The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  The treaty was good news, too, for Virginian land speculators. Virginia’s representative at the treaty was Dr. Thomas Walker, the veteran explorer, surveyor, and head of the Loyal Land Company. Walker claimed he was there only as an observer, but he had important agendas to push. His great-grandson later said he was “as great a land-monger as Genl. Washington.”80 Andrew Lewis also made the journey to Fort Stanwix but left before the treaty got under way, hurrying home for the treaty with the Cherokees. If Johnson had obeyed his instructions, the boundary would have stopped at the Kanawha; instead, no doubt prompted by Walker behind the scenes, he pushed the boundary down to the Tennessee River. It seemed that by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Johnson and Walker had opened Kentucky for Virginia to claim.81

  In 1763 the Royal Proclamation had set the Indian boundary line at the Appalachian Mountains. Five years later the Treaty of Fort Stanwix effectively moved it hundreds of miles to the west. George Washington was back in business.

  Chapter 9

  “A good deal of Land”

  The treaty of fort stanwix set off a land rush. Arthur Lee resubmitted the Mississippi Land Company’s 1763 petition to the king.1 Thomas Walker revived the dormant Loyal Land Company. Thomas Jefferson, for whom Walker had acted as guardian after his father died, got in on the act, joined two separate land companies, and set about securing 7,000 acres of land west of the Appalachians, although he had no interest in moving west himself.2 And George Washington redoubled his efforts to get as much good land as he could. In the eight years between the Treaty of Fort Stanwix and the outbreak of the Revolution, as Americans moved from trying to preserve their independence within the British Empire to seeking independence from the British Empire,3 Washington’s main concern was acquiring land he thought was due to him—and some he knew was not. Unfortunately, the lands Washington, Walker, and Jefferson coveted were bitterly contested. The Shawnees and Cherokees both claimed the territory ceded at Fort Stanwix as hunting grounds and denied the Iroquois had any right to sell it. Shawnees tried to build a multitribal coalition to resist the British-Iroquois land deal.4 Rival colonies and companies competed for the same lands.

  The Stanwix Treaty seemed to reopen the opportunity for realizing Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie’s promise of 200,000 acres to the Virginia regiment and the Royal Proclamation’s promise of 5,000 acres to “reduced” officers who had served in the war. Dinwiddie’s proclamation had offered land bounties to encourage men to enlist; it did not, as noted, apply to commissioned officers, and Washington was not a “reduced” officer—he resigned his commission long before his regiment was disbanded after the Cherokee War. Undaunted, he renewed his demands that Dinwiddie’s promise be met for officers and soldiers alike, and he pressed his claim to be included in the proclamation’s provision.

  He petitioned Governor Botetourt and the Executive Council to implement the land bounties Dinwiddie had promised. He argued that only the three hundred officers and men who had joined the Virginia Regiment between February and July 1754—in other words, Washington and the men who served under him in the Fort Necessity campaign—were entitled to the land bounties, thereby excluding “the multitude which afterwards engaged in the course of a Ten years War.” His petition also included “some self-serving suggestions under the guise of helpful hints.” He urged that some of the bounty lands be set aside along the Monongahela River, and the rest along the Kanawha—in the area William Crawford had already surveyed for him. Since the Ohio territory in question was nominally part of Augusta County in 1769, and the county surveyor (who was Andrew Lewis’s brother, Thomas) would no doubt be busy with other duties, Washington recommended that another surveyor be appointed. Clearly, he had Crawford in mind for the position. The country was “settling very fast,” Washington pointed out, and poor people “swarming with large Families” would soon occupy all the fertile areas, “whilst none but barren Hills, & rugged Mountains, will be left to those, who have toild, and bled for the Country, & whose right to a part of it is fixed by the strongest Assurances which Government coud give them so long ago as 1754.”5

  Botetourt and the council bought it. With a watchful eye on Pennsylvanian traders and settlers who were claiming lands west of the Alleghenies, the day after Washington petitioned, the council granted permission for Washington and the officers and soldiers who had joined the Virginia Regiment prior to July 4, 1754 (the day Washington surrendered Fort Necessity), to locate 200,000 acres of land on the Great Kanawha and other rivers. Washington was to apply to the president and masters of the College of William and Mary, who licensed county agents, to appoint a surveyor to determine the exact location of the lands. Washington took out an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette requesting the officers and soldiers to submit their claims to him so that he could lay them all before the governor and council. He then moved quickly to exert his influence and secure Crawford’s appointment as surveyor.

  Other Virginians also wanted to increase their share of ceded lands. They objected to the Treaty of Hard Labor with the Cherokees. Walker of the Loyal Land Company, Andrew Lewis of the smaller Greenbrier Company, and others wanted to redraw the northern boundary of Cherokee country to legitimize their claims to lands in Kentucky.6 The House of Burgesses petitioned the British government, complaining that if the line stood, lands already granted by regular patent “would be entirely dismembered from this Colony, allotted to the Indians, and entirely lost to the Proprietors,” who, after all, had been authorized by law and encouraged by Governor Dunmore “to explore and settle this new Country, at the Risque of their Lives, and at a great Expence.” Virginians wanted to extend their boundary with North Carolina westward and effectively annex Kentucky and all land northward to the mouth of the Kanawha River that had been ceded at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.7

  Confronted with an invasion of white people into their hunting territories who killed their deer, Cherokees opposed the new boundary proposed by Virginia. Superintendent John Stuart warned that continued actions by “adventurers from your colony” and a further cession of Cherokee land could cause “a general rupture with and coalition of all the tribes on the continent.”8 Nevertheless, with Virginian land speculators exercising their influence and Virginian agents at work, Stuart met with Attakullakulla, Ostenaco, Oconostota, and other Cherokees at Lochaber, South Carolina, in 1770 and negotiated a new treaty that revised the Treaty of Hard Labor and moved the boundary line west.9 Then a Virginian surveyor and speculator, Colonel John Donelson, got Cherokee delegates to agree to move that line west to the Kentucky River.10

  The new boundary lines formed by the Fort Stanwix and Cherokee treaties pointed like an arrow into the heart of Indian country, but the lines did not hold, and neither did the peace. Escalating rents and hard times drove thousands of people from the Celtic borderlands of Britain to America. In a society where nineteen out of twenty people lived by farming, the influx put pressure on agricultural lands in the East and sent migrants west onto lands the Shawnees and Cherokees still regarded as theirs. Alexander Cameron, British agent among the Cherokees, described to Superintendent John Stuart the pattern of encroachment that remained a feature of American expansion through Washington’s presidency and beyond: “The white people upon the frontier are all inveterate against the Indians because they have any land left them. They drive their cows and horses over the line and when any of them are stolen they exclaim against the Indians and would have them all cut off, although upon every little alarm they are ready to desert their interest and all that is dear to them.”11

  Washington denounced such violence against Indians, not least because it sparked hostilities that threatened his land business. In the summer of 1769, three Mingoes returning from a raid against southern tribes were killed on the South Branch of the Potomac. “It seems this Murder (for it deserves no other name) was committed on slight provocation,” Washington wrote John Armstrong. He was not optimistic about the chances of bringing the perpetrators to justice, but fortunately, since non
e of the Indians survived to tell the tale, “we, in consequence, may represent it in as favorable a light, as the thing will admit of, having the knowledge of it confined to ourselves.”12

  With considerable understatement Indians told the governors of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland in 1771: “We find your people are very fond of our rich land.” Settlers had crossed the mountains, then the Fort Stanwix treaty line, and would soon be crossing the Ohio; if the governors could not restrain their people, the chiefs would be unable to control their young men, “for we assure you the black clouds begin to gather fast in this country.” Indians who had watched as nation after nation was destroyed saw that “it must be soon their turn also to be exterminated.”13 In 1768 few white people lived in the region that became Kentucky; by the early 1780s there would be more than twenty thousand.14

  The Treaty of Fort Stanwix left Pennsylvania’s western boundary undetermined and the area still contested between Virginia and Pennsylvania. The claims of the Ohio Company became entangled with the claims of a group of Philadelphia merchants who described themselves as the “Suffering Traders” in an area known as the Indiana Grant. The original group of traders expanded to include British politicians and speculators, and their claim for reparations for losses sustained during the Indian war became absorbed into a much larger project that reached the highest levels of government. George Mercer, in London to push the Ohio Company’s claim, was “bought off,” and the Suffering Traders joined forces with Benjamin Franklin, Sir William Johnson, George Croghan, and influential individuals in England to form a new consortium, known as the Grand Ohio Company or Walpole Company. It planned to develop a new western colony called Vandalia in the ceded lands south of Ohio and petitioned for a grant of 20 million acres within the Stanwix cession that would have swallowed up the Indiana Grant and embraced what is now West Virginia and northeastern Kentucky.15 Washington and the Ohio Company complained, but they had been beaten at their own game. Meanwhile, settlers who claimed Indian land by occupying, clearing, and defending it felt little obligation to respect the mammoth paper claims of wealthy elites far from the scene.

  Washington was still impatient to secure the land while he could. Having obtained permission to survey lands he had already effectively surveyed, he summoned meetings of veterans, induced them to select Crawford as surveyor of the bounty lands, and collected money from them to cover their share of the surveying costs. He also set about buying up the claims of fellow officers when he could get them on the cheap and without making the purchases in his own name.16 Anticipating that the government would soon make a decision on whether officers and soldiers who were promised land by the Royal Proclamation would be permitted to acquire it west of the Allegheny Mountains, Washington enlisted the help of his brother Charles to discover if any of the officers would sell their rights and at what price. He doubted any of them would sell “upon such terms as I woud buy,” because with so many competing grants, “I woud hardly give any Officer a button for his Right,” but surely some who needed “a little ready money, would gladly sell.” He asked Charles to approach them “in a joking way” and find out what they would take for their grants. If he could buy them for as little as £7 or less per 1,000 acres, he was to do so under his own name and not let it be known that George had “any concern therein.” By one argument or another, Washington purchased from his former comrades lots totaling more than 5,100 acres “for a pittance.” Through grant and purchase combined, he would acquire over 20,000 acres.17

  In October 1770 Washington, in company with Dr. James Craik, William Crawford, several others, and their servants, set out on another trip across the Alleghenies and down the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha, to explore and mark possible sites for future surveys of bounty lands.18 Traveling by way of Fort Necessity and Braddock’s Field, they viewed 1,600 acres of land Crawford had selected for Washington on the Youghiogheny and spent a day at Crawford’s home. Subsequent visitors to Crawford’s home noted their host was not a model of virtue. In January 1773 Rev. David McClure preached a sermon at Stewart’s Crossings and after the meeting rode home with Crawford. “The Captain was very hospitable,” McClure recorded in his diary. “He is from Virginia.” And then, in Latin: “Holy things are not much observed in his house. He has a virtuous wife, but, alas, he at this time lives in fornication; and the scandalous woman, according to what they say, he keeps not far from his house.” Two years later Nicholas Cresswell, a young Englishman traveling in the Ohio country with hopes (vain, it turned out) of securing enough land to establish himself as a gentleman farmer, met Crawford at his mistress’s house. No prude when it came to relations with the opposite sex, Cresswell noted in his diary that “this woman is common to him, his brother, half brother, and his own Son, and is his wife’s sister’s daughter at the same time.” Cresswell pronounced them “a vile set of brutes.”19 If Crawford’s creative domestic arrangements were in place in 1770, Washington made no mention in his journal; one wonders what Martha would have thought of it all.

  At Fort Pitt—described by Cresswell five years later as “small, about 30 houses, the people chiefly in Indian trade”20—Washington dined with George Croghan. The two had quarreled back in 1754, but now Washington was mending fences with a view to advancing his land schemes in the region, and Croghan had land claims he wanted to sell, despite—or because of—the fact that the British government rejected them. Working through Crawford, Washington discussed buying 15,000 acres of Croghan’s land, as well as the possibility of purchasing his interest in the Walpole Company. But Crawford could not find land of the quality and quantity Washington wanted, and Croghan’s claims were all too shaky. Finally, Washington decided against it.21

  At Fort Pitt, a Seneca chief named White Mingo and a group of Six Nations chiefs came “to bid me welcome to this Country.” White Mingo said they remembered Washington from when he went as an ambassador to the French, and they hoped that past differences were now resolved and forgotten. He gave him a string of wampum so “the People of Virginia wou’d consider them as friends & Brothers linked together in one chain.”22

  Washington took on Joseph Nicholson as interpreter and two Indians, an older man called the Pheasant and a young warrior.23 Departing Fort Pitt, they canoed down the Ohio and made their surveys of land between the Little and Great Kanawha Rivers (lands also claimed by the Walpole Company, which agreed to allow the regimental claims24). Croghan and Alexander McKee, the British Indian agent at Fort Pitt, accompanied them for the first day, as far as Logstown.25 There, they heard rumors (unfounded, it turned out) that Indians had killed two traders downriver. They saw a war party of sixty Iroquois heading south to raid the Catawbas.26 Washington filled his journal with detailed descriptions of the rich lands he saw, including those “which Captn. Crawford had taken up for me.”27

  Passing the mouth of the Kanawha into what is now West Virginia at the end of October, the group came across the camp of an Indian hunting party. Washington recognized their leader as “an old acquaintance, he being one of the Indians that went with me to the French in 1753.” Then Guyasuta was “the young hunter”; now he was “one of the Six Nations Chiefs, and the head of them upon this River,” a seasoned warrior and diplomat to whom it was necessary to pay “our Compliments.” In the intervening years, Guyasuta had fought in the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War and led attacks on English forts and settlements. David McClure, who saw him a couple of years later, said he looked every inch a warrior, with “a very sensible countenance & dignity of manners.” For his part, Washington was now himself a seasoned Indian fighter and land speculator; he had twice invaded the Ohio country with British armies, had defended the Virginia backcountry against Indian raids, and relentlessly coveted Indian lands. Nevertheless, Guyasuta was pleased to see him and treated his party “with great kindness,” sharing buffalo meat and insisting they spend the night. The next morning, he expressed the Indians’ desire for trade with Virginia and asked Washington to inform
the governor of their friendly disposition toward white people. Washington complained that “the tedious ceremony which the Indians observe in their Councellings & speeches” delayed their departure until 9:00 a.m. Eight days later, Washington’s party came upon Guyasuta’s hunting camp again, now located on Big Sandy Creek. Again Washington was detained the rest of the day by “the Kindness and Idle ceremony of the Indians,” but he put the time to good use, “having a good deal of conversation with him on the Subject of Land.” Washington wanted to know the distances from the Great Kanawha to the Falls, where the bottom lands were located, and where the soil was rich.28 (George Washington Parke Custis later narrated an account, “received from the lips of Dr. Craik,” of a meeting with “an old Indian” who, recognizing his adoptive father as the soldier who had been invulnerable to Indian bullets at Braddock’s defeat, prophesied his future destiny in conventional “Indian speak.”29 Washington’s journal makes no mention of such an encounter.)

  Washington knew what he was looking for, and so did his Indian guides. At one point, the Pheasant told him about a fine piece of land with a beautiful location for a house and, “in order to give me a more lively Idea of it,” sketched it out in chalk on a deerskin. The house would sit on top of a hill overlooking a large stretch of level land, watered by a creek that ran parallel to the Ohio and attracted herds of buffalo that had worn tracks coming to drink.30 Like other Indians who guided explorers, surveyors, and speculators through their country, the old man seems to have willingly or unwittingly assisted in staking out the best lands for colonizers, but Washington had no way of knowing, and nor do we, if and when the guides diverted his attention from other lands or hurried him past sites that held cultural significance for Native people.