Traders were willing participants in Jefferson’s strategy. The Scottish traders William Panton and John Forbes, who continued to dominate Indian trade in the Southeast after the Revolution, knew all about leveraging Indian debts to secure Indian lands—they’d been doing it for years—and readily collaborated with the United States. They bought at discount the debts individual hunters owed small traders and then aggregated them into one lump sum. By 1803, the southeastern tribes owed John Forbes and Company $192,526 (the Creeks alone owed $113,000). The United States compelled the Creeks to cede millions of acres, in exchange for which it paid off some of the traders’ debts. In 1805, the traders exerted their influence among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Upper Creeks to help secure the cession of almost eight million acres. The United States paid the tribes a total of $380,000 in money and goods, of which more than $77,000 went to Forbes and Company to settle the Indians’ debts. Eventually, the company recouped all but a little under $7,000 of the original debt. In this way, “thousands of small, face-to-face exchanges between traders and hunters were transmuted by a multinational company and an expanding nation-state into massive land cessions that affected an entire people.”59 At the Treaty of Mount Dexter in 1805, for instance, Choctaws ceded more than four million acres of land in southern Mississippi and southwestern Alabama to the United States for $50,500. Of that amount, $48,000 went to pay off their debts to traders. The remaining $2,500 went to the interpreter, John Pitchlynn, “to compensate him for certain losses sustained in the Chaktaw country, and as a grateful testimonial of the nation’s esteem.” (Pitchlynn, who had interpreted in the Choctaws’ first treaty with the United States twenty years earlier, was long recognized as a “friend to the United States” who could exert influence over the tribe.) The Choctaws were left with $3,000 a year in trade goods.60 Such arrangements became common in US treaty making and trader-creditors became regular attendees at treaty councils.
United States commissioners in the first decade of the nineteenth century held treaties with individual tribes, or groups from several tribes, and pressured them into exchanging land for cash, annuities, or trade goods. These tactics yielded millions of acres of land in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. The Treaty of St. Louis in 1804 stood out as infamous even by the treaty-making standards of the time. Sauk and Fox (Mesquakie) delegates signed away a huge swath of tribal lands for $1,000. The Sauk war chief Black Hawk denounced the treaty and said the delegates were “drunk the greater part of the time they were in St. Louis.” A dozen years later he unwittingly confirmed the deal: “Here, for the first time, I touched the goose quill to the treaty,” he recalled in later life, “not knowing, however, that by that act, I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it, and never would have signed their treaty.” As far as Black Hawk was concerned, he could not have sold the land even if he had wanted to: “my reason teaches me that 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 the right to the soil ….Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.”61
As governor of Indiana territory, William Henry Harrison built his career on advancing Jefferson’s policies of national expansion and Indian dispossession.62 He exploited divisions within and among the tribes, coercing one tribe into signing by threatening to cut a better deal with another; he bribed compliant chiefs, and he ignored or rode roughshod over the reciprocal obligations that treaty making entailed and the pledges that treaties established. At the Treaty of Fort Wayne with Delawares, Potawatomis, Miamis, and members of the Eel River tribes in September 1809, the Miamis resisted Harrison’s demands and a chief named Owl insisted that the United States pay the going rate for their land—about $2 per acre. Such a price was totally unacceptable to Harrison. He withheld annuities due under previous treaties until this one was signed, and he injected alcohol into the proceedings to move negotiations along. The Miami position became untenable and in the end the United States acquired almost three million acres for less than two cents an acre. The Shawnee chief Tecumseh called it a “whiskey treaty.” Harrison told the secretary of war that the treaty terms were “just to all” and he assured the Indians that the United States would always adhere to their agreements: “To do otherwise would be offensive to the great spirit and all the world would look upon them as a faithless people.”63 Harrison became president in 1840.
Indians understood how American treaty makers operated, even if they found it hard to do anything about it. Wyandots at Detroit in February 1812 sent a message to the president and Congress:
Fathers, Listen! We can assure you in sincerity and truth, how the thing is conducted at all treaties. When the United States want a particular piece of land, all our nations are assembled; a large sum of money is offered; the land is occupied probably by one nation only; nine-tenths have no actual interest in the land wanted; if the particular nation interested refuses to sell, they are generally threatened by others, who want the money or goods offered, to buy whiskey.64
Such treaty-making tactics fueled the cause of the Tecumseh, who denounced the American practice of making treaties with individual tribes, and added urgency to the idea that Indian land belonged to all the tribes and could be ceded only with their unanimous consent. Tecumseh’s vision was to create a united and independent Indian state in what was to become the heartland of the United States. A boundary line between Indians and whites like that implemented in 1763 and reaffirmed in 1768 became a dream for Indian freedom fighters in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Tecumseh’s resistance movement attracted warriors from more than thirty tribes but his vision ended with his death in battle in 1813. The men who killed him, and according to some accounts stripped the skin from his body, were Kentuckians, who had grown up on the dark and bloody grounds opened up by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768.
In the South, Upper Creek towns tended to favor adopting a militant stance in dealing with the United States; Lower Creek towns tended to advocate peace and accommodation. Conflicts within the Creek confederacy spilled over into attacks on American settlers, and the United States responded with swift military action against the militant Creeks or “Red Sticks.” In the Creek War of 1813–14 General Andrew Jackson led a series of devastating campaigns that culminated in the slaughter of some eight hundred Creek warriors at the Battle of Tohopeka, or Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River in present-day Alabama in March 1814. About five hundred Cherokees and one hundred Lower Creeks helped Jackson win his victory. But Jackson paid no attention to former allies as he drove to acquire Indian land. At the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, the future president met with thirty-five pro-American Creek chiefs and exacted retribution and “just indemnity” for the expenses of the war. As Jackson made clear to the secretary of war, this was not to be a negotiated peace: “The Commissioners appointed to make a treaty with the Creeks will have little to do but assign them their proper limits. Those of the friendly party, who have associated with me, will be easily satisfied; and the remainder of the hostile party, pleased that their lives were spared them, will thankfully accept, as a bounteous donation, any district which may be allowed them for their future settlement.” The first article of the treaty began with the words “The United States demand.” Jackson took twenty-three million acres in Georgia and Alabama, the biggest single land cession in southeastern Indian history, and most of it from “friendly” Creeks who had helped him win his victories.65 Meanwhile, the end of the War of 1812 effectively removed Great Britain as an ally of Indian nations in the Southeast. The way was open for the United States and the expanding cotton kingdom to advance across the Old Southwest. Nations like the Choctaws who in the past had successfully played off rival colonial powers now had to deal only with the United States; Indians who had formerly traded deerskins now found increasingly that Americans wanted only their lands. They took t
hose lands in treaty after treaty, but increasingly the federal government, and Jackson in particular, resorted to force rather than “the old norms of negotiation.” As Leonard Sadosky notes, “The forms remained the same, but the realities of power behind them were very different.”66
As the cotton kingdom and its slave labor force expanded across the South, treaties generated more and more cessions of Indian land. Southern cotton fed the mills of northern England and New England, and southeastern lands were too valuable to be left in Indian hands. Americans increasingly demanded the occupation of all Indian lands. In 1803 American emissaries in Paris had purchased the Louisiana Territory—some 827,000 square miles of territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains for a mere $15 million—and the United States doubled its size overnight. Many Americans saw the West as barren and virtually empty, useless for American farmers but good enough for Indian hunters. Removing Indians from the East was now a practical possibility. American treaty makers began pressuring Indian people to cede their lands in exchange for new lands west of the Mississippi. As American pressures and market forces undermined traditional social and economic structures, Indians seemed to face a choice between destitution and removal, and many Indians chose the latter. In 1817, Cherokees gave up two large tracts of land in Georgia and North Carolina in exchange for land in Arkansas. In 1820, Andrew Jackson bullied and threatened Choctaw chiefs into making a treaty at Doak’s Stand, ceding lands in Mississippi and accepting lands in the West in return. Ten years later, at the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, US commissioners told the Choctaws that if they refused to move west, they would be made subject to Mississippi state law and lose their existence as a tribe. Some Choctaws remained in Mississippi but most headed west.
In 1825 the Creek chief William McIntosh and a handful of minor chiefs signed the Treaty of Indian Springs, giving up all remaining Creek lands in Georgia between the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers. In return the United States paid $400,000 to “the emigrating nation,” of which $200,000 went directly to McIntosh and the treaty signers. McIntosh had led the pro-American faction of the Lower Creeks in the Creek War, fought alongside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson that confiscated two-thirds of all Creek land. McIntosh grew wealthy through a series of shady land deals, and he engineered further cessions of Creek lands into American hands. In addition to the Treaty of Fort Jackson, he signed treaties with the Americans in 1805, in 1818, and twice in 1821. He overreached in the Treaty of Indian Springs, which blatantly flouted a recent tribal law that made selling tribal lands a capital offense. Despite protests from the Creeks against such “base treachery,” abundant evidence of fraud, and a warning from the Indian agent that ratification might “produce a horrid state of things among these unfortunate Indians,” the Senate ratified the treaty. Creek warriors acting on the orders of the Creek National Council assassinated McIntosh for treason.67
Removal treaties secured millions of acres in the North as well. Charles Latrobe, a traveling Englishman of Huguenot descent (and later the first lieutenant-governor of Victoria in Australia), stopped off at Chicago in the fall of 1833 while a treaty was being negotiated with the Potawatomis. Latrobe found the “little mushroom town” “crowded to excess.” Six thousand Indians camped on the prairie around the town. Gaudily dressed and painted warriors were accompanied by wives, children, ponies, and dogs; groups of older chiefs sat around smoking and talking; local merchants dispensed their wares; and whiskey flowed freely. In addition to “emigrants and land speculators as numerous as the sand,” there were
horse-dealers, and horse-stealers, rogues of every description, white, black, brown, and red—half-breeds, quarter breeds, and men of no breed at all;—dealers in pigs, poultry, and potatoes;—men pursuing Indian claims, … creditors of the tribes, or of particular Indians, who know that they have no chance of getting their money, if they do not get it from the Government agents;—sharpers of every degree; pedlars, grog-sellers; Indian agents and Indian traders of every description, and Contractors to supply the Pottawattomies with food. The little village was in uproar from morning to night, and from night to morning.
Latrobe saw casks of whiskey “for sale under the very nose of the Commissioners” and drunken Indians everywhere. “Who will believe that any act, however formally executed by the chiefs, is valid, as long as it is known that whiskey was one of the parties to the treaty”? Watching the proceedings, Latrobe concluded “that the business of arranging the terms of an Indian Treaty, whatever it might have been two hundred years ago, … now lies chiefly between the various traders, agents, creditors, and half-breeds of the tribes” on whom the chiefs had become dependent and the government agents. The Potawatomis signed the treaty and gave up the last of their lands on the Great Lakes, some five million acres in present-day northern Illinois and Wisconsin, in exchange for an equal quantity on the Missouri and $1 million in removal expenses and support, part of which, $175,000 to be precise, went to paying off debts to traders and other creditors.68
Amid such chaos and confusion, Indian homelands became American real estate. Pressured by American demands and divided by American tactics, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ottawa leaders signed away thousands of acres of land around the Great Lakes in the 1820s and 1830s. The Potawatomis held the unfortunate record: they signed a treaty each year from 1826 to 1829, two treaties in 1832, the Chicago treaty in 1833, four treaties in 1834, nine in 1836 (!), and another in 1837.69 The pressure on the Iroquois also continued in the nineteenth century as politicians, transportation interests, and land speculators conspired to divest them of their lands, and canals, railroads, the massive influx of settlers, and the rapid growth of cities transformed Iroquoia. In 1826, under pressure from the Ogden Land Company, the federal government made a treaty with the Senecas, which the US Senate never ratified, taking thousands of acres. A dozen years later, sixteen Seneca chiefs signed another treaty at Buffalo Creek, “one of the major frauds in American Indian history,” but nonetheless ratified by the Senate. Coerced by threats, bribery, and alcohol, they agreed to sell their remaining lands in New York to the Ogden Land Company, to give up their four reservations, and to move to Kansas. Commissioner Ransom H. Gillet induced more chiefs to sign their agreement after the treaty council.70
Despite the bribes, whiskey, intimidation, and divide-and-conquer tactics, Indians did not succumb easily or go quietly. Time and again in treaty negotiations they cited chapter and verse from earlier treaties and requested redress for agreements not met and payments not made.71 In 1820, a chief named Sassaba kicked away the gifts of tobacco that American officials placed on the ground before the Ojibwe delegation, by the same action rejecting the Americans’ request for a land cession.72 Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Ottawa leaders learned that the United States could not be trusted to honor its treaty commitments; they became acquainted with American business and financial practices and in subsequent meetings often kept American treaty commissioners on the defensive with pointed questions about long-overdue payments. They spoke out against boundaries and land cessions; they resisted attempts to divide their nations, and at the same time frustrated efforts to consolidate or conflate different bands into a single polity capable of making comprehensive land cessions; they articulated their nationhood on their own terms, stressing kinship and alliances, and pointed to the autonomy of individual bands who had multiple and overlapping claims to the lands being negotiated.73 At the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, seven Choctaw elder women sat in the center of a circle comprising some sixty Choctaw councilmen, the US commissioners, and other persons involved in the negotiations. The women freely expressed their opinions and one of them threatened to cut open with a butcher knife a Choctaw man who agreed to sell the Choctaws’ land and move west. The US commissioners chose to make no mention of the presence or participation of the Choctaw women in their formal record of the treaty.74
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