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Unsettling the West

Page 6

by Rob Harper


  ans now sought imperial recognition of their political and territorial sover-

  eignty, along with ongoing trade and diplomacy. Their diverse strategies for

  obtaining these goals often caused tensions within and between their own na-

  tions. colonists, meanwhile, raced to occupy and obtain legal title to upper

  Ohio Valley land. rather than either accepting or defying imperial authority,

  colonists more often debated which manifestation of the imperial state ought to

  prevail in a given time and place. an array of uncertainties— the merits of

  decades- old Virginia land grants, the precise western boundary of pennsylva-

  nia, and more— fueled lasting disputes in which all sides claimed to respect and

  uphold some version of tangled and contradictory imperial policies. such feuds

  gummed up the workings of nascent governing institutions, but also fostered

  coalitions and patronage networks that in themselves created a tenuous order.

  This story of the interwar Ohio Valley begins with the creation of two

  new communities: the seneca town of two creeks and the cluster of colo-

  nists around redstone. From the mid- 1760s into the early 1770s, the people

  of these communities traded, talked, fought, and made peace. Both groups

  often exasperated nominal authorities in the six nations and the British em-

  pire, sometimes finding common cause as they grappled with imperial de-

  mands. in 1768, a massive new land cession threatened to bring on a new war,

  but British officials responded with a compromise boundary that most of the

  region’s inhabitants seemed to accept. Throughout, indians and colonists met

  and interacted often, usual y peaceful y. When they fought, they did so in this

  context of everyday encounters. animosity endured, and sometimes led to

  bloodshed, but through the early 1770s the region’s peoples contained such

  violence. rather than a virtual state of war, they preserved a tenuous peace.

  On a sunday morning in march 1768, the reverend John steel delivered a

  sermon and a death threat. The governor of pennsylvania had sent him and

  Figure 1. Th e Upper Ohio Valley, 1765–74.

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  three companions to redstone creek to order the unauthorized colonists

  there to leave or face execution. The errand seemed urgent. Just two months

  before, two white men had murdered ten senecas and mohicans in the mid-

  dle creek massacre, 170 miles to the east. The local sheriff jailed the culprits

  in carlisle, but nearby colonists rioted and set them free. to atone for this

  failure of colonial justice, provincial officials aimed to drive off the redstone

  colonists, about whose presence the six nations had repeatedly complained.

  When steel arrived, the trespassers insisted that their native neighbors “were

  very peaceable” and wanted them to stay, but the minister insisted that “a few

  straggling indians” could hardly represent “the mind of the six nations” as a

  whole. amid heated discussion, most of steel’s audience agreed to leave.

  Then eight senecas arrived from the town of two creeks, about seventy miles

  to the west, bearing wampum to affirm the integrity of their words. steel and

  his companions hoped they would persuade the holdouts to move, but in-

  stead they insisted that the colonists stay. all talk of leaving ceased and the

  pennsylvanians headed for home, their mission a failure.4

  like the redstone colony, the seneca town of two creeks was only a few

  years old. The historic seneca homeland lies south of lake Ontario, several

  hundred miles northeast, but by the 1740s many senecas and other haudeno-

  saunees had built new towns on the upper Ohio river and its tributaries.

  during the seven years’ War, a group of senecas left their vil ages on French

  creek, between the allegheny river and lake erie, and moved down the

  Ohio river, hoping to find “plenty of game.” They built about twenty cabins

  on the river’s west bank, just above the mouths of two creeks that entered the

  Ohio from opposite sides. colonists subsequently referred to the community

  by various names: two creeks, cross creeks, crow’s town, or simply “the

  mingo town.” in 1761, other senecas built a town at the mouth of pine creek,

  just a few miles from pittsburgh and directly across the Ohio from the home

  of the British indian agent george croghan. They likely abandoned the site

  during pontiac’s War but reoccupied it soon thereafter. in early 1767, a third

  group of senecas occupied an abandoned shawnee and delaware vil age at

  the mouth of Beaver river, thirty miles downstream.5

  By settling on the region’s aquatic thoroughfare, these Ohio river senecas

  gambled on a peaceful and commercial y vibrant future. Their new towns

  positioned them to profit from colonial trade, but also left them vulnerable to

  attack. during the seven years’ War many delawares and shawnees had

  moved from similarly exposed locations to new sites northwest of the Ohio,

  farther from British garrisons. By contrast, the people of the pine creek,

  containment, 1765–72

  27

  Beaver river, and two creeks towns aimed to capitalize on proximity. in

  1765, as western indians assembled at Fort pitt to end pontiac’s War, about

  eighty two creeks senecas showed up with loads of peltry, “expecting to

  trade.” The political y nimble guyasuta, now a prominent leader at pine

  creek, urged “our Brethren, the english,” to “Open the trade, and let us sell

  our skins.” This enthusiasm for economic connectedness accompanied an

  equal y fervent political independence. ethnic and linguistic ties linked the

  three towns to one another, and to the six nations league as a whole, but like

  other haudenosaunee communities they governed themselves local y. in

  1765, when croghan led an intercultural embassy to illinois, a two creeks

  leader insisted on joining him to represent his community, marking it as an

  autonomous entity rather than a mere satellite.6 Their subsequent defense of

  the redstone colonists thus reflected a shared ambivalence, if not indiffer-

  ence, toward national and imperial authorities.

  a well- worn path stretched southeastward from two creeks to the red-

  stone country, where John ryan killed captain peter and the reverend steel

  gave his ineffective sermon. in the eyes of imperial officials, the redstone

  colonists had flagrantly violated a royal ban on trans- appalachian coloniza-

  tion. colonists could move there, they argued, only after the six nations sold

  the region to the crown, and then only under imperial and provincial over-

  sight. One described the colonists as “idle persons” looking to avoid the de-

  mands of either “landlord or law.”7 people with so little regard for their king,

  they reasoned, would hardly tolerate other aspects of social order.

  The officials failed to recognize, or conveniently forgot, how imperial and

  provincial policies had spurred redstone’s colonization. twenty years earlier,

  land- hungry Virginia had issued a series of vast upper Ohio land grants to

  well- connected speculators, who surveyed, established trading posts, and

  brought colonists to live there. The colonists fled during the midcentury

  wars, but
the fighting created new means and incentives to move west. Vir-

  ginia promised western land to those who fought to defend its claim, while

  the British army built two roads linking the region to the seaboard colonies.

  after expelling the French and building Fort pitt, many soldiers and camp

  followers liked what they saw of the region and chose to stay. By the early

  1770s, thousands had joined them. such migrants plainly violated the royal

  ban on western colonization, but Fort pitt’s commanders muddied things by

  inviting farmers, traders, and craftsmen to settle nearby to help feed and sup-

  ply the garrison. citing such arrangements, some colonists insisted they had

  built homesteads on “the King’s orders.” Others asserted that Virginia’s

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  prewar grants— including a 100,000- acre spread issued to William russell

  and partners— trumped the royal prohibition. rather than a spontaneous

  flood of independent pioneers, the colonization of the upper Ohio Valley

  stemmed from the expansionist policies of Virginia, wars that those policies

  brought about, and the British army’s determination to hold on to the region

  after the wars were won.8

  The redstone colony combined all these elements. in the 1740s Thomas

  cresap helped establish the Ohio company, the most ambitious and influen-

  tial of the Virginia grantees. he became one of the company’s foremost

  agents, surveying land, reaching out to nearby indians, and fending off rival

  speculators. The company built a small trading post at redstone, cleared a

  rough path to the potomac, and recruited eleven families to settle nearby. The

  colonists fled during the seven years’ War, returned in the early 1760s when

  the British built a small fort there, and fled once more at the outbreak of pon-

  tiac’s War. When hostilities ended, cresap sought to revive his dormant claim

  despite the new ban. he offered land around redstone on easy terms, aiming

  to populate the area with people whose right to the land depended on his

  own. in the spring of 1766, after the six nations complained about the tres-

  passers, both the army and the governor of Virginia threatened to drive them

  off by force. cresap promptly met with a few dozen haudenosaunee, who

  allegedly “ceded to him a large extent of land.” neither the six nations nor

  British authorities considered the sale valid: cresap likely met only with

  passing travelers, rather than anyone empowered to sell territory. But he

  found many customers willing to gamble on his dubious title: within a year,

  hundreds of families had built homesteads on his claim. When an army de-

  tachment burned all the houses they could find and urged the colonists to

  leave, they quickly rebuilt, and more joined them. Within a few years of pon-

  tiac’s War, colonists had occupied nearly all the good farmland east of the

  monongahela.9

  rather than illegal squatters with no regard for authority, these migrants

  are better understood as quasi- legal colonists seeking to manipulate the law

  for their own ends. From long experience in the seaboard colonies, they had

  learned that the imperial state’s many arms often promulgated contradictory

  policies, and that local interpretations of the law usual y mattered more than

  imperial ones. They also knew that wealthy and well- connected colonists

  often exploited such contradictions to their own advantage, particularly in

  matters of land tenure. These circumstances, together with the vicissitudes of

  the atlantic economy and the perennial scarcity of cash, had dashed many

  containment, 1765–72

  29

  people’s aspirations to own farms east of the mountains, even as the royal

  proclamation denied them the chance to obtain legal title in the west. But the

  “fluid constitutional environment” of British north america offered fuzzy

  and malleable lines between legality and illegality. The quasi- legal claims of

  russell and cresap, as well as the army’s need for farmers to supply Fort pitt,

  suggested plausible routes to circumvent london’s disapproval. Far from in-

  different to government authority, the monongahela colonists aimed to fi-

  nesse murky imperial policies to gain a title that might someday prove good.10

  The colonists’ persistence reflected a mutual y advantageous relationship

  with nearby indians like the two creeks senecas. a decade of war had dis-

  rupted trade networks and inflated prices. meanwhile, postwar imperial pol-

  icymakers tried to restrict frontier trade to established posts like Fort pitt,

  under army and indian department supervision. agents who stood to profit

  from the new system insisted that it would prevent fraud and abuse, but it

  forced indians to travel farther to buy goods and limited competition among

  merchants. many simply ignored the policy. shawnee and delaware towns in

  Ohio soon hosted many resident traders, often working for prominent penn-

  sylvania merchants, who trucked and bartered at wil . On the monongahela,

  cresap regularly traded with haudenosaunees from the Ohio river towns, as

  well as others passing through the region, and asked Virginia’s governor to

  help squeeze out pennsylvanian competitors. after the governor rebuffed

  him, cresap and his colonists waged a price war, inviting indians to buy

  goods “at one half the rates” charged by pittsburgh merchants. The pittsbur-

  ghers howled in protest. in 1770, croghan complained that “every Farmer

  [wa]s a sutler,” foiling all his attempts to police trade. cresap’s low prices

  helped reconcile his customers to the growth of his colony. as a rival specu-

  lator noted, indians were “more oblidging” to colonists “[w]ho trade[d] with

  them.”11

  The redstone colonists also paid at least some respect to indian territorial

  rights. They built homesteads only east of the monongahela river, “for fear of

  disturbing” their native neighbors. This discretion likely reflected an agree-

  ment with nearby senecas. When provincial officials surveyed the southern

  border of pennsylvania, indians stopped them at the monongahela, insisting

  that the survey proceed no farther until they were “paid for the land.” They

  did not object to the survey east of the monongahela, even though Britain

  had not yet paid for that land either, suggesting that they, too, recognized the

  river as an intercultural boundary, even if the British empire did not. This

  common understanding likely emerged during informal discussions,

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  probably in the course of trade. Ohio indians ful y expected the six nations

  to sell the monongahela Valley within a few years— in 1765, William Johnson

  and six nations leaders had demanded that they acquiesce to the planned

  cession— and so the premature arrival of cresap and his colonists deprived

  them of nothing they did not already expect to lose. This expectation, to-

  gether with their shared understanding of a monongahela boundary, de-

  terred nearby indians from opposing the colonization of redstone, even

  when British officers encouraged them to do so.12

  For one haudenosaunee family, the redstone colonists were literal y

  neighbors
. like many others of his nation, mohawk peter moved west from

  Kahnawake, near montreal, but while most of the migrants settled in central

  and northern Ohio, peter, his wife, and their children made their home near

  the mouth of redstone creek. They may have done so to be close to his wife’s

  British family: when pontiac’s War began, they took refuge among her rela-

  tives east of the mountains. prior to that conflict they had lived alongside red-

  stone’s small British garrison, on the site of cresap’s earlier Ohio company

  settlement. after pontiac’s War, peter’s family reoccupied their home along-

  side the rapidly growing colonial population. When six nations spokesmen

  demanded that the redstone colonists be evicted, they stressed that peter and

  his family could stay. in 1768, when the two creeks delegation came to the

  redstone colonists’ defense, they stayed at peter’s home. The following year,

  when a pennsylvania land office began selling upper Ohio Valley land, peter

  obtained a warrant for over three hundred acres across the monongahela from

  redstone. his widow and son sold the land in the mid- 1780s, perhaps to es-

  cape growing anti- indian sentiment. But in the 1760s, trade, cooperation, and

  intermarriage remained possible, even amid wartime upheaval.13

  two months after steel’s mission to redstone, perhaps two thousand

  Ohio indians met with pennsylvania officials in pittsburgh. six nations

  spokesmen once again demanded that the British “remove the people from

  our lands” until “you have purchased them.” in reply, the pennsylvanians

  detailed their attempts to do so and griped about interference from two

  creeks. a prominent pine creek leader agreed to accompany pennsylvanians

  John Frazier and William Thompson to redstone to drive off the offenders

  once and for al . The next morning, Frazier and Thompson woke early, sad-

  dled their horses, and waited. after some time the senecas appeared and de-

  clared they could not undertake such a “disagreeable” task. The english, they

  argued, ought to take full responsibility for their own people’s misbehavior: if

 

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