Angered by the success George Croghan and other British traders had enjoyed in winning allies in the southern pays d’en haut, the latest Father Onontio, Governor Roland-Michel Barrin de La Galissonière, could have sent a large military force into the Ohio country to sweep it clean of Englishmen and fortify the crucial points along the rivers. Instead, he sent Céloron with 20 soldiers and officers and 180 Canadian militia of questionable value. They were accompanied by only 30 Abenakis and French Iroquois; the large contingent of Indians expected to join them from Detroit, knowing a lost cause when they saw one, decided they had better things to do.
Despite this, Céloron pushed ahead, leading his flotilla past Fort Niagara and into eastern Lake Erie. They beached, then cleared a ten-mile road through thick, hilly forest to the south. By stages, they portaged their canoes and a mountain of food, bedding, ammunition, and Indian gifts to a lake the Iroquois called yjadakoin—today’s Chautauqua Lake. The skies poured incessantly throughout the five-day portage, and Céloron could only comfort himself that all the rain would eventually mean easier canoeing downriver.
Beyond the lake, though, the way grew even worse. Another portage led to streams that would have been easily navigable in spring but were now, despite the downpour, almost dry. While most of the party carted backbreaking loads overland, some of the men dragged their half-empty canoes through a few inches of water, ripping holes in the precious boats. The Ohio country seemed like a cruel mirage. They’d been told to expect a bountiful land teeming with de boeufs illinois, but instead of buffalo, they found themselves in a “somber and dismal valley,” on guard against serpents à sonnettes—rattlesnakes.
Finally, at noon on July 29, the small creek brought them to La Belle Rivière—what the English called the Allegheny River, one of the Ohio’s two major tributaries, near the modern town of Warren, Pennsylvania. The company drew up in ranks, arrayed in full uniform with weapons at the ready. Céloron ceremoniously buried a heavy lead plate about eleven inches by seven, pre-engraved with all but the date and place (which had been quickly stamped into the metal that afternoon). The inscription proclaimed the plaque “a monument of the renewal of the possession we have taken of the said Rivière Oyo, and all those which fall into it, and of all the territories on both sides as far as the source of the said rivers, as the preceding Kings of France have possessed or should possess them.”
An iron plate bearing the royal coat of arms was nailed to a nearby tree. Finally, a written proclamation known as a procès-verbal was prepared and signed by the officers, reiterating the French claim. After a few cheers of “Vive le Roi!” the soldiers and Indians slipped their canoes back into the current and headed south.
Five more times in the next five or six hundred miles, between the upper Allegheny and the mouth of La Rivière à la Roche (the Great Miami, where Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana meet today), Céloron buried his plates and drew up his written procès-verbaux. In Indian villages along the way, he tried to cajole the elders back into friendship with the French, offering a few gifts and occasionally sharing “a cup of the milk of their Father Onontio” (a glass of brandy). But everywhere the French went, they found two things—a distaste bordering on contempt among the Indians, and English traders doing a thriving business.
“Each village, whether large or small, has one or more traders, who have in their employ engagés for the transportation of peltries [dressed pelts],” the Jesuit Joseph-Pierre de Bonnécamps wrote in his journal. “Behold, then, the English [are] already far within our territory; and what is worse, they are under the protection of a crowd of savages whom they entice to themselves, and whose number increases every day.”
Along the lower Allegheny, the French intercepted five such traders working for George Croghan. “They had some forty packets of peltries,” Bonnécamps wrote, “skins of bears, otters, cats, pécans [fishers], and roe-deer with the hair retained—for neither martens nor beavers are seen there.” They found the traders “lodged in miserable cabins, and had a storehouse well filled with peltries, which we did not disturb.” Instead, Céloron ordered them out of the country and gave them a letter for the governor of Pennsylvania asserting French sovereignty.
The mood at Chiningué (as the French called Logstown)—which tyhey reached two days later, to find Weiser’s faded Union Jack still flying over the village—was so overtly menacing that Céloron ordered his men to sleep in their clothes, muskets ready, having been warned of imminent attack. For two days, he parleyed with the Indian leaders, although his message was so unwelcome that in the middle of one of his speeches, a blind but still spunky Shawnee chief name Kakowatchiky was heard to urge someone—anyone—to please shoot Céloron for him.
No one did, but the captain concluded that Logstown was “a bad village, which is seduced by the allurements of cheap merchandise furnished by the English, which keeps them in a very bad disposition towards us.” But his hands were tied by distance and ineffectuality. The chief trader there (probably one of Croghan’s men), “who saw us ready to depart, acquiesced in all that was exacted from him,” Bonnécamps said, “firmly resolved, doubtless, to do nothing of the kind, as soon as our backs were turned.”
Céloron had a similarly unpleasant reception at Pickawillany from the Miami, whose leader, Memeskia, called “La Demoiselle” by the French, had earned a new nickname: “Old Briton.” By the time Céloron returned to Montreal, five months and 3,500 miles after leaving, the weary chevalier seemed to realize that his expedition had had precisely the opposite effect he’d intended. Instead of strengthening French rule in the Ohio country, he had shown it to be weak and impotent.
The French could do little to peel the Ohio Indians away from Brother Onas and their British friends. But it was not impossible, as the next few years would prove—although the British colonies would largely accomplish the deed themselves, alienating their own allies; sending them back to the French in anger, frustration, and eventually sheer desperation; and reawakening grievances stretching back to the Walking Purchase and beyond. When at last the Ohio Indians lifted the hatchet, the causes would include British fecklessness and stupidity, along with bad luck, bad politics, and bad judgment. An inexperienced young officer from Virginia would make a military blunder in a valley called Great Meadows, triggering what has been called the first truly global war, while a far more senior (and far more arrogant) commander following in his tracks the next year would err even more spectacularly, inviting defeat and stampeding the Ohio tribes to the French.
But behind all of this, driving the region toward cataclysm, was the same naked greed for Native land that had underpinned virtually every other frontier war of the previous century and a half. Some things, it seems, never change.
One might think the news of a longtime imperial adversary making a public display of reclaiming the Ohio would snap the British colonies into sharp action. Instead, they seemed barely to notice amid their interprovincial bickering. At times, open war seemed more likely between the colonies than between them and the French.
Far from being a cordial melting pot, the frontier was becoming an increasingly fractious mishmash, although ideas of race and ethnicity were curiously tangled, and the divisions did not always—or even usually—fall out the way one might expect. Animosity between a Presbyterian Ulsterman and a pietist German along the Susquehanna might be sharper than that between either man and a neighboring Delaware. A Protestant New Yorker in the upper Hudson Valley might view a fellow European—a Catholic Frenchman from Montreal—as more vividly different (and thus more ominously threatening) than a Mohawk.
For almost two centuries along the eastern frontier, the sharpest division from a colonial perspective was not racial—Caucasian versus Amerindian—but religious. Whether British, French, or Spanish, colonists almost invariably referred to themselves as Christians and to the Indians they encountered as heathens, pagans, or savages. Before he was torched alive by the Tuscarora, John Lawson advocated an intentional policy of intermarriage
with Natives in Carolina to erase that gulf. The colony, he felt, ought to “give Encouragement to the Ordinary People, and those of a lower Rank, that they might marry with these Indians . . . By the Indians Marrying with the Christians, and coming into Plantations with their English Husbands, or Wives, they would become Christians, and their Idolatry would be quite forgotten, and in all probability, a better Worship come in its Stead . . . and the whole body of these people would . . . become as one People with us.”
Skin color, the foundation of the modern concept of race, was very much an afterthought. Europeans did not see themselves as a monolithic race; national identity—English, Scots, Welsh, German, Swede—trumped other considerations, and the same was largely true of their Native counterparts. Growing up in Iroquoia, a young man would view himself first as a member of, say, the Wolf Clan; then as an Oneida; and then, to a lesser degree, as part of the Six Nations. A Catawba wasn’t a fellow Indian but a traditional enemy, generations of tribal war having carved a deep psychological divide that shared ethnicity was unlikely to bridge.
By the early eighteenth century, however, recognition of racial lines was beginning to crystallize. In Carolina in the late 1600s, the slave-owning immigrants from Barbados already thought in terms of black and white, and it is here that some of the earliest self-references to “white” appear. By the mid-eighteenth century in the Middle Colonies and New England, the term had largely replaced “Christian” as the catch phrase for those of European descent. Most of the official correspondence in Pennsylvania, for example, used the terms “whites” and “white people” when speaking of colonists in general, regardless of their national origin.
Conrad Weiser spoke of the difficulty of judging private quarrels between “the white and the brown People, for the former will out swear the very devil, and the Latter oath is not Good in our Laws,” but such references to Indian skin color were still unusual. New Englanders and others had long tended to speak of “tawnies,” if they brought up Indian appearance at all, and in 1751 Benjamin Franklin noted that “Asia [is] chiefly tawny, America . . . wholly so.” What he considered to be “purely white People,” on the other hand, were rare. Franklin excluded “Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, [who] are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted.” Franklin mused that “by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys,” the colonies could serve to increase “the lovely White and Red”—by which he apparently meant ruddy English stock.
Ironically, “red” as a description of American Indians, now considered a racist slur, first appeared among some Indians themselves. Sitting in council in 1725, a Chickasaw chief told the Carolinians that his towns “desire always to be at peace with the White people and desire to have their own way and to take revenge of the red people”—one of many references by Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw leaders of that period to “red people.” As historian Nancy Shoemaker has shown, this term was virtually unknown outside the South, where many Native cultures used red and white as potent symbols of duality, and the term likely made its way into common use in French and English via frontier diplomacy. Among themselves, many Indians adopted some form of “white” to speak of the colonists, usually unkindly. The Cherokee referred to “white nothings,” and the Lenape word for settlers, shuwánakw, meant “sour people” or “white people.”
While racial identity was hardening in the eighteenth century, in other respects the same barriers were breaking down. Intermarriage was a fact of frontier life from the very beginning, whether the unions were formalized or not, and the long tradition of absorbing captives and refugees into Native communities made it especially easy, for example, for freed or escaped African slaves to find refuge and acceptance there. Similarly, subjugated Indian populations, such as the Pequot of southern New England, who were held as slaves or servants after the Pequot War, often married Africans in similar straits.
Traders especially blurred the edges of ethnicity and culture, even as they pushed the boundaries of the frontier. Marrying into an Indian society was simply smart business. It gave a trader immediate access to his wife’s many family connections, which often stretched across hundreds of miles and into many villages and towns; it bestowed a degree of legitimacy that fostered trade; and it offered a welcome measure of protection in an inherently dangerous profession. Traders were notoriously lax about the niceties. Many had “country wives” scattered throughout Indian country, in addition to a legally married spouse (white or Indian) back in the settlements. This practice was not confined to lowly traders; Sir William Johnson, New York’s powerful Indian agent, maintained a Mohawk “housekeeper” in addition to his wife, although the polygamous Iroquois understood the reality of the situation perfectly.
Cotton Mather disparaged the war parties attacking New England in 1690 as “half one, half t’other, half Indianized French, and half Frenchified Indians,” a sarcastic reflection of the fact that intermarriage was both common and frequently encouraged in New France, at least at lower levels of society. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac, who in 1701 founded Ville de Troit, “city of the straits,” hoped to bring female Indian converts to Detroit as wives for his French soldiers, but most such unions were the result of human nature, not policy, and had been going on since Samuel de Champlain arrived. The métis developed their own distinct culture and, in the western pays d’en haut, their own language, known as Michif, which blended French and Plains Cree.
Andrew Montour’s family—his mother, uncles, aunts, cousins, and siblings—were a singular example of the way the métis straddled multiple worlds. But while he had been walking the knife-edge between white and Indian, French and English all his life, by the time Montour returned from the Logstown council in 1748, he was looking to make something uniquely his own in a hostile world.
“Andrew Montour has pitched upon a place in the Proprietor’s manor, at Canataqueany,” a keyed-up Conrad Weiser wrote to council secretary Richard Peters in August of that year. “He Expects that the Government shall build him a house there, and furnish his family with necessarys. In short, I am at a lost what to say of him. He seams to be very hard to please.”
The “manor” to which Weiser was referring was not a house, but one of several reservation-like holdings the Penns had set aside, ostensibly for Indian use—in this case, one along Conodoquinet Creek, on the western shore of the Susquehanna, not far from Croghan’s establishment. It was initially created “to Accommodate the Shaawna Indians or such others as may think fit to Settle there.” (The eviction of the Lenape years earlier from a similar manor along Brandywine Creek, west of Philadelphia, was one of many long-nursed injuries the Delaware held.) The Shawnee shunned it, and white settlers were pouring in. At least officially, though, the land was to “Remain free to ye Indians for Planting & Hunting.” Chameleon-like, the multiethnic Montour chose to consider himself if not a Shawnee, at least an Indian.
Peters and Weiser were having none of it. The land was valuable, and Montour was prodded out of the Conodoquinet manor with his home half built. But with the stick, the Pennsylvanians—who saw a way to benefit from the situation—offered an eventual carrot: land north of the Kittatinny Ridge, given because Montour had “earnestly and repeatedly applied for Permission to live in some of the Plantations over the Blue Hills.”
Actually, Weiser, Peters, and Pennsylvania governor James Hamilton saw an opportunity to quiet Montour’s incessant requests for a home and to use him as a check on squatters who were flooding into land not yet purchased from the Indians. Montour’s commission noted that “many Persons are lately gone and continually going over the Kittochtinny Hills to settle . . . notwithstanding repeated Proclimations . . . If it was permitted you to go and reside there you cou’d be very serviceable to both this Government and to the Six Nations in keeping People off.”
Montour picked a sweet spot for his home, where the so-called New Path to the Ohio country crossed Sherman’s Creek, a deep and clear stream
full of trout that flowed into the Juniata River. Perhaps he moved there fully intending to keep his end of the bargain and police the frontier, evicting the white settlers who were drawn by the same good soils and game-rich forests that attracted him. If so, he changed his mind quickly; he was soon encouraging immigrants, white and Native, instead of evicting them. It seems Montour was already envisioning something else: a place where in-betweens, half-bloods, refugees, and the other impoverished riffraff on the colonial margins could make a life for themselves and a living for him—a mini-Penn, a small proprietor of sorts, collecting their rents and overseeing their settlements.
Montour was illiterate, and none of his words and thoughts have come down from his own hand. Historian James Merrell has reconstructed Montour’s dream largely from the métis’s land deals and from the reactions of those, like Weiser, who were at first puzzled, and later concerned, by his actions in the Juniata country. There is no evidence that Montour was imagining an egalitarian utopia of ethnic equality. More likely, he saw an opportunity to create a community of the kind of people he knew best and among whom he felt most comfortable, a community that would also provide him with the kind of means he’d never enjoyed. Montour may not have thought beyond the rude framework of such a plan, but it’s clear that what he and others were doing in the Susquehanna hinterlands was keenly unsettling to those in power.
Richard Peters worried that “the lower sort of People who are exceeding Loose & ungovernable . . . wou’d go over [the mountains] in spite of all measures and probably quarrel with the Indians.” Bad enough, Peters admitted, “but Mr. Weiser apprehends a worse Effect, that they will become tributary to the Indians & pay them yearly Sums for their Lycense to be there.” The idea of white settlers living under the political and economic control of Indians had been a colonial bugaboo since the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, since it would quickly erode the central, determinedly English character of any province. If such a circumstance were to come about, Peters fretted, not only would the Penns lose much of the revenue that now flowed into their coffers, but “the Proprietaries will not only have all the abandon’d People of the Province to deal with but the Indians too & . . . they will mutually support each other & do a vast deal of Mischief.”
The First Frontier Page 35