Chapter V (2)

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.

During the long term of intermittent warfare of the French and English on this continent, with native tribes respectively for their foes or allies, the conditions of the conflict, as before hinted, were in general but slightly affected by the alternative of peace or war as existing at any time between their sovereigns and people in Europe. Some of the fiercest episodes of the struggle on this soil took place during the intervals of truce, armistice, and temporary treaty settlements between the leading powers in the old world. When, in the treaties closing a series of campaigns, the settlement in the articles of peace included a restoration of the territory which had been obtained by either party by conquest, no permanent result was really secured. These restitutions were always subject to reclamation. Valuable and strategic points of territory merely changed hands for the time being; Acadia, for example, being seven times tossed as a shuttlecock between the parties to the settlement. The trial had to be renewed and repeated till the decision was of such a sort as to give promise of finality. The prize contended for here was really the mastery of the whole continent, though the largeness of the stake was not appreciated till the closing years of the struggle. Indeed, the breadth and compass of the field were then unknown quantities. Those closing years of stratagem and carnage in our forests correspond to what is known in history as the “Seven Years’ War” in Europe, in which France, as a contestant, was worsted in the other quarters of the globe, as in this. Clive broke her power in India, as the generals of Britain discomfited her here. The French, in 1758, held a profitable mercantile settlement on five hundred miles of coast in Africa, between Cape Blanco and the river Gambia. It is one of the curious contrarieties in the workings of the same avowed principles under different conditions, that just at the time that the pacific policy of the Pennsylvania Quakers forbade their offering aid to their countrymen under the bloody work going on upon their frontiers, an eminent English Quaker merchant, Thomas Cumming, framed the successful scheme of conquest over this French settlement in Africa.[1350]

The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, seemed to promise a breathing-time in the strife between the French and English here. In fact, however, so far from there being even a smouldering of the embers on our soil, that date marks the kindling of the conflagration which, continuing to blaze for fifteen years onward, comprehended all the decisive campaigns. The earliest of these were ominous and disheartening to the English, but they closed with the fullness of triumph. We must trace with conciseness the more prominent acts and incidents in which the natives, with the French and English, protracted and closed the strife.

When Europeans entered upon the region now known as Pennsylvania, though its well-watered and fertile territory and its abounding game would seem to have well adapted it to the uses of savage life, it does not appear that it was populously occupied. The Delawares, which had held it at an earlier period, had, previously to the coming of the whites, been subjugated by the more warlike tribes of the Five Nations, or Iroquois. Some of the vanquished had passed to the south or west, to be merged in other bands of the natives. Such of them as remained in their old haunts were humiliated by their masters, despised as “women,” and denied the privileges of warriors. While the Five Nations were thus potent in the upper portion of Pennsylvania, around the sources of the Susquehanna, its southern region was held by the Shawanees. The first purchase near the upper region made by Europeans of the natives was by a colony of Swedes, under Governor John Printz, in 1643. This colony was subdued, though allowed to remain on its lands, by the Dutch, in 1655. In 1664, the English took possession of all Pennsylvania, and of everything that had been held by the Dutch. Penn founded his province in 1682, by grant from Charles II., and in the next year made his much-lauded treaty of peace and purchase with the Indians for lands west and north of his city. The attractions of the province, and the easy opening of its privileges to others than the Friends, drew to it a rapid and enterprising immigration. In 1729 there came in, principally from the north of Ireland, 6,207 settlers. In 1750 there arrived 4,317 Germans and 1,000 English. The population of the province in 1769 was estimated at 250,000. The Irish settlers were mostly Presbyterians, the Germans largely Moravians. It soon appeared, especially when the ravages of the Indians on the frontiers were most exasperating and disastrous, that there were elements of bitter discord between these secondary parties in the province and the Friends who represented the proprietary right. And this suggests a brief reference to the fact that, as a very effective agent entering into the imbittered conflicts of the time and scene, we are to take into the account some strong religious animosities. The entailed passions and hates of the peoples of the old world, as Catholics and Protestants, and even of sects among the latter, were transferred here to inflame the rage of combatants in wilderness warfare.[1351] The zeal and heroic fidelity of the French priests in making a Christian from a baptized and untamed savage had realized, under rude yet easy conditions, a degree of success. In and near the mission stations, groups of the natives had been trained to gather around the cross, and to engage with more or less response in the holy rites. Some of them could repeat, after a fashion, the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Creed. Some had substituted a crucifix or a consecrated medal for their old pagan charm, to be worn on the breast. When about to go forth on the war-path, their priests would give them shrift and benediction. But, as has been said, it was no part or purpose of this work of christianizing savages to impair their qualities as warriors, to dull their knives or tomahawks, to quench their thirst for blood, or to restrain the fiercest atrocities and barbarities of the fight or the victory. On the well-known experience that fresh converts are always the most ardent haters of heresy, these savage neophytes were initiated into some of the mysteries of the doctrinal strife between the creed of their priests and the abominated infidelity and impiety of the English Protestants. Some of the savages were by no means slow to learn the lesson. Mr. Parkman’s brilliant and graphic pages afford us abounding illustrations of the part which priestly instructions and influence had in adding to savage ferocity the simulation of religious hate for heresy. With whatever degree of understanding or appreciation of the duty as it quickened the courage or the ferocity of the savage, there were many scenes and occasions in which the warrior added the charge of heretic to that of enemy, when he dealt his blow.[1352]

Almost as violent and exasperating were the animosities engendered between the disciples of different Protestant fellowships. The Quakers, backed by proprietary rights, by the prestige of an original peace policy and friendly negotiations with the Indians, and for the most part secure and unharmed in the centralized homes of Philadelphia and its neighborhood, imagined that they might refuse all participation in the bloody work enacting on their frontiers. The adventurous settlers on the borders were largely Presbyterians. The course of non-interference by the Quakers, who controlled the legislature, seemed to those who were bearing the brunt of savage warfare monstrously selfish and inhuman. There was a fatuity in this course which had to be abandoned. When a mob of survivors from the ravaged fields and cabins of the frontiers, bringing in cartloads of the bones gathered from the ashes of their burned dwellings, thus enforced their remonstrances against the peace policy of the legislature, the Quakers were compelled to yield, and to furnish the supplies of war.[1353] But sectarian hatred hardly ever reached an intenser glow than that exhibited between the Pennsylvania Quakers and Presbyterians. Meanwhile, the mild and kindly missionary efforts of the Moravians, in the same neighborhood, were cruelly baffled. Their aim was exactly the opposite of that which guided the Jesuit priests. They sought first to make their converts human beings, planters of the soil, taught in various handicrafts, and weaned from the taste of war and blood.

When the frontier war was at its wildest pitch of havoc and fury, the Moravian settlements, which had reached a stage giving such promise of success as to satisfy the gentle and earnest spirit of the missionaries who had planted them, were made to bear the brunt of the rage of all the parties engaged in the deadly turmoil. The natives timidly nestling in their settlements were regarded as an emasculated flock of nurslings, mean and cowardly, lacking equally the manhood of the savage and the pride and capacity of the civilized man. Worse than this, their pretended desire to preserve a neutrality and to have no part in the broil was made the ground of a suspicion, at once acted upon as if fully warranted, that they were really spies, offering secret information and even covert help as guides and prompters in the work of desolation among the scattered cabins of the whites. So a maddened spirit of distrust, inflamed by false rumors and direct charges of complicity, brought upon the Moravian settlers the hate and fury of the leading parties in the conflict.[1354]

It is noteworthy that the most furious havoc of savage warfare should have been wreaked on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, the one of all the English colonies in America whose boast was, and is, that there alone the entrance of civilized men upon the domains of barbarism was marked and initiated by the Christian policy of peace and righteousness. Penn and his representatives claimed that they had twice paid the purchase price of the lands covered by the proprietary charter to the Indian occupants of them,—once to the Delawares residing upon them, and again to the Iroquois who held them by conquest. The famous “Walking Purchase,” whether a fair or a fraudulent transaction, was intended to follow the original policy of the founder of the province.[1355]

In the inroads made upon the English settlements by Frontenac and his red allies, New York and New England furnished the victims. The middle colonies, so far as then undertaken, escaped the fray. Trouble began for them in 1716, when the French acted upon their resolve to occupy the valley of the Ohio. The Ohio Land Company was formed in 1748 to advance settlements beyond the Alleghanies, and surveys were made as far as Louisville. This enterprise roused anew the Indians and the French. The latter redoubled their zeal in 1753 and onward, south of Lake Erie and on the branches of the Ohio. The English found that their delay and dilatoriness in measures for fortifying the frontiers had given the French an advantage which was to be recovered only with increased cost and enterprise. In an earlier movement, had the English engaged their efforts when it was first proposed to them, they might have lessened, at least, their subsequent discomfiture. Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, in 1720 had urged on the British government the erection of a chain of posts beyond the Alleghanies, from the lakes to the Mississippi. But his urgency had been ineffectual. The governor reported that there were then “Seven Tributary Tribes” in Virginia, being seven hundred in number, with two hundred and fifty fighting-men, all of whom were peaceful. His only trouble was from the Tuscaroras on the borders of Carolina.[1356]

The erection of Fort Duquesne may be regarded as opening the decisive struggle between the French and the English in America, which reached its height in 1755, and centred around the imperfect chain of stockades and blockhouses on the line of the frontiers then reached by the English pioneers.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the number of French subjects in America, including Acadia, Canada, and Louisiana, was estimated at about eighty thousand. The subjects of England were estimated at about twelve hundred thousand. But, as before remarked, this vast disparity of numbers by no means represented an equal difference in the effectiveness of the two nationalities in the conduct of military movements. The French were centralized in command. They had unity of purpose and in action. In most cases they held actual defensive positions at points which the English had to reach by difficult approaches; and more than all, till it became evident that France was to lose the game, the French received much the larger share of aid from the Indians. Pennsylvania and Virginia were embarrassed in any attempt for united defensive operations on the frontiers by their own rival claims to the Ohio Valley. The English, however, welcomed the first signs of vacillation in the savages. When Céloron, in 1749, had sent messengers to the Indians beyond the Alleghanies to prepare for the measures he was about to take to secure a firm foothold there, he reported that the natives were “devoted entirely to the English.” This might have seemed true of the Delawares and Shawanees, though soon afterwards these were found to be in the interest of the French. In fact, all the tribes, except the Five Nations, may be regarded as more or less available for French service up to the final extinction of their power on the continent. Indeed, as we shall see, the mischievous enmity of the natives against the English was never more vengeful than when it was goaded on by secret French agency after France had by treaty yielded her claims on this soil. Nor could even the presumed neutrality of the Five Nations be relied upon by the English, as there were reasons for believing that many among them acted as spies and conveyed intelligence. Till after the year 1754 so effective had been the activity of the French in planting their strongholds and winning over the savages that there was not a single English post west of the Alleghanies.

At the same critical stage of this European rivalry in military operations, the greed for the profits of the fur trade was at its highest pitch. The beavers, as well as the red men, should be regarded as essential parties to the struggle between the French and the English. The latter had cut very deep into the trade which had formerly accrued wholly to the French at Oswego, Toronto, and Niagara.

Up to the year 1720 there had come to be established a mercantile usage which had proved to be very prejudicial to the English, alike in their Indian trade and in their influence over the Indians. The French had been allowed to import goods into New York to be used for their Indian trade. Of course this proved a very profitable business, as it facilitated their operations and was constantly extending over a wider reach their friendly relations with the farther tribes. Trade with Europe and the West Indies and Canada could be maintained only by single voyages in a year, through the perilous navigation of the St. Lawrence. With the English ports on the Atlantic, voyages could be made twice or thrice a year. A few merchants in New York, having a monopoly of supplying goods to the French in Canada, with their principals in England, had found their business very profitable. Goods of prime value, especially “strouds,” a kind of coarse woollen cloth highly prized by the Indians, were made in and exported from England much more cheaply than from France. The mischief of this method of trade being realized, an act was passed by the Assembly in New York, in 1720, which prohibited the selling of Indian goods to the French under severe penalties, in order to the encouragement of trade in general, and to the extension of the influence of the English over the Indians to counterbalance that of the French. Some merchants in London, just referred to, petitioned the king against the ratification of this act. By order in council the king referred the petition to the Lords of Trade and Plantations. A hearing, with testimonies, followed, in which those interested in the monopoly made many statements, ignorant or false, as to the geography of the country, and the method and effects of the advantage put into the hands of the French. But the remonstrants failed to prevent the restricting measure. From that time New York vastly extended its trade and intercourse with the tribes near and distant, greatly to the injury of the French.[1357]

The first white man’s dwelling in Ohio was that of the Moravian missionary, Christian Frederic Post.[1358] He was a sagacious and able man, and had acquired great influence over the Indians, which he used in conciliatory ways, winning their respect and confidence by the boldness with which he ventured to trust himself in their villages and lodges, as if he were under some magical protection. He went on his first journey to the Ohio in 1758, by request of the government of Pennsylvania, on a mission to the Delawares, Shawanees, and Mingoes. These had once been friendly to the English, but having been won over by the French, the object was to regain their confidence. The tribes had at this time come to understand, in a thoroughly practical way, that they were restricted to certain limited conditions so far as they were parties to the fierce rivalry between the Europeans. The issue was no longer an open one as to their being able to reclaim their territory for their own uses by driving off all these pale-faced trespassers. It was for them merely to choose whether they would henceforward have the French or the English for neighbors, and, if it must be so, for masters. Nor were they left with freedom or power to make a deliberate choice. But Post certainly stretched a point when he told the Indians that the English did not wish to occupy their lands, but only to drive off the French.

As Governor Spotswood, in the interest of Virginia, had attempted, in 1716, to break the French line of occupation by promoting settlements in the west, Governor Keith, of Pennsylvania, followed with a similar effort in 1719. Both efforts could be only temporarily withstood, and if baffled at one point were renewed at another. The English always showed a tenacity in clinging to an advance once made, and were inclined to change it only for a further advance. Though Fort Duquesne was blown up when abandoned by the French, with the hope of rendering it useless to the English, the post was too commanding a one to be neglected. After it had been taken by General Forbes in November, 1758, and had been strongly reconstructed by General Stanwix, though it was then two hundred miles distant from the nearest settlement, the possession of it was to a great extent the deciding fact of the advancing struggle. Colonel Armstrong had taken the Indian town of Kittanning in 1756.

The treaty negotiations between English and French diplomates at a foreign court, in 1763, which covenanted for the surrender of all territory east of the Mississippi and of all the fortified posts on lake and river to Great Britain, was but a contract on paper, which was very long in finding its full ratification among the parties alone interested in the result here. There were still three of these parties: the Indians; the French, who were in possession of the strongholds in the north and west; and the English colonists, supported by what was left of the British military forces, skeleton regiments and invalided soldiers, who were to avail themselves of their acquired domain. During the bloody and direful war which had thus been closed, the Indians had come to regard themselves as holding the balance of power between the French and the English. Often did the abler savage warriors express alike their wonder and their rage that those foreign intruders should choose these wild regions for the trial of their fighting powers. “Why do you not settle your fierce quarrels in your own land, or at least upon the sea, instead of involving us and our forests in your rivalry?” was the question to the officers and the file of the European forces. Though the natives soon came to realize that they would be the losers, whichever of the two foreign parties should prevail, their preferences were doubtless on the side of the French; and by force of circumstances easily explicable, after the English power, imperial and provincial, had obtained the mastery of the territory, the sympathies and aid of the natives went with the British during the rebellion of the colonies. But before this result was reached England won its ascendency at a heavy sacrifice of men and money, in a series of campaigns under many different generals. The general peace between England, France, and Spain, secured by the treaty of 1763, and involving the cession of all American territory east of the Mississippi by France to Britain, was naturally expected to bring a close to savage warfare against the colonists. The result was quite the contrary, inasmuch as the sharpest and most desolating havoc was wrought by that foe after the English were nominally left alone to meet the encounter. The explanation of this fact was that the French, though by covenant withdrawn from the field, were, hardly even with a pretence of secrecy, perpetuating and even extending their influence over their former wild allies in embarrassing and thwarting all the schemes of the English for turning their conquests to account. General Amherst was left in command here with only enfeebled fragments of regiments and with slender ranks of provincials. The military duty of the hour was for the conquerors to take formal possession of all the outposts still held by French garrisons, announcing to those in command the absolute conditions of the treaty, and to substitute the English for the French colors, henceforward to wave over them. This humiliating necessity was in itself grievous enough, as it forced upon the commanders of posts which had not then been reached by the war in Canada, a condition against which no remonstrance would avail. But beyond that, it furnished the occasion for the most formidable savage conspiracy ever formed on this continent, looking to the complete extinction of the English settlements here. The French in those extreme western posts had been most successful in securing the attachment of the neighboring Indian tribes, and found strong sympathizers among them in their discomfiture. At the same time those tribes had the most bitter hostility towards the English with whom they had come in contact. They complained that the English treated them with contempt and haughtiness, being niggard of their presents and sharp in their trade. They regarded each advanced English settlement on their lands, if only that of a solitary trader, as the germ of a permanent colony. Under these circumstances, the French still holding the posts, waiting only the exasperating summons to yield them up, found the temptation strong and easy of indulgence to inflame their recent allies, and now their sympathizing friends, among the tribes, with an imbittered rage against their new masters. Artifice and deception were availed of to reinforce the passions of savage breasts. The French sought to relieve the astounded consternation of their red friends on finding that they were compelled to yield the field to the subjects of the English monarch, by beguiling them with the fancy that the concession was but a temporary one, very soon to be set aside by a new turn in the wheel of fortune. Their French father had only fallen asleep while his English enemies had been impudently trespassing upon the lands of his red children. He would soon rouse himself to avenge the insult, and would reclaim what he had thus lost. Indeed, on the principle that the size and ornamentings of a lie involved no additional wrong in the telling it, the Indians were informed that a French army was even then preparing to ascend the Mississippi with full force, before which the English would be crushed.

There was then in the tribe of Ottawas, settled near Detroit, a master spirit, who, as a man and as a chief, was the most sagacious, eloquent, bold, and every way gifted of his race that has ever risen before the white man on this continent to contest in the hopeless struggle of barbarism with civilization. That Pontiac was crafty, unscrupulous, relentless, finding a revel in havoc and carnage, might disqualify him for the noblest epithets which the white man bestows on the virtues of a military hero. But he had the virtues of a savage, all of them, and in their highest range of nature and of faculty. He was a stern philosopher and moralist also, of the type engendered by free forest life, unsophisticated and trained in the school of the wilderness. He knew well the attractions of civilization. He weighed and compared them, as they presented themselves before his eyes in full contrast with savagery, in the European and in the Indian, and in those dubious specimens of humanity in which the line of distinction was blurred by the Indianized white man, the “Christian” convert, and the half-breed. Deliberately and, we may say, intelligently, he preferred for his own people the state of savagery. Intelligently, because he gave grounds for his preference, which, from his point of view and experience, had weight in themselves, and cannot be denied something more than plausibility even in the judgment of civilized men, for idealists like Rousseau and the Abbé Raynal have pleaded for them. Pontiac was older in native sagacity and shrewdness than in years. He had evidence enough that his race had suffered only harm from intercourse with the whites. The manners and temptations of civilization had affected them only by demoralizing influences. All the elements of life in the white man struck at what was noblest in the nature of the Indian,—his virility, his self-respect, his proud and sufficing independence, his content with his former surroundings and range of life. With an earnest eloquence Pontiac, in the lodges and at the council fires of his people, whether of his own immediate tribe or of representative warriors of other tribes, set before them the demonstration that security and happiness, if not peace, depended for them on their renouncing all reliance upon the white man’s ways and goods, and reverting with a stern stoicism to the former conditions of their lot. He told his responsive listeners that the Great Spirit, in pouring the wide salt waters between the two races of his children, meant to divide them and to keep them forever apart, giving to each of them a country which was their own, where they were free to live after their own method. The different tinting of their skin indicated a variance which testified to a rooted divergence of nature. For his red children the Great Spirit had provided the forest, the meadow, the lake, and the river, with fish and game for food and clothing. The canoe, the moccasin, the snow-shoe, the stone axe, the hide or bark covered lodge, the fields of golden maize, the root crops, the vines and berries, the waters of the cold crystal spring, made the inventory of their possessions. They belonged to nature, and were of kin to all its other creatures, which they put freely to their use, holding everything in common. The changing moons brought round the seasons for planting and hunting, for game, festivity, and religious rite. Their old men preserved the sacred traditions of their race. Their braves wore the scars and trophies of a noble manhood, and their young men were in training to be the warriors of their tribes in defence or conquest.

These, argued Pontiac, were the heritage which the Great Spirit had assigned to his red children. The spoiler had come among them from across the salt sea, and woe and ruin for the Indian had come with him. The white man could scorn the children of the forest, but could not be their friend or helper. Let the Indian be content and proud to remain an Indian. Let him at once renounce all use of the white man’s goods and implements and his fire-water, and fall back upon the independence of nature, fed on the flesh and clothed with the skins secured by bow and arrow and his skill of woodcraft.

Such was the pleading of the most gifted chieftain and the wisest patriot, the native product of the American wilderness. There was a nobleness in him, even a grandeur and prescience of soul, which take a place now on the list of protests that have poured from human breasts against the decrees of fate. Pontiac followed up his bold scheme by all the arts and appliances of forest diplomacy. He formed his cabinet, and sent out his ambassadors with their credentials in the reddened hatchet and the war-belt. They visited some of even the remoter tribes, with appeals conciliatory of all minor feuds and quarrels. Their success was qualified only by the inveteracy of existing enmities among some of these tribes. It would be difficult to estimate, even if only approximately, the number of the savages who were more or less directly engaged in the conspiracy of Pontiac. A noted French trader, who had resided many years among the Indians, and who had had an extended intercourse with the tribes, stayed at Detroit during the siege, having taken the oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain. Largely from his own personal knowledge, he drew up an elaborate list of the tribes, with the number of warriors in each. The summing up of these is 56,500. In the usual way of allowing one to five of a whole population for able-bodied men, this would represent the number of the savages as about 283,000, which slightly exceeds the number of Indians now in our national domain.[1359]

The lake and river posts which had been yielded up by the French, on the summons, were occupied by slender and poorly supplied English garrisons, unwarned of the impending concentration. The scheme of Pontiac involved two leading acts in the drama: one was the beleaguerment of all the fortified lake and river garrisons; the other was an extermination by fire and carnage of all the isolated frontier settlements at harvest time, so as to cause general starvation. The plan was that all these assaults, respectively assigned to bodies of the allies, should be made at the same time, fixed by a phase of the moon. Scattered through the wilderness were many English traders, in their cabins and with their packh-orses and goods. These were plundered and massacred.[1360] The assailed posts were slightly reinforced by the few surviving settlers and traders who escaped the open field slaughter. The conspiracy was so far effective as to paralyze with dismay the occupants of the whole region which it threatened. But pluck and endurance proved equal to the appalling conflict. Nearly all the posts, after various alternations of experience, succumbed to the savage foe. Such was the fate of Venango, Le Bœuf, Presqu’ Isle, La Bay, St. Joseph, Miamis, Ouachtanon, Sandusky, and Michilimackinac. Detroit alone held out. The fort at Niagara, being very strong, was not attacked. The Shawanees and Delawares were active agents in this conspiracy. The English used all their efforts and appliances to keep the Six Nations neutral. The French near the Mississippi were active in plying and helping the tribes within their reach. The last French flag that came down on our territory was at Fort Chartres on the Mississippi.[1361]

* * * * *

CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.[1362]

_By Dr. Ellis and the Editor._

ON some few historical subjects we have volumes so felicitously constructed as to combine all that is most desirable in original materials with a judicious digest of them. Of such a character is Francis Parkman’s _France and England in North America, A Series of Historical Narratives_. So abundant, authentic, and intelligently gathered are his citations from and references to the journals, letters, official reports, and documents, often in the very words of the actors, that, through the writer’s luminous pages, we are, for all substantial purposes, made to read and listen to their own narrations. Indeed, we are even more favored than that. So comprehensive have been his researches, and so full and many-sided are the materials which he has digested for us, that we have all the benefit of an attendance on a trial in a court or a debate in the forum, where by testimony and cross-examination different witnesses are made to verify or rectify their separate assertions. The official representatives of France, military and civil, on this continent, like their superiors and patrons at home, were by no means all of one mind. They had their conflicting interests to serve. They made their reports to those to whom they were responsible or sought to influence, and so colored them by their selfishness or rivalry. These communications, gathered from widely scattered repositories, are for the first time brought together and made to confront each other in Mr. Parkman’s pages. Allowing for a gap covering the first half of the eighteenth century, which is yet to be filled, Mr. Parkman’s series of volumes deals with the whole period of the enterprise of France in the new world to its cession of all territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain. His marvellously faithful and skilful reproduction of the scenic features of the continent, in its wild state, bears a fit relation to his elaborate study of its red denizens. His wide and arduous exploration in the tracks of the first pioneers, and his easy social relations with the modern representatives of the aboriginal stock, put him back into the scenes and companionship of those whose schemes and achievements he was to trace historically. After identifying localities and lines of exploration here, he followed up in foreign archives the missives written in these forests, and the official and confidential communications of the military and civic functionaries of France, revealing the joint or conflicting schemes and jealousies of intrigue or selfishness of priests, traders, monopolists, and adventurers. The panorama that is unrolled and spread before us is full and complete, lacking nothing of reality in nature or humanity, in color, variety, or action. The volumes rehearse in a continuous narrative the course of French enterprise here, the motives, immediate and ultimate, which were had in view, the progress in realizing them, the obstacles and resistance encountered, and the tragic failure.[1363]

The references in Parkman show that he depends more upon French than upon English sources, and indeed he seems to give the chief credit for his drawing of the early Indian life and character to the _Relations_ of the French and Italian Jesuits,[1364] during their missionary work in New France.