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The Hazards of War

IMPERIALISM USUALLY FEEDS OFF EMPIRE BUILDERS’ FEARS: FEAR that their own empire is weak; fear that an end to expansion will bring economic collapse; fear that if one’s own empire doesn’t seize a prized territory, some rival surely will. This last fear weighed heavily on the early modern imperial mind, and it drove the French to build their tenuous and economically unproductive North American empire. Tens of thousands of Indians supported that empire, partly with furs and food and slaves, partly by their profession of kinship with the French and their monarch, and partly with their military labor, their willingness to fight France’s adversaries. Fear of British competition for those Native allies drove officers to build forts hundreds of miles from the nearest French settlement, and to mount showy and expensive military campaigns from New York to Mississippi. Fear eventually drove the French to initiate the war that brought down their extensive and expensive North American empire.¹

French officials particularly feared the potential consequences of Native Americans’ autonomy. The Indians in their empire were not subjects but allies, independent nations who manipulated the French to their own ends, and who might at some future date “defect” to the British. In point of fact, only a small minority of Lakes Indians sought to break with the French by the mid-eighteenth century. While many traded with the British colonists, they also continued to buy goods from and pledge their loyalty to their French fathers, and during the Seven Years’ War (1754–1760), most demonstrated that they preferred the French as allies. Lakes Indian warriors raided Britain’s settlements, besieged its forts, and helped the French oppose its armies. Their aid, ultimately, did not suffice to save the French empire, for Britain had resources that neither Louis XV nor his Indian supporters could match: a huge navy, ample money and credit, and an American colonial population fifteen times larger than French America’s. When the war ended, however, the Lakes Indians would demonstrate quite clearly that they retained their independence and power, and that Britons could not safely belittle or ignore Native peoples.²

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The European kingdom that would become France’s principal colonial rival, England, paid little attention to the North American interior in the seventeenth century. Like its French neighbor, England—after 1707, part of the Kingdom of Great Britain—had been in past centuries a province (a marginal province) of the Roman Empire, then a cluster of tribal kingdoms unified in the eleventh century CE by the Danes and Normans. It remained an unstable realm for another seven hundred years, experiencing a major rebellion or civil war once or twice each century. The seventeenth century brought to England a bloody civil war and a royal coup d’état, which (not surprisingly) distracted its royal government from goings-on in the new overseas settlements. The English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard functioned as chartered companies or family properties with substantial local autonomy; as long as they sent valuable exports back to England and served as dumping grounds for vagrants, criminals, religious malcontents, and unplaced younger sons of the aristocracy, the Crown usually left them alone. Despite this neglect, and thanks to “push” factors like a stagnant English economy that drove hundreds of thousands of people across the North Atlantic, the English American colonies’ settler population steadily grew. By 1700 it reached 250,000 colonists, sixteen times as many whites as one could find in New France, and their numbers would quadruple during the next half-century.³

Though the English colonists had little interest in the country west of the Appalachians, their influence already extended there. The Dutch colony of New Netherland and its successor colony of New York sold the Iroquois the weapons they used to disperse the Hurons, fight the Anishinaabeg, and harry the Illiniwek. New York later became an alternative trading center, if a somewhat remote one, for Lakes Indians dissatisfied with French goods or prices; hunters could canoe to Lake Erie or Lake Ontario and traverse Iroquoia, stopping along the way to pay respect and gifts to the Five Nations. Some French traders came to Albany and bought English textiles for resale to their own Indian customers. Meanwhile, the colony of South Carolina became the center of the English Indian slave trade, which ensnared thirty thousand to forty thousand people by 1715. While this trade mainly occurred in the southeast, it extended into the southern Lakes country: one of Carolina’s principal slave-trading partners, the Chickasaws, sent war parties into Illinois in search of captives, and French settlers sold Illini and Kickapoo slaves to Carolina traders.⁴

Albany stood distant from the Lakes Indians’ settlements, and Carolina’s Indian slave trade collapsed after the Yamasee War of 1715–

16. Shortly thereafter, though, two other British colonies began to pose a more serious challenge to French authority. Both played a part in igniting the conflict that ultimately destroyed the French empire in North America. The first was Pennsylvania, established in 1681 as a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissidents, and as a real-estate venture by founder William Penn. Pennsylvania’s Quaker-controlled government refused to create a provincial militia, instead cultivating good relations with the colony’s Delaware Indian neighbors, trading them weapons and using them to defend the colony’s borders. After it became clear that the Pennsylvanians wanted peace and that their government had legally restricted the purchase of Indian lands, Native peoples from other regions began relocating to Pennsylvania’s river valleys. The Indian settlers included a faction of the Five Nations Iroquois, known to their detractors as “Mingoes” (here we will refer to them as “Ohio Iroquois”), and some of the Shawnees.⁵

Pennsylvania’s white settler population also grew rapidly, rising to 160,000 by 1760. As the colony grew, the Penn family used land cession treaties, some of them fraudulent, to push their Indian neighbors and allies westward. Their main targets were the Delawares, an Algonquian-speaking nation known sometimes by the names of their divisions, the Lenapes and Munsees. Both of these Delaware groups distinguished themselves by their fluid gender boundaries: Lenape and Munsee men and women both dressed alike and both sexes could serve as sachems and religious leaders. The Iroquois derided all of the Delawares as “women,” but the targets of their scorn did not take this as an insult; to them, women were spiritually equal to men and often served as intercultural mediators. For the Lenapes and Munsees, “woman” served as a metaphor for diplomat.⁶

The Penn family chose to view the Delawares’ predilection for diplomacy and gender egalitarianism as signs of weakness. In 1737, the Penns and their allies drove the nation entirely out of the valley that bore its name. Pennsylvania officials presented Delaware leaders with an old (and fake) deed of cession to tribal land on the Delaware River, with one of the cession’s boundaries extending as far as a man could walk “in a day and a half.” The Penn family then hired runners to cover fifty-five miles of ground on the days allotted to mark the boundary. When the Delawares protested the so-called Walking Purchase, the Penns brought in the Iroquois, with whom they had been cultivating an alliance for several decades, to bully their smaller Indian neighbors into leaving. At a 1742 conference, Onondaga chief Canasatego declared that “we [the Iroquois] conquered you; we made women of you; you know you are women, and can no more sell land than women,” and ordered the Delawares to “remove immediately.” Canasatego’s tone and threats made it clear that he used “women” as a label for subjugation, and the Iroquois continued to use gendered language to shame and belittle the Delawares into the 1750s. For its victims, the Walking Purchase became a bitter experience and a cautionary tale to Lakes Indians with whom they subsequently resided. Pierre-Joseph Céloron reminded the Allegheny Delawares of their mistreatment when he visited them in 1749, and four decades later a Wyandot chief recounted the colonists’ perfidy to an American governor.⁷

The Delawares driven from their homes after the Walking Purchase sought a new homeland in the upper Ohio valley, joining there Shawnees and Ohio Iroquois who had begun moving to the region in the 1720s. The migrants established farming settlements centered on communal longhouses, where they held religious ceremonies like the Delawares’ annual gamwing rite—twelve days of singing, vision dances, and thanksgiving to the Creator. They extended their winter hunting trips to the southern shore of Lake Erie, a region notable for its “abundance of game,” including bison. There men shot beaver, deer, waterfowl, and other animals, which provided their families with meat and with peltry exchangeable for European goods.⁸

The Indian communities in western Pennsylvania established ties to those living on the southern Great Lakes. The Odawas, Potawatomis, and Wyandots residing near Detroit and Sandusky regularly traded with the Delawares, whom the Odawas called Wapanachki (Easterners), and with the Shawnees. Men and women from all of these nations used the southern shorelands of Lake Erie as a common range. Hunting and fishing in shared country, the Anishinaabeg and Wyandots shared campfires and stories with the newcomers and developed a common identity with them. They saw themselves not as French or British allies, or as members of wholly distinct nations, but as an autonomous regional alliance—as Ohio Indians. Their confederacy eventually became one of the nuclei of larger pan-Indian movements in the region.⁹

Reinforcing the Ohio Indians’ autonomy was their willingness to trade and negotiate with both of the European empires that claimed the region. Fur traders from British Pennsylvania followed the Ohio valley migrants west to their new homeland. By the early 1740s, one of the most prominent, George Croghan, had pushed into modern Ohio, building a trading post for the Delawares and Ohio Iroquois on the Cuyahoga River. Concurrently, the Pennsylvania provincial government developed diplomatic ties with the southern Lakes Indians. In 1747–48, Pennsylvania commissioners invited Ohio Iroquois and Miami deputies to Philadelphia and Lancaster and there signed with them treaties designed to detach them from the French alliance. More ominously, they also interviewed the Miamis on the principal river routes and French forts in their homeland, demonstrating Pennsylvanians’ interest in expanding even further westward.¹⁰

France had always maintained a tenuous sovereignty over the Lakes Indians. French officials needed their Native American allies more than the Indians needed them, and the Lakes Indians saw the French kings and governors not as their rulers but as their fictive “fathers,” men who gave gifts and resolved disputes but had no command authority. France also found it difficult to govern the Lakes Indians because none of the Lakes nations comprised a politically consolidated whole. Individual towns had headmen and war parties had captains, but the region’s chiefs played ceremonial and diplomatic roles and could govern their kinsmen only through persuasion. Political factions formed easily in the region’s Native American communities, and often those factions opposed an exclusive relationship with the French or favored an alliance with Britain.¹¹

One such faction emerged within the Miamis, an Indian nation descended from the Fort Ancient culture and loosely affiliated with the Illiniwek. Residing chiefly in the Wabash and Maumee River valleys, to which they had migrated from Illinois in the mid-seventeenth century, the Miamis had in 1718 around eight thousand people, gathered into a half-dozen towns with extensive fields and access to rich beaver and bison-hunting grounds. Their population and productivity as hunters gave the Miamis leverage over their French trading partners, whom they obliged to build convenient trading posts at Fort Miami (present-day Fort Wayne) and Ouiatenon. During King George’s War (1744–48), however, the British navy blockaded New France, and French goods became scarce in the Lakes country. So too did the generosity of French traders, whom many Lakes Indians suspected of cheating or exploiting them. By 1747 a faction of Miamis under Memeskia, or La Demoiselle (as the French called him), had begun diplomatic communication with the English, and the following year this group moved their homes to Pickawillany (modern Piqua, Ohio), where George Croghan had constructed a trading post.¹²

Another disaffected group came from the Huron-Wyandots, who had settled near Detroit earlier in the century. Some of the Hurons had come to dislike French traders’ goods and attitudes. Others had come to distrust the neighboring Odawas, whom the Wyandots, as farmers and Christians, considered a primitive, pagan people. In 1738 a faction of disaffected Wyandots moved to Sandusky Bay, fifty miles from Detroit. During King George’s War their principal chief, Orontony, put out diplomatic feelers to Pennsylvania, and in 1747 he helped organize an anti-French “revolt” in the lower Lakes region. Among other incidents, Wyandot warriors slew five traders at Sandusky, while Miamis plundered another eight French traders at Fort Miami. The following year, Orontony and his kinsmen burned their settlement and relocated to the Muskingum River, where they continued to trade with the British.¹³

French officials found the Pennsylvanians’ presence in the Ohio country and the growing disaffection among the southern Lakes Indians deeply troubling, as it threatened to create a salient of British influence between Canada and Louisiana. Some feared that Britain had even more ambitious goals, that it would use the Ohio valley as a base to seize Louisiana, then advance from that province to conquer Spanish America, thereby giving Great Britain mastery of the hemisphere. Such fears impelled French officials to an energetic and violent response, similar to Governor Bienville’s response to the Chickasaws’ challenge in the 1730s.¹⁴

First, the governor of New France in 1749 sent a party of soldiers under Pierre-Joseph Céloron to descend the Ohio River, post or bury metal plates proclaiming the renewal of French rule over the region, and inform the Ohio valley Indians that their lands came under Louis XV’s authority. Céloron visited several communities of Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis, warned them not to trade with Britain, and told them that British colonists only wanted their lands. Most of his hosts responded with politeness and flattery, raising French flags, greeting the emissaries with “pipes of peace,” and assuring Céloron and the governor of New France of their friendship. However, some Ohio Indians fled at the French party’s approach, and others allegedly planned to attack Céloron and his companions. Still others argued, as bluntly as protocol permitted, that French traders could not supply them and that they needed English goods and blacksmiths to survive. One Delaware spokesman told Céloron that without British aid, “we shall . . . be exposed to the danger of dying of hunger and misery on the Beautiful River. Have pity on us, my father, you cannot at present minister to our wants.” When the French emissaries returned to Quebec, their report only confirmed what their superiors already feared.¹⁵

A more violent assertion of French authority soon followed. In 1752, the biracial trader Charles Langlade received French approval to attack La Demoiselle’s base at Pickawillany. Langlade, an Odawa relative by virtue of his Odawa mother, assembled two hundred Anishinaabe warriors and destroyed the Miami settlement. Other French-allied war parties attacked or threatened British traders in the Ohio country, forcing them to withdraw east of the Allegheny Mountains. The following year, Governor Duquesne led twenty-two hundred French soldiers to build a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. The undertaking proved costly in money and lives, but Duquesne and his superiors in the Ministry of Marine (France’s colonial bureaucracy) considered the forts essential to block English expansion and control the upper Ohio valley. For their part, the Ohio Indians initially regarded the French incursion as an opportunity rather than a threat. The previous winter had been a lean one, and the Delawares, Ohio Iroquois, and Shawnees were happy to feed the French soldiers and hire out their horses. This set the new pattern for French-Indian relations in the eastern Lakes country: not a sovereign-subject relationship but a marriage of convenience, which Native Americans would abandon once it became inconvenient.¹⁶