By the eighteenth century, the easy availability of European goods prompted most native manufactures to cease in the Northeast. A list of items sent to the Iroquois about this time suggests how essential trade had become. It included weapons and ammunition, knives, hatchets, needles, scissors, and flint strikers for starting fires, steel and brass wire, glass bottles, heavy blankets and other textiles, ready-made shirts and dresses, paint for body decoration, glass beads and wampum, tobacco and pipes, and liquor, many barrels of liquor.
Alcohol abuse increased the dizzying effects of colonization. New Englanders manufactured bootleg rum from contraband sugar smuggled from the Spanish or French West Indies. The colonial authorities knew that the addictive substance sometimes turned voluntary economic arrangements into Devil’s bargains, and they outlawed the liquor trade to maintain their moral integrity and preserve the peace. Drunks brawled. People died, and survivors sought revenge. The alcohol trade to the Indians resembled the modern cocaine or heroin business, with traders acting like drug lords. They profited from intoxication while Indian communities grappled with addiction. “Strong liquor is the root of all evil,” a chief of the Senecas declared, but the chiefs found themselves unable to stop the flow of the drug. One missionary observed a drunken fight among the Senecas in 1750. “The yelling and shrieking continued frightfully in the whole village. It is impossible to describe the confusion to anyone who has not witnessed it.”9
By the mid-eighteenth century, such violent scenes had become commonplace in eastern North America. To find refuge, many Indian families moved westward, settling in ethnically mixed Indian towns; others remained in their traditional homelands but dispersed to put distance between themselves and their addled neighbors. Gradually, the traditional communal longhouse gave way to single-family log cabins. And the frontier structures took on yet another meaning: they became safe houses from alcohol-induced disruption.
. . .
The Ohio country, the great trans-Appalachian watershed of the Ohio River, inspired visions of peace, abundance, and profit. Warfare had kept the human population sparse in the seventeenth century. The Ohio country bloomed as a buffer zone between the warring French-allied Great Lakes Algonquians and the northeastern Haudenosaunee, allied first with the Dutch, then with the English. Animals multiplied in the absence of human predators. In the early 1700s, the fat and numerous bears, deer, and bison proved irresistible, and hunters drifted back into the area. Soon whole communities joined them. The Ohio country became a refuge for Indian peoples sick of the Northeast—Iroquois, Hurons, Delawares, and Shawnees among them. They built multiethnic towns and over time acquired their own leaders and foreign policy. The product of buffer zones, social fractures, and land grabs, these Ohio Indians salvaged a home region from the wreckage of colonization.
The new towns attracted French traders always on the prowl for customers and military allies. The French saw the Ohio country as a crucial hedge against British expansion. The millions of people in the British colonies alarmed them, but also the superior quality and low prices of British trade goods. The rich land of the interior was also a prime target of frontier land speculators and backcountry settlers. Worried that their traders would be crushed and that British settlements would lock up the headwaters of Ohio and thereby break their waterlogged empire, the French moved to reinforce their claims in 1749. They sent a heavily armed force of Canadians and Indians down the Ohio to warn off the British. In 1753 they began constructing a series of forts that extended south from Lake Erie to the forks of the Ohio River, the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. The forts irritated the British. They threw up their own blockhouses and strengthened their old frontier outposts, and the king gave huge chunks of the region away to a group known as the Ohio Company, a land-speculating venture organized by Virginia and London capitalists. The company made plans to build a fort of its own at the forks of the Ohio.
All this construction upset the residents. The Ohio Indians were suspicious of Europeans with imperial ambitions and blueprints. Many, like the Delawares, had crossed the mountains to rid themselves of scheming speculators and squatters. Most of the Ohio Indians opposed the British and wanted to stop their westward expansion at the Appalachians. They were also disturbed by the French moves into their country, but unlike the British, French outposts did not become centers of swelling agricultural settlements. Indian diplomats understood that it was in their interest to perpetuate the colonial stalemate. They waffled, hoping to forestall a decisive victory by either side.
In 1754 the governor of Virginia sent a young militia officer, Colonel George Washington, to expel the French from the Ohio Company lands. Washington confronted a superior force of French and Indians based in Fort Duquesne, a log bastion erected at the forks of the Ohio and named for the governor of Canada. The Canadians and Indians surrounded Washington and forced him to surrender his troops. From Duquesne, the French commanded the Ohio country (at least in the opinions of the squabbling Europeans). The next year, the British escalated the conflict when they brought in the professionals. General Edward Braddock of the Scottish Coldstream Guards led more than two thousand British troops and fifty Indian scouts from Virginia toward the forks. The French and their Indian allies ambushed the army, and in Britain’s worst defeat of the eighteenth century, Braddock lost his life. The survivors buried the general’s body on the trail, and the entire English detachment marched over the grave to destroy the traces. Braddock’s trouncing launched a global conflagration. The French and British and the many allies on both sides fought on land and sea, embattling North America, India, the Caribbean islands, and Europe proper. The Ohio country became one of the most hotly contested real estate developments in world history.
Braddock’s defeat headlined a long series of setbacks for the British. Canadians captured British posts in northern New York, and Indians pounded backcountry settlements, killing thousands of settlers, then raided deep into the coastal colonies, throwing colonists into panic. Prime Minister William Pitt, a passionate advocate of colonial expansion, poured military resources into the North American contest, determined to defeat New France once and for all. To win the support of the colonists, he promised that the war would be fought “at His Majesty’s expense.” To win the support of the natives, British officials promised the Six Nations and the Ohio Indians that the crown would “agree upon clear and fixed Boundaries between our Settlements and their Hunting Grounds, so that each Party may know their own and be a mutual Protection to each other of their respective Possessions.” Pitt dispatched more than twenty thousand regular British troops across the Atlantic, and in combination with colonial forces, he massed over fifty thousand men against French Canada.10
The investment in money and manpower reversed the course of the war. A string of British victories culminated in the taking of Fort Duquesne in 1758—renamed Fort Pitt, later Pittsburgh. The last of the western French forts fell the next year. The imperial stalemate in the trans-Appalachian frontier toppled in the South as well. Here, the Cherokees were the key players. Like other Indian confederacies, they tried to balance their alliances to prevent a winner-take-all scenario. During the world war that came to be known in future generations as the French and Indian War in North America, the Cherokees sided with the French to slow British expansion into the interior from the Carolinas. They paid dearly for this choice. Regular and provincial British troops invaded their homeland—no backcountry to the Indians—and crushed them.
The decisive British victory came in 1759. British forces converged on Quebec in the heart of French Canada. Their commander, General James Wolfe, sought a final showdown with the French army led by the Marquis de Montcalm. Wolfe and his men twice made frontal assaults on Quebec from the river, failing both times. He then devised a scheme worthy of a wilderness scout—a night maneuver up a cleft in the bluffs two miles behind the city. At dawn on September 13, 1757, the British met the French on the Plains of Abraham behind Quebec. In a day’s h
ard fight, Montcalm was killed and Wolfe shot three times. Before he died, Wolfe knew he had won, and with the victory England supplanted France in North America.
Benjamin West’s painting of General Wolfe’s death is filled with last gasps, but the global struggle did not end with the fall of Quebec. For two more years, the British hammered French ships, and since Spain was allied with France, they lost possessions as well. The British invaded and captured several Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the Pacific. At approximately the same time, England also conquered India, thus becoming the greatest imperial power the world had yet known.
Londoners rang bells while Parisians moped in silence. In the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, France gave up all its North American possessions, ceding its claims east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, with the exception of New Orleans, which along with its other trans-Mississippi West claims passed to Spain. In exchange for the return of its Caribbean and Pacific colonies, Spain ceded Florida. In one gulp, the English swallowed France’s riverine concoction. As British officials pondered the green valleys, fair forests, and packages of animal pelts that were now theirs, they may have mistaken the pleasant burn in their guts for satisfaction. Wars, however, create as many problems as they solve. The ink had barely dried on the Treaty of Paris when the British began to suffer from indigestion.
“The Death of General Wolfe.” Engraving by William Woollett, based on a painting by Benjamin West, 1776. Library of Congress.
. . .
When the Ohio Indians heard that the French had ceded their homeland to the British, they were shocked. “Having never been conquered, either by the English or French,” British Indian agent William Johnson wrote, the Indians “consider themselves as a free people.” A new set of British policies soon turned shock into rage. Both the French and British in America had long given gifts to initiate and renew alliances. This was Indian diplomatic protocol. Friends offered presents; enemies withheld them. The Spanish officials who replaced the French in Louisiana adhered to the old policy to keep the peace, but the British military governor in the western region, General Jeffrey Amherst, in one of his first official actions, banned presents to Indian chiefs and tribes, demanding that they learn to live without “charity.” As British subjects, Amherst reasoned, the Indians should offer their allegiance to the crown without recompense. The Indians, as “free people,” considered this assertion of sovereignty ridiculous and insulting. Amherst’s stinginess not only wounded friendships, it hit Indians in the stomach. He refused to supply them with ammunition that they required for hunting. Many Ohio Indians went hungry.11
Ohio Indians meet with the British in 1764. Engraving by Benjamin West, from William Smith, An Historical Account of the Expedition Against the Ohio Indians . . . (London, 1766).
Religion fanned the discontent. An Indian visionary, Neolin, known to the English as the Delaware Prophet, amassed hundreds of followers in the Ohio country. “The Enlightened One” taught that European ways had corrupted native people. To recover, they needed to purify themselves, return to their traditions, and prepare for a holy war against the colonists. “If you suffer the English among you, you are dead men. Sickness, smallpox, and their poison will destroy you entirely,” he declared, and urged his followers to “drive them out!” Neolin’s message inspired and empowered a collection of native military leaders who laid plans for a coordinated attack against the British in the spring of 1763. The principal figure among them was an Ottawa named Pontiac, a renowned orator and political organizer who admired Neolin’s prophecies as much as he despised Amherst’s policies. The combination of inspirational religious and political leadership had fired the Algonquian resistance on the Chesapeake early in the seventeenth century, and it would recur numerous times over the long history of Indian resistance to colonial expansion in North America. Religion consolidated military campaigns, welding the fractures of intertribal differences.12
In May 1763, the Indians attacked all the British forts in the West. At Mackinaw, located at the narrows between Lakes Michigan and Huron, Indians overran the fort by scrambling through the gates in pursuit of a ball during a lacrosse game, cheered on by the unsuspecting soldiers. Indian raids cost the lives of more than two thousand settlers. At Fort Pitt, General Amherst proposed that his officers “Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians” by distributing the infected blankets from the fort’s hospital. Contagion, whether from Amherst’s despicable blankets or the general health disaster that was warfare, struck the Delawares and Shawnees and traveled south to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, killing hundreds. The Indians sacked and burned eight British posts, but the confederacy failed to dislodge the British from key forts at Niagara, Detroit, and the forks of the Ohio. Pontiac fought for another year, but his ranks thinned as rebels peeled off to defend their villages or salvage what was left. Many native groups sued for peace; the British started negotiations by handing out presents. Gifts, it turns out, were cheaper than uprisings.13
Even before the revolt began, British authorities were at work on a policy that they hoped would resolve frontier tensions. The king assumed jurisdiction over Indian lands and issued the famous Royal Proclamation of 1763. Some areas at the geographical extremes of British North America—Quebec and Florida—would open for settlement, but the crown forbade its citizens from taking possession of trans-Appalachia. That region was to become Indian Country, and the king’s agents controlled access to it. Farmers and speculators would need specific authorization before the purchase of these protected Indian lands. British authorities promised to maintain commercial posts in the interior for Indian commerce and fortify the border to keep out land-hungry settlers. The proclamation gratified Indian leaders, especially the tribes who had sided with the English against the French, but land speculators and their would-be customers grumbled.
Backcountry colonists expected that with the removal of the French threat, they could move unencumbered into the West, regardless of the wishes of the Indian inhabitants. Why would the crown reward territory to Indian enemies who slaughtered more than four thousand settlers during the previous wars? The Royal Proclamation of 1763 seemed absurd, and colonists pushed against the line. They discovered the limits of British power. The king’s agents could draw boundaries on maps and declare huge territories off-limits, but they had neither the will nor the manpower to stop the flow of illegal border crossers. Within a few years, New Englanders by the thousands seeped into the northern Green Mountain district, known by the corrupted French name “Vermont.” In the middle colonies, New York settlers moved ever closer to the homeland of the Haudenosaunee, while other illegals located within the protective radius of Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. Hunters, stock herders, and farmers crossed over the first range of the Appalachians in Virginia and North Carolina, planting illicit pioneer communities in what are now West Virginia and eastern Tennessee.
The western human tide came with sharks. Land speculators and investors saw profit in the king’s Indian Country. George Washington considered the proclamation line nothing but “a temporary expedient,” and he touted the advantages of investing in western land. “There is a large field before you, an opening prospect in the back Country for Adventurers,” he wrote to a contemporary, “where an enterprising Man with very little Money may lay the foundation of a Noble Estate in the New Settlements.” The future president himself speculated heavily in trans-Appalachian lands. In 1768 the Ohio Company sent surveyors to mark out its grant in the upper Ohio. In response to settlers and speculators, British authorities pressed the Haudenosaunee and the Cherokees for land cessions. With France gone, native negotiators could no longer play the balancing game between rival colonial powers. They found themselves reduced to a choice between compliance and resistance, and weakened by the recent war, they chose to sign away their rights to land. In 1768 the Cherokees ceded a vast tract on the waters of the upper Tennessee River—where British settlers had already planted co
mmunities—and the Six Nations gave up their claim of possession to the Ohio valley, a claim many of the Ohio Indians rejected. The Haudenosaunee sold out the buffer-zone refugees to deflect the British squatters and speculators from their homeland.14
. . .
Thanks to the French and Indian War, the Ohio country went from a marginal, wartorn no man’s land to some of the most hotly contested real estate on the planet. The watershed stoked desire; one group’s want begot other groups’ wants, and soon colonial rivals had launched a world war to possess the region. The Ohio country epitomized the competition and possessiveness that remade the map of North America in the eighteenth century. Colonial powers scrambled to seize lands and resources, not because they could populate, protect, or use them necessarily, but rather because they did not want their opponents to get hold of them. Empires gobbled territory, at least on paper, in a giant exercise of keep-away.
Thousands of miles from the forks of the Ohio, on the fogbound coasts of the northern Pacific, natives and Europeans battled over a natural resource. Different setting, familiar scene. Driven by the search for valuable furs, the Russians had conquered Siberia and eventually moved across the icy sea to the Aleutian archipelago, homeland of the amphibious Aleuts, master canoeists and hunters of sea mammals. We know this region by the name applied to it much later—Alaska. With the hallmark arrogance of an invading European nation, the invaders called it Russian America.
Tsar Peter the Great commissioned the Danish-born naval officer Vitus Bering to lead a scouting expedition across the Pacific, and in 1741, after several shorter voyages, Bering sailed east across the sea that now bears his name and “discovered” the Aleutian Islands. Although he died on the return passage, his associates brought back a cargo of sea otter furs valued at ninety thousand rubles. This fabulous sum triggered a rush of independent Russian fur trappers and traders called promyshlenniki. By 1763 hundreds of Russian traders had followed the Aleutian chain to the mainland and were sending home a steady supply of furs, valued in the millions of rubles, that were traded into China in exchange for the tea to which the Russians were addicted.
The American West Page 12