The First Frontier
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treatment of Indians by, [>]
view of Proclamation Line, [>]
Waterhouse, Edward, [>]–[>]
Wawaus (James Printer), [>]
Wawenock subgroup, [>] (n)–90 (n)
Waymouth, George
as the English Bashabes, [>] (n)
explorations along New England coast, [>] (n)
goals, [>], [>]
“grandstanding” by, [>]–[>]
refusal to visit Bashabes, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]
search for Northwest Passage, [>]–[>]
1605 expedition, [>]–[>], [>]–[>]
view of Natives, [>]
visit to Wapánahki village, [>]–[>]
Waymouth, William the younger, [>]
Weapemeoc, [>]
weapons
bow and arrow, [>]
Clovis-style spear points, [>] (n)
development of, cultural implications, [>]
European, Natives desire for, [>], [>]
firearms, appeal of, [>]
flintlock guns, [>], [>]
harquebus, [>]
matchlock muskets (“shot”), [>]
pikes and “shot,” [>]
spear points, [>]
Weinshauks (Fort Hill)
Endecott’s destruction of, [>]
Mason’s attack strategy, [>]–[>]
Pequot village at, [>], [>] f
Weiser, Ann Eva Feck, [>], [>], [>]
Weiser, Conrad
at the Albany Congress, [>]–[>]
anti-Catholic rhetoric, [>]
childhood and education, [>]–[>]
diplomatic missions, negotiations, [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]
at Easton treaty councils, [>], [>], [>]
efforts to discredit Teedyuscung, [>]–[>]
enforcement of the Walking Purchase, [>]–[>]
gravestone, [>]
marriage and family, [>]–[>]
on Ohio River and surrounding land, [>]
prosperity, [>], [>]–[>]
references to skin color, [>]
relationship with French, [>]
relationship with the Mohawk, [>]
relationship with Montour, [>], [>], [>], [>]
relationship with Moses the Song, [>]
relationship with Ohio Indians, [>]
relationship with the Quakers, [>]
relationship with Virginia, [>]
spiritual search/beliefs, [>], [>]
state historic park on farm of, [>]
trip to Aughwick by, [>]
will and death, [>]–[>]
work as interpreter/translator, [>], [>]
work as translator for Logan, [>]
Weiser, Johann (John), [>]–[>]
Weiserdorf, Schoharie County, NY, [>], [>]
Welsh settlers, [>]
wenooch (strangers), [>]
Wentworth, William, [>]
Wequash, [>]
werowance (powerful chief), [>], [>]
Werowocomoco (Powhatan’s capital), [>]
West, Benjamin, [>] f, [>] f, [>] f
West, Thomas (Lord De La Warr), [>], [>]
West India Company, [>]
West Jersey, [>]
Westo, [>]–[>]
Wetamo (Weetamoo), [>]–[>]
Wethersfield, CT, [>]
“Weymouth pines,” [>]
whaling expeditions, [>]
“white,” as term for Europeans, [>]
White, John, [>] f, [>]
Wickford, MA, [>]–[>]
Wiggan, Eleazer, [>]
wigwaol (birch bark canoe), [>]–[>], [>] (n)
Willey, Abigail, [>]
Willgan, Eleazar, [>]
William and Sarah (fishing boat), [>]–[>], [>]
William of Orange, King of England, [>]
“William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians” (West), [>] f
Williams, Eunice (daughter), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n)
Williams, Eunice (mother), [>]
Williams, Roger
Providence Plantations, [>]
relationship with Natives, [>]–[>], [>]
relationship with the English, [>], [>]
role during King Philip’s War, [>]–[>]
separatist beliefs, [>]–[>]
Williams, Samuel, [>]
Williams John, [>]–[>]
Will’s Creek (Cumberland, Maryland), [>], [>], [>]
Winthrop, John, [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]
Winthrop, John, Jr., [>]–[>], [>], [>]
Wiyot, [>]
wôbanakik, [>], [>]–[>]
wolastoqiyik, [>]
Wolcott, Roger, [>]
woleskaolakw (sea-going dugouts), [>]
Wolfe, James, [>] final battle with Montcalm, [>]
Wootenekanuske, [>]
Wright, John, [>]
Wyandot, [>]
Wyoming Valley, PA
Christian Indians of, [>]–[>], [>]–[>]
Mohawk view of, [>]
move of New Englanders to, [>]
removal of Forks Indians to, [>]
Susquehanna Company inroads into, [>]
Teedyuscung’s move to, [>]
Yamasee (Yamasis)
complaints about slave traders, [>]–[>]
counter attack on Tuscarora, [>]–[>]
declining slave trading, [>]
expectation of attack, [>] (n)
Indian slave trading by, [>], [>]
march against Tuscarora, [>]
Nairne’s and Wright’s different messages to, [>]–[>]
participation in repartimiento system, [>]
“preemptive” war against, rationale for, [>]
removal to Port Royal Sound, [>]
removal to St. Augustine, [>]–[>]
South Carolina war involving, [>]–[>]
as symbol, [>]
threats to from English plantations, [>]
Yamasee War, [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n)
Yates, James, [>]–[>]
yaupon tea (cassina), [>], [>] (n)
yaws, [>]
Yazoo, [>]
York, ME, [>], [>]
Younger Dryas, [>]
Yuchi, [>]–[>]
Yurok, [>]
Zúniga y la Cerda, José de, [>], [>]
Footnotes
1 Dates are, frankly, a bit of a mess during the period covered by this book. Because of the simplistic way in which the Julian calendar, dating back to 46 b.c., dealt with leap days, it was slightly out of synch with the astronomical year, and by the sixteenth century, the eleven-minute annual deficit had compounded dramatically into a serious problem. The Gregorian calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, solved this problem but created another. England (and its colonies), not being Catholic, chose not to comply with the “papist” reform until 1752. Then, by an act of Parliament, everyone jumped ahead eleven days in a single night, from September 2 to September 14. The same act also set the first day of the year as January 1, not Lady Day (March 25) as had previously been the case. Except where noted, all months and days in this book are as recorded at the time, and readers wishing to know the modern equivalent should add roughly ten days. Years prior to 1752 have, however, been corrected—that is, a date recorded as March 15, 1620 (Old Style) has been corrected to March 15, 1621 (New Style).
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2 In 2010, scientists announced that a small group of Icelanders carry an unmistakable genetic marker found in Asians and American Indians — proof, they said, that Viking explorers brought at least one Native woman back to Iceland.
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%3 As early as 1590, the Spanish cleric José de Acosta—seeking to explain how Natives had populated “the Indies,” as the New World was then known—speculated that the continents might meet, or come very close together, in the poorly explored high latitudes. The ancestors of the Indians might simply have walked to North America, he wrote, “some peopling the lands they found, and others seeking for newe
, in time they came to inhabite and people the Indies, with so many nations, people, and tongues as we see.”
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%4 Any lingering debate over the “Clovis First” hypothesis seemed extinguished in March 2011, when scientists announced the discovery of a site in Texas at which they had excavated a wide array of stone tools in sediment below a layer bearing Clovis tools. What’s more, the newly discovered spear points, which date back as far as 15,500 years ago, showed similarities to the Clovis style, suggesting that their makers could have been ancestors of the later Clovis culture.
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%5 In 2009, researchers found dramatic confirmation of this Paleo-Indian hunting technique. A hundred feet below the surface of Lake Huron, along what nine thousand years ago was a land bridge between Michigan and Ontario, they found camps, stone blinds in which hunters would hide, caribou “drive lanes” walled with stone and stretching for hundreds of yards, and stone inuksuit.
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%6 Hawkins and the Minion managed to limp back to Europe, where forty-five of his emaciated survivors died after gorging on too much meat. He finally reached England with only 15 of the 408 men who’d started out with him. Ten years later, by then a vice admiral, he and his once unreliable cousin Sir Francis Drake would lead the English fleet to victory against the Spanish Armada.
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%7 Starting in the nineteenth century, but especially since the 1960s, a myth has taken root that scalping was a European invention, to which Natives were introduced after contact. Although there is a certain appeal to this view of history—after all, the list of wrongs committed against American Indians by European invaders is long and bitter—it is demonstrably false. Scalping had an ancient and incontrovertible history throughout North America.Scalping leaves diagnostic cut marks in the skull, and such wounds have been found by archaeologists at sites dating back thousands of years in places such as Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and North Dakota. More recently, but still well before European contact, almost five hundred people were massacred at Crow Creek, South Dakota, during an attack around 1325, most of them mutilated and virtually all scalped after death. (In fact, a few of the victims had been scalped in some earlier attack and survived.)Scalps were hardly the only body parts taken as trophies. Entire heads were often removed, and early observers noted that scalps were sometimes preferred only when distance precluded taking the whole thing. The lodge of a Huron war captain, in fact, was known as otinontsiskiaj ondaon, “the house of cut-off heads.”Scalping, especially among Algonquians and other tribes in the Northeast, needs to be seen within the widespread cultural framework of ritual torture (and sometimes ritual cannibalism), enslavement, and the customary adoption of women, children, and occasionally men as replacements for lost relatives. Through torture, an enemy’s spiritual strength could be assumed by his captors—a force also tapped through the possession of a scalp, which was far more than a mere trophy.While the sheer horror of scalping initially appalled European immigrants, the practice was eventually embraced by the French and English as colonial military and political strategy. Scalp bounties were a perennially popular way of trying to fight fire with fire. While bounties were initially paid to Indian allies, frontiersmen of all races eventually lifted hair. According to one historian, “Scalping [became] as Anglo-American as shillings and succotash.”
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%8 The master of a second ship accompanying Smith’s fishing expedition, Thomas Hunt, enraged Smith by slipping off and kidnapping twenty-four Nauset and Patuxet Indians, whom he sold into Spanish slavery. One was Tisquantum, or Squanto, who spent the next five years in captivity, returning just in time to aid the Pilgrims.
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9 James Fenimore Cooper forever muddied the historical waters by appropriating the name of the ambitious Mohegan sachem for the title character in The Last of the Mohicans, changing his tribal identity to Mahican (a group that lived in the upper Hudson Valley) and transplanting him to the middle of the eighteenth century.
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10 Though not as large, a second, much more secret stronghold near what is now Exeter, Rhode Island, was in some respects even more impressive. Known as Queen’s Fort, for the female sachem Quaiapen, it was the work of a Narragansett mason named Stonewall John or John Wall Maker, who may also have helped design the Great Swamp fort. He built Queen’s Fort not from wood but from rock, elaborating on a naturally occurring hilltop system of caverns among glacial boulders, which he strengthened with walls and passageways.
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1 The Narragansett word sauncksquûaog was recorded by Roger Williams in 1643, along with other variants, including squaw for “woman” and keegsquaw for “young woman.” What is essentially the same root word, variously rendered as squa, esqua, skwe, and skwa, appears in most Algonquian languages. For example, a female werowance, or subchief, in Virginia was a werowancequa. In its original use, squaw was a simple descriptive term for a woman, with no derogatory connotation.
“Squaw” has become an enormously controversial and heavily freighted word, however, thanks to centuries of racist misuse. What’s more, a mistaken but persistent myth—that the word actually stems from one syllable of a crude, multisyllabic Mohawk term for female genitals—has taken root in recent years, despite rebuttals to the contrary from both professional linguists and Algonquian activists. (These include Smithsonian linguist Ives Goddard in “A True History of the Word ‘Squaw’” and Margaret Bruchac in “Reclaiming the Word ‘Squaw’ in the Name of the Ancestors.”) They point out that “squaw” was used in the early seventeenth century by English colonists recording Massachusett and other Algonquian languages—Europeans who had no contact with Iroquois speakers hundreds of miles inland. Regardless of the demeaning term it has morphed into today, “squa was an ancient and thoroughly decent word,” Goddard wrote.
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12 Unlike the United Colonies of New England, which was a voluntary confederation, the Dominion of New England was imposed by the Crown in an attempt to regain control over fractious and unruly colonies. Centralizing what had been local religious and secular authority in the person of the royal governor in chief, it was widely reviled, especially in Massachusetts, as an infringement of the traditional rights of the colonists.
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13 Keith was technically the deputy governor. The actual governors of provinces such as Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia often never left England. In their absence, the day-to-day business was conducted by a deputy or lieutenant governor, or by the president of the council, such as James Logan in Pennsylvania.
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14 The importance of gift giving in Indian diplomacy can hardly be overstated. One story, probably apocryphal but accurate in its message, is recounted by Weiser’s biographer, Paul A. W. Wallace. Weiser and Shikellamy were walking together along the Susquehanna when the Oneida, admiring the German’s flintlock, said, “I have had a dream. I dreamed that Tarachiawagon [Weiser’s Iroquois name] gave me a new rifle.” Knowing what was required of him, Weiser immediately gave the older man his gun—then turned the tables. “I, too, have had a dream,” he said, pointing to an island in the river. “I dreamed that Shikellamy gave me an island.” Trapped, the sachem complied—but then said, “Let us never dream again.”
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15 Cresap’s reputation depended on which side of the Maryland-Pennsylvania border you lived on. During the 1730s, boundary tensions between the two colonies flared almost into open war, exacerbated by hostility between Scots-Irish immigrants mostly from Maryland and Germans from Pennsylvania. Cresap was the leader of those Marylanders who, legally or not, occupied land west of the Susquehanna claimed by Pennsylvania, earning him the nickname “the Maryland Monster.” In 1736
, Pennsylvania forces besieged his cabin, burning it and taking Cresap into custody. Arriving in Philadelphia, Cresap famously told his jailer, “Damn it, Aston, this is one of the Prettyest Towns in Maryland.”
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16 Tanaghrisson fell ill while accompanying Weiser on the trip to Aughwick in September 1754, and although Scarouady managed to get him back to Harris’s Ferry, Tanaghrisson died there of an unknown illness. “The Indians here blame the French for his death, by bewitching him,” John Harris Jr. wrote to Hamilton, “for which they seem to threaten immediate Revenge.” Weiser blamed it on the sachem’s heavy drinking.
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17 The Memoirs is an intriguing little puzzle, apparently written in the 1760s but not published until 1800 in England. Because it is so unlike Stobo’s straightforward letters, he was probably not the author, but it was obviously penned by someone with access to firsthand information about him. Stobo biographer Robert C. Alberts considered it an overwrought but basically trustworthy account of Stobo’s exploits.
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18 “Rattlesnake colonel” was a dismissive term for a colonial irregular. One of Braddock’s men referred to Cresap as “a Rattle Snake Colonel and a D——d Rascal.”
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