Colonial America
Page 68
The combined pressure of the proprietors and the Iroquois League was too strong for the Delawares to fight against. A few, like Chief Teedyuscung, adopted Christianity in an abortive attempt to keep their lands. Others sought refuge with the Moravian missionaries at Gnadenhutten near Bethlehem or moved to the Susquehanna Valley. But many refused to accept such clearly fraudulent proceedings and migrated westward to the Ohio River Valley. Here they encountered a friendly group of people whose members were also migrating west in order to avoid conflict with the Pennsylvania proprietors and the Iroquois: the Shawnees.
Known as the “greatest travelers in America,” Shawnees had already ranged across vast distances by the eighteenth century. After being driven by the Iroquois from their homeland in the Ohio Valley by the 1680s, various groups of Shawnees moved to South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and what would later become Alabama and Kentucky in order to escape from English and Iroquois domination. In Pennsylvania at the end of the seventeenth century the Shawnees had lived peacefully near the Delawares. Then during the first half of the eighteenth century, many Shawnees began returning to the Ohio Valley, sometimes migrating around the same time as their former Delaware neighbors. The Delawares and the Shawnees soon represented a formidable combination, not least because of their mutual resentments against both the British and the Iroquois.10
In the Ohio Country Delawares and Shawnees settled at sites along the Allegheny River which had once served as hunting camps for their warriors. Here they were joined by a group of Senecas (called Mingoes by local peoples) who had moved away from their ancestral Iroquois homelands. Living in new villages that dotted the countryside along the Allegheny and Ohio rivers, Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingoes mingled with French-allied Indians from the pays d'en haut who had settled along the western portions of the Ohio. Before many years their communities became thoroughly multiethnic much like the refugee communities of the western Great Lakes during the late seventeenth century.
Life in the Ohio Country offered the western Delawares considerably more independence than their eastern kinfolk who had stayed in Pennsylvania. Great Britain and France both claimed the right to sovereignty over the region, which meant that both British and French traders and missionaries all came through the region periodically. Colonial governments saw traders and missionaries as emissaries who could win Indian allies and strengthen their territorial claims, but for the Delawares and the Shawnees they presented new opportunities for freedom. Both the Delawares and the Shawnees distrusted the British (and the British-allied Iroquois). At the same time, they felt no historical attachment to the French. This left them free to trade with any nation they wished. Both British and French traders competed fiercely for their loyalty. British traders consistently offered better-quality goods for lower prices, especially during the 1740s when a war cut off French merchants' ability to ship goods to New France. Meanwhile the French worked harder to maintain the reciprocal ties so important to alliances with the Indians.
In the Ohio Country it seemed that the once embattled Delawares had at last discovered the key to freedom. Their favorable location gave them access to trade goods, and yet they did not have to do the bidding of any single European power in order to obtain them. Having resettled in a borderland where they were dominated by neither the French nor the British, they were able to play the one off against the other. This renewed independence may have helped to inspire some western Delawares to begin thinking about spurning their European alliances altogether. It was around this time that some visionary leaders among the western Delaware people began to develop a new philosophy which taught that only by abandoning the ways of the white man could they ever again enjoy their former happy state.
The other major population group inhabiting the region from the Mississippi River to the Ohio, as we saw in Chapter 15, were the peoples of the pays d'en haut, comprised of various Algonquian-speaking refugee groups including Ottawas, Potowatomis, Ojibwas, Mississaugas, Wyandots, and others from the western Great Lakes region. At the beginning of the century they had been united by their enmity towards the Iroquois and their common alliance with the French. By the 1720s they had reconciled with the Iroquois and learned the same lesson as the Delawares had learned about dealing with Europeans. Instead of relying on an alliance with one imperial power, it was to their advantage to maintain a relationship with two. During much of the eighteenth century the people of the pays d'en haut traded with the British in Albany and Oswego as well as with the French in Montréal. Their ability to spurn the assistance of the French allowed them to make their own decisions. At the same time they had begun to think differently about their relationships with one another, becoming more closely tied across tribal lines in a loose, multiethnic coalition. Membership in this broad group would one day serve them well.
3 The Nations of the Southern Frontier
In the South, native peoples living outside the settled regions of the British colonies negotiated their relationships with European colonizers in many of the same ways as did the peoples of the North. The presence of Spain in Florida and (after 1699) of France in Louisiana could be an advantage, giving many Native Americans in the South options to play different European traders off one another. On the other hand trade could mean becoming ensnared in debilitating relationships of dependence. For some, alliances brought new resources and autonomy. For others, especially those who inadvertently became caught up in the perverse cycle of the Carolina slave trade or in the bloody Indian wars that tore through the South from 1703 to 1717, the costs of those alliances could be devastating. Some peoples scattered and regrouped, becoming part of new nations. Some migrated to new locations, sought the protection of stronger allies, and cultivated ties to more than one set of European traders in order to avoid becoming overly dependent. Between 1720 and 1750, most of the native peoples who remained in the region achieved relatively stable relationships with their European neighbors thanks to their new strategies for maneuvering through the world they now shared with British, French, and Spanish colonizers.
A traveler in Florida around 1660 would have encountered a variety of peoples living in and around Spanish missions (see Chapter 15). Though their numbers had been much reduced by disease during their many years of contact with the Spanish, the Apalachees, Timucuas, and Guales still possessed coherent cultures and traditions. Had that traveler gone north and west from Florida, through what would later become Georgia, he would have encountered the Lower and Upper Creeks. Some 15,000 strong and living in about 60 villages, the Creeks subsisted on a mixture of farming and hunting. Further west, but still east of the Mississippi, were the powerful and densely populated nations of the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and the Natchez. North of the Creeks and along the Carolina coast lived a diverse group of peoples, including the Cherokees in the west, and Yamasees, Savannahs, Catawbas, and Tuscaroras along the coast. Many of these peoples had traditional rivalries with one another, but a relatively stable balance of power before 1670 had kept friction under control and allowed these societies to coexist.
From 1670 onwards the Native American slave trade in Carolina had disrupted relationships between many of these peoples and created tremendous instability. Thereafter, English demand for captives, their Indian allies' own desire for trade goods, and English conflicts with Spain combined to make things worse. By the end of the Indian wars in 1717, a total of between 30,000 and 50,000 Indian people had been enslaved, and the total Native American population in the region had declined by perhaps 60 percent.11 The question for us is to what extent those who were left were able to adapt and to assert their autonomy as independent peoples.
The Tuscaroras' numbers had been reduced from 5,000 to perhaps 2,500. As we have seen, as many as 2,000 surviving Tuscaroras migrated north where they were offered sanctuary by the Five Nations on the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River. The remainder opted to stay in North Carolina instead. Here they were grouped by the provincial authorities in a reservation on the north side
of the Roanoke River under a single sachem, Tom Blount. Elevation of one individual in this way was alien to Native American culture and helped to weaken their clans. Moreover, the Tuscaroras, who had previously been important participants in the fur trade, no longer had access to furs and trade with the western nations. Soon white settlements began to encroach on the reservation, and the North Carolina authorities proved even less ready than New Englanders to protect the native peoples from unscrupulous land speculators. In deepening poverty, the remnants frequently had to sell their land. Their numbers dwindled further, and by 1760 many had moved north to join their relatives in Iroquoia.
Leaving the area was generally a better strategy than staying among the British. The Savannahs (the British name for the Shawnees in South Carolina) had been a major trading partner of the Carolinians, but began to leave the region by the early 1700s. Most migrated to join their Shawnee relatives in the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania, and many eventually went on from there to the Ohio Valley. The Yamasees likewise left the region to seek refuge with another confederacy after their own defeat by South Carolina and its Creek allies in 1717. Since they spoke a Muskogean language, they traveled south to join the Muskogean-speaking Guales in northern Florida and became allied with the Spanish. Spain now maintained alliances with a mixed coalition that included Yamasees, Apalachees, Guales, and Lower Creeks. In time new communities formed out of these mixed populations, along with a number of escaped African slaves. Members of the resulting nation called themselves Seminoles.
Map 21 Major Native American powers of the southern frontier, circa 1725.
Forming a new nation out of the remnants of older ones could be an effective strategy for long-term survival, a process perhaps best illustrated by the experiences of the Catawba peoples. Until 1715 the term “Catawba” was unknown, being a phrase of convenience first coined by the Europeans to describe the Esaw, Sugaree, and Shuteree tribes living on the Catawba River in the vicinity of Sugar Creek, in the Carolina piedmont region. All of these peoples had originally come from the Siouan area of the plains sometime in the sixteenth century. By the early eighteenth century they lived on the border between North and South Carolina, sandwiched between the Tuscaroras to the east and the Cherokees to the west. Then around 1715 they came together to form a single nation since they needed the support of a larger coalition in order to survive. Their new community was not large, numbering perhaps 2,500 members total with some 570 warriors in 1715. Following the Yamasee War they were joined by the remnants of other Siouan peoples, among whom were the coastal Waccamaws and Santees and the more inland Congarees, Saponis, Ocaneechees, and Cheraws. A Scotsman who traded with them during the 1740s reported hearing 20 different languages spoken in the Catawba settlements that he visited. In large part because of their flexibility and willingness to work together, the Catawbas managed to hold their own against larger competing nations at least until the 1750s. Each tribe lived in its own village with a council of headmen held periodically to help bridge their differences. Ties were also reinforced by communal hunting, war parties, and trade. Although their consolidation was not complete, it was strong enough for these Siouan peoples to sustain their sense of common identity for many years.
Making war against other powerful confederacies in the region probably helped unify the Catawbas, and certainly helped them to retain their cultural integrity. Like the Iroquois, the Catawbas practiced the mourning war ritual, and were drawn into frequent battles against Iroquois war parties coming down from the North. After 1722 Iroquois raiders were joined by Tuscaroras, who resented the Catawbas' role in driving them out of North Carolina. The Catawbas more than held their own, and won a reputation for themselves as some of the most fearsome warriors east of the Mississippi. The fighting became so intense that the provincial authorities in Virginia, South Carolina, and New York attempted in the 1740s to end the warfare in order to unite the native peoples against the French. A treaty was accordingly signed at Albany in 1751, but it proved of limited duration. The mourning war ritual had its own imperatives, and the Catawbas continued to fight individual Iroquois clans despite the agreement at Albany.
The Catawbas' reputation may have helped them to win a place as South Carolina's most vital Native American ally until at least the 1740s. Up to this point in its history the colony's government lacked the power to police its own borders or to defend its settlers against a host of potential enemies. Like the government in Pennsylvania, South Carolina needed groups of friendly Indians who could be employed as guardians of their frontier, absorbing the brunt of attacks from the north that might otherwise have fallen on British settler communities. The South Carolinians also needed an ally who could be used in tracking down runaway slaves. The Catawbas filled both of these roles. Meanwhile the experience of the Yamasee War had made the colonists nervous about the possibility of future Indian uprisings, so they worked hard to maintain amicable relations with the Catawbas. Thus the Catawbas occupied an enviable position with access to British trade goods and British diplomatic protection, enabling them to prosper for at least three decades.
Nevertheless, by the 1750s the Catawbas were increasingly under threat. The main problem was the advancing line of white settlement. Since 1729 the authorities in Charleston had encouraged development of the backcountry to protect the coastal plantations from another Indian war. Now a new tide of settlement was approaching from the North, along the great wagon road from Pennsylvania through Virginia and North Carolina. The settlers cut down the trees, drove away the game, cleared the land, erected fences, built roads, diverted streams, stocked the countryside with domestic livestock, and destroyed the Catawba economy in the process. Earlier the Catawbas had been able to conduct a thriving trade in skins to meet their needs. Now they were increasingly dependent on the colonial government – even for food when a drought occurred in 1755. Only their reputation as warriors sustained them in the eyes of the colonists.
The Catawbas recognized their precarious situation, and as early as 1748 they debated the wisdom of joining the Chickasaw or Creek nations. Essentially they had three options: removal, resistance, or reservation status. Removal to unknown lands was both risky and unappealing. Resistance was no longer realistic, since they had become vastly outnumbered. The majority wished to stay and decided the best way was through accommodation. At a meeting in 1754 the Catawbas promised to respect the colonists' laws, explaining that recent thefts of livestock and other items had merely been the result of exuberance on the part of the younger warriors. They hoped that gratitude for past services and current usefulness would ensure them a future.
As long as the Spanish, French, Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws posed a threat, the South Carolina government in Charleston continued to welcome the Catawbas. Indeed the Catawbas were even able to play the South Carolinians off against the Virginians and North Carolinians, who were anxious for their support. But should the military balance shift decisively in favor of the British, such bargaining power would be lost. As it was, the Catawbas were now on the verge of being a dependent people, with a homeland little more than a reservation.12
By the late 1740s it had become clear that another people had replaced the Catawbas as South Carolina's most vital Native American ally: the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokees. One of the most numerous Indian peoples, they had a population of around 12,000 at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Cherokees resided in the mountains of southern Appalachia, where the borders of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee now meet, concentrated in three groups – the lower, middle, and upper towns – comprising some 60 settlements. Like the Iroquois, their towns were based on clans and were politically independent. Also like the Iroquois, Cherokee clans never fought each other. Diversity in their foreign relationships was not incompatible with harmony at home.
The Cherokees had been the key to South Carolina's success in the Yamasee War, as they turned against the Creek–Yamasee coalition to side with the British in exchange for promises of trade
goods. Once the Yamasees had been defeated, many of the Cherokees continued to trade with the British and to promise military support. Still, not all Cherokees welcomed British traders. The lower and middle towns favored the British, or at least tried to remain neutral. The upper towns looked to the French at New Orleans, reflecting their different economic interests and location on the tributaries of the Tennessee River. This disunity proved helpful to the lower Cherokees, who were able to convince the British to make periodic concessions to them in order to secure their allegiance.
The Cherokees faced a major challenge to their autonomy when a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1738 and 1739 killed half their population. Some Cherokee bands retreated north. However, the Cherokees remained able to convince the British that they were indispensable allies. British fear of attacks from French-allied Indians to their west made them eager for Cherokee support and they repeatedly reconfirmed their ties through a series of treaties during the 1740s and 1750s.
West of the Cherokees was another powerful nation whose friendship the British also tried to cultivate. A Muskogean-speaking people, the Chickasaws had a population of about 5,000. Because the Chickasaws lived near the Mississippi River it was relatively easy for them to attack the French colony in Louisiana. The Chickasaws' longstanding animosity towards the Choctaws, who became allied with the French, made them desirable allies and trading partners to the British. South Carolina's government kept them supplied with guns and trade goods for many decades, and they rewarded British efforts by periodically attacking French settlements. For both the Cherokees and the Chickasaws, geographical position was the advantage that guaranteed their favorable treatment by the British.