The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  50. Devine, Tobacco Lords, 3, 18–30, 178.

  51. EAID 5:25.

  52. Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse, 100–101.

  53. James H. Merrell, The Lancaster Treaty of 1744 with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 30, 59 (Tachanoontia); Warren R. Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 41–43, 172–77; Daniel P. Barr, A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744–1794 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014).

  54. Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions, ix–x.

  55. Rice, Nature and History in the Potomac Country, 2–3.

  56. Ragsdale, “Young Washington’s Virginia,” 53–55; Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit, 256–67, 519–20 (Carter).

  57. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen, 1, 72, 84.

  58. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen, 32 (Gunther’s chain); Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History (New York: Penguin/Plume, 2002), 40 (“frontier math” figures); Gunther’s chain exhibited at the Lunder Center, the Clark, Williamstown, MA, Aug. 2016.

  59. David A. Clary, George Washington’s First War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 16–17; Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen; Hofstra, Planting of New Virginia, 21 (“land stealer”), 110–13.

  60. Hughes, Surveyors and Statesmen; Philyaw, Virginia’s Western Visions, 29, 34.

  61. On Washington’s early training and subsequent career as a surveyor, see Philander D. Chase, “A Stake in the West: George Washington as Backcountry Surveyor and Landholder,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 159–94.

  62. Robert D. Mitchell, “ ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’: George Washington and the Changing Virginia Backcountry,” in Hofstra, George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, 68 (ten thousand settlers); Stephen Brumwell, George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (London: Quercus, 2010), 28–29.

  63. Diaries of GW 1:13, 15, 18.

  64. Hofstra, “ ‘A Parcel of Barbarian’s and an Uncouth Set of People,’ ” 87–114.

  65. Hofstra, “ ‘A Parcel of Barbarian’s and an Uncouth Set of People,’ ” 88.

  66. PGW, Col. 1:8–9; Chernow, Washington, 22–23; John Ferling, The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 12–13.

  67. Chernow, Washington, 23; Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 55; Edward Redmond, “George Washington: Surveyor and Mapmaker,” https://www.loc.gov/collections/george-washington-papers/articles-and-essays/george-washington-survey-and-mapmaker/ (Bullskin Creek purchase).

  68. Mitchell, “ ‘Over the Hills and Far Away,’ ” 68. PGW, Col. 1:8–37 provides a comprehensive overview and complete listing of Washington’s surveys in this period.

  69. PGW, Col. 1:16; Edward G. Lengel, First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity (Boston: Da Capo, 2016), 21–22.

  70. PGW, Ret. 4:512–19; Linklater, Measuring America, 45; Redmond, “George Washington: Surveyor and Mapmaker.”

  71. On Ferry Farm, and Washington’s childhood there, see Philip Levy, Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013); Philip Levy, George Washington Written upon the Land: Nature, Memory, Myth, and Landscape (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2015).

  72. Edward G. Lengel, General George Washington: A Military Life (New York: Random House, 2005), 17–18.

  73. See, for example, William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 10–16; Rennard Strickland, Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), ch. 2; John Phillip Reid. A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970).

  74. Peter Charles Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 76.

  75. Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 28–31; Samuel Cole Williams, ed., Adair’s History of the American Indians (1930; New York: Promontory Press, n.d.), 244; Paul Kelton, Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 10–11, 87–91, 97–101.

  76. Kathryn Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, 2008), 87–88, 97–98 (export figures); William L. McDowell Jr., ed., Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents relating to Indian Affairs, 1750–1754 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1958), 1:453.

  77. McDowell, Colonial Records of South Carolina, 52–53; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69–70.

  78. W. Stitt Robinson, “Virginia and the Cherokees: Indian Policy from Spotswood to Dinwiddie,” in The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernethy, ed. Darrett Bruce Rutman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 21–40, Byrd quoted at 26; EAID 5:2, 17–18, 113–24, 155–56.

  79. Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 140–41, 166–68 (Warriors’ Path); 162–64, 176–77 (Lower Susquehanna).

  80. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

  Chapter 2: The Ohio Company and the Ohio Country

  1. Kenneth P. Bailey, Thomas Cresap, Maryland Frontiersman (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1944), 86.

  2. Matthew L. Rhoades, Long Knives and the Longhouse: Anglo-Iroquois Politics and the Expansion of Colonial Virginia (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011), 107–8; Woody Holton, “The Ohio Indians and the Coming of the American Revolution in Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 60 (1994): 456; Executive Journals 5:172–73; James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial Virginia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 10–11 (thirty-six grants).

  3. Kenneth P. Bailey, The Ohio Company of Virginia and the Westward Movement, 1748–1792 (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1939), 35–36.

  4. Lois Mulkearn, ed., George Mercer Papers relating to the Ohio Company of Virginia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1954), viii, xi, 233–36.

  5. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 246–47; Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 298–301; CO 5/1327:7–8, 26–28, 53–57.

  6. CO 5/1338:45–47; Executive Journals 5:295–96; Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 25–31.

  7. Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 70; Writings of Washington 1:18.

  8. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 147.

  9. Executive Journals 5:296–97; David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 152–53; Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 24.

  10. Bailey, Thomas Cresap, 89–90; Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 103–22, quotes at 112–13.

  11. Andrew Gallup, ed., The Céloron Expedition to the Ohio Country, 1749: The Reports of Pierre-Joseph Céloron and Father Bonnecamps (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1997). The translated inscription on the plates is in CRP 5:510–11.

  12. NYCD 10:293–94.

  13. Daniel P. Barr, A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744–1794 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014), 36–37.

  14. Thomas Wildcat Alford, Civilization and the Story of the Absentee Shawnees (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1936), 44; Vernon Kinietz and Erminie W. Voegelin, eds., Shawnese Traditions: C. C. Trowbridge’s Account (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1939), 16–17.

  15. Michael N. McConnell, A Country Between: The Upper Ohio Valley and Its Peoples, 1724–1774 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), chs. 1–5; Michael N. McConnell, “Kuskusky Towns and Early Western Pennsylvania Indian History, 1748–1778,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116 (Jan. 1992): 33–37; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 5; Helen Hornbeck Tanner, ed., Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 44 (Cuyahoga); Cayuga quote in NYCD 10:206.

  16. Charles A. Hanna, The Wilderness Trail, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 1:352 (Thomas quote); White, Middle Ground, 223–27 (proxies at 223).

  17. CRP 5:146–47, 151. The council reported that the warriors belonged to “a Tribe of Indians, being a mixture of the Six Nations” (156). Hanna, Wilderness Trail 1:329; McConnell, A Country Between, 71; Eric Hinderaker, “Declaring Independence: The Ohio Indians and the Seven Years’ War,” in Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years’ War in North America, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 105–6.

  18. NYCD 6:593–94; McConnell, A Country Between, 79.

  19. White, Middle Ground, 225.

  20. EAID 2:193; CRP 5:358; Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Journals, 1748–1765, rpt. of Early Western Travels, vol. 1 (1904; Lewisburg, PA: Wennawoods Publishing, 1998), 43.

  21. EAID 2:283; CRP 5:666.

  22. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 476.

  23. Gallup, Céloron Expedition to the Ohio Country, 40–45; NYCD 10:206.

  24. Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser., 2:31.

  25. EAID 2:244, 5:111.

  26. Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 74–78; EAID 3:329n (Warriors’ Path); Paul R. Misenick, George Washington and the Half-King Chief Tanacharison: An Alliance That Began the French and Indian War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 36–37 (Namacolin’s Trail and map); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 134 (earthwork).

  27. Bailey, Ohio Company of Virginia, 85–100; Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 7–8, 97.

  28. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 9–10, 98–100.

  29. EAID 3:49n; Nancy Lee Hagedorn, “ ‘Faithful, Knowing, and Prudent’: Andrew Montour as Interpreter and Cultural Broker, 1740–1772,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 53–60; James H. Merrell, “ ‘The Cast of His Countenance’: Reading Andrew Montour,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 9–39; Hanna, Wilderness Trail 1:223–46; Tanaghrisson quote in CO 5/1327, pt. 2:270, and “The Treaty of Logg’s Town, 1752,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 13 (1905): 165.

  30. Croghan said he was “not only very capable of doing the Business, but look’d on amongst all the Indians as one of the Chiefs” (Thwaites, Early Western Journals, 71). Weiser once said he thought Montour was “a Frenchman in his heart” (EAID 2:303), but he employed him “in sundry affairs of Consequence” and “found him faithful, knowing, & prudent” (CRP 5:290). Cresap said he had a good reputation “both amongst White people and Indians & very much beloved by the latter” (CVSP 1:245–46).

  31. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 11, 13, 101, 103.

  32. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 16, 106.

  33. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 16, 106; A. Gwynn Henderson, “The Lower Shawnee Town on Ohio: Sustaining Native Autonomy in an Indian ‘Republic,’ ” in The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 25–55.

  34. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 19, 109.

  35. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 18, 24, 108, 114.

  36. EAID 2:248–56; CRP 5:530–36; Thwaites, Early Western Journals, 58–69.

  37. NYCD 7:268; EAID 3:198–99.

  38. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 39.

  39. Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 52.

  40. EAID 2:221–22, 244, 5:112.

  41. Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Penguin, 2009), 128–31; McConnell, A Country Between, 80–82; Hinderaker, “Declaring Independence,” 108–13; Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy on the Colonial Frontier, 1701–1754 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 204.

  42. Dinwiddie Papers 1:6–10; Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 546; EIAD 5:29–33. The following paragraphs are based on C.O. 5/1327, pt. 2:263–76, rpt. in “Treaty of Logg’s Town, 1752,” 143–74, and Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 52–66, 127–39, 273–84.

  43. Barr, Colony Sprung from Hell, 39.

  44. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:206, 211.

  45. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:267; “Treaty of Logg’s Town,” 160.

  46. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:268; “Treaty of Logg’s Town,” 161.

  47. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:272; “Treaty of Logg’s Town,” 168; Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), 41–44, quote at 43.

  48. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:274; “Treaty of Logg’s Town,” 171–72; Lois Mulkearn, “Half King, Seneca Diplomat of the Ohio Valley,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 37 (Summer 1954): 71–72; David Dixon, “A High Wind Rising: George Washington, Fort Necessity, and the Ohio Country Indians,” Pennsylvania History 74 (Summer 2007): 351n.

  49. Archer Butler Hulbert and William Nathaniel Schwarze, eds., David Zeisberger’s History of the Northern American Indians (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1910), 34–35; EAID 2:4–46; Gunlög Fur, A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Roger M. Carpenter, “From Indian Women to English Children: The Lenni-Lenape and the Attempt to Create a New Diplomatic Identity,” Pennsylvania History 74 (2007): 1–20.

  50. Penn quoted in C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 166; Nicholas Cresswell, The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York: Dial Press, 1924), 117, 119; Hulbert and Schwarze, David Zeisberger’s History of the North American Indians, 92–93.

  51. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:264.

  52. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:271; Mulkearn, George Mercer Papers, 62, 512; McConnell, A Country Between, 98.

  53. John W. Jordan, ed., “Journal of James Kenny, 1761–1763,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 37 (1913), 157. In the early 1760s many Delawares turned away from the peacekeeping efforts of Tamaqua in favor of more militant leaders like Netawatwees.

  54. Timothy J. Shannon, ed., The Seven Years’ War in North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014), 31.

  55. CRP 5:599–600; Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2015), 152–57.

  56. JHBV, 1752–58, 509–10; Hanna, Wilderness Trail 2:292–99; White, Middle Ground, 233–34.

  57. Donald H. Kent, The French Invasion of Western Pennsylvania, 1753 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1954), 1–4, 13–15; Mulkearn, “Half King,” 73 (earth trembling).

  58. CRP 5:623.

  59. White, Middle Ground, 227–37.

  60. CRP 5:569–70.

  61. White, Middle Ground, 235.

  62. CRP 5:614–16.

  63. CRP 5:635.

  64. EAID 5:177.

  65. EAID 2:269–70, 284; CRP 5:666–67.

  66. CO 5/1327, pt. 2:295; EAID 2:275; CRP 5:635.

  67. Amy C. Schutt, The Lands Would Be Entirely Theirs Again: Indians and t
he Seven Years’ War in the Ohio Valley (Fort Washington, PA: Eastern National, 2009), 16; Misenick, George Washington and the Half-King Chief Tanacharison, 64.

  68. Kent, French Invasion of Western Pennsylvania, 47–49; EAID 2:277–79; CO 5/1328:11–18; CRP 5:667–68.

  69. Kent, French Invasion of Pennsylvania, 49–51; Fernand Grenier, ed., Papiers Contrecoeur et autres documents concernant le conflit Anglo-François sur l’Ohio de 1745 à 1756 (Quebec: Les Presses Universitaires Laval, 1952), 53–58 (council with the Tsonnontounans [Senecas]), 61–62 (Shawnee reluctance); EAID 2:280.

  70. McConnell, A Country Between, 104; Mulkearn, “Half King,” 74–75; CRP 5:667–68.

  71. CRP 5:669, 684 (tears); EAID 2:302 (“Lyon” quote); Jennings, Empire of Fortune, 54.

  72. Dinwiddie Papers 1:57 (“squeeze You to Death”), 58–84, 99, 121, 131–34; EAID 5:160–61, 165–80, 199–222; JHBV, 1752–58, 516–23; William L. McDowell Jr., ed., The Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents relating to Indian Affairs, 1750–1754 (1958; Columbia: South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, 1992), 466–68, 472–74, 477–84, 522–39; William L. McDowell Jr., ed., The Colonial Records of South Carolina: Documents relating to Indian affairs, 1754–1765 (1970; Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1992), xii; Jeff W. Dennis, Patriots and Indians: Shaping Identity in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 33–34.

  73. CRP 5:698.

  74. Kenneth P. Bailey, ed., The Ohio Company Papers, 1753–1817, Being Primarily Papers of the “Suffering Traders” of Pennsylvania (Arcata, CA: Sons of the American Revolution Library, 1947), 23–24.

  75. CRP 5:691; WJP 9:626, 655. A son of Anglican converts, and a staunch English ally, Jonathan Cayenquerigo was Conrad Weiser’s adoptive brother and sachem of the Bear Clan at the Mohawk town of Canajoharie (EAID 3:46).

  76. CRP 6:1–7, 49.

  Chapter 3: Into Tanaghrisson’s World

  1. J. Frederick Fausz, “ ‘Engaged in Enterprises Pregnant with Terror’: George Washington’s Formative Years among the Indians,” in George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry, ed. Warren R. Hofstra (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 121–22.