In 1790 Congress passed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act. Traders required licenses to operate in Indian country, and transfers of Indian land required congressional approval. The Trade and Intercourse Act was renewed periodically until 1834. In words that must have sounded reminiscent of British assurances after the Proclamation of 1763, George Washington told the Iroquois “the General Government only has the Power to treat with the Indian Nations, and any Treaty formed and held without its Authority will not be binding. Here, then, is the Security for the Remainder of your Lands. No State, nor Person, can purchase your Lands, unless at a general treaty, held under the Authority of the United States.”33
But frontier settlers, squatters, and speculators seldom shared their government’s concern for orderly expansion and individual states, that were often resentful of attempts by the federal government to restrict their rights, sometimes made treaties that never received congressional approval. Like the British imperial administration in 1763, the US government found that proclaiming order on a distant frontier was a far cry from being able to enforce it and restrain its citizens as they flooded Indian lands. Many Federalist leaders were concerned with restoring social order on the frontier in the wake of the bloody Revolutionary War and they wanted to exert the government’s authority to ensure a well-ordered national expansion. In that, they shared some common goals with Indian civil or village chiefs; both groups of leaders sought to establish trade and boundaries and to avoid war. But Indian and Federalist leaders also shared similar challenges. Civil chiefs influenced, persuaded, and acted as a check on warriors, but they did not control them. As battle lines hardened, Indian warriors and Indian-hating frontiersmen turned away from the moderate policies of their “civil” leaders. Warriors denounced tactics of accommodation and forged new multitribal resistance movements; frontiersmen denounced leaders who seemed to pander to Indians while American settlers’ cabins burned. American citizens embraced the vision of a rapidly expanding agrarian republic and American policies justified taking Indian land by eradicating Indian cultures and hunting economies.34
Not everything that went into an Indian treaty appeared in the Constitution. Sometimes the United States resorted to bribes to get the results they wanted. In 1790, Alexander McGillivray led a delegation of Creek chiefs to New York where they signed a treaty in which they ceded most of their lands in Georgia to the United States and the United States guaranteed Creek territorial boundaries. Secret articles in the treaty gave the head chief an annual salary of $1,200 and salaries of $100 each to lesser chiefs.35 Creek complaints about inadequate representation in the treaties they made with the United States increased, and secret articles became more common.36 After the Treaty of Holston in July 1791, negotiated with William Blount, governor of the Territory south of the Ohio River and ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs, Cherokees complained that Blount pressured them into selling land and that the federal negotiators inserted clauses without their knowledge and bribed the interpreter to tell them that the land being ceded was smaller than it actually was and that the payment would be double the amount that was written in the treaty.37 After their experience with Blount, the Cherokee chief Bloody Fellow asked the secretary of war to “Tell General Washington that the Carolina people ought not to be appointed to hold talks with the Indians, as they always ask for our lands.”38 As Georgia continued to encroach on Creek and Cherokee lands, Creek chiefs in the 1790s worried that if they parted with any more land “at last the white people will not suffer us to keep as much as will be sufficient to bury our dead” and that before long the whites would take “every fork of a creek where there is a little good land … and every stream of water, where there is a fish to be found.”39
Despite the bombast of its treaty commissioners, the United States still lacked the military power to crush Indian resistance. The Indian confederacy that formed north of the Ohio repulsed General Josiah Harmar’s expedition in 1790 and then, in November 1791, the confederacy shattered an army led by St. Clair, inflicting some nine hundred casualties and effectively destroying the only army the infant republic possessed. It was the biggest single defeat ever inflicted by Indians on the United States and it took the new nation three years to reverse the outcome. With its army reduced to a shambles, the government opted to negotiate, or at least to stall and break down the tribes’ united stance while it rebuilt its army. In the summer of 1792, it sent peace feelers via an Iroquois delegation headed by the noted Seneca orator Red Jacket. Almost one thousand Indians from the confederated nations assembled in council on the Auglaize River to hear the Americans’ offer. Although Joseph Brant, the Iroquois, and some other groups favored compromise, the western tribes stood firm on maintaining the Ohio River boundary that had been established in 1768. A Shawnee chief named Painted Pole demanded that Red Jacket “speak from your heart and not from your mouth,” and, picking up the strings of wampum on which Red Jacket had spoken, he threw them at the feet of the Seneca delegation. The Shawnees had been fighting for the Ohio River boundary for more than twenty years and they would accept no other boundary. The fighting had taken its toll on the authority of their civil chiefs: war leaders sat in front of civil chiefs during the councils and the Mahican emissary Hendrick Aupaumut reported that it was now the Shawnee “custom that the Chief Warriors should be foremost in doing business.”40
The following year in an abortive peace council at Sandusky in northwestern Ohio matters were not helped by the fact that Simon Girty was interpreting. Girty, who had been captured by Indians at fourteen and then liberated at the end of the French and Indian War, had built a career in a conflicted ethnic and national borderland on his dual identity, his multilingual skills, and his knowledge of Indian and white cultures. During the Revolution he went over to the British and worked in the Crown’s Indian Department, incurring the wrath of Americans who hated him as a renegade who had betrayed both his country and his race. Girty continued to side with the Indians and the British after the Revolution. At one Indian council, according to Secretary of War Henry Knox, “no other white person was admitted but Simon Girty, whom they considered as one of themselves.” The Sandusky peace talks had barely gotten under way when a Wyandot chief, with Girty interpreting, told the American commissioners that the Indian delegates would convey their words to their warriors but that the commissioners might as well go home. As the council was breaking up, someone pointed out that the speech had been misinterpreted. Girty modified his translation to say instead that the commissioners should wait for the Indians to consult and give their answer. Girty had earlier vowed “that he would raise hell to prevent peace.”41
The Indians at Sandusky suggested to the commissioners, rather tongue-in-cheek, that the United States take all the money it was offering the Indians for their lands and all the money expended in raising and paying armies, and divide it among the poor settlers who had been “in continual trouble ever since they cross the Ohio,” so they would happily go back to where they came from. The commissioners were not amused. The Indians also rejected the premises on which the United States claimed their land:
We never made any agreement with the King, nor with any other nation, that we would give to either the exclusive right of purchasing our lands; and we declare to you, that we consider ourselves free to make any bargain or cession of lands, whenever and to whomever we please. If the white people, as you say, made a treaty that none of them but the King should purchase of us, and that he has given that right to the United States, it is an affair which concerns you and him, and not us: we have never parted with such a power.
The federal government rejected (and the Supreme Court in Johnson v. McIntosh later explicitly denied) the Indians’ assertion that they could sell their lands to whomever they pleased, and the commissioners at Sandusky were adamant: “it is impossible to make the river Ohio the boundary, between your people and the people of the United States.” The Indians were equally adamant: “Look back, and review the lands from whe
nce we have been driven to this spot,” they said; “We can retreat no further.” With negotiations at an impasse, the commissioners departed. The Indians had only themselves to blame for the continuing war, they reported. As the commissioners withdrew, General Anthony Wayne advanced with his rebuilt American army.42 In August 1794 Wayne defeated the confederated tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
Word of the battle reached US treaty commissioner Colonel Timothy Pickering and the Iroquois at Canandaigua. Pickering, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had been assigned a double task: keep the Six Nations, especially the Senecas, from joining the western confederacy, and obtain unconditional surrender of any Iroquois claims to land in the Ohio Valley. He had been educated at Harvard, but he learned about doing business in Indian country from Red Jacket, who had matched him in two previous meetings and lectured him on proper council protocol.43 More than 1,500 Iroquois, including Red Jacket, Cornplanter, Handsome Lake, and other prominent leaders, gathered at Canandaigua in the fall of 1794. At the invitation of both President Washington and the Iroquois, four Quakers attended the treaty as observers, and three of them kept journals, in which they recorded both Iroquois and American perspectives on the proceedings. The treaty dragged on for almost two months with frequent delays and adjournments. Red Jacket conveyed the sentiments of the Iroquois women, who insisted that their voices be heard because “it was they who made the Men, [and] altho’ they did not sit in council, yet that they were acquainted from time to time with the transactions at the Treaties.” At one point, irritated that Pickering was busy writing down what he was saying, Red Jacket stopped and “would not proceed until he looked him in the face.” The Quakers William Savery and James Emlen both commented on the need for patience. “It is to no purpose to say you are tired of waiting,” explained Savery, “they will only tell you very calmly, Brother, you have your way of doing business, and we have ours; we desire you would sit easy on your seats. Patience then becomes our only remedy.” Emlen reflected: “Perhaps no people are greater masters of their time, hence in their public transactions we often complain of their being tedious, not considering that they & we estimate time with very diff[eren]t. judgm[en]ts—we are very apt to condemn any natural practices that differ from our own but it requires a greater conquest over prejudices & more penetration than I am Master of clearly to say that we are the happier people.”44
Pickering was there to appease the Iroquois. He told them his principal purpose was “to heal the wounds which have been given by disposing of your lands, and to point out the way in which you can avoid future strife.” The Oneidas had seen their homeland shrink from five or six million acres to one-quarter of a million acres and the recurrent land losses divided their nation. “Brother,” one said, “you requested that we would lay before you the whole cause of our difference: I repeat, that is our land.”45 An Oneida chief named Onondiyo (or Captain John) “had much to say about the many deceptions which had been practiced upon them by the white people; observing that however good and honest white men might be in other matters, they were all deceivers when they wanted to buy Indian lands; and that the advantages of learning which they possessed made them capable of doing much good and much evil.” The Iroquois were particularly incensed by the intimidation and deception at Fort Stanwix ten years earlier, although Pickering explained to the Quakers that the lands they ceded constituted just compensation for siding with Britain during the Revolutionary War. “He instanced the case of an individual who had committed a trespass on another; the law determines that the trespasser shall suffer either in person or in property, and this law is just. Such,” added Savery, “is the reasoning of conquerors.”46
Pickering acknowledged that some white people had imposed on the Indians, exploiting their ignorance in computing the value of their lands, plying them with alcohol, and getting them to sign papers that had not been properly interpreted. Sometimes the interpreters deliberately deceived; sometimes their interpretations were not exact because Indian languages lacked the words to express the terms used in treaties, which even few white people understood. “You ought never to set your hands to a paper unless the interpreters first say, in the presence of the Great Spirit, that they have faithfully interpreted every word,” Pickering advised. “If this were done, brothers, such papers would contain but a few words; and the fewer words the less danger of you being deceived. But I must not enlarge on these matters.” For Pickering, the best way for the Iroquois “to avoid future strife” was to adopt white ways so they could match whitemen and to become literate so they could avoid being cheated.47
But the short-term goal was to keep the Iroquois out of the war that was winding down in the West. When the Treaty of Canandaigua was finally signed, the United States confirmed Oneida, Cayuga, and Onondaga lands in New York; restored lands to the Senecas; and promised never to disturb them “in the free use and enjoyment thereof.” Fifty sachems signed the treaty.48 Three weeks later, Pickering signed a second treaty with the Oneidas, awarding them, and their Stockbridge and Tuscarora allies, compensation for their services to the United States during the Revolution. Washington recognized Pickering’s peace-keeping diplomacy by promoting him to replace Henry Knox as secretary of war, but Philip Schulyer and other powerful New Yorkers continued to erode the Iroquois homeland in defiance of federal law and federal treaties.49
In August 1795, the western Indians assembled at Greenville to make peace with Wayne (see figure 3.1). Wayne opened the councils in customary fashion—“I have cleared the ground of all brush and rubbish, and opened roads to the east, to the west, to the north, and to the south, that all nations may come in safety and ease to meet me,” he announced. He stated that he adhered to the protocol of the calumet and wampum belt “to evince that my mind and heart are always the same.”50 The American officers and commissioners maintained a façade of civility in dealing with the Indians and the Indians still attempted to establish social obligations with the Americans.51 New Corn, a Potawatomi chief, asked Wayne to replace the Indians’ old medals, which they had received from their former British allies, with General Washington’s medals. They had “thrown off the British” and henceforward would regard the Americans as their only true friends. “The Great Spirit has made me a great chief, and endowed me with great power,” said New Corn. “The heavens and earth are my heart, the rising sun my mouth.” He knew that other people had made and broken treaties but he was “too honorable and too brave a man to be guilty of such unworthy conduct.” The Great Spirit heard what he said and he dared not tell a lie. He asked Wayne, “the Great Wind,” not to deceive the Indians as the French, British, and Spaniards had done but to keep his promises. “My friend,” he concluded, “I am old, but I shall never die. I shall always live in my children, and children’s children.” And he handed Wayne a string of wampum.52
FIGURE 3.1 “Indian Treaty of Greenville,” Ohio, 1795. Artist unknown; believed to be Officer of General Wayne’s staff. (Chicago History Museum [ICHi-64806])
But lofty rhetoric and respectful relationships could not mask the marked shift in power: Wayne effectively dictated the terms and presented the Indians with a prepared treaty for signing. Sixty-nine chiefs, including Little Turtle of the Miamis, and Black Hoof and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees who had fought to defend the Ohio boundary since before the Revolution, acknowledged that the fight was lost and ceded most of Ohio to the United States. Egushawa, who had denounced treaties as “pen and ink witchcraft,” signed this one.53 The war for the boundary established at Fort Stanwix in 1768 was finally over.
Even as Little Turtle and Wayne negotiated a new boundary between Indians and whites, the individual who stood beside them translating their words reflected the porous nature of such boundaries. William Wells had been captured by the Miamis as a boy, married Little Turtle’s daughter, and apparently “went Indian.” He participated in raids against frontier settlements, helped lure travelers on the Ohio River into ambushes, and had fought against both Harmar and S
t. Clair. Then he left the Miamis, enlisted as a scout in Wayne’s army in the Fallen Timbers campaign, and was at the treaty as one of the team of interpreters. Seventeen years later, Wells would escort the garrison and families as they evacuated Fort Dearborn (present-day Chicago) at the beginning of the War of 1812. Dressed as an Indian with his face painted black as was the Miami custom when confronting certain death, Wells was killed by attacking Potawatomi warriors, who cut off his head and tore out his heart.54
The Greenville boundary was no more effective in checking American expansion than the Proclamation Line of 1763 or the Fort Stanwix boundary had been. “Scarcely anything short of a Chinese Wall, or a line of Troops will restrain Land Jobbers, and the Incroachment of Settlers, upon the Indian Territory,” said George Washington.55 Treaties increased dramatically in number and frequency—more than two hundred between 1795 and 1840 and sometimes every couple of years with the same tribes. Just three years after the Treaty of Canaidaigua, Red Jacket, Cornplanter, and other Seneca chiefs agreed to the Treaty of Big Tree, which ceded millions of acres of land west of the Genesee River and effectively reduced the Seneca homeland to eleven parcels. Red Jacket received a cash payment for his compliance. Although he later took a strong stand against further reductions of Seneca land, many Senecas remember him for the land-sale treaties he signed and depict him as “as a man condemned by the Creator to push a dirt-filled wheelbarrow up a hill for eternity.”56 Treaty making became land marketing, and some Indians were active participants; they sold off chunks of tribal land to finance consumption of new goods and pay off old debts, and some used treaties as a way to enter the land market and make money on the one valuable commodity they possessed.57
Treaties were the key instruments in the recurrent dispossession of Indians as the United States pushed steadily westward. In the winter of 1802–3, President Thomas Jefferson told Delaware and Shawnee delegates in Washington that he would “pay the most sacred regard to existing treaties between your respective nations and ours, and protect your whole territories against all intrusions that may be attempted by white people.” At the same time, Jefferson was implementing plans to deprive the Indians of their lands. Jefferson and others easily solved the dilemma of how to deal honorably with Indians (as they said they would) while at the same time taking their lands (as they knew they must); they determined that having too much land was a disincentive for Indians to become “civilized.” Ignoring the role of agriculture in Eastern Woodland societies, Jefferson argued that Indians would continue to hunt rather than settle down as farmers unless their options were restricted. Taking their lands forced Indians into a settled, agricultural, and “civilized” way of life and was therefore, in the long run, good for them. As Indians took up farming, Jefferson wrote in 1803 to William Henry Harrison, the governor of Indiana Territory, “they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time in exchange for necessaries for their farms and families.” To promote this process “we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals run into debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.” In this way, American settlements would gradually surround the Indians “and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.” The process of dispossession could be comfortably accomplished within Jefferson’s philosophy of minimal government. The government could do little to regulate the frontier and protect Indian lands, which meant that the Indians would fight for their land. The government would then have no choice but to invade Indian country, suppress the uprising, and dictate treaties in which defeated Indians signed away land. The stage was then set for the process to repeat itself. Jefferson’s strategy for acquiring Indian lands resulted in some thirty treaties with a dozen or so tribal groups and the cession of almost two hundred thousand square miles of Indian territory in nine states. Jefferson regretted that Indians seemed doomed to extinction, but he had little compunction about taking away their lands.58
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