The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  Washington’s travels to the Great Kanawha and its tributaries took him past extensive ancient earthworks; the area known as Washington’s Bottom is particularly dense with prehistoric mounds. Washington could hardly have missed these mounds, noted a former director of the National Park Service, Roger Kennedy; “these earthen buildings were by far the largest architecture he had ever seen or ever would see.” But if he wrote about them in his journals, his words were lost when the pages of his diary for that part of his journey were mutilated, “so chewed by rodents as to be intelligible only in patches.”31

  Reaching the village of Mingo Town on November 17, Washington and his party were compelled to remain there for three days until horses for baggage and riding arrived. The delay gave Washington an opportunity to pen some rare but brief observations on Indian life in his journal. He noted the Indians had hunting camps and cabins all along the river conveniently located for transporting their skins to market by water, and they were all “(even there women)” dexterous in handling canoes. He recorded a cursory description of their subsistence cycle. They would set out in family hunting bands in the fall and move their camps from place to place, traveling two or three hundred miles from their towns by the spring. In May the women were busy planting, “the Men at Market, & in Idleness, till the Fall again; when they pursue the same course again. During the Summer Months they live a poor & perishing life.” The Shawnees, Delawares, and Mingoes living on the upper Ohio viewed white settlers on the river “with an uneasy & jealous Eye, and do not scruple to say that they must be compensated for their Right if the People settle thereon, notwithstanding the Cession of the Six Nation’s thereto” at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.32

  Washington viewed frontier settlers with an equally uneasy eye. They viewed him and his kind much the same way. Washington and other elites had to establish their claims to large tracts of land by going through the proper channels—or at least give the appearance of doing so—and have the lands surveyed and registered. Settlers employed less formal and more violent methods of establishing ownership on the basis of physical occupation. They cleared fields and built fences and cabins with the axe, defended their new property with the gun, and often defied and disputed the legal claims and surveys of their “betters.”33 Washington noted with some alarm that people from Virginia and other colonies were already exploring and marking out all the valuable lands on Redstone Creek and the waters of the Monongahela and as far down the Ohio as the Little Kanawha. He expected they would reach or even pass the Great Kanawha the following summer and be difficult to deal with. They threatened his plans: “A few Settlements in the midst of some of the large Bottoms, woud render it impractable to get any large qty. of Land Together,” he noted in his diary.34

  Toward the end of his journey, Washington met Dr. John Connolly, George Croghan’s nephew. Connolly lived in Pittsburgh and shared Croghan’s and Washington’s lust for western lands. Washington described him as a sensible and intelligent man who had traveled widely over the western country by land and water. By his own account, Connolly had fought in Pontiac’s War and then, after peace was established, explored the newly acquired territory, visiting the various tribes and studying their different manners and customs. He told Washington there were excellent lands for settlement on the Shawnee River, as well as in the Illinois country, and he was eager to attract families to live there.35 Washington reached Mount Vernon on December 1, 1770, after an absence of nine weeks and one day.36 He had traveled hundreds of miles, and he had seen a lot of land.

  Back home, he continued to enlarge his holdings and buy up grants. On December 6 Crawford wrote to inform Washington that he had bought for him Great Meadows, the site of his defeat and ignominious surrender at Fort Necessity in 1754.37 Washington made overtures to enlisted men about selling their bounty land, warning them that that there was a good “chance of our never getting the Land at all.” John Posey, who had served as a captain in the Virginia Regiment, was entitled to 3,000 acres, but the land “being inconvenient for him to seek after,” he decided to sell his rights to it “for a certain Sum agreed upon with the said George Washington.”38 Others did the same. Washington even tried without success to get Captain Robert Stobo and Jacob Van Braam, who had both been taken as hostages by the French after the surrender at Fort Necessity, to sell him their grants, but only, he wrote George Mercer, if “they will take a trifle for it, and more than a trifle circumstanced as things are, I will not give.”39 By such tactics, Washington purchased hundreds of bounties from needy veterans who exchanged the uncertain prospect of obtaining land in the future for a small amount of cash in hand, and he bought up valuable riverfront properties.

  In March 1771 Washington held a meeting with the officers of the first Virginia Regiment in Winchester, where he had commanded them during the French and Indian War. After he debriefed them on his trip and Crawford’s initial surveys, the officers authorized Washington to instruct Crawford to carry out the surveys he had begun on the Kanawha as soon as possible and to give him orders from time to time to give as needed to complete the work.40 In his surveys for Washington, Crawford included only rich bottom lands, thereby infringing a Virginia law that grants of Crown land be no more than three times as long as they were deep. Then, back at Mount Vernon, he and Washington prepared finished drafts, or “redrew the surveys in accord with the notes that Washington had carefully made the year before.” With Washington alone knowing which bottom lands were the best in the tracts, they presented the surveys to the governor’s council for approval and showed them to the officers of the Virginia Regiment.41 As Ron Chernow writes, “Washington proved a natural manager of this enterprise and undertook the necessary surveying work, but his situation was fraught with conflicts of interest, and the entire episode would be shadowed by accusations of sharp dealing from his former men.”42

  Virginian expansion received a boost in September 1771, when John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, arrived to succeed Governor Botetourt, who had died the year before. A former Jacobite who had made his peace with and made a place for himself in the Hanoverian regime, Dunmore had been building a fortune in real estate as governor of New York, and he accepted transfer to Virginia’s governorship reluctantly.43 Instead of enforcing the Crown’s restrictions on western settlement, he befriended men like Walker and Washington, who claimed and coveted tens of thousands of acres beyond the Appalachians and were willing to share part of their claims in appreciation of his support. Dunmore shared their concern that the Walpole Company associates might secure a grant for their colony of Vandalia, and he encouraged settlers near the Forks of the Ohio to assert Virginia’s claim to the area against Pennsylvania.44

  Washington never joined the Vandalia scheme, and he feared the organization threatened his own land schemes. But he could hardly resist the lure of land wherever the opportunity beckoned, as a letter written to George Mercer on November 22, 1771, betrayed: “Colo. Cresap who I have seen since his return from England gave it to me as his opinion, that, some of the Shares in the New (Charter) Government on the Ohio might be bought very Cheap from some of the present Members—are you of this Opinion? Who are they that would sell? And at what price do you think a share could be bought?”45

  The Royal Proclamation of 1763 had authorized colonial governors to award land grants to veterans as a way of settling the colonies in Florida and Nova Scotia, but Dunmore interpreted it to include lands purchased at Fort Stanwix.46 Washington, individually and in petitions from the officers of the Virginia Regiment, lobbied Dunmore to permit the surveys for veterans’ claims, and appeared in person in the council chamber to present his case. In November 1771 the governor and council ordered the 200,000 acres of bounty land distributed and awarded the tracts, which ranged from 400 acres for each of fifty-two private soldiers who had made claims to 15,000 acres for each of three field commanders, including Washington. Crawford returned to the region to carry out the surveys and by fall 1772 had surveyed thirteen tracts totaling about
128,000 acres.47

  Washington feared—and complained to Dunmore in June 1772—that squatters were taking advantage of the ban on westward expansion to establish homesteads in territory that was now officially off-limits, “daily & hourly settling on the choice spots.” When and if the proclamation was repealed, the squatters would then solicit legal title directly from the British government on the basis of prior occupancy at the expense of officers and soldiers who had suffered in the cause of their country. Of course, such a development would also cut out middlemen and land speculators like Washington.48

  These were worrying times for Virginian planter-speculators. By the early 1770s, tightening credit and falling prices aggravated a system that seemed to keep them permanently in debt and threaten their way of life, status, and personal independence. It was a system of dependence Washington had railed against. A financial crash in England in 1772 hit tobacco farmers hard: after borrowing heavily from British merchants to expand their acreage, they suddenly faced demands for repayment of loans. As debts mounted and British restrictions increased, Virginia planters began to see economic independence as a prerequisite to liberty.49 Chief Justice Lord Mansfield’s ruling in Somerset v. Stewart in 1772, that an African slave from the colonies who set foot in England became free and could not be returned to slavery, fueled paranoia about impending imperial threats to Virginian planters’ property rights.50 Many began to think radical thoughts and to organize.

  They also continued to look west for land. Tobacco agriculture always demanded more land, not least in hard times: if prices were low, planters responded by growing more tobacco on more land with more slaves. New land also offered opportunities to generate additional income by renting or selling it to farmers. In 1772 the British government pulled its troops from outposts like Fort Pitt and Fort Chartres to deal with growing tensions in the cities on the seaboard, leaving a power vacuum in the trans-Appalachian West. In the ensuing anarchy, Virginians and Pennsylvanians almost went to war over the Forks of the Ohio. Colonists invaded Indian lands without restraint. Rival land companies and speculators, land jobbers who acted as agents scouting out lands for companies and speculators, and frontier settlers scrambled to grab what they could, taking possession by force if necessary. In a world that was becoming increasingly disorderly, formal claims looked increasingly vulnerable.51

  On Wednesday, November 4, 1772, in Williamsburg, Washington submitted a petition to Dunmore and the council on behalf of himself and the officers and soldiers of the Virginia Regiment, claiming land under Dinwiddie’s proclamation in 1754. He dined that day with Dunmore; on Thursday he dined with Speaker Peyton Randolph, and on Friday with members of the council. He wanted them to allow him more surveys and in the remaining surveys to substitute better tracts of land for the hilly and rocky parts of the originally designated areas. He had not risked his life in war for poor land: “It is the cream of the Land … which stimulates men to such kind of Enterprise,” he argued. The councilors rejected his request, but on Saturday they approved patents for land Crawford had surveyed. Washington secured four tracts totaling 20,147 acres—15,000 on account of his own claim and the rest in claims he had purchased from others in his regiment—more than 10 percent of Dinwiddie’s total grant.52 And he was not finished. The next month Dunmore approved a grant to Washington of 10,990 acres on the left bank of the Kanawha River near its confluence with the Ohio.53

  Washington’s share and the shares he acquired from others amounted to more than 23,000 acres along a forty-mile stretch of the Great Kanawha River and almost 10,000 acres on the banks of the Ohio.54 He planned to establish a permanent settlement on his lands nearer the mouth of the Great Kanawha. His title to all this was cloudy, but he was, in the historian Charles Ambler’s words, “to all intents and purposes a modern real estate promoter, promising everything to everybody.”55 And his land was prime real estate. No other claimant received land that was “so good as your Land,” Crawford told him; the lots Washington acquired were “much the best on the hole River.” By manipulating the system Washington secured “the cream of the Country” for himself.56

  Some veterans protested. When some of the officers went to the Kanawha to see the bounty tract for themselves, they were “a good deel shagreened” that Washington’s land was almost all prize bottomland, as was Dr. Craik’s land. Never one to take criticism well, Washington was incensed. He responded to an “impertinent letter” from Major George Muse, who had been a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia Regiment, saying he must have been drunk when he wrote it and that he was an “ungrateful & dirty” fellow. In fairness to Washington, he had a history with Muse. Accused of cowardice for withdrawing his company without orders at the Fort Necessity fight, Muse had resigned his commission. He was then appointed colonel of militia defending the Virginia frontier in 1756. After the war, excluded from the land bounty promised by Dinwiddie, he had asked Washington to help him get his share, offering him one-third of the land if Washington would bear the costs of obtaining it. Washington used his influence to get Muse a share, but it was not as much as Muse hoped for, and he blamed Washington.57

  Having secured more than his own share under Dinwiddie’s proclamation, Washington acquired more under the Royal Proclamation. Dunmore in March 1773 issued him a certificate for the amount allowable to reduced colonels—an additional 5,000 acres.58 According to the historian Bernhard Knollenberg, Washington secured lands to which he was not entitled by either Dinwiddie’s proclamation or the Proclamation of 1763, had them surveyed illicitly by someone who was not qualified by law and who laid them out in violation of legal stipulations as to size and location, and enriched himself at the expense of his Virginia comrades-in-arms: “The more he got of the allotted 200,000 acres, the less was available for the enlisted men to whom it was promised.”59 Douglas Southall Freeman, author of a seven-volume biography of Washington, observed that difficulties in developing land did not deter Washington from acquiring more—“and more and more.”60

  Washington’s land hunger extended as far west as the lower Mississippi and as far south as Florida.61 Looking to Florida for the lands to which he felt entitled under the Royal Proclamation of 1763, he engaged James Wood, a Virginian who was traveling to Florida, to act as his agent and have 10,000 acres surveyed for him if he should see “such Lands as he thinks will answer my purpose.” Needless to say, he told Wood, “I should choose good Land, or none at all.” The proclamation entitled Washington to 5,000 acres; he would purchase the rest himself. In fact, if Wood found good land, easy to acquire, and not difficult to keep under the government’s rules, he should increase the amount to 15,000, 20,000, or 25,000 acres: “In short I could wish to have as much good Land located in a Body or contiguous together … as I could save without much difficulty or expence.”62 Nothing came of his Florida speculation because the British government declared Washington ineligible for land grants under the proclamation.

  In April 1773 Washington offered to accompany Dunmore on a trip through the western country in the summer. He and Crawford would be only too willing to assist in “facilitating any Schemes your Lordship might have of procuring Lands to the Westward for us, for yourself.”63 But in June, his stepdaughter Martha “Patsy” Custis, who had a history of epileptic seizures, died suddenly. Distraught, Washington remained at home, and Dunmore made the journey without him, visiting Crawford en route.64 In September, in anticipation that Dunmore would grant land for petitions below the Scioto, Washington instructed Thomas Bullitt, who was surveying lands down the Ohio, to survey 10,000 acres for him: 5,000 to which he was entitled in his own right, and another 5,000 that he had purchased from a captain and a lieutenant. “No time should be lost,” urged Washington. He asked Bullitt to get him all the land in one tract if there was enough “of the first quality,” but if not, to get it in two or three. He also asked him “to get it as near to the mouth of the Scioto, that is, to the western bounds of the new Colony, as may be, but for the sake of better Land, I would g
o quite down to the Falls, or even below it; meaning thereby to get richer & wider bottoms, as it is my desire to have my Land run out upon the Banks of the ohio.” He also joined the land rush into Kentucky, acquiring a tract that included a salt spring on the Kentucky River, which, he told Crawford, he planned to turn “to an extensive public benefit, as well as private advantage.” Bullitt had no authority to do the surveys, and when Dunmore recalled him Washington immediately asked Crawford to obtain a license and survey his 10,000 acres quickly, because once it became known the governor was going to grant patents for those lands, officers from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas would “flock there in shoals,” taking every valuable tract of riverfront land.65

  That the mouth of the Scioto was the site of Lower Shawnee Town and a center of Shawnee culture and economy seems not to have troubled Washington; nor did he hesitate to join the rush into Shawnee hunting grounds. John Connolly, Virginia’s agent in the Ohio Valley, continued to send Washington reports. In June 1773 he wrote describing “a very curious piece of antiquity,” earthwork mounds he had seen on the east side of the Scioto River when he was returning from the Shawnee towns. “The Ruins of Fort Pitt twenty years hence, will not exhibit half the labour discoverable at this place,” he said. The mounds, and the artifacts he found, induced him to believe that “a Politic, & numerous People” formerly inhabited the country and that these were religious sites rather than fortifications. Connolly was closer to the truth than he knew; scholars are still trying to unravel the ritual significance and the solar alignments of the complex of mounds in the Ohio country. As many Americans would do in the nineteenth century, Connolly assumed that Indian people lacked the labor resources, political organization, and sophistication to create such mounds, and he speculated that the civilization that had built them must have been destroyed by warlike invaders.66 Like Connolly, Washington subscribed to the belief that Indians did not create civilizations; they destroyed them. He would not have been deterred by, or interested in, the spiritual significance of such sites. Nevertheless, he knew that lands he coveted had an ancient human past.