The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Ohio Indians watched to see how they would respond: “The Eyes of all the Indians are fixed upon you,” William Trent advised Dinwiddie in August 1753. What he did now would determine whether the Indians joined the English against the French or the French against the English.74 Although Scarouady was unable to get Virginia or Pennsylvania to hold back their settlements in the Ohio country, the English seemed to pose less of a threat than the French. But the Indians needed guns, ammunition, and assistance if they were to mount effective resistance to the French invasion. In October they sent a speech written by a Mohawk named Jonathan Cayenquerigo, along with a wampum belt “dyed a bloody Colour,” to the governor of Pennsylvania, asking that he and the governor of Virginia take hold of it and come to their assistance.75 Pennsylvania’s governor failed to respond.76 Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie’s response was not exactly the demonstration of English support Tanaghrisson was looking for. The French and British had each signaled their intention to assert control of the Ohio country. The French sent a war party that killed and ate a Miami chief, and an army that built a string of forts. Virginia sent a messenger boy to ask that the French withdraw.

  Chapter 3

  Into Tanaghrisson’s World

  As a servant of the british empire and a shareholder in the Ohio Company, Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie peppered the home government and his fellow colonial governors with warnings that France was gearing up to seize the Ohio country, and he requested permission to build a fort there. In August 1753 the government ordered him to demand the withdrawal of French fortifications and begin construction of British fortifications. Dinwiddie wrote a letter, formally demanding that France abandon its forts and claims in the Ohio country, and looked for someone to deliver it to the French commander in the region. Twenty-one-year-old George Washington rode to the governor’s palace in Williamsburg and put himself forward for the mission.

  Young Washington had few qualifications for an assignment of that magnitude and no experience in Indian country. He would have found himself a novice in the geopolitics and Indian diplomacy of the Ohio Valley at any time. He entered the region at a moment when multiple agendas and ambitions among empires, colonies, tribes, and individuals generated a kaleidoscope of competition that challenged the knowledge and skills of even seasoned frontier operators. Men like Christopher Gist, Thomas Cresap, or George Croghan had the experience and contacts to operate in Indian country but lacked the gentry status necessary to represent Virginia in a formal diplomatic mission to a European power.1 Washington had the necessary status and was eager to go. Dinwiddie entrusted him with the mission.2

  His instructions were to travel northward to the Ohio, gather information about the French forts and forces in the Ohio country along the way, and then deliver Dinwiddie’s letter to the French officer commanding at Fort LeBoeuf. “The Lands upon the River Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are so notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great-Britain,” the letter declared, “that it is a Matter of equal Concern and Surprize to me, to hear that a Body of French forces are erecting Fortresses, and making Settlements upon that River, within his Majesty’s Dominions.” By what authority did the French invade British territory? Dinwiddie asked. It was his duty to demand that they depart peacefully and not interrupt the harmony that King George wished to maintain with King Louis. Dinwiddie trusted the French commander would receive Major Washington “with the Candour and Politeness natural to your Nation” and send him back “with an Answer suitable to my Wishes for a very long and lasting Peace between us.”3

  Washington left Williamsburg on the last day of October 1753. At Fredericksburg he engaged as his French interpreter Jacob Van Braam, a Dutch friend of the family who had once taught him fencing. At Alexandria and Winchester he acquired supplies, horses, and baggage. Traveling north to Wills Creek, he hired Christopher Gist as his guide, John Davison as Indian interpreter, Barnaby Currin (an Ohio Company employee and former Indian trader), and three others: John MacQuire, Henry Steward, and William Jenkins. Washington was a young man in a hurry; he wanted to take the most direct route, get the job done, and return home, mission accomplished. But diplomacy in Indian country was a slow and deliberate process, hedged about by time-consuming rituals and protocols. Emissaries did not always follow the most direct path: different paths could have different purposes; a peace mission would not travel a warpath, and attending to social, political, and ceremonial obligations sometimes involved diversions. Travel, like so much else in Indian country, was governed by relationships, not just weather and terrain.4

  According to Dinwiddie’s instructions, Washington was to proceed to Logstown, inform the resident half king Tanaghrisson, Scarouady, and other prominent chiefs of his errand, and get them to furnish warriors as an escort.5 Gist knew where to go and whom to meet. The group crossed the Allegheny River and proceeded to a spot on the Ohio where the Ohio Company had planned to build a fort, a site that Washington correctly assessed as less well situated than the Forks of the Ohio, where the French intended to build. More important, for the moment, was that it was also the home of Shingas, the noted chief of the Turkey or Unalachtigo division of the Delawares. Gist knew it would be important to have Shingas accompany them to Logstown as a representative of the Delawares and as an interpreter, so he and Washington called on the chief and invited him to a council there.6 Shingas agreed and went with Washington to Logstown, some forty miles farther on.

  Twenty-five days after leaving Williamsburg, Washington arrived at Logstown, only to learn that Tanaghrisson was at his hunting cabin some fifteen miles away. So Washington met with Scarouady and some other chiefs and informed them of his mission. Scarouady was a veteran Oneida war chief, whom Washington later described as “a man of Sense and Experience & a great friend to the English.”7 Like any other colonist embarking on diplomacy in Indian country, Washington had a rudimentary understanding of the role of tobacco as a gift and wampum as a means of communication and establishing trust. He gave Scarouady a string of wampum and a twist of tobacco and asked him to send for Tanaghrisson, which Scarouady promised to do by a runner in the morning.8

  The next morning four French deserters arrived in camp. Washington took the opportunity to quiz them about the disposition of French forces and the location of their forts. He learned the French had not completed their fort-building program that year because of the sieur de Marin’s death and sickness among the troops. The race for the Forks of the Ohio was still on.

  Tanaghrisson arrived at three in the afternoon. Taking Davison with him as interpreter, Washington immediately invited the chief to a private meeting in his tent. Although in his fifties and past the prime of life, Tanaghrisson would have been an impressive figure. An experienced warrior and diplomat, with tattoos on his face, chest, and arms, and probably wearing a mixture of Native and European clothing, he represented and juggled the overlapping and sometimes competing interests and agendas of the multiple nations in Ohio, the Iroquois League, and himself. Representing British and Virginian interests and perspectives, Washington could have had little understanding of the stakes and complexities of Indian diplomacy as practiced by Tanaghrisson.9

  Washington asked Tanaghrisson about his journey to speak with the now-dead sieur de Marin and the best route to take. Tanaghrisson recommended going by way of the Indian town at Venango and said that it would take five or six days’ hard travel. He then proceeded to give Washington his version of the meeting with Marin, who had received him “in a very stern Manner.” According to Tanaghrisson, he had told Marin the French were “the Disturbers in this Land.” The Indians would not have opposed them if the French had come as traders like the English, but they would not submit to armed invaders building forts. Tanaghrisson then laid out the Ohio Indians’ position and policy, and recited his statement clearly for Washington’s ears and Virginia’s benefit:

  Fathers, Both you and the English are white, we live in a Country between; therefore the Land belo
ngs to neither one nor t’other: But the Great Being above allowed it to be a Place of Residence for us; so Fathers, I desire you to withdraw, as I have done our Brothers the English; for I will keep you at Arms length: I lay this down as a Trial for both, to see which will have the greatest Regard to it, and that Side we will stand by, and make equal sharers with us. Our Brothers the English have heard this, and I come now to tell it to you, for I am not afraid to discharge you off this Land.10

  (When Dinwiddie read the account of Tanaghrisson’s speech, he thought it remarkable that he should have insisted that the land belonged to the Indians after having agreed at the Treaty of Logstown to let the English settle and build a fort there.11) Whether or not Tanaghrisson delivered his statement as boldly to a French commander in a French fort as he did to an impressionable young Virginian in his own village, he certainly conveyed the tone of the French response. “Child, you talk foolish [when] you say this Land belongs to you,” Marin told Tanaghrisson. “It is my Land, and I will have it.” He rejected Tanaghrisson’s speech and the wampum belt that accompanied it (“here is your Wampum, I fling it at you”), he dismissed the Indians as “Flies, or Musquitos,” and he repeated his determination to advance down the Ohio and sweep aside any opposition. His troops were as numerous “as the Sand upon the Sea Shoar,” he boasted.12

  More than thirty years later, preparing some “remarks” for his potential biographer David Humphreys, Washington said it was on this occasion that Tanaghrisson gave him the same name that Indians had given his great-grandfather, Conotocarious, which name “being registered in their Manner and communicated to other Nations of Indians, has been remembered by them ever since in all their transactions with him during the late war.” Why a Seneca in the 1750s should have remembered a name given first to John Washington by the Susquehannocks in the 1670s, or even have made the family connection, is unclear. It seems more likely that Washington remembered the name from family lore and took it for himself, a young man’s act of bravado. Despite its hostile connotations, Washington took pride in the name. He signed his message to Tanaghrisson “Washington or Conotocarious,” and he used the name writing to Andrew Montour two years later.13 It was not uncommon for Indian people to bestow names as a mark of respect, but doing so often carried obligations on the part of the recipient.14 Simply assuming his great-grandfather’s name—if that is what Washington did—presumably carried less significance. However, by the time Washington penned his remarks for Humphreys, “the late war” referred to the Revolution, when the Iroquois did indeed refer to him as the “Town Destroyer.”

  Washington and Tanaghrisson met again the next day in the village longhouse, accompanied by Gist, Scarouady, and other chiefs. With Davison interpreting, Washington informed the chiefs of his mission and asked their advice and assistance in continuing his journey. Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie esteemed them as friends and allies, and “desired me to apply to you for some of your young Men to conduct and provide Provisions for us on our Way, and be a safeguard against those French Indians who have taken up the Hatchet against us,” Washington said, confirming his words with a string of wampum. After the chiefs consulted, Tanaghrisson stood up and gave a guarded response. “We shall put Heart in Hand and speak to our Fathers, the French, concerning the Speech they made to me, and you may depend that we will endeavour to be your Guard,” he assured Washington. He intended to send an escort of Mingoes, Shawnees, and Delawares, he said. But he was not about to be rushed into an English alliance that might mean conflict with the Ojibwa, Ottawa, and Huron allies of the French. “Brother, as you have asked my Advice, I hope you will be ruled by it, and stay until I can provide a Company to go with you.” Protocol demanded that Tanaghrisson retrieve the wampum belt that symbolized friendship with the French and return it to them and he wanted to get the Delawares and Shawnees to do the same with the belts the French had given them. That would take some time. “The French Speech-Belt is not here, I have to go for it to my hunting-Cabbin; likewise, the people which I have ordered in are not yet come, nor cannot till the third Night from this; till which Time, Brother, I must beg you to stay.” Washington was anxious to be on his way and protested that his “business required the greatest expedition,” but there was little he could do. “As I found it was impossible to get off without affronting them in the most egregious Manner,” he noted in his diary, “I consented to stay.” Things would proceed according to Tanaghrisson’s timetable, not Washington’s.15

  Early the next morning, November 27, Tanaghrisson set off for his cabin on Beaver Creek. Before he left he dispatched runners to the Shawnee chiefs and sent for Shingas to bring the Delaware wampum belt. He returned the following evening and came with Scarouady and two other chiefs to Washington’s tent. They asked “to know on what Business we were going to the French.” Washington had expected the question and, especially after hearing Tanaghrisson’s forceful speech that the Ohio country belonged to nether Britain nor France, knew better than to announce he was carrying a letter asserting Britain’s claim to the region. Instead, he gave “as satisfactory Answers” as possible. His answers “allayed their Curiosity a little” but may also help explain the subsequent lack of enthusiasm for assisting his mission. Scarouady then divulged that an Indian had brought news a few days ago that the French had held a council with the Mingoes, Delawares, and other nations at Venango. Captain Philippe-Thomas Chabert de Joncaire, “their Interpreter in Chief, living at Venango, and a Man of Note in the Army,” told them the French soldiers had intended to come down this river this fall but, the waters growing cold, had gone into winter quarters instead. However, the Indians should expect them in the spring and had better not interfere “unless they had a Mind to draw all their Force upon them.” The French expected that it would take three years to defeat the English, but if the English proved equally strong the two powers would join forces against the Indians “to cut them all off, and divide the Land between them.” The French had lost a few soldiers but had enough reinforcements to make them “Masters of the Ohio.”16

  Tanaghrisson and Scarouady came early the next morning and requested another day’s delay. The Shawnee chiefs had not brought their wampum belt, and no renunciation of their French alliance would be valid without it, Tanaghrisson explained. But the belt would certainly arrive tonight. Recognizing that returning the wampum was essential to “shaking of[f] all Dependence upon the French,” Washington agreed to stay, “as I believed an Offense offered at this Crisis, might be attended with greater ill Consequence, than another Day’s Delay.” Tanaghrisson explained that the Delawares did not have their wampum belt at Logstown either; it was in the hands of Custaloga, a chief at Venango. And Shingas would not be able to accompany the Virginians on their mission. He said his wife was ill, but Washington believed the real reason was “Fear of the French.”17 Washington must have suspected that he was getting the runaround. His diplomatic mission could not proceed without the appropriate wampum belts, but clearly the Delawares and Shawnees were dragging their feet and in no hurry to return their belts and sever diplomatic relations with the French. In this instance, the affair of the wampum belts was, literally, a shell game.

  Washington had his eyes on the French and what they were doing—or at least, prompted by Tanaghrisson, what he thought they were doing. The Shawnees, Delawares, and other Ohio nations had their eyes on the both the French and the English. They were also watching the Iroquois, who, they assumed, would follow their own interests and sacrifice theirs as they had in the past. They were also taking note of developments to the north, an area barely on Washington’s radar. There, many Anishinaabeg—Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis—and other Great Lakes Indians were tied to the French by bonds of marriage and trade and, as they had demonstrated when they destroyed the Miami village at Pickawillany, increasingly hostile to the English. The Iroquois, Shawnees, and Delawares had no wish to come to blows with the Anishinaabeg. The Shawnees also were angry and distrustful of the English after South Carolinia
ns in the spring of 1753 captured and held hostage half a dozen Shawnee warriors on their way to raid the Catawbas.18 Delawares had tolerated their position as “women” in the Iroquois Confederacy so long as the Six Nations and their British backers offered them military protection and access to trade goods. Now, with the French and their Indian allies invading the Ohio country, and Onondaga clinging to a precarious neutrality, western Delawares were reassessing their relationship with both the Iroquois League and the British, neither of whom displayed much evidence of being able to protect them.19 It is unlikely Washington knew much about these shifting dynamics.

  By late evening the Shawnees still had not turned up, but now, Tanaghrisson said, it should not delay their journey. In Washington’s hearing, he recited the speeches that were to be repeated by an elderly Cayuga chief named Jeskakake when he gave up the belt and terminated their alliance to the French. He also handed Jeskakake a string of wampum that Shingas had sent for Custaloga to take and give back to the French. He then gave another “very large String of black [purple] and white Wampum, which was to be sent immediately to the Six Nations, if the French refused to quit the Land at this Warning; which was the third and last Time, and was the Right of this Jeskakake to deliver.” In other words, if the French failed to heed the traditional third warning to abandon their posts and leave the Ohio country, Jeskakake would carry the belt to Onondaga so the council could issue a declaration of war. Presumably, Gist was kept busy explaining to his young charge the different purposes of the different belts and the diplomatic intricacies that determined who delivered what wampum to whom and with what meaning.20 This was a world where wampum spoke louder than words, and words carried no weight unless accompanied by wampum. Washington needed to learn the language of the belts.21