was dead, authority west of the line was collapsing, and Croghan’s influence was evaporating. He resigned his post as deputy, “hoping to make as much money as he could before his world dissolved.”164
In the final weeks of his life Sir William Johnson also saw the treaty he had maneuvered and the world he had created coming apart.165 The land ceded at Fort Stanwix, he assured Lord Dartmouth in late June, “was secured by the plainest & best natural boundaries, and the Indians freely agreed to make it more ample that our people should have no pretext of narrow limits, and the remainder might be rendered the more secure to themselves & their posterity.” But now squatters were pushing beyond the boundaries. He expected soon to hear they had even crossed the Ohio “wherever the lands invite them; for the body of these people are under no restraint, they perceive that they are in places of security, and pay as little regard to Government, as they do title for their possessions.” Atrocities like the murder of the Mingo chief Logan’s family by frontier thugs (an event made infamous when Thomas Jefferson included Logan’s alleged lament in his Notes on the State of Virginia) threatened to spark fresh wars. And there was little hope of establishing order in the West until better order was restored in the East.166
As Johnson was writing, parties of Iroquois gathered at Johnson Hall to discuss “the critical state of Indian Affairs.” Conoghquieson opened the meeting on Saturday, July 9, 1774. Serihowane, a Seneca, got down to the business at hand:
Brother, we are sorry to observe to you that your People are as ungovernable, or rather more so, than ours. You must remember that it was most solemnly, and publicly settled, and agreed to at the General Congress held at Fort Stanwix in 1768 … that the Line then pointed out and fixed between the Whites and Indians should forever after be looked upon as a barrier between us, and that the White People were not to go beyond it. It seems, Brother, that your People entirely disregard, and despise the settlement agreed upon by their Superiors and us; for we find that they, notwithstanding that settlement, are come in vast numbers to the Ohio, and gave our people to understand that they wou’d settle wherever they pleas’d. If this is the case we must look upon every engagement you made with us as void and of no effect.
The conference adjourned for the rest of the weekend. On Monday Johnson responded that the Crown would take steps to keep colonists off Indian lands but the Iroquois must do their part and keep the Shawnees in check. Then, fatigued from his exertions, he ordered pipes, tobacco, and some liquor for the Indians, and he retired to give them time to consider. Two hours later Sir William Johnson was dead.167
Conoghquieson conducted the condolence ceremony at Johnson’s funeral. He handed Guy Johnson a black and white wampum belt, exhorting him to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and take over the conduct of their affairs. Abraham repeated that if the British could not prevent their settlers from breaching the Stanwix line, it “must end in troubles.”168 The chiefs returned to Johnson Hall in September to hold a formal condolence ceremony and invest Guy Johnson as superintendent with a new name. Several chiefs who had been with Sir William at the Fort Stanwix treaty but not at the council where he died—Bunt, Diaquanda, and Sayenqueraghta—conveyed their sympathies and assured Guy Johnson of their support.169 In December, the Iroquois again reminded Guy Johnson that they had given up so much land at Fort Stanwix in expectation that the king would hold the line and they hoped that would not be forgotten, “for we remember it still, and you have it all in writing.”170
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix bulged the 1763 proclamation line to the west; it did not demolish or revoke it. Although the line did little to restrain colonial settlers, land speculators in Virginia and elsewhere still chomped at the bit, frustrated in their investments unless they could obtain clear title. The British government denied Virginia’s bid for Kentucky, and Indian resistance to the cession made things worse. As a result, writes Woody Holton, “the total yield of the Virginia land rush set off by the Fort Stanwix treaty was a pile of rejected land petitions and worthless surveys.” Lack of clear title infuriated Virginia gentry like George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson who had received preliminary grants to millions of acres. They would have to find other ways to acquire the Indians’ lands.171
In the spring of 1774 Virginia went to war against the Shawnees.172 There was, said Croghan in August, “too great a Spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians.” He requested thirty thousand white wampum beads and twenty thousand black beads in order to help preserve the friendship of th
e Delawares and Six Nations and prevent a general Indian war.173 Isolated by British diplomatic strategy, the Shawnees fought virtually alone. While James Murray, Governor Dunmore, led one army down the Ohio from Fort Pitt, Andrew Lewis, who had represented the claims of Virginian officers at Fort Stanwix, led another down the Kanawha River. Chief Cornstalk and the Shawnees attacked Lewis at Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha joins the Ohio. Charles Lewis, the general’s brother, died in the daylong firefight that ensued but the Shawnees were outnumbered and outgunned and forced from the field.174 Cornstalk made peace with Dunmore, and the Shawnees conceded their lands south of the Ohio. Dr. Thomas Walker, who represented Virginia at the treaties at Fort Stanwix and Lochaber, was present at this treaty as well.
As Dorothy Jones noted, Dunmore’s War might “better be called the War of the Stanwix Cession.” The Shawnees protested first against the land ceded north and east of the Kanawha and they fought against Virginia to try and keep white settlers out of that region. After they were defeated and compelled to accept that cession, they and their western allies fought to keep whites out of the unauthorized part of the Fort Stanwix cession, the lands south and west of the Kanawha in Kentucky and Tennessee that became the famous “dark and troubled ground” of frontier history.175 The fighting over the Stanwix cession merged into the fighting of the American Revolution.
When the Revolution broke out, many Indians in the Ohio country hoped to stay out of the conflict. But they understood that it was a war over their land as well as a war for American independence and their best option was to side with the British, who had offered at least token protection for Indian lands, rather than with the Americans who were hell-bent on taking them. Shawnee chiefs told the Virginians in July 1775 “we are often inclined to believe there is no resting place for us and that your Intentions were [sic] to deprive us entirely of our whole Country.”176
More than six hundred Indians showed up at Fort Pitt in the fall of 1776 to meet with the American commissioners for Indian affairs, one of whom, once again, was Thomas Walker. George Morgan, now an Indian agent for the United States, was on hand. The Americans assured the Indians their lands would not be touched as long as they held fast the chain of friendship. Both sides pledged themselves to peace, although a Seneca chief named Round Face reminded the commissioners, “You know the Boundary lately established at Fort Stanwix—You then told us if any of your people should presume to set their Feet over the Line, they should be cut off.” The commissioners assured the Indians that “no white people will be suffered to pass the Line settled at Fort Stanwix, for although that agreement was made with the King yet as we are satisfied with it, we shall take care that it is complied with.” Nevertheless, Cornstalk had Morgan write down his speech and send it to the Congress in Philadelphia. American land thefts struck at the core of Shawnee life, and “all our lands are covered by the white people,” he said. Referring to the lands south and west of the Kanawha—the lands Johnson was not authorized to buy—he declared: “We never sold you our Lands which you now possess on the Ohio between the Great Kenhawa and the Cherokee River, and which you are settling without ever asking our leave, or obtaining our consent ….That was our hunting Country and you have taken it from us. This is what sits heavy upon our Hearts and on the Hearts of all Nations, and it is impossible for us to think as we ought to whilst we are thus oppressed.”177
The next year Cornstalk visited the American garrison at Fort Randolph on the Kanawha River, at the site where he had fought the Virginians exactly three years earlier. He was taken hostage, held in the fort, and later murdered by American militia.178 Meanwhile, the Delaware chief White Eyes publicly threw off the subordinate status the Iroquois had assigned his people and negotiated a defensive alliance with the United States at Fort Pitt in September 1778.179 But American militia murdered White Eyes. By 1779 most Shawnees and Delawares joined the British alliance. Shawnee war parties and Kentucky militia raided back and forth across the Ohio River, burning villages and taking scalps in a vicious conflict along the boundary set at Fort Stanwix.
Cherokees also fought to preserve the disputed lands. No matter how much land Cherokees gave up, the colonists kept coming; Cherokees said they could “see the smoke of the Virginians from their doors.” In March 1775, at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in Tennessee, Judge Richard Henderson and a group of North Carolina land speculators known as the Transylvania Land Company induced Attakullakulla, the principal headman Oconostota, and the Raven of Chota to sell twenty-seven thousand square miles of land between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers—most of modern Kentucky—in exchange for a cabin full of trade goods. The chiefs later claimed that Henderson had deceived them as to what they were signing. A young chief named Dragging Canoe reputedly stormed from the treaty council in disgust, vowing to make the ceded lands “dark and bloody.” He told the British “that he had no hand in making these Bargains but blamed some of their Old Men who he said were too old to hunt and who by their poverty had been induced to sell their land but that for his part he had a great many young fellows that would support him and that they were determined to have their land.”180
In April 1776 a Shawnee chief and a delegation of fourteen northern Indians traveled to Cherokee country. In the council house at the town of Chota the Shawnee produced a nine-foot wampum belt, painted red as a sign of war. He recited the grievances of the Shawnees and other nations, particularly their cruel treatment at the hands of the Virginians. The Indians once held the whole country; now they barely had enough ground to stand on. “Better to die like men than to dwindle away by inches,” he declared. The older Cherokee chiefs, who had seen war and tasted defeat, sat silent, but Dragging Canoe led the warriors in accepting the war belt. Cherokee war parties attacked the colonists who encroached on their lands but armies from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas immediately retaliated, burned Cherokee villages and crops, and then dictated peace terms that took more Cherokee land. Rather than surrender, Dragging Canoe led his warriors deep into present-day Tennessee and continued the fight from the Chickamauga River and Lookout Mountain. Chickamauga Cherokees made common cause with militant Shawnees.181
The Revolution ended many careers, alliances, and hopes that had rested on the Fort Stanwix treaty. Delegates from the Six Nations and the Continental Congress met at Albany in the summer of 1775 to remind each other of their peaceful intentions. Abraham and Conoghquieson were both there.182 The Fort Stanwix treaty had left the Oneidas on the border of the new boundary and they faced hard choices when the Revolution broke out. The British had endeavored to regulate white encroachment on their lands, but they had failed to stop it and the Oneidas knew that if they displayed British sympathies their American neighbors would be sure to seize their lands and the Carrying Place they had negotiated so hard to keep at Fort Stanwix. Conoghquieson blamed the missionary Samuel Kirkland for meddling in Oneida affairs and dividing the tribe (which he did) but most Oneidas supported the Americans.183 But the Revolution swept away the Fort Stanwix treaty provisions that protected Mohawk and Oneida land; in their place, it brought frontier violence and racial conflict.
Joseph Brant sided with the Crown and the Mohawks were driven from their homeland. Guy Johnson and his followers fled to Canada. American troops occupied and trashed Johnson Hall, the center of the world that Sir William had constructed and dominated with the help of his Iroquois friends and allies. John Butler, who had interpreted at Fort Stanwix, also fled to Canada with his sons Thomas and Walter, although his wife and other children were imprisoned by the rebels and he did not see them again until an exchange was arranged in 1780. Dispatched to Niagara to manage the Indian department there, Butler orchestrated raids on the American frontier and organized a corps of rangers to serve with the Indians, fighting alongside Joseph Brant and the aging Seneca war chief Sayenqueraghta. His property in New York was confiscated and he tried to recoup his losses through various means—monopolizing trade at Niagara during the war, speculating in Indian lands
and other shady ventures in Upper Canada after the war—which got him investigated by the British colonial government but brought little success. He continued to serve as deputy superintendent of Indian affairs and, despite growing infirmities, attended the Sandusky conference between the Indians and Americans in 1793, his last public act. At Butler’s funeral in 1796 Brant described him as “the last that remained of those that acted with that great man the late Sir William Johnson, whose steps he followed and our Loss is the greater, as there are none remaining who understand our manners and customs as well as he did.”184
Sayenqueraghta remained firm in his allegiance to the British. The rebels, he declared, “wish for nothing more, than to extirpate us from the Earth, that they may possess our Lands, the desire of attaining which we are convinced is the Cause of the present War between the King and his disobedient Children.” He led Seneca war parties harassing Fort Stanwix, now in American hands, and fought with Butler in the bloody Battle of Oriskany in the woods near the fort in 1777. Seneca villages bore the brunt of the American invasion of Iroquoia in 1779, when General John Sullivan’s army burned forty towns, destroyed an estimated 160,000 bushels of corn, and systematically wasted fields and orchards. Left without food and shelter as one of the harshest winters on record gripped upstate New York, many Senecas accompanied Sayenqueraghta to the British garrison at Fort Niagara, where he continued to exercise a prominent role in the refugee community that grew up there and in British-Iroquois relations. In 1780 he moved with his family and followers to Buffalo Creek in New York, where he died six years later.185
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