THE RED INDIAN OF NORTH AMERICA IN CONTACT WITH THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH.
BY GEORGE E. ELLIS, D. D., LL. D.
_President of the Massachusetts Historical Society._
THE relations into which the first Europeans entered with the
aborigines in North America were very largely influenced, if not
wholly decided, by the relations which they found to exist among the
tribes on their arrival here. Those relations were fiercely hostile.
The new-comers in every instance and in every crisis found their
opportunity and their immunity in the feuds existing among tribes
already in conflict with each other. This state of things, while it
gave the whites enemies, also furnished them with allies. So far as the
whites could learn in their earliest inquiries, internecine strife had
been waging here among the natives from an indefinite past.
Starting, then, from this hostile relation between the native tribes of
the northerly parts of the continent, we may trace the development of
our subject through five periods:—
1. The first period, a very brief one, is marked by the presence
of a single European nationality here, the French, for whom, under
stringency of circumstance that he might be in friendly alliance with
one tribe, Champlain was compelled to espouse its existing feud with
other tribes.
2. The next period opens with the appearance and sharp rivalry here of
a second European nationality, the English, the hereditary foe of the
French, transferring hither their inherited animosities, amid which the
Indians were ground as between two mill-stones.
3. Upon the extinction of French dominion on the continent by the
English, the former red allies of the French, with secret prompting and
help from the dispossessed party, were stirred with fresh animosities
against the victors.
4. Yet again the open hostilities of contending Indian tribes were
largely turned to account, to their own harm, in their respective
alliances with the English colonies or with the mother-country in the
War of Independence.
5. The closing period is that which is still in progress as covering
the relations with them of the United States government. The old
hostilities between those tribes have been steadily of less account in
affecting their later fortunes; and our government has not found it
essential or expedient to aggravate its own severity against its Indian
subjects, or “wards,” by availing itself of the feuds between them.
The same antagonisms which had kept the Indian tribes in hostility
with each other prevented their effective alliance among themselves
against the whites, and also embarrassed the English and French
rivals, who sought to engage them on their respective sides. Many
attempts were made by master chiefs among the savages, from the first
intrusion of the Europeans, to organize combinations, or what we call
“conspiracies,” of formerly contending tribes against the common foe.
The first of them, formidable though limited in its consequences, was
made in Virginia in 1622. Only two of these schemes proved otherwise
than wholly abortive. That of King Philip in New England, in 1675, was
effective enough to show what havoc such a combination might work. That
of Pontiac, in 1763, was vastly more formidable, and was thwarted only
by a resistance which engaged at several widely severed points all the
warlike resources of the English. But the inherent difficulties, both
of combining the Indian tribes among themselves, and of engaging some
of them in alliance on either side with the French and the English
contestants, were vastly increased by the seeds of sharp dissension
sown among them through the rivalries in trade and temptations offered
in the fluctuating prices of peltries. Even the long-standing league of
the Five Nations was ruptured by the resolute English agent Johnson.
He succeeded so far as to secure a promise of neutrality from some of
them, and a promise of friendly help from one of them. There were some
in each of the tribes falling not one whit behind the sharpest of the
whites in skilled sagacity and calculation, who were swift to mark and
to interpret the changes in the balance of fortune, as one or the other
of the parties of their common enemies made a successful stroke for
ascendency.
The facilities for alliance with one or another native tribe against
its enemies made for the Europeans a vast difference in the results
of their warfare with the aborigines. One might venture positively to
assert that the occupancy of this continent by Europeans would have
been indefinitely deferred and delayed had all its native tribes, in
amity with each other, or willing for the occasion to arrest their
feuds, made a bold and united front to resist the first intrusion upon
their common domains. Certainly the full truth of this assertion might
be illustrated as applicable to many incidents and crises in the first
feeble and struggling fortunes of our original colonists in various
exposed and inhospitable places. In many cases absolute starvation was
averted only by the generous hospitality of the Indians. Taking into
view the circumstances under which, from the first, tentative efforts
were made for a permanent occupancy by the whites on our whole coast
from Nova Scotia to Florida, and along the lakes and great western
valleys, we must admit that their fortunes had more of peril than of
promise. While, of course, we must refer their success and security in
large measure to the forbearance, tolerance, and real kindliness of
the natives, yet it was well proved that as soon as the jealousy of
these natives was stirred at any threatened encroachment, only their
own feuds disabled them from any united opposition, and gave to one or
another tribe the alternative of fighting the white intruders or of an
alliance with them against their neighbor enemies. The whole series
of the successive encroachments of Europeans on this continent is a
continuous illustration of the successful turning to their own account
of the strife of Indians against Indians. And when two rival European
nationalities opened their two centuries of warfare for dominion on
this continent, each party at once availed itself of red allies ready
to renew or prolong their own previous hostilities.
The French Huguenots in Florida and the Spaniards who massacred
them had each of them allies among the tribes which were in mutual
hostility. Champlain was grievously perplexed by the pressure, to which
none the less he yielded, that if he would be in amity with the Hurons
he must espouse their deadly enmity with the Iroquois. Even the poor
remnants of the tribe with which the Pilgrims of Plymouth made their
treaty of peace, which lasted for fifty years, were the vanquished and
tributary representatives of a broken people. A sharp war and a more
deadly plague had made that colony a possibility.
And so it comes to pass that, if we attempt to define at any period
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the conflicts between
the savages and Europeans on this continent, we have to look for the
explanation of any special change in the relations of the Indian tribes
to the varying interests and collisions of the different foreign
nationalities in rivalry here. The hostilities between the French
and the English were chronic and continuous. Frenchman’s Bay, at Mt.
Desert, preserves the memorial of the first collision, when Argall,
from Virginia, broke up the attempted settlement of Saussaye.[1340]
As to the later developments of the antagonism, resulting in the
extinction of French possession here, we are to refer them in about
equal measure to two main causes,—the jealousy of the home governments,
and the keen rivalry of the respective colonists for the lucrative
spoils of the fur trade. The profit of traffic may be regarded as
furnishing the prompting for strife on this side of the water, while
the passion for territorial conquest engaged the intrigues and the
armies of foreign courts in the stakes of wilderness warfare.
In tracing the course of such warfare we must take into our view two
very effective agencies, which introduced important modifications
in the methods and results of that warfare. In its progress these
two agencies became more and more chargeable with very serious
consequences. The first of these is the change induced in the warfare
of the Indians by their possession of, leading steadily to a dependence
upon, the white man’s firearms and supplies. The second is the usage,
which the Indians soon learned to be profitable, of reserving their
white prisoners for ransom, instead of subjecting them to death or
torture.
When we read of some of the earliest so-called “deeds” by which the
English colonists obtained from the sachems wide spaces of territory
on the consideration of a few tools, hatchets, kettles, or yards of
cloth, we naturally regard the transaction as simply illustrating the
white man’s rapacity and cunning in tricking the simplicity of the
savage. But we may be sure that in many such cases the Indian secured
what was to him a full equivalent for that with which he parted. For,
as the whites soon learned by experience, the savages supposed that
in such transactions they were not alienating the absolute ownership
of their lands, but only covenanting for the right of joint occupancy
with the English. And then the coveted tools or implements obtained by
them represented a value and a use not measurable by any reach of wild
territory. A metal kettle, a spear, a knife, a hatchet, transformed
the whole life of a savage. A blanket was to him a whole wardrobe.
When he came to be the possessor of firearms and ammunition, having
before regarded himself the equal of the white man, he at once became
his superior. We shall see how the rivalry between the French and
the English for traffic with the Indians, the enterprise of traders
in pushing into the wilderness with pack-horses, the establishment
of trucking houses, the facility with which the natives could obtain
coveted goods from either party, and the occasional failure of
supplies in the contingencies of warfare, were on many occasions the
turning-points in the fights in the wilderness, and in the shifting of
savage partisanship from one side to the other, as the fickle allies
found their own interests at stake.
It was in 1609, when Champlain invaded the Iroquois country, on the
lake that bears his name, that the astounded savages first saw the
flash and marked the deadly effect of his arquebuse. But the shock soon
spent itself. The weapon was found to be a terrestrial one, made and
put to service by a man. The Dutch on the Hudson very soon supplied the
Mohawks with this effective instrument for prosecuting the fur trade.
The French began the general traffic with the Indians near the St.
Lawrence, in metal vessels, knives, hatchets, awls, cotton and woollen
goods, blankets, and that most coveted of all the white man’s stores,
the maddening “fire-water.” But farther north and west for full two
hundred years, from 1670 quite down to our own time, annual cargoes of
these commodities were imported through Hudson Bay by the chartered
company, and had been distributed by its agents among those who paid
for them in peltries, in such abundance that the savages became really
dependent upon them, and gradually conformed their habits to the use of
them. Of course, in their raids upon English outposts, the spoils of
war in the shape of such supplies added rapacity to their ferocity. It
was with a proud flourish that Indian warriors, enriched by the plunder
on the field of Braddock’s disastrous defeat, strutted before the walls
of Fort Duquesne, arrayed in the laced hats, sashes, uniform, and
gorgets of British officers.
When Céloron was sent, in 1749, by the governor of Canada, to take
possession of interior posts along the Alleghanies, he found at
each of the Indian villages, as at Logstown, a chief centre, from a
single to a dozen English traders, well supplied with goods for a
brisk peltry traffic. He required the chiefs, on the threat of the
loss of his favor, to expel them and to forbid their return. But the
Indians insisted that they needed the goods. Some of these traders
were worthless reprobates, mostly Scotch-Irish, from the frontiers of
Pennsylvania. When Christopher Gist was sent, the next year, by the
Ohio Land Company, to follow Céloron and to thwart his schemes, he
complained strongly of these demoralized and demoralizing traders. In
the evidence given before the British House of Commons on the several
occasions when the monopoly and the mode of business of the Hudson
Bay Company were under question, the extent to which the natives had
come to depend upon European supplies was very strongly brought into
notice. It was urged that some of the tribes had actually, by disuse,
lost their skill in their old weapons. It was even affirmed that in
some of the tribes multitudes had died by freezing and starvation,
because their recent supplies had failed them. This dependence of the
natives upon the resources of civilization, observable from the opening
of their intercourse with the whites, has been steadily strengthening
for two hundred years, till now it has become an absolute and heavy
exaction upon our national treasury.
* * * * *
The custom which soon came in, to soften the atrocities of Indian
warfare by the holding of white prisoners for ransom, was grafted upon
an earlier usage among the natives of adopting prisoners or captives.
There was a formal ceremonial in such cases, and after its performance
those who would otherwise have been victims were treated with all
kindness. The return of a war-party to its own village was attended
with widely different manifestations according to the fortune which
had befallen it. If it consisted only of a baffled and flying remnant
that had failed in its hazardous enterprise, its coming was announced,
and received by the old men, women, and youths in the village with
howls and lamentations. If, however, it had been successful, as
proved by rich plunder, reeking scalp-locks, and prisoners, some
runners were sent in advance to announce its approach. Then began a
series of orgies, in which the old squaws were the most demonstrative
and hideous. While the scalp-locks were displayed and counted, the
well-guarded prisoners were exultingly escorted by their captors,
the squaws gathering around them with taunts and petty tormentings.
The woful fate which was waiting these prisoners was foreshadowed in
prolonged rehearsals for its final horrors. One by one they were forced
to run the gauntlet from goal to goal, between lines of yelping fiends,
under blows and missiles, stones, sticks, and tomahawks, while efforts
were made to trip them in their course, that they might be pounded in
their helplessness when maddened with pain. Any exhibition of weakness
or dread did but intensify the malignant frenzy of their tormentors.
Those who lived through this ordeal, which was intended to be but a
preliminary in the barbaric entertainment, and to stop short of the
actual extinction of life, were afterwards, by deliberate preparations
made in full view of the prisoners, subjected to all the ingenuities
of rage and cruelty which untamed savage fiendishness could devise.
The hero who bore the trial without flinching, singing his song of
defiance, and in his turn mocking his tormentors because they failed to
break his spirit, was most likely to find mercy in a finishing stroke
dealt by a magnanimous foe.
Anything like an alleviation of these dread revenges of savage warfare
being unallowable, there was open one way of complete relief in the
usage of adoption, just referred to. This, however, was never available
to the prisoner from his own first motion or prompting. He was wholly
passive in the matter. It came solely from the inclination of any
one in the village, a warrior or a squaw who, having recently lost a
relative, or one whose service was necessary, might select a prisoner
from the group as desirable to supply a place that was vacant. There
would seem to have been a large liberty allowed in the exercise of this
privilege, especially for those who were mourning for a relative lost
in the encounter in which the prisoner was taken. Sometimes the merest
caprice might prompt the selection. Scarcely, except in the rare case
of some proud captive who would haughtily scorn to avail himself of a
seeming affinity with the tribe of a hated or abject enemy, would the
offered privilege of adoption be refused. For, in any case, an ultimate
escape from an enforced durance might be looked to. Of course those
who were thus adopted were mostly the young and vigorous. The little
children were not especially favored in the process,—except, as soon to
be noted, the children of the whites. The ceremonial for adoption was
traditional. Beginning generally with somewhat rough and intimidating
treatment, the captive was for a while left in suspense as to his fate.
When at length the intent of the arbiter of his life was made known to
him, the method pursued has been very frequently described to us in
detail by the whites who were the subjects of it.[1341] The candidate
was plunged and thoroughly soused in a stream to rinse out his white
blood; the hair of his head, saving the scalp-lock, was plucked out;
and after some mouthings and incantations, completing the initiation,
all winning blandishments, arts, and appliances were engaged to secure
the confidence of the adopted captive, and to draw from him some
responsive sign of affection. He was arrayed in the choicer articles of
forest finery, and nestled in the family lodge. The father, the squaw,
or the patron, in whatever relation, to whom he henceforward belonged,
spared no effort to engage and comfort him. Watchful eyes, of course,
jealously guarded any restless motions looking towards an escape. The
final aim was to secure a fully nationalized and acclimated new member
of a tribe, ready to share all its fortunes in peace and war.
Naturally there were differences in this whole process and its results,
as they concerned these attempted affiliations between the members of
Indian tribes and in the adoption of white captives.[1342]
In their early conflicts with the whites, the Indians generally
practised an indiscriminate slaughter. There were a few exceptions to
the rule in King Philip’s war.[1343] In the raids of the French, with
their Indian allies, upon the English settlements, prisoners taken on
either side came gradually to have the same status as in civilized
warfare, and to be held for exchange. This, however, would proceed
upon the supposition that both parties had prisoners. But before there
was anything like equality in this matter, the captives were for the
most part such as had been seized from among the whites in inroads
upon their settlements, not in the open field of warfare. A midnight
assault upon some frontier cabins, or upon the lodge of some lonely
settler, left the savages to choose between a complete massacre or upon
a selection of some of their victims for leading away with them to
their own haunts, if not too cumbersome or dangerous for the wilderness
journey. It soon came to be understood among the raiding parties of
Indians in alliance with the French in Canada that white captives had
a ransom value. Contributions were often gathered up in neighborhoods
that had been raided, and in the meeting-houses of New England on
Sundays, for redeeming such captives as were known to be in Canada.
And, curiously enough, Judge Sewall in his journal records appeals for
charity in the same form for the redemption of captives in the hands of
our own savages, and for the ransom of our seamen and traders who were
kept in durance by African corsairs.
In the raids of desolation on either side of the Alleghanies and
along the sources of the Susquehannah and the Ohio, from the outbreak
of the French and Indian war, down to and even after the crushing
of Pontiac’s conspiracy, while more than a thousand cabins of the
borderers were burned and their inmates mostly slaughtered, several
hundred captives were borne off by the Indians and distributed among
their villages. The ultimate fate of these captives always hung in
dread uncertainty. If a panic arose among the lodges in apprehension
of an onset from a war-party of the whites, the captives might be
massacred. But the force of circumstances and the urgency of interested
motives steadily made it an object for their captors to retain their
prisoners unharmed, and even to make captivity tolerable to them.
The alternative of death or life to them generally depended upon
whether they might escape or be released by an avenging party without
compensation, or could be held for redemption through a ransom. The
knowledge that the Indians retained such captives of course became a
very effective motive in inducing their relatives in the settlements
to gather parties of neighbors for following the victims into the
forest depths. Temporary truces also, when made by victorious parties
of the whites, were conditioned upon the surrender of all their
surviving countrymen who were supposed to be in duress. The savages
practised all their artifices and subterfuges in concealing some of
their prisoners, alleging that they had been carried deeper into the
country by new masters, or by positively denying all knowledge of their
whereabouts. But the persistency and threats of those who had learned
how to deal with these red diplomates, with a few resolute strokes
generally brought about their surrender. When Bouquet had secured
possession of Fort Duquesne with his army of 1,500 men, he stoutly
followed up his success beyond the Ohio to the Indian settlements
near the Muskingum, and with his sturdy pluck and strong force he
overawed the representatives of the neighboring tribes which he had
summoned to meet him. He insisted, as the first condition of a truce,
upon the delivery of all the white prisoners secluded among them, not
only without the payment of any ransom, but upon their being brought
in with a protecting escort and with means of sustenance. Of course
there was always ignorance or doubt as to the number of captives in any
particular place, and as to the hands into which any individual known
or supposed to be in durance might have fallen. The word of an Indian
on these points was worthless unless backed by other testimony. A
stimulating of the tongue into unguarded speech by a dram of rum might
in some cases serve the purpose of the rack or the thumb-screw in more
civilized cross-examinations. An uncertainty of course always hung over
the survival or the whereabouts of individuals or members of a family
whose bodies had not been found on the scene of an Indian frontier
raid. Bouquet was accompanied by friends and relatives of supposed
survivors held in captivity as the spoils of some massacre, and these
might be depended upon to circumvent the falsehoods and cunning of
the captors, and to insist upon their giving up their prizes. The
persistency and the plain evidence of resolved purpose manifested by
Bouquet finally compelled from the representatives of the tribes in
council a pledge to surrender all the prisoners in their hands, and
messengers were sent out to gather and bring them in, though with some
plausible excuses for delay, and the grudging return of only a part of
them. But those who were given up became the best witnesses as to the
deception practised by the cunning culprits in holding back others.
Only after repeated exposures of falsehood by those so grudgingly
surrendered, asserting of their own knowledge that there were others
held in durance, whom they might even know by name, was there brought
about a full deliverance, saving that, whether truly or falsely, in
the case of a few individuals demanded the excuse was alleged that
they belonged to some chief or tribe absent at a distance on a hunt,
and so not to be reached by a summons. Bouquet was also absolute in
his demand for all such white captives, young or old, as were alleged
to have been adopted or married among the tribes. His firmly insisting
upon this, and the compliance with it in many cases, led to some scenic
manifestations in the wilderness, of a highly dramatic character, full
of the matter of romance in their revelations of the working of human
nature under novel and strange conditions. Such manifestations often
attended similar scenes in the ransom or forced surrender of whites who
had been in captivity among the Indians. But in this special instance
of Bouquet’s resolute course with the Ohio tribes, numbers, variety,
picturesqueness in those manifestations, gave to the bringing in and
the reception of captives features and incidents which strongly engage
alike the sympathies and antipathies of human nature. Some of those
brought into Bouquet’s camp, who had once at least been whites, came
with full as much reluctance on their part as that which was felt by
those who gave them up. Indeed, several of them could be secured only
by being bound and guarded.
Approximation in all degrees to the manners and habits of Indian
life and to all the qualities of Indian nature had been realized by
Europeans from the first contact of the races on this continent. Of
course the instances were numerous and very decisive in which this
approximation was completed, and resulted in a substitution of all
the ways and habits of savagery for those of civilization. Many of
those who were forced back into Bouquet’s camp clung to their Indian
friends, and repelled all the manifestations of joy and affection of
their own nearest kin by blood. They positively refused to return to
the settlements. They had been won by preference to the fascinations
and license of a life in the wilderness. This preference was by no
means inexplicable, even for some full-grown men and women who had
been reared in the white settlements. Life in scattered cabins on the
frontiers had more points of resemblance than of difference in hard
conditions and privations, when compared with savage life in the woods.
Such society as these scattered cabins afforded was rude and rough, all
experiences were precarious, daily drudgery was severe, the solitary
homes were gloomy, and only exceptional cases of early domestic and
mental training alleviated the stern exigencies of the condition of the
first generation of the settlers. For women and children especially,
the outlook and the routine of life were dismal enough. As for the
men, the more they conformed themselves in many respects to the actual
habits and resources of the Indians in the training of their instincts,
in their garb, their food, their adaptation of themselves to the ways
and resources of nature, the easier was their lot. Many women, likewise
made captives by the savages, in some cases of mature age, and having
looked forward to the usual lot of marriage, found an Indian to be
preferable, or at all events tolerable, as a husband. Children who
preserved but a faint remembrance of home and parents very readily
adopted savage tastes, and testified by their shrieks and struggles
their unwillingness to part from their red friends. Specimens from
each of these classes were the most marked and demonstrative among
the groups brought in to Bouquet from Indian lodges, being in number
more than two hundred. Doubtless, however, the majority of them had
had enough of the experiences of savage life to make a return to the
settlements a welcome release. Such persons thenceforward constituted
a useful class as interpreters, mediators, and messengers between the
contending parties. Their knowledge of Indian character, superstitions,
limitations, weak and strong points, impulsive excitability,
stratagems, and adaptability to circumstance proved on many emergent
occasions of good account. Such of these returned captives as had had
the rudiments of an education, and were trustworthy as narrators, have
made valuable contributions to local history.
Among many such intelligent and trustworthy reporters was Col.
James Smith, captured on the borders of Pennsylvania in 1755, when
eighteen years of age, and kept in captivity five years. Another
was John McCullough, taken at about the same time and from the near
neighborhood, when eight years old. He was retained eight years,
and, being a quick-witted and observing youth, he kept his eyes and
ears open to all that he could learn. From such sources we derive
the most authentic information we possess of that transition period
in the condition and fortunes of many of our aboriginal tribes when
the intrusion of Europeans upon them with their tempting goods and
their rival schemes, which equally tended to dispossess them of their
heritage, introduced among them so many novel complications. Some of
the narratives of the whites, who, under the conditions just referred
to, lived for years and were assimilated with the Indians, present us
occasionally by no means unattractive pictures of the ordinary tenor of
life among them. In the brief intervals of peace, and in some favored
recesses where game abounded and the changing seasons brought round
festivals, plays, and scenes of jollity, there were even fascinations
to delight one of simple tastes, who could enjoy the aspects of nature,
share the easy tramp over mossy trails, content himself with the viands
of the wilderness, employ the long hours of laziness in easy handiwork,
delight in basking beneath the soft hazes of the Indian summer, or
listening to the traditional lore of the winter wigwam. The forests
very soon began to be the shelter and the roving haunts of a crew of
renegades and outlaws from the settlements, who assimilated at all
points with the savages, and often used what remained to them of the
knowledge and arts of civilization for ingenious purposes of mischief.
It has always proved a vastly more easy and rapid process for white men
to fall back into barbarism than for an Indian to conform himself to
civilization. Wild life brought out all reversionary tendencies, and
revived primitive qualities and instincts. It gave those who shared it
a full opportunity to become oblivious of all fastidious tastes and
of all the squeamishness of over-delicacy. The promiscuous contents
of the camp-kettle, with its deposits and incrustations from previous
banquets, were partaken of with a zestful appetite. The circumstances
of warfare in the woods quickened all the faculties of watchfulness,
made even the natural coward brave, imparted endurance, and multiplied
all the ingenuities of resource and stratagem. There is something that
surpasses the merely marvellous in the feats of sturdy and persevering
scouts, escaped captives, remnants of a butchery, messengers sent to
carry intelligence in supreme peril, and lonely wayfarers treading
the haunted forests, or creeping stealthily through ambushed defiles,
penetrating marshes, using the sky and their woodcraft for guidance,
fording or swimming choked or icy streams, climbing high tree-tops
for a wider survey from the closed woods and thickets, subsisting on
roots and berries and moss, and yielding to the exhaustion of nature
only when all perils were passed and the refuge was reached. Alike on
the march of armies and in the siege of some little forest stronghold
surrounded by yelping savages, it was necessary from time to time to
send out a single plucky hero to carry or to obtain intelligence. When
such a messenger was not designated by the commander, and the extremity
of the emergency left the dismal honor to a volunteer, such was never
found to be lacking. It confounds all calculations of the law of
chances to learn how, even in the majority of such dire enterprises as
are on record, fortune favored the brave. Narratives there are which
for ages to come will gather all the exciting elements of tragedy and
romance, and occasionally even of comedy, as, set down in the language
of the woods, without the constraints of art or grammar, they make us
for the moment companions of some imperilled man or woman who borrowed
of the bear, the deer, the fox, or the beaver, their several instincts
and stratagems for outwitting pursuit and clinging to dear life. Rare,
it may be, but still well authenticated, are cases of victims with a
strong tenacity of vitality, who, left as dead, mutilated and scalped,
reasserted themselves when the foe had gone, found their way back to
their homes, and, after such reconstruction as the art of the time
would allow, enjoyed a long life afterwards.
The conditions attending the entrance of European war-parties, with
their necessary supplies, into the depths of the wilderness were of the
most severe and exacting character. They involved equally the outlay of
toil and an exposure to perils requiring the most watchful vigilance.
Well-worn trails made by the natives, and always sufficiently travelled
to keep them open, had long been in use for such purposes as were
needed in primitive conditions. These were very narrow, necessitating
that progress should be made through them singly, in “Indian file.”
At portages or carrying-places, burdens were borne on the back from
one watercourse to another, round a rapid or across an elevation.
Some of these trails are even now traceable in the oldest settled
portions of the country, where the woods have never been wholly
cleared. Part of that which was availed of by the whites two hundred
and fifty years ago between Plymouth and Boston, and others in untilled
portions of the Old Colony, are clearly discernible. The thickets
and undergrowths came close to the borders of these trails, and the
overhanging branches of the trees were found a grievous annoyance when
the earliest traders with pack-horses traversed them. In a large part
of our present national domain and in Canada, it may safely be said
that nineteen twentieths of all movement from place to place was made
by the savages by the watercourses of lake and stream, and the same
was done by the Europeans till they brought into use horses first, and
then carts. These were first put to service by the traders from the
English settlements on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The
pack-horses, heavily laden, trained to their rough service for rocky
and marshy grounds, as well as for the thick and stifling depths of
the forest, and able to subsist on very poor forage, carried goods
most prized by the natives, and generally in inverse ratio to their
real worth. They returned to the settlements from the Indian villages
with a burden of precious furs, the traffickers mutually finding
their account in their respective shares in barter and profit. These
traders with their pack-horses were for a long time the pioneers of the
actual settlers. The methods and results of their traffic, trifling
as they may seem to be, had the two leading consequences of critical
importance: first, they made the Indians acquainted with and dependent
upon the white man’s goods, and then they provoked and embittered
the rival competition between the French and the English for the
considerable profits.
What we now call a military road was first undertaken on a serious
scale in the advance of the disastrous expedition of General
Braddock, in 1755, over the Alleghanies to the forks of the Ohio.
The incumbrances with which he burdened himself might wisely have
been greatly reduced in kind and in amount. But the exigencies of
the service in which he was engaged were but poorly apprehended by
him. As in the case of the even more disastrous campaign of General
Burgoyne, twenty-two years later, (1777) though his route was mainly
by water, the camp was lavishly supplied with appliances of luxury
and sensuality. Braddock’s way for his cattle, carts, and artillery
was slowly and poorly prepared by pioneers in advance, levelling
trees, stiffening marshy places, removing rocks and bushes, and then
leaving huge stumps in the devious track to rack the wagons and
torment the draught animals. It is not without surprise that we read
of the presence of domestic cattle far off in the extreme outposts
of single persevering settlers. But when, on the first extensive
military expeditions for building a fort on the shore of a lake, at
river forks, or to command a portage, we find mention of cannon and
heavy ammunition, we marvel at the perseverance involved in their
transportation. The casks of liquor, of French brandy and of New
England rum, which generally, without stint, formed a part of the
stores of each military enterprise, furnished in themselves a motive
spirit which facilitated their transport. Flour and bread could, with
many risks from stream and weather, be carried in sacks. But pork and
beef in pickle, the mainstay in garrisons which could not venture
out to hunt or fish, required to be packed in wood. After all the
persevering toil engaged in this transportation, the dire necessities
of warfare under these stern conditions often compelled the destruction
of the stores, every article of which had tasked the strained muscles
and sinews of the hard-worked campaigners. When it was found necessary
to evacuate a forest post, the stockade was set on fire, the magazine
was exploded, the cannon spiked, the powder thrown into the water, and
everything that could not be carried off in a hasty retreat was, if
possible, rendered useless as booty. As the French and English military
movements steadily extended over a wider territory and at more numerous
points, with increased forces, the waste and havoc caused by disasters
on either side involved an enormous destruction of the materials of
war. Vessels constructed with incredible labor on the lakes, anvils,
cordage, iron, and artillery having been gathered for their building
and arming by perilous ocean voyages and by transit through inner
waters and portages, and thousands of bateaux for Lakes Champlain and
George, now lie sunken in the depths, most of them destroyed by those
in whose service they were to be employed. The “Griffin,” the first
vessel on Lake Erie, built by La Salle in 1679, disappeared on her
second voyage, and lies beneath the waters still. After Braddock’s
defeat, when the fugitive remnant of his army had reached Dunbar’s
camp, a hundred and fifty wagons were burned, and fifty thousand pounds
of powder were emptied into a creek, after the incredible toil by which
they had been drawn over the mountains and morasses.
There were many occasions and many reasons which prompted the
Europeans to weigh the gain or loss which resulted to them from the
employment of Indian allies, who were always an incalculable element
in any enterprise. They could never be depended upon for constancy or
persistency. A bold stroke, followed, if successful, with butchery,
and a rush to the covert of the woods if a failure, was the sum of
their strategy. They had a quick eye in watching the turning fortunes
and the probable issue of a venture, and they acted accordingly. They
were wholly disinclined for any protracted siege operations. In the
weary months of the investment of Detroit, the only enterprise of
the sort engaged in by large bodies of savages acting in concert, we
find a single exceptional case of their uniform impatience of such
prolonged strategy. And even in that case there were intervals when the
imperilled and starving garrison had breathing-spells for recuperation.
Charges and counter-charges, pleas and criminations of every kind,
plausible, false, or sincere, are found in the journals and reports of
English and French officers, prompted by accusations and vindications
of either party, called out by the atrocities and butcheries wrought
by their savage allies in many of the conflicts of the French and
Indian war. In vain did the commanders of the white forces on either
side promise that their red allies should be restrained from plunder
and barbarity against the defeated party. It was an attempt to bridle
a storm. From the written opinions expressed by various civil and
military officials during all our Indian wars one might gather a list
of judgments, always emphatically worded, as to the qualities of the
red men as allies. Governor Dinwiddie, writing in May 28, 1756, to
General Abercrombie, on his arrival here to hold the chief command
till the coming of Lord Loudon, expresses himself thus: “I think we
have secured the Six Nations to the Northward to our Interest who, I
suppose, will join your Forces. They are a very awkward, dirty sett of
People, yet absolutely necessary to attack the Enemy’s Indians in their
way of fighting and scowering the Woods before an Army. I am perswaded
they will appear a despicable sett of People to his Lordship and you,
but they will expect to be taken particular Notice of, and now and then
some few Presents. I fear General Braddock despised them too much,
which probably was of Disservice to him, and I really think without
some of them any engagement in the Woods would prove fatal, and if
strongly attached to our Interest they are able in their way to do more
than three Times their Number. They are naturally inclined to Drink. It
will be a prudent Stepp to restrain them with Moderation, and by some
of your Subalterns to shew them Respect.”[1344] Baron Dieskau, in 1755,
had abundant reason for expressing himself about his savage auxiliaries
in this fashion: “They drive us crazy from morning to night. One needs
the patience of an angel to get on with these devils, and yet one must
always force himself to seem pleased with them.”[1345]
* * * * *
It would seem as if the native tribes, when Europeans first secured a
lodgment, were beguiled by a fancy which in most cases was very rudely
dispelled. This fancy was that the new-comers might abide here without
displacing them. The natives in giving deeds of lands, as has been
said, had apparently no idea that they had made an absolute surrender
of territory. They seem to have imagined that something like a joint
occupancy was possible, each of the parties being at liberty to follow
his own ways and interests without molesting the other. So the Indians
did not move off to a distance, but frequented their old haunts, hoping
to derive advantage from the neighborhood of the white man. King Philip
in 1675 discerned and acutely defined the utter impracticability of any
such joint occupancy. He indicated the root of the impending ruin to
his own race, and he found a justification of the conspiracy which he
instigated in pointing to the white man’s clearings and fences, and to
the impossibility of joining planting with hunting, and domestic cattle
with wild game.
The history of the Hudson Bay Company and that of the enterprises
conducted by the French for more than a century, when set in contrast
with the steady development of colonization by English settlers and by
the people of the United States succeeding to them, brings out in full
force the different relations into which the aborigines have always
been brought by the presence of Europeans among them, either as traders
or possessors of territory. The Hudson Bay Company for exactly two
centuries, from 1670 to 1870, held a charter for the monopoly of trade
with the Indians here over an immense extent of territory, and in the
later portion of that period held an especial grant for exclusive trade
over an even more extended region, further north and west. The company
made only such a very limited occupancy of the country, at small and
widely distant posts, as was necessary for its trucking purposes and
the exchange of European goods for peltries. During that whole period,
allowing for rare casualties, not a single act of hostility occurred
between the traders and the natives. A large number of different
tribes, often at bitter feud with each other, were all kept in amity
with the official residents of the company, and each party probably
found as much satisfaction in the two sides of a bargain as is usual
in such transactions. Deposits of goods were securely gathered in some
post far off in the depths of the wilderness, under the care of two
or three young apprentices of the company, and here bands of Indians
at the proper season came for barter. Previous to the operations of
this company, beginning as early as 1620, large numbers of Frenchmen,
singly or in parties, ventured deep into the wilderness in company with
savage bands, for purposes of adventure or traffic, and very rarely did
any of them meet a mishap or fail to find a welcome. Such adventurers
in fact became in most cases Indians in their manner of life. Nor
did the jealousy of the savages manifest itself in a way not readily
appeased when they found the French priests planting mission stations
and truck-houses. In no case did the French intruders ask, as did the
English colonists, for deeds of territory. It was understood that
they held simply by sufferance, and with a view to mutual advantage
for both parties, with no purpose of overreaching. The relations thus
established between the French and the natives continued down till even
after the extinction of the territorial claims of France. And when,
just before the opening of the great French and Indian hostilities with
the English colonists, the French had manifested their purpose to get a
foothold on the heritage of the savages by pushing a line of strongly
fortified posts along their lakes and rivers, the apprehensions of the
savages were craftily relieved by the plea that these securities were
designed only to prevent the encroachment of the English.
A peaceful traffic with the Indians, like that of the Hudson Bay
Company and the French, had been from the first but a subordinate
object of the English colonists. These last, while for a period they
confined themselves to the seaboard, supplemented their agricultural
enterprise by the fishery and by a very profitable commerce. As soon
as they began to penetrate into the interior they took with them their
families and herds, made fixed habitations, put up their fences and
dammed the streams. Instead of fraternizing with the Indians, they
warned them off as nuisances. We must also take into view the fact
that this steadily advancing settlement of the Indian country directly
provoked and encouraged the resolute though baffled opposition of the
savages. They could match forces with these scattered pioneers, even
if, as was generally the case, a few families united in constructing
a palisadoed and fortified stronghold to which they might gather
for refuge. If a body of courageous men had advanced together well
prepared for common defence, it is certain the warfare would not have
been so desultory as it proved to be. All the wiles of the Indians
in conducting their hostilities gave them a great advantage. They
thought that the whites might be dislodged effectually from further
trespasses if once and again they were visited by sharp penalties for
their rash intrusion. It was plain that they were long in coming to a
full apprehension of the pluck of their invaders, of their recuperative
energies, and of the reserved forces which were behind them. From
the irregular base line of the coast the English advanced into the
interior, not by direct parallel lines, but rather by successive
semicircles of steadily extending radii. The advances from the middle
colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia marked the farthest reaches in
this curvature. The French, in the mean while, aimed from the start for
occupying the interior.
* * * * *
The period which we have here under review is one through which the
savages, for the most part, were but subordinate agents, the principals
being the French and the English. So far as the diplomatic faculties of
the savages enabled them to hold in view the conditions of the strife,
there were doubtless occasions in which they thought they held what
among civilized nations is called the balance of power. Nor would it
have been strange if, at times, their chiefs had imagined that, though
it might be impossible for them again to hold possession of their old
domains free from the intrusion of the white man, they might have power
to decide which of the two nationalities should be favored above the
other. In that case the French doubtless would have been the favored
party. We have, however, to take into view the vast disproportion
between the numbers, if not of the resources, of these two foreign
nationalities, when the struggle between them earnestly began. In 1688
there were about eleven thousand of the French in America, and nearly
twenty times as many English. The French were unified under the control
of their home government. Its resources were at their call: its army
and navy, its arsenals and treasury, its monarch and ministers, might
be supposed to be serviceable and engaged for making its mastery on
this continent secure. The English, however, were only nominally, and
as regards some of the colonies even reluctantly and but truculently,
under the control of their home government. It had been the jealous
policy of the New England colonists, from their first planting, to
isolate themselves from the mother-country, and to make self-dependence
the basis of independence. Their circumstances had thrown them on their
own resources, and made them feel that as their foreign superiors could
know very little of their emergencies, it was not wise or even right
in them to interpose in their affairs. Indeed, it is evident that all
the British colonists felt themselves equal, without advice or help
from abroad, to take care of themselves, if they had to contend only
against the savages. But when the savages had behind them the power of
the French monarch, it was of necessity that the English should receive
a reinforcement from their own countrymen. In the altercations with the
British ministry which followed very soon after the close of the French
and Indian war, a keenly argued question came under debate as to the
claim which the mother-country had upon the gratitude of her colonists
for coming to their rescue when threatened with ruin from their red and
white enemies. And the answer to this question was judged to depend
upon whether, in sending hither her fleets and armies, Britain had
in view an extension of her transatlantic domains or the protection
of her imperilled subjects. At any rate, there were jealousies,
cross-purposes, and an entire lack of harmony between the direct
representatives of English military power and the coöperating measures
of the colonial government. Never, under any stress of circumstances,
was England willing to raise even the most serviceable of the officers
of the provincial forces to the rank of regulars in her own army. The
youthful Washington, whose sagacity and prowess had proved themselves
in field and council where British officers were so humiliated, had
to remain content with the rank of a provincial colonel. Nor did the
provincial legislatures act in concert either with each other, or with
the advice and appeals of their royal governors in raising men, money
or supplies for combined military operations against common enemies.
Each of the colonies thought it sufficient to provide for itself. Each
was even dilatory and backward when its own special peril was urgent.
These embarrassments of the English did very much to compensate the
French for their great inferiority in numerical strength. We are again
to remind ourselves of the fact that the French, alike from their
temperament and their policy, were always vastly more congenial and
influential with the savages.
The French in Canada from the first adopted the policy of alliance
with native tribes. Though their warfare with the English was hardly
intermittent, there were several occasions when it was specially
active. Beginning with the first invasion of the Iroquois territory
by Champlain, in 1609, already mentioned, under the plea of espousing
the side of his friends and allies, the Hurons and Algonquins, other
like enterprises were later pursued. Courcelles, in 1666, made a wild
and unsuccessful inroad upon the Iroquois. Tracy made a more effective
one in the same year. De la Barre in 1684, Denonville in 1687, and
Frontenac in 1693 and 1696, repeated these onsets. The last of these
invasions of what is now Central New York was intended to effect the
complete exhaustion of the Indian confederacy. Its havoc was indeed
well-nigh crushing, but there was a tenacity and a recuperative power
in that confederacy of savages which yielded only to a like desolating
blow inflicted by Sullivan, under orders from Washington, in our
Revolutionary War.
This formidable league of the Five Nations, when first known to
Europeans, claimed to have obtained by conquest the whole country from
the lakes to the Carolinas, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
France, as against other Europeans, though not against the Indians,
claimed the same territory. Great Britain claimed the valley of the
Ohio and its tributaries, first against the French as being merely the
longitudinal extension of the line of seacoast discovered by English
navigators, and then through cessions from and treaties with the Five
Nations. The first of these treaties was that made at Lancaster, Pa.,
in June, 1744. But the Indians afterwards complained that they had been
overreached, and had not intended to cede any territory west of the
Alleghanies. Here, of course, with three parties in contention, there
was basis enough for struggles in which the prize, all considerations
of natural justice being excluded, was to be won only by superior
power. Neither of the rivals and intruders from across the ocean dealt
with the Indians as if even they had any absolute right to territory
from which they claimed to have driven off former possessors. So the
Indian prerogative was recognized by the French and the English as
available only on either side for backing up some rival claim of the
one or the other nation; though when the mother-countries were at peace
in Europe, their subjects here by no means felt bound even to a show
of truce, and they were always most ready to avail themselves of a
declaration of war at home to make their wilderness campaigns. It is
curious to note that in all the negotiations between the Indians and
Europeans, including those of our own government, the only landed right
recognized as belonging to the savages was that of giving up territory.
The prior right of ownership by the tenure of possession was regarded
as invalidated both by the manner in which it had been acquired and by
a lack to make a good use of it.
It was in the closing years of the seventeenth century and in
those opening the eighteenth that the military and the priestly
representatives of France in Canada resolutely advised and undertook
the measures which promised to give them a secure and extended
possession of the whole north of the continent, excepting only the
strip on the Atlantic seaboard then firmly held by the English
colonists. Even this excepted region of territory was by no means,
however, regarded as positively irreclaimable, and military enterprises
were often planned with the aim of a complete extinction of English
possession. The French in their earliest explorations, in penetrating
the country to the west and to the south, had been keenly observant in
marking the strategic points on lake and river for strongholds which
should give them the advantage of single positions and secure a chain
of posts for easy and safe communications. Their leading object was to
gain an ascendency over the native tribes; and as they could not expect
easily and at once to get the mastery over them all, policy dictated
such a skilful turning to account of their feuds among themselves as
would secure strong alliances of interest and friendship with the more
powerful ones. The French did vastly more than the English to encourage
the passions of the savages for war and to train them in military
skill and artifice, leaving them for the most part unchecked in the
indulgence of their ferocity. It is true that the Dutch and the English
had the start in supplying the savages with firearms, under the excuse
that they were needed by the natives for the most effective support of
the rapidly increasing trade in peltries. But the French were not slow
to follow the example, as it presented to them a matter of necessity.
And through the long and bloody struggle between the two European
nationalities with their red allies, it may be safely affirmed that the
frontier warfare of the English colonists was waged against savages
armed as well as led on by the French.
Two objects, generally harmonious and mutually helpful of each other,
inspired the activity of the French in taking possession successively
of posts in the interior of the continent. The first of these was the
establishment of mission stations for the conversion of the savages.
The other object of these wilderness posts was to secure the lucrative
gains of the fur trade from an ever-extending interior. Though, as was
just said, these two objects might generally be harmoniously pursued,
it was not always found easy or possible to keep them in amity, or to
prevent sharp collisions between them. There was a vigorous rivalry
in the fur trade between the members of an associated company, with
a government monopoly for the traffic, and very keenly enterprising
individuals who pursued it, with but little success in concealing their
doings, in defiance of the monopolists. The burden of the official
correspondence between the authorities in Canada and those at the
French court related to the irregularities and abuses of this traffic.
Incident to these was a lively plying of the temptations of that other
traffic which poured into the wilderness floods of French brandy. The
taste of this fiery stimulant once roused in a savage could rarely
afterwards be appeased. The English colonists soon gained an advantage
in this traffic in their manufacture of cheap rum. It is easy to see
how this rivalry between monopolists and individuals in the fur trade,
aided by the stimulant for which the Indian was most craving, would
impair the spiritual labors of the priests at their wild stations.
Nor were there lacking instances in which the priests themselves were
charged with sharing not only the gains of the fur trade, but also
those of the brandy traffic, either in the interests of the monopolists
or of individuals.
The earliest extended operations of the French fur trade with the
Indians were carried on by the northerly route to Lake Huron by
the Ottawa River. The French had little to apprehend from English
interference by this difficult route with its many portages. But it
soon became of vital necessity to the French to take and hold strong
points on the line of the Great Lakes. These were on the narrow streams
which made the junctions between them. So a fort was to be planted at
Niagara, between Ontario and Erie; another at Detroit, between Erie
and Huron; another at Michilimackinac, between Michigan and Huron;
another at the fall of the waters of Superior into Huron; and Fort St.
Joseph, near the head of Lake Michigan, facilitated communication with
the Illinois and the Miami tribes; the Ojibwas, Ottawas, Wyandots, and
Pottawattomies having their settlements around the westernmost of the
lakes, the Sioux being still beyond. South of Lake Erie, in the region
afterwards known as the Northwest Territory, between the Alleghanies,
the Ohio, and the Mississippi, were the Delawares, the Shawanees,
and the Mingoes. It is to be kept in view that this territory,
though formally ceded by France to England in the treaty of 1762-63,
had previously been claimed by the English colonists as rightfully
belonging to their monarch, it being merely the undefined extension of
the seacoast held by virtue of the discovery of the Cabots.
The fifth volume of the _Mémoires_ published by Margry gives us the
original documents, dating 1683-1695, relating to the first project
for opening a chain of posts to hold control of, and to facilitate
communication between, Canada and the west and south of the continent.
The project was soon made to extend its purpose to the Gulf of Mexico.
The incursions of the Iroquois and the attempted invasions of the
English, with a consequent drawing off of trade from the French, had
obliged the Marquis Denonville to abandon some of the posts that had
been established. In spite of the opposition of Champigny, Frontenac
vigorously urged measures for the repossession and strengthening of
these posts. The Jesuits were earnest in pressing the measure upon the
governors of Canada. In pushing on the enterprise, the French had sharp
experience of the intense hostility of the inner tribes who were to be
encountered, and who were to be first conciliated. The French followed
a policy quite unlike that of the English in the method of their
negotiations for the occupancy of land. The colonists of the latter
aimed to secure by treaty and purchase the absolute fee and ownership
of a given region. They intended to hold it generally for cultivation,
and they expected the Indians then claiming it to vacate it. The French
beguiled the Indians by asserting that they had no intention either of
purchasing or forcibly occupying, as if it were their own, any spot
where they established a stronghold, a trucking or a mission station.
They professed to hold only by sufferance, and that, too, simply for
the security and benefit of the natives, in furnishing them with a
better religion than their own and with the white man’s goods. The
Iroquois, finding the hunting and trapping of game for the English so
profitable on their own territory, were bent on extending their field.
They hoped, by penetrating to Michilimackinac, to make themselves the
agents or medium for the trade with the tribes near it, so that they
could control the whole southern traffic. So they had declared war
against the Illinois, the Miamis, the Ottawas, and the Hurons. It was
of vital importance to the French to keep firm hold of Lakes Ontario
and Erie, and to guard their connections. The Iroquois were always the
threatening obstacle. It was affirmed that they had become so debauched
by strong drink that their squaws could not nourish their few children,
and that they had availed themselves of an adoption of those taken
from their enemies. As they obtained their firearms with comparative
cheapness from the English on the Hudson and Mohawk, they used them
with vigor against the inner tribes with their primitive weapons, and
were soon to find them of service against the English on the frontiers
of Virginia. So keenly did the English press their trade as to cause a
wavering of the loyalty of those Indian tribes who had been the first
and the fast friends of the French. Thus it was but natural that the
Iroquois should be acute enough to oppose the building of a French
stronghold at any of the selected posts.
In 1699,[1346] La Mothe Cadillac proposed to assemble their red
allies, then much dispersed, and principally the Ottawas, at Detroit,
and there to construct both a fort and a village. At the bottom of
this purpose, and of the opposition to it, was a contention between
rival parties in the traffic. The favorers and the opponents of the
design made their respective representations to the French court. De
Callières objected to the plan because of the proximity of the hostile
Iroquois, who would prefer to turn all the trade to the English, and
his preference was to reëstablish the old posts. The real issue to be
faced was whether the Indians now, and ultimately, were to be made
subjects of the English or of the French monarch. Cadillac combated
the objections of Callières, and succeeded in effecting his design at
Detroit. The extension of the traffic was constantly bringing into
the field tribes heretofore too remote for free intercourse. In each
such case it depended upon various contingencies to decide whether the
French or the English would find friends or foes in these new parties,
and the alternative would generally rest, temporarily at least, upon
which party was most accessible and most profitable for trade. It would
hardly be worth the while for an historian, unless dealing with the
special theme of the rivalries involved in the fur trade as deciding
with which party of the whites one or another tribe came into amity, to
attempt to trace the conditions and consequences of such diplomacy in
inconstant negotiators.
The English began the series of attempts to bind the Five, afterwards
the Six, Nations into amity or neutrality by treaty in 1674. These
treaties were wearisome in their formalities, generally unsatisfactory
in their terms of assurance, and so subject to caprice and the
changes of fortune as to need confirmation and renewal, as suspicion
or alleged treachery on either side made them practically worthless.
There were two ends to be gained by these treaties of the English with
the confederated tribes. The one was to avert hostilities from the
English and to secure them privileges of transit for trade. The other
object, not always avowed, but implied as a natural consequent of the
first, was to alienate the tribes from the French, and if possible to
keep them in a state of local or general conflict. Each specification
of these treaties was to be emphasized by the exchange of a wampum
belt. Then a largess of presents, always including rum, was the final
ratification. These goods were of considerable cost to the English, but
always seemed a niggard gift to the Indians, as there were so many to
share in them.
The first of this series of treaties was that made in 1674, at Albany,
by Col. Henry Coursey, in behalf of the colonists of Virginia. It was
of little more service than as it initiated the parties into the method
of such proceedings.
In the middle of July, 1684, Lord Howard, governor of Virginia,
summoned a council of the sachems of the Five Nations to Albany. He
was attended by two of his council and by Governor Dongan of New York,
and some of the magistrates of Albany. Howard charged upon the savages
the butcheries and plunderings which they had committed seven years
previous in Virginia and Maryland, “belonging to the great king of
England.” He told the sachems that the English had intended at once to
avenge those outrages, but through the advice of Sir Edmund Andros,
then governor-general of the country, had sent peaceful messengers to
them. The sachems had proved perfidious to the pledges they then gave,
and the governor, after threatening them, demanded from them conditions
of future amity. After their usual fashion of shifting responsibility
and professions of regret and future fidelity, the sachems renewed
their covenants. Under the prompting of Governor Dongan they asked that
the Duke of York’s arms should be placed on the Mohawk castles, as a
protection against their enemies, the French. Doubtless the Indians, in
desiring, or perhaps only assenting to, the affixing of these English
insignia to their strongholds, might have had in view only the effect
of them in warning off the French. They certainly did not realize that
their English guests would ever afterwards, as they did, regard this
concession of the tribes as an avowal of allegiance to the king of
Great Britain, and as adopting for themselves the relation of subjects
of a foreign monarch.
The experience gained by many previous attempts to secure the
fidelity of the tribes, thenceforward known as the Six Nations by the
incorporation into the confederacy of the remnant of the Tuscaroras,
was put to service in three succeeding councils for treaty-making, held
respectively at Philadelphia in 1742, in Lancaster, Pa., in 1744,[1347]
and at Albany in 1746.[1348] Much allowance is doubtless to be made
in the conduct of the earlier treaties for the lack of competent
and faithful interpreters in councils made up of representatives of
several tribes, with different languages and idioms. Interpreters have
by no means always proved trustworthy, even when qualified for their
office.[1349] The difficulty was early experienced of putting into our
simple mother-tongue the real substance of an Indian harangue, which
was embarrassed and expanded by images and flowers of native rhetoric,
wrought from the structure of their symbolic language, but adding
nothing to the terms or import of the address. It was observed that
often an interpreter, anxious only to state the gist of the matter in
hand, would render in a single English sentence an elaborately ornate
speech of an orator that had extended through many minutes in its
utterance. The orator might naturally mistrust whether full justice had
been done to his plea or argument. There is by no means a unanimity
in the opinions or the judgments of those of equal intelligence, who
have reported to us the harangues of Indians in councils, as to the
qualities of their eloquence or rhetoric. The entire lack of terms
for the expression of abstract ideas compelled them to draw their
illustrations from natural objects and relations. Signs and gestures
made up a large part of the significance of a discourse. Doubtless the
cases were frequent in which the representation of a tribe in a council
was made through so few of its members that there might be reasonable
grounds for objection on the part of a majority to the terms of any
covenant or treaty that had been made by a chief or an orator. Of one
very convenient and plausible subterfuge, or honest plea,—whichever in
any given case it might have been,—our native tribes have always been
skilful in availing themselves. The assumption was that the elder, the
graver, wiser representatives of a tribe were those who appeared on its
behalf at a council. When circumstances afterwards led the whites to
complain of a breach of the conditions agreed on, the blame was always
laid by the chiefs on their “young men,” whom they had been unable to
restrain.