The American West

by Robert V Hine

  By the 1720s these immigrants took the composite Indian-European frontier culture from its hearth in the Delaware valley and pushed it into the backcountry, down the immense Shenandoah valley, running southwest along the eastern front of the Appalachians. The Shenandoah became British America’s first “west.” Within a generation settlers could be found all along the front range of the Appalachians, from Pennsylvania south to the Carolinas. Many, perhaps most, of these farmers and hunters held no legal title to the lands they occupied but simply hacked out and defended their squatters’ rights.

  The squatters built their rights on a fiction. They based their claim to property on the labor they invested in “improving” the land. This assumed that the ground lay fallow, unused, and ripe for manipulation. But the invaders laid claim to the lands of Indian peoples who found themselves literally pressed to the mountain wall. While English colonial society underwent rapid expansion, these coastal Indian societies continued to undergo traumatic population decline, mostly as a result of the terrific beating inflicted by European epidemic diseases. During the eighteenth century, the European colonial population overtook the native population of the continent. Accurate counts of people were hard to come by in the eighteenth century; no headlines alerted natives and newcomers to the demographic shift. They crossed the historical threshold blind to what the future would hold.

  American farm in the Pennsylvania backcountry. From Patrick Campbell, Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America . . . (Edinburgh, 1793). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  In the tidewater region of Virginia, coastal North and South Carolina, and Georgia, where the climate proved suitable for growing tobacco, rice, or indigo, settlers at first used enslaved Indians or European indentured servants to work the fields, but they gradually shifted to enslaved Africans, following the pattern that had been laid down in the Caribbean. Nearly four hundred thousand captive Africans were landed in the British colonies before the American Revolution, a small portion of the more than twelve million people who suffered the largest forced migration in world history. Settlers and slaves moved westward from the coast, clearing the piney woods and constructing hardscrabble compounds that in no way resembled the elegant plantations of southern nostalgia. By 1770 Africans made up nearly half the population of the southern colonies.

  . . .

  Population loss did not affect all Indians equally. Although the number of coastal natives declined precipitously, the population of interior peoples such as the Creeks and Cherokees actually stabilized and grew in the mid-eighteenth century. Imperial competition, immigration, natural increase, and territorial expansion would radically alter relationships between human—and nonhuman—populations throughout North America in the eighteenth century. Yet the immense scale of these changes was matched by their haphazard application. Colonization opened new routes to power and wealth even as it foreclosed others. On the grassy plains of the continent’s interior, some humans discovered an express to fortune on the backs of Spanish horses. One group, the Comanches, rode this path all the way to their own empire. In the eighteenth century, Europeans monopolized neither the grand designs nor the strong-arm tactics of imperial regimes. Indians could be masters, too.

  The Comanches moved from the Rocky Mountains to the Great Plains in the early 1700s in response to the Spanish presence in New Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan–speaking people cared nothing for the Spaniard’s God or their claims to New World sovereignty; they were after their animals. During the tumult of the Pueblo Revolt, Spanish horses—a tough breed known as barbs—escaped their owners and galloped onto the southern plains grasslands to find an ungulate paradise. They ate grass, reproduced, and partnered with new sets of caballeros. The Jumanos and Apaches acquired mounts first. They demonstrated the animals’ extraordinary potential, and their military and material success attracted imitators, including the mountain-dwelling Utes and Comanches. The Utes and Comanches were allies and indistinguishable in the eyes of the Spanish. The Comanches first appeared in the historical record in 1709. A Spanish official in New Mexico mentioned their presence as an afterthought.

  Once they figured out how to fully exploit the power of horses, the Comanches’ influence and reputation grew. Unlike the Apache and Jumanos, the Comanches went all in with horses, altering their mixed hunting and farming economy to take advantage of the new technology. They stopped growing food, and they stayed on the plains year-round to hunt bison full time. They raided the villages of vegetable growers to sprinkle their diets with carbohydrates, and they began trading bison robes, horses, and captive slaves with the Spanish in Taos and the French in the Mississippi valley. Trade brought guns, and they used the increased firepower to further escalate their raiding and trading. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Comanches dominated the Southwest. The Jumanos disappeared, the Apache suffered continuous pilfering, and the grand designs of the Spanish in New Mexico and Texas became afterthoughts.

  The Comanche method of training horses. From George Catlin, Die Indianer Nord-Amerikas . . . (Leipzig, 1845). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  . . .

  The French colonies also grew in the eighteenth century, but at a much slower pace. Dedicated to keeping its colony exclusively Catholic, officials regulating immigration to Canada refused to admit thousands of Huguenot French Protestants, preventing the colony from achieving the impressive growth of the English. Although Canadian population climbed from fifteen thousand in 1700 to more than seventy thousand by midcentury, it was relatively puny beside the English colonial behemoth of more than a million.

  Their low population numbers turned the French into social entrepreneurs. They reached out to Indian peoples through trade and alliances to thwart British and Spanish expansion. They worked to strengthen their great crescent of military posts and isolated settlements extending from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes, then down the length of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. The scattered French settlements in the western country anchored this meandering hybrid creation of natives and colonists. At each site—from the sugar plantations of the lower Mississippi to the farms of the Illinois Country to the fur posts at Prairie du Chien—the French re-created the “long plot” pattern of the Saint Lawrence; it was the distinctive Franco-American stamp on the landscape, visible to this day from the air. There were also French settlements at each of the strategic passages of the Great Lakes: Mackinaw, Sault Sainte Marie, and Detroit, this last by midcentury a community of a hundred métis farm families who worked their land near the villages of Ottawas, Potawatomies, and Hurons.

  French long lots at Green Bay, Wisconsin. From American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive (Washington, D. C., 1832–61).

  French frontier communities combined European and Indian elements. At first glance, one observer testified, Detroit looked like “an old French village” until he looked closer and noticed that the houses were “mostly covered with bark,” Indian style. “It is not uncommon to see a Frenchman with Indian shoes and stockings, without breeches, wearing a strip of woolen cloth to cover what decency requires him to conceal,” wrote another visitor; “yet at the same time he wears a fine ruffled shirt and a laced waistcoat, with a fine handkerchief on his head.” Family and kinship also took on local Indian patterns. Colonial men and native women intermarried, and soon there were groups of métis in every French settlement. Households often consisted of several related families, and in the Indian fashion, most women limited their fertility, bearing an average of two or three children. There was arranged marriage and occasional polygamy, but wives had easy access to divorce and enjoyed full rights to property. Yet unlike their Indian kin, these people focused their activities on commerce and overwhelmingly identified themselves as Catholics. Choosing a path of mutual accommodation, the French and Indians established some of the most interesting and distinct communities in all of North America.4

  Altho
ugh in general the French had better relations with native peoples, they sometimes came into conflict with Indian groups as they pursued their expansionist plans. When the Foxes of the upper Mississippi attempted to block French access to the interior, positioning themselves as lucrative middlemen in the fur trade, the French did not hesitate to wage bloody war upon them, eventually forcing them to sign a treaty in 1738. On the lower Mississippi, the French fought the Natchez Indians, who opposed their arrival, a war that concluded with the decimation and scattering of the entire Natchez tribe in 1731. By force or by friendship, the French strung together a vast territory linked by water and cross-cultural relationships. Like their fellow North American expansionists, they had big plans for an epic continental realm. Although it was true that British colonists far outnumbered them, observed a military officer of New France, numbers were not of first importance, for “the Canadians are brave, much inured to war, and untiring in travel. Two thousand of them will at all times and all places thrash the people of New England.”5

  . . .

  Population increase, territorial expansion, and imperial consolidation: the European colonies in North America bulked up and butted heads throughout the long eighteenth century. Indians cheered and jeered from the sidelines, trading blows when battle met strategic needs from military advantage to cultural survival. The string of colonial wars strengthened some native groups and destroyed others. By the late seventeenth century, for example, the Five Nations had demonstrated their power far to the south and west of their homeland, matching the influence of any European colony. The Osages controlled a vast territory stretching from the Mississippi into the Arkansas River valley, and the Comanches ruled the southern plains. In the Southeast, Indians—including the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws—joined forces to build new confederacies. The Choctaws allied with the French, the others with the English. Neither Indians nor Europeans understood the colonial wars as racial conflicts of red against white; rather, every group fought for itself, allied as circumstances and interest demanded, in a kind of free-for-all. Indians shot Indians and colonists blew up colonists at least as much as Indians fought colonists and vice versa.

  Many of these wars started in Europe, but the North Americans quickly made the hostilities their own. What the English colonists called King William’s War in 1689 began when King Louis XIV of France rejected William of Orange as the new ruler of England. In America, this dynastic squabble translated into a battle fought over access to the rich fur ground of the north and west. In 1670 the English had chartered the Hudson’s Bay Company to counter French trade dominance in the north, while on the southern flank of New France the English sought to extend their control of the Indian trade through their Covenant Chain allies, the Five Nations. The hostilities opened with an English-supported Mohawk massacre of French settlers at the village of Lachine, near Montreal. The next year the French and their Indian allies counterattacked, burning frontier settlements in New York, New Hampshire, and Maine and pressing the attack on Iroquois towns. The same year, a Massachusetts fleet briefly captured the strategic French harbor and fort at Port Royal in Acadia, but a combined English colonial force failed in an attempt to conquer the French settlements along the Saint Lawrence. The inconclusive war ended with a European treaty of 1697 that established an equally inconclusive peace.

  In five short years, the combatants were at each other again, this time over the English refusal to let Louis XIV’s grandson ascend to the throne of Spain, bringing those Catholic nations too close for comfort. But in North America what was called Queen Anne’s War stoked frontier resentments, and most of the bloodshed occurred on the edges of the empires. The English attacked the French communities in the maritime region, while the French and their Indian allies raided English settlements, such as the outlying village of Deerfield, Massachusetts, dragging more than a hundred prisoners into captivity in 1704. In the South, South Carolina troops invaded Spanish Florida in 1702, burning and plundering Saint Augustine, and four years later, a combined French and Spanish fleet took revenge by bombarding Charleston. Indians fought on all sides of the conflict. The monarchs and their ministers signed a treaty in 1713, but the North Americans kept animosities hot. English slave traders encouraged their Indian allies to continue the attack against natives allied with the Spanish Floridians and French Louisianans. Over the next quarter-century, these raids destroyed the last of the Spanish mission stations in Florida. The raiders captured thousands of mission Indians, and the English sold them into slavery in the Caribbean. Thousands more died in the fighting or bolted for safety. The Creeks resettled in Florida, where they joined fugitive African American slaves from South Carolina and formed a new mixed group known as the Seminoles.

  Iroquois warrior. French engraving, 1796. Library of Congress.

  The colonial wars went particularly badly for groups like the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscaroras of North Carolina. Defeated in battle in 1713, the surviving families moved north to join their colinguists in New York. In 1722 the Haudenosaunee admitted the Tuscaroras. The Six Nations exploited the violent conflicts, expanding their ranks and their influence over reeling tribes, such as William Penn’s old friends the Delawares. Haudenosaunee diplomats became adept at playing the French against the British. Shaken by Canadian attacks on their towns during King William’s War, in 1701 they negotiated a treaty of neutrality with New France while maintaining an alliance with the English. “To preserve the Ballance between us and the French,” wrote one New York official, “is the great ruling Principle of the Modern Indian Politics.” The Haudenosaunee—as well as other powerful nations like the Comanche—benefited from the flexibility of their internal politics. Unlike European monarchical states, Indian confederacies operated through persuasion rather than command. Factions created their own foreign policies to suit their immediate needs. This opened possibilities for the Six Nations: the factions within the Confederacy were free to ally themselves with either the British or the French. They could also withdraw their support without completely wrecking larger agreements. In a similar way the southern confederacies attempted to carve out space for themselves between the British colonies and those of the French in Louisiana and the Spanish in Florida. Onondaga chief Otreouti expressed the Indian position. “We are born freemen,” he declared, “we have a power to go where we please, conduct who we will to the places we resort to, and to buy and sell where we think fit.”6

  . . .

  Yet another succession dispute tested the free-range politics of the Indian confederacies. In the 1740s King George’s War broke the peace between the English and French, and both powers sought the help of the Six Nations. The English presented their case at a 1744 conference held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Haudenosaunee were unhappy. Like other native peoples, they felt under siege. A chief named Canasatego gave a long speech that recounted a time before the European invasion: “We then had room enough, and plenty of deer, which was easily caught, and though we had not knives, hatchets, or guns, such as we have now, yet we had knives of stone, and hatchets of stone, and bows and arrows, and those served our uses as well then as the English ones do now.” But times had changed: “We are now straitened, and sometimes in want of deer, and liable to many other inconveniences since the English came among us, and particularly from that pen-and-ink work that is going on at the table.” Here Canasatego pointed at the scribe recording his speech. Through their wars, treaties, and land-grabbing, the English had worn some of the shine off their friendship.7

  At Lancaster, the Six Nations agreed to support the British—in exchange for payments of gold and promises of fair dealing in the future—and with the Iroquois protecting their northern borders, the English felt safe enough on that frontier to focus on the capture of the strategic French fortress of Louisbourg, at the entrance to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. But the “pen-and-ink work” remained much on Indians’ minds. A series of land deals signed by the Delawares with the colony of Pennsylvania alarmed Indian Co
untry, especially the Walking Purchase of 1737, an event that unfolded on the hazy ground between history and myth. The story was that William Penn had negotiated a treaty in good faith with the Delawares, stipulating the Indians’ willingness to cede lands vaguely bounded by the distance a man could travel in a day and a half. Forty years passed, Penn died, and his heirs moved to enforce the treaty. They hired fleet-footed ringers who covered more than sixty miles in the specified time. Historians argue over the accuracy of this tale, but its absolute truth is beside the point. The Walking Purchase symbolized the escalating conflict between Indians and settlers over western land. To install a farmer’s paradise in Pennsylvania for Germans and Scots-Irish, Penn’s descendants pressured, swindled, and abused the farming peoples already there. The Walking Purchase opened a huge tract in the upper Delaware and Lehigh valleys by dispossessing Indian communities. A stain on Penn’s legacy, the story announced an end to fair deals and signaled disturbing things to come.

  Delaware chief Tishcohan, who was defrauded by the Walking Purchase. From Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America . . . , 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1836–44). Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  Along with land, trade goods became flash points of resentment. Their growing dependence on European manufactures had, to use Chief Canasatego’s phrase, “straitened” some Indian groups. Being able to purchase knives, hatchets, and guns at the trading post gave “a vast advantage to the Six Nations,” another Haudenosaunee spokesman declared. “But we think, Brother, that your people who trade there have the most advantage by it, and that it is as good for them as a Silver mine.” Trade items bolstered political alliances. The goods cemented friendships and promoted peace. When the Six Nations pointed out an unfair advantage, they were communicating more than their economic displeasure. Unhappy customers meant war.8