CONTESTED TERRITORIES

Native Americans and Non-Natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700–1850

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2012 Michigan State University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-045-0

Contents

Foreword by Greg O'Brien...............................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments........................................................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction by Melissa Rinehart and Charles Beatty-Medina.............................................................................................................................................xiiiA Year at Niagara: Negotiating Coexistence in the Eastern Great Lakes, 1763–1764 Daniel Ingram..................................................................................................1"Foolish Young Men" and the Contested Ohio Country, 1783–1795 Sarah E. Miller...................................................................................................................35Native American–French Interactions in Eighteenth-Century Southwest Michigan: The View from Fort St. Joseph Michael S. Nassaney, William M. Cremin, and LisaMarie Malischke.....................55Old Friends in New Territories: Delawares and Quakers in the Old Northwest Territory Dawn Marsh.......................................................................................................81Delawares in Eastern Ohio after the Treaty of Greenville: The Goshen Mission in Context Amy C. Schutt.................................................................................................111Miami Resistance and Resilience during the Removal Era Melissa Rinehart...............................................................................................................................137The Politics of Indian Removal on the Wyandot Reserve, 1817–1843 James Buss.....................................................................................................................167Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................................................195Contributors...........................................................................................................................................................................................215Index..................................................................................................................................................................................................217

Chapter One

A Year at Niagara: Negotiating Coexistence in the Eastern Great Lakes, 1763–1764

DANIEL INGRAM

In early September 1763, the British garrison of Fort Niagara felt lucky. They had been spared the fates of Fort Michilimackinac and many smaller western forts that had been overtaken or destroyed in the Indian rebellion that would soon be named after the Odawa leader Pontiac. Niagara lay within the nominal country of the Senecas, and some of them had become disaffected with the British regime. Many of the westernmost Senecas living in the Genesee river area, often called Chenussios by their contemporaries, had joined in the rebellion and may have played a role in fomenting the uprising in the first place. They had long been friendlier to the old French regime in Canada than most of their English-allied Iroquois kin, and they saw the uprising as a way to assert their influence in regional affairs. However, except for a few small skirmishes, mainly in Pennsylvania, the rebellious Chenussios had not yet subjected the Niagara region to the kind of violence that had roiled through the Great Lakes region earlier that summer. This was vital to British plans for quelling the uprising because Niagara was the main supply point for all the western posts, and any chance of relieving besieged Fort Detroit and stopping the rebellion would begin there. In the meantime, British representatives continued to parley for peace with western Indian groups. To that end, the sloop Michigan had sailed into Lake Erie on August 26, carrying provisions for Detroit's besieged garrison, and an Iroquois delegation to meet with Pontiac. The small delegation included Daniel Oughnour, a Mohawk friend of Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, and their mission was a routine peace negotiation. But, soon after the ship entered Lake Erie, it was cast ashore. The effort to reclaim its wreckage from the lakefront prompted a series of events that brought the full force of the Indian uprising to the Niagara region.

Niagara's role in the Indian uprising of 1763 has been less prominent in studies of the rebellion than more familiar events at Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Pittsburgh. Pontiac and his allies in the Great Lakes region, the Ohio Valley, and Illinois have garnered more attention than the western Seneca group, despite the Chenussios' roles as early instigators and supporters of the rebellion, and their success in overthrowing Pennsylvania forts Venango, Le Boeuf, and Presque isle in 1763. The Seneca attack at Devil's Hole on the Niagara portage is usually noted as an important British defeat, but second to the battles of Bushy Run near Fort Pitt, or Bloody Run near Detroit. Johnson's 1764 Niagara peace conference is often depicted as a smashing diplomatic success because it resulted in the supposedly desperate Senecas ceding control of the Niagara corridor to the British. From the British military's point of view, and with the benefit of hindsight, these interpretations seem well founded.

However, studying these events from the Senecas' perspective complicates the picture. The Anglocentric vantage emphasizes Iroquoian social and military decline and economic dependency during the eighteenth century. The Senecas would have understood the events of the 1760s differently. For six decades, Senecas and their Iroquoian kin had worked to establish favorable economic and political relations with both the British and French governments in North America without taking part in European military conflicts. By the 1760s, the Six Nations Iroquois had become vital consumers in the Atlantic fur trade. They desired fair trade, political neutrality in European affairs, and, like nearly all Eastern Woodland peoples of the eighteenth century, restriction of white settlement in their country. But the Iroquois Confederacy was not a monolith; the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations that made up the confederacy, and indeed each town within those nations, exercised significant autonomy in managing their own affairs. The Chenussios held long-established relations with French traders at Niagara, and viewed French defeat in the Seven Years' War and the new British military hegemony in the Great Lakes with trepidation. Restrictions on trade, rising prices of English goods, and the threat of English civilian settlement near Niagara gave the Chenussios common cause with Odawas, Shawnees, Ojibwas, and other groups in open rebellion against the British Great Lakes military regime of the early 1760s. There is little evidence of desperation or decline in this initiative; indeed, the Chenussios used time-tested military and diplomatic techniques to strengthen their position. The Seneca attack at Devil's Hole made strategic sense, given the ever-increasing British presence at the Niagara Strait and the portage's vital importance for supplying Great Lakes outposts. The Senecas' subsequent cession of the Niagara corridor to the British in 1764 continued a diplomatic strategy employed by the Iroquois twice before in the eighteenth century, and the Chenussios had no reason to think that the cession would exclude them from the region or eventually reduce their influence over Niagara's affairs. From the summer of 1763 to the summer of 1764, Senecas and their allies operating near Niagara used the best methods available to them, both violent and diplomatic, to maintain the use of their territory and as much of their traditional lifeways as possible in the face of British economic and military expansion. They understood from long practice that maintaining cooperative relationships often involved both intimidation and acquiescence. Therefore, they sought a negotiated coexistence with British military neighbors who had clearly come to stay.

For centuries, Indian groups had traveled through the Niagara Strait, following a well-defined portage route around Niagara Falls. Archaeologists studying the Lower Landing site, near present-day Lewiston, New York, have found evidence of Native use from the Archaic stage (at least 3,300 years ago) through the French and British occupations of the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Portage Site, located at the top of the steep Niagara escarpment where the portage path around Niagara Falls begins its decline to the Lower Landing, has produced artifacts that reveal continuous portaging since at least 1,000 C.E. Substantial Indian portage around Niagara Falls is not surprising, considering the passage's strategic and practical importance. As French explorers realized by the 1670s, the portage was the only land carriage in a continuous waterway stretching between Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore represented an important key to the western fur trade.

The seventeenth century was a period of upheaval for people living in the Niagara region. By the 1630s and 1640s, the peoples of the Iroquois League had become enmeshed as suppliers and consumers in the growing Atlantic fur trade. The five nations that made up the Iroquois League each played vital roles in supplying furs for European markets. The easternmost nation, the Mohawks, lived closest to Dutch traders in Fort Orange (later Albany) and French traders in Montreal and Quebec, and thus became involved deeply in the trade. The Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, who occupied the middle territories of Iroquoia in the Finger Lakes region of what is now upstate New York, hunted and hauled furs to Dutch or French traders, sometimes using the Mohawks as middlemen. The most populous nation of the league, the Senecas, occupied the western end of Iroquoia. Their territory extended from just west of the Genesee River Valley eastward to the Finger Lakes. When overhunting reduced the numbers of beaver and other fur-bearing animals by the 1630s, Iroquoians began to seek new hunting grounds to their west, north, and east. Mohawks began this expansion in the 1630s by attacking and dispersing some Algonquian groups in the Great Lakes region. Senecas followed by expanding into the Niagara River corridor. From 1638 through the 1640s, the inhabitants of this region, the Iroquoian-speaking Eries, Neutrals, and Wenros, vacated their territories in western New York and southern Ontario. An Iroquoian invasion of the Lower Great Lakes region followed. Senecas and other Iroquois attacked Eries, Neutrals, Petuns, Hurons, Odawas, Ojibwas, and Susquehannocks from the late 1640s through the 1670s, dispersing several towns throughout the Great Lakes region. By at least 1669, when French priest René de Bréhant de Galinée described the existence of a Seneca hunting village near the western end of Lake Ontario, the Niagara region had become a nominal Seneca domain. Historians have disagreed over the reasons for Iroquois expansion and its effect on Great Lakes peoples, but Seneca influence in the Niagara region of the late seventeenth century is not disputed. However, Senecas and other Indians used the Niagara corridor as a highway and a place for hunting and fishing, not for permanent settlement; there is no record of a Seneca post on the Niagara River itself until 1707. Niagara's strategic importance and lack of a large, permanent Native population therefore made it a natural target for French expansion by the end of the seventeenth century.

The French had begun the North American fur trade in the sixteenth century as an extension of their successful fisheries in the St. Lawrence Valley. By the early seventeenth century, they had established an advantageous alliance with the Hurons and had turned the fur trade into a truly transatlantic enterprise. This attracted competition, and by the years 1610–1620, Dutch traders had established themselves in the trade, especially with the Iroquois living closest to their Fort Orange entrepôt. Dutch-allied Five Nations Iroquois vied with French-allied Hurons and others for fertile hunting grounds, and to pillage furs and goods. Population losses from European-borne diseases led Indian groups increasingly to take captives as replacements for lost kin. By the middle of the seventeenth century, these escalating Beaver Wars, deadly cycles of violence, mourning, captive-taking (to replace lost kin), and revenge led to further population losses among many northeastern Indian groups. In the 1650s and 1660s, Dutch-allied Iroquoians sought peace with French officials in Montreal, but these truces never lasted long. However, French traders made the most of these brief periods of peace by exploring and expanding their fur trade into the Great Lakes region. In the 1670s English traders replaced the Dutch at Albany following British victory in the Anglo-Dutch wars. This severed the Five Nations' trade lifeline with the Dutch at the very time that Iroquoian animosities with other Indian groups, especially Susquehannocks in Pennsylvania, demanded a continuous supply of European arms and ammunition. The Iroquois made peace with the French in the 1660s and 1670s, but worked to maintain their trade with Albany under its new British proprietors. Senecas found keeping peace with the French especially difficult; they resented the efforts of French missionaries to spread European religion and culture in Seneca towns, and sought to limit the efforts of French fur trappers and traders in the west. By the 1680s, English-allied Iroquois began to intensify their efforts to restrict the French fur trade, leading to open warfare throughout New France from Illinois to the St. Lawrence. The French response would have long-lasting effects for Senecas and the Niagara region.

In 1687 two thousand French troops under the command of New France's governor-general, the Marquis de Denonville, invaded the Senecas' territory in the Finger Lakes region. Denonville's invasion was destructive but short-lived. After burning the Senecas' corn crops, Denonville retreated to the Niagara frontier. There he built a small fort at the outlet of the Niagara River into Lake Ontario, believing that the outpost would keep the Senecas "in check and in fear" if properly garrisoned. Eight years earlier, explorer and trader René-Robert de la Salle had tried unsuccessfully to establish a trading post at Niagara. Denonville hoped his fort, along with Fort Cataraqui (later called Fort Frontenac) at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, would establish French dominance over the lake and its trade. He correctly guessed the Senecas would rebuff his attempt to control the Niagara passage and would seek to prevent French hegemony by enlisting the aid of the Iroquois' British allies in New York. The Five Nations had already met the year before with New York's governor Thomas Dongan, agreeing to tear down any forts the French might build south of Lake Ontario. In return, Dongan promised to assist the Iroquois against any French threats. He gave no credence to Denonville's argument claiming the region for France based on the small house La Salle built on the fort's site in 1676. Dongan demanded that Denonville abandon the fort and remove the four hundred men garrisoned there. Denonville relented in 1688, citing "the bad air, and the difficulty of revictualling that post," while noting that he had always meant the fort to be a place of refuge for threatened Indians, though none had used it for that purpose. But, Denonville's abandonment of Niagara represented only a temporary pause in French plans to fortify the strait and the constant violence between the Iroquois and French-allied Indians in Canada, which continued through the following decade.

By the end of the seventeenth century, warfare and disease had depleted Iroquois ranks, and they began disentangling themselves from European conflicts. in 1700 Iroquois delegations visited Montreal and Albany to conduct peace negotiations that established the Five Nations as neutral middlemen in the economic and political struggles between New France and New York. British-allied Iroquois, led by Onondaga speaker and diplomat Sadekanaktie, knew that the French retained their designs to fortify the Niagara Strait and had already begun establishing a western post at Detroit, in what many Iroquois considered part of their territory. In July 1701, Sadekanaktie and other Iroquois leaders representing all of the five Iroquois nations met with New York's lieutenant governor John Nanfan in Albany to establish Iroquoian neutrality and to ensure a peaceful continuance of Iroquois-English trade. To counter French expansion, twenty Iroquois town leaders and chiefs granted the king of England a deed to their professed beaver-hunting grounds, which encompassed most of Michigan and Upper Canada between Lakes Michigan and Erie. The land cession included "the great falls Oakinagaro," or Niagara, and gave the British "power to erect Forts and castles" in any part of the ceded territory. In return, the British were required to protect Iroquois rights to hunt in the region forever, "free of all disturbances expecting to be protected therein by the Crown of England." Of course, this "deed" was not a genuine land cession in either a legal or practical sense; western Native groups, many of them allied to the French, dominated much of the ceded territory. The French government in Montreal did not recognize the deed at all. Any British forts built in the land cession would still cause conflict between the European powers, with or without Iroquois permission. From the Iroquois viewpoint, however, the treaty was a bond of friendship and mutual protection with powerful allies that could be used to prevent destructive wars with both European and Indian enemies, and to continue a steady trade lifeline. Unlike the neutrality provisions of the 1701 settlement treaties, carefully negotiated and signed by Anglophilic, Francophilic, and neutral representatives of the Five Nations; French-allied western Indian groups; and the governments in Albany and Montreal, the Beaver Hunting Ground deed was a marginal factor in subsequent French-Anglo diplomacy. However, it demonstrated the Iroquois' hopes that maintaining amity with the British in Albany would give them leverage in their dealings with French authorities. As for the Niagara Strait, the Iroquois diplomats' insistence upon retaining perpetual hunting rights in the ceded region made it clear that Iroquois hunters and travelers intended to continue using the passage as they always had.

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