by Rob Harper
official sanction, delaware leaders resolved to send an embassy to london at
their own expense, by raising funds through the fur trade: hence White eyes’s
visits to new Orleans and philadelphia.26 Johnson’s opposition and the
mounting imperial crisis frustrated their plans, but these years of interwar
activism nonetheless prepared White eyes and others for more ambitious
projects in the years to come.
White eyes, guyasuta, and pan- indian alliance builders all sought to es-
tablish a new political order that affirmed some form of indian sovereignty
and territorial integrity. They disagreed sharply about both means and ends:
guyasuta encouraged the colonization of Kentucky while the pan- indianists
staunchly opposed it; delaware leaders labored to win British recognition of
containment, 1765–72
37
a distinct and sovereign delaware nation. But despite these differences, their
work reflected a common disil usionment with military resistance and hope
for creating a more fruitful relationship with the multifaceted imperial state,
whether through pan- indian unity, guyasuta’s clientelism, or White eyes’s
program of cultural adaptation. none of them called for submitting whole-
sale to British authority, but neither did they advocate the stark political and
cultural separation that nativists like neolin envisioned. instead they sought
more advantageous terms of interdependence with a colonial empire that
had seemingly come to stay.27
as Ohio indians pursued that interdependence, upper Ohio colonists
wrangled with other facets of the composite imperial state. On a september
day in 1771, abraham teagarden learned that a pennsylvania sheriff planned
to evict a nearby colonist from a monongahela Valley homestead. teagarden
had butted heads with pennsylvania before: in 1768 he had heard and ignored
the reverend steel’s plea for the redstone colonists to leave. soon after the
Fort stanwix treaty nominal y empowered the provincial government to sell
upper Ohio tracts and evict— or exact payment from— quasi- legal colonists.
Before stanwix, the two creeks senecas had helped protect teagarden and
his neighbors, but now the colonists took matters into their own hands. tea-
garden rallied nearly thirty men “armed with guns, clubs, and tomahawks” to
defend their neighbor. The sheriff backed down. teagarden’s band let him go
unharmed, but they warned that if he attempted to enforce pennsylvania law
against them again, he would meet with “the height of ill usage.”28
like Ohio indians, many upper Ohio colonists resented the Fort stanwix
treaty, though for different reasons. and like indians, rather than rejecting
imperial authority, teagarden and his neighbors aimed to reshape and ma-
nipulate it to serve their interests. in particular, they exploited the region’s
chronic jurisdictional confusion. Quasi- legal speculators like george croghan
and Thomas cresap encouraged them, seeking support for shady land titles.
croghan had once served pennsylvania, but he turned against the proprietors
when they refused to endorse a massive, and legal y dubious, private land
purchase from the six nations. he now insisted that the chartered breadth of
pennsylvania— “five degrees of longitude”— could not possibly reach as far as
pittsburgh. When the proprietors demanded that upper Ohio colonists pay
for their land, teagarden and his neighbors resisted, just as croghan had
hoped. in 1771, they formed an association to “Keep off all Officers belonging
to the law,” threatening a £50 fine for anyone who failed “to appose everey of
pens laws.” provincial officials repeatedly arrested teagarden himself, but
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each time his supporters broke him out of jail. croghan’s pronouncement that
pennsylvania lacked jurisdiction helped mobilize resistance for years to come.
neither croghan nor teagarden opposed state authority in general— both
coveted legal confirmation of their claims— but they sought to replace penn-
sylvanian rule with a manifestation of the state that better served their ends,
such as the proposed new colony of Vandalia.29
Other colonists eagerly patronized the new land office, including a sur-
prisingly well- funded Virginian named William crawford. a veteran of the
seven years’ War, crawford had subsequently built a homestead at a critical
river crossing on an army road tying pittsburgh to the east. he knew the re-
gion well but, like most upper Ohio colonists, lacked the ready money the
new land office required. But crawford had a patron: his former comrade- in-
arms george Washington. in 1767, the two men worked out a mutual y bene-
ficial arrangement: crawford quietly explored the region identifying desirable
tracts, and Washington fronted the money to purchase them as soon as they
became legal y available. Their plan flouted royal restrictions on coloniza-
tion, but they gambled that the king’s order was, in Washington’s words,
merely “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the indians.” sooner or
later, they expected the ban would be lifted, prompting a land rush. By iden-
tifying desirable tracts in advance, the two Virginians gained a head start on
the competition, enabling crawford to appear in philadelphia, cash in hand,
when the new land office opened.30
The Washington- crawford col aboration scorned imperial policy but
bolstered the tenuous authority of the provincial government. in acquiring
pennsylvanian title, they gained a vested interest in defending the propri-
etors’ jurisdiction, just as colonists who bought from cresap and croghan
came to oppose it. pennsylvania rewarded well- connected customers with
lucrative local government appointments, giving them and their friends still
more reason for allegiance. crawford and dorsey pentecost, another Virgin-
ian who bought pennsylvania land, found places for themselves in the new
western pennsylvania courts. For these aspiring members of the upper Ohio
elite, col aborating with pennsylvania offered a means to obtain landed
wealth and political power. such ambitions did not necessarily foster loyalty:
crawford and pentecost later abandoned the pennsylvania camp when it
suited their purposes. But the combination of land sales and political ap-
pointments nonetheless created networks of patronage that gave social y
prominent colonists a stake in provincial authority.31
competition for land thus fostered coalitions that linked a wide range of
containment, 1765–72
39
colonists to some manifestation of state power. small- scale homesteaders like
teagarden based their ownership claims on purchases from quasi- legal spec-
ulators like cresap and croghan, who offered favorable terms of sale to build
support for their claims. They, like crawford, cultivated patrons in philadel-
phia, Williamsburg, or london. access to the coveted resource— legal land
titles— varied with social and political status. teagarden’s hopes depended on
those of russell and cresap, just as crawford’s plans hinged on the favor of
Washington. in turn, these patrons l
obbied imperial officials to support their
various schemes. at the same time, distant patrons required local allies to
help make their claims good. rather than the rugged individualism of na-
tional mythology, ordinary colonists’ aspirations for economic security rested
on their reciprocal relationships with both members of the emerging regional
elite and, increasingly, provincial and imperial officialdom.
The midcentury wars left lasting distrust and antipathy between indians and
colonists. in the years that followed, thousands of colonists moved to the
monongahela Valley, indians complained frequently about the loss of land
and deer, and imperial officials repeatedly warned of imminent hostilities.
not surprisingly, intercultural encounters were often tense and sometimes
ended with bloodshed. But for nearly a decade, Ohio Valley inhabitants suc-
cessful y contained such violence. although indians and colonists usual y
distrusted and sometimes killed one another, they nonetheless averted re-
newed warfare, for a time.32
Between 1765 and 1773, intercultural violence followed markedly different
patterns on each side of the alleghenies. east of the mountains, both during
and after pontiac’s War, large bands of pennsylvanians and Virginians repeat-
edly assembled to kill defenseless indians or to free murderers of indians
from jail. in 1763, a large gang dubbed the paxton Boys slaughtered the men,
women, and children of conestoga manor, near lancaster, then marched on
philadelphia in defiance of the provincial government. two years later in
western Virginia, another group of colonists fell upon a party of traveling
cherokees, killing five. Officials briefly jailed some of the killers, who called
themselves the augusta Boys in imitation of their paxton counterparts, but a
mob soon freed them. Then, in early 1768, pennsylvanians Frederick stump
and John ironcutter murdered ten senecas and mohicans, including three
women and three children, on middle creek in cumberland county. The
local sheriff arrested and jailed the men, who admitted their guilt, but more
than seventy armed men soon descended and “carried off” the culprits “in
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open triumph, and violation of the law.” in each case, eastern colonists dis-
played a shocking readiness either to murder indians indiscriminately or to
assemble en masse to aid those who did.33
West of the mountains, colonists who attacked indians similarly evaded
punishment, but the pattern otherwise differed in both scale and context.
instead of ral ying in large groups, western killers of indians usual y acted
alone or in pairs. rather than enjoying the backing of their communities,
most were marginal individuals like runaway servants or deserting soldiers.
They eluded justice thanks to stealth, incompetence, or corruption, with no
mobs appearing to rescue them. rather than indiscriminate attacks on
strangers, these western murders more often arose out of everyday interac-
tions: brawling in taverns, haggling over trade, or feuding with coworkers.
Western violence was also less one- sided: indians killed colonists as wel .
above al , retaliation remained rare, as both indian and colonial leaders
acted quickly to prevent escalation. Viewed apart from the horrific massacres
east of the mountains, the murders of the interwar Ohio Valley underscored
that indian and colonial lives remained enmeshed.34
a brief catalog of bloodshed il ustrates the western pattern. in the spring
of 1765, near pittsburgh, a white trader sexual y assaulted a seneca woman,
perhaps one of his customers; her husband killed him. The following year,
when a group of shawnees sheltered two colonists, the guests killed three
men in their sleep and stole their canoe. The murderers turned out to be de-
serters from Fort pitt: knowing the shawnees were on good terms with the
army, they likely feared being returned to the garrison. in the summer of
1767, British officers arrested two saginaw Ojibwes near lake huron; in retal-
iation, another saginaw party attacked two traders’ boats on the Ohio, killing
ten colonists and stealing their goods. That september, a shawnee man killed
Thomas mitchel , one of many traders then living and trading, otherwise
peaceful y, in the scioto Valley shawnee towns. Three months later, a dela-
ware man killed John mcdonald and wounded another colonist on the
monongahela. a farmer had hired both the victim and his killer, it turned
out, to watch his fields over the winter. The killer complained that mcdonald
had given him “ill treatment.” Whatever the cause of their dispute, the con-
flict once more erupted out of the closeness of indians and colonists, rather
than the cultural distance between them. When pennsylvanian officials com-
plained about mcdonald’s death, White eyes replied that his killer “was half
a white man, and the other half an indian,” making the colonists “equal y
concerned with us in that Breach of Friendship.”35
containment, 1765–72
41
The marked differences between violence east and west of the mountains
reflected other regional distinctions. The paxton and augusta mobs came
from young but well- established communities. many of their inhabitants had
lived, worked, and fought together for a full generation before and during the
recent wars. Those wars had driven most indians out of the region, giving
colonists east of the mountains a massive demographic advantage even in
frontier areas. trade continued— stump and ironcutter murdered their vic-
tims after selling them rum— but was becoming an increasingly marginal
part of the local economy. By contrast, colonial communities west of the al-
leghenies remained in their infancy. Because of their recent arrival and dis-
persed pattern of settlement, many early Ohio Valley colonists knew their
neighbors only slightly. Until the mid- 1770s, they largely lacked civil institu-
tions like churches, courts, and militias. The difficulties of transmontane
transportation left them few opportunities to trade with, or seek aid from,
the seaboard colonies. in addition, at least three haudenosaunee towns stood
within one hundred miles of redstone, and many more indian communities
dotted rivers to the north and west. monongahela colonists thus had much
more to gain from trade, and lose in war, than their counterparts in paxton
and augusta. in the spring of 1771, Bemineo and gelelemend learned the
difference firsthand. in the Ohio Valley they and other indian diplomats
moved freely, but when they traveled east to philadelphia they required an
armed guard to protect them from murderous colonists.36
in early september 1769, a cheat river colonist named charles hanin-
gam and two other men murdered a delaware man named Jacob daniel and
his two sons at the victims’ hunting cabin on dunkard creek. Within days,
two other colonists, charles martin and henry tracks, publicly accused
haningam of the crime and pledged to provide evidence against him. a third
colonist, James Booth, arrested the culprit and handed him over to two trad-
ers, david Owens and John Wi
lliams, who brought him down the mononga-
hela to Fort pitt, where the British commandant jailed him. in sum, five
different colonists worked together to arrest and transport haningam over
one hundred miles, a journey of two or three days, through the heart of the
growing redstone community. in contrast to similar cases east of the moun-
tains, no one interfered with haningam’s arrest or imprisonment. haningam
eluded justice all the same: after sitting for ten days in the Fort pitt guard-
house, chained hand and foot, he managed to slip out of his leg bolts and es-
cape in the night, reportedly “through the negligence of the sergt. of the
guard.” he probably had help, especial y with the leg bolts and the guard, but
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this flight in the dark bore little resemblance to the carlisle mob’s midday
rescue of stump and ironcutter.37
about two years after haningam’s escape, an indentured servant, mathew
haley, ran away from his master, richard Brown. two seneca men found the
fugitive in the woods and turned him in, but haley soon escaped again, only
to stumble upon the two senecas once more. according to haley’s subse-
quent confession, the senecas this time “gave him a tomahawk and one pr. of
macosons” and promised to let him stay if he helped them “steal horses from
the white people.” instead, haley killed them with the tomahawk and fled
into the woods with as many of their possessions as he could carry. later,
after Brown recaptured haley, the servant confessed his crime. allegheny
homesteader John miller and his wife, who had sheltered haley in exchange
for stolen goods, later confirmed the story. guyasuta came to Fort pitt to re-
port the victims’ disappearance; soon thereafter, haley’s master turned him
in. Both colonists and senecas acted quickly to prevent further violence. The
British commandant invited guyasuta to see the imprisoned murderer, ex-
plaining that he was “a foolish boy” who had murdered the senecas because
he feared “being delivered up” to his master. guyasuta thanked the British for