Dimensions of Settler Colonialism in a Transnational Perspective

Experiences, Actors, Spaces

Eva Bischoff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138599376
• eBook ISBN: 9780429940910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As a field of research, settler colonial studies has developed dynamically in recent years. This volume contributes a set of much-needed empirical analyses of the microhistory and practices of settler colonialism. Incorporating six case studies from across the Anglo-world, including the United States, Australia, and South Africa, this book examines the roles different actors played in this process, their individual experiences, and the social and physical (re-)organization of settler colonial space. They reconstruct the complexities of settler responses to Indigenous resistance, guided by fear or religious convictions; and explore the settlers' potential to manoeuvre on higher political levels, legitimizing frontier violence as a patriotic duty to the common good. In addition, they examine the production and circulation of knowledge about land, and discuss the ways in which socio-ecological systems were manipulated by stock farmers whose success depended upon an effective integration into a world-wide economic system. Overall, the volume presents a unique combination of microhistorical analysis and environmental history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.

Good land–bad land: ecological knowledge and the settling of the old Northwest, 1755–1805

Ursula Lehmkuhl

ABSTRACT
The settlement of the Old Northwest and more specifically of the territory that became the state of Ohio did not take place according to the pattern of a slowly moving frontier. Instead, the land was settled in a very irregular way, with patches of settled land spreading along the Ohio and Scioto River from the south well up to the north. One reason for this irregular settlement pattern was knowledge about what was conceived as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ land. Based primarily on the narratives of early travelers and observers, this article analyzes the content, origin and political usage of ecological knowledge in the settlement of Ohio. How was ecological knowledge developed and how was it spread? To what extent was Indigenous knowledge included and where did it come from? How did knowledge transfer between the Indigenous knowledge system and the Euro-American knowledge system occur? Where was knowledge transfer successful and where did it fail?

Introduction

The exploration and settlement of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains, the settlement frontier, took place in a laissez-faire fashion with few regulatory obstacles. Surveyors, speculators and settlers claimed and appropriated land according to the available knowledge about the quality of the land, the accessibility of the land by travel and trade routes or waterways, and information about how to cope with the specific environment and climate at the frontier. The same holds true for the distribution of land titles in the complex economic system of the Early Republic, when land was used as currency. Land parcels were not always assigned in a consecutive, linear way, but more according to the wishes of the future landowners who again identified their preferred location based on information about ‘good land’.¹ This practice created a patchwork ‘agricultural frontier’ of the Old Northwest understood as ‘places undergoing relatively rapid transformation in land management practices’.²

After the American Revolution, the question of identifying good land occupied a whole generation of surveyors, speculators, agents of land companies, missionaries and of course settlers.³ John Jacob Eyerly, Jr, for example, who in the 1790s traveled through Pennsylvania and Ohio in order to survey the lands near Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, entitled to the Moravian Mission after the Gnadenhutten massacre of 1791, wrote in 1794:

We saw some tracts of very good land today, suitable for single plantations, abounding in sugar trees, maple, and the like. I saw chestnut trees, too, today, 6 or 7 feet in diameter at the butt and of an amazing height. We had no thought, however, of surveying here for the Society, for the land here is inferior in many ways to that on the East Branch of French Creek. […] Except for one small patch, the French Creek tract is very good rich land, with many clearings in the bottom lands where, from all appearances, the Indians used to dwell. Where these bottoms are not cleared, they are densely overgrown with white walnut, wild cherries, and the like.⁴

Similar observations can be found in many diaries and travelogues written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of these journals and diaries were published or distributed among family and friends. The information about land was thus disseminated rather quickly and reached a large audience. While environmental historians have pointed out the close connection between European colonialism and expansion and the ecological transformation of the conquered and settled land,⁵ the link between ‘knowledge’, ‘space’/‘environment’ and ‘domination’ in the context of settler colonial systems still needs further consideration and analysis.

Contemporary knowledge about ‘good land’ and ‘good roads’ resulted from a knowledge system composed of several interrelated components. Among these components was practical knowledge accumulated in a first settlement experience in the back country of the former 13 Colonies; adapted knowledge gained from experiences in Europe and transferred to the North American ecological system; or scientific knowledge gathered by early explorers, geographers, botanists, road makers, surveyors and adventurers and published in journals and travelogues. Furthermore, Indigenous knowledge acquired and appropriated by Euro-American fur traders, hunters, scouts, and missionaries was a crucial component of this knowledge system. This group of actors developed their knowledge about ‘good land’ through multifarious practices, ranging from the observation of Indigenous settlement patterns, from living among the native population and traveling with them, or by hunting and fishing together. Hunters, fur traders, scouts and missionaries very often presented already processed or ‘translated’ information about the quality of the land, the character of the environment or the climate. They adapted and projected the appropriated Indigenous knowledge to Euro-American economic objectives.

Hence, the patchwork agricultural frontier and the concomitant changes in the character of land caused by Euro-American colonization of the Old Northwest were also the result of a complex system of knowledge transfer. This system was characterized by the selective appropriation, adaptation and translation of Indigenous knowledge by Euro-American actors, who did not necessarily themselves settle at the Western frontier. Selective knowledge transfer together with the practice of selling and buying but not necessarily settling land resulted in the creation of the patchwork frontier with multiple ‘contact zones’⁶ and localized ‘middle grounds’.⁷ Hence, geographical fragmentation and dispersed location of spheres and zones of interaction characterized the settler colonial system in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. In order to reconstruct the system of knowledge acquisition and knowledge transfer that contributed to the creation of a patchwork agricultural frontier I will analyze four witnesses’ accounts of journeys into and through the territory of the Old Northwest made before and after the American Revolution. The descriptions of land presented in these four texts cover the time period between 1755 and 1805. My historical observers and narrators were prominent citizens of New England and their publications were widespread. They are well known to historians of the post-revolutionary United States: James Smith (1737–1812/1814, Pennsylvania), Manasseh Cutler (1742–1823, Connecticut), John Jacob Eyerly, Jr (1757–1800, Pennsylvania) and Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768–1842, Massachusetts).

I have chosen these four accounts out of an abundance of published letter collections, day books, journals or diaries written by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century explorers, surveyors, geographers, botanists and adventurers.⁸ This relatively large group of early witnesses of the ecology, geography, economy and culture of ‘Indian land’ was traveling mostly on horseback or on foot with an average speed of 15–20 miles a day. Their daily reports contain descriptions of local environments in great detail. The early travelers commented on the state of the roads and waterways, the quality of land, but also on the ‘Indian’⁹ population, their traditions and customs, their way of life and their warfare tactics. They were eager to commit their observations to paper, for a variety of reasons. Day books, journals and diaries very often served as a way to relate and to share experiences with friends and families. They also were used as source material for scholarly descriptions of the nature and environments that were later published and distributed to a larger interested audience. Information provided in these texts was important for military and economic purposes, too. Surveyors and land agents used the insights of explorers, hunters and scouts to encourage settlers to buy land and to migrate farther west.

The texts chosen for this article cover this broad spectrum of different motifs, interests and observation perspectives. All four describe the territory of the Old Northwest, that is, the land northwest of the treaty line defined by the Treaty of Paris in 1763 as ‘Indian territory’. This land was re-colonized by the USA 20 years after France was forced out of the area with the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and Great Britain had guaranteed a border line defining the settlement frontier for the settlers of the 13 Colonies. The Northwest Territory as defined 20 years later, again in a treaty signed in Paris, contained six future states: Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), Wisconsin (1848) and Minnesota (1858). All of our authors had an interest in exploring, conquering and settling the territory, as member of the army during the Revolutionary War, as surveyor and member of a land company, or as a member of a protestant missionary movement, but none of them established a pioneer farm himself. All four men belong to the group of early White explorers who just passed through the Ohio area and returned with their notes and records to eastern, that is, Euro-American bases.¹⁰ The information provided in their journals, books and pamphlets served settlers willing to establish a farm or a town in the Ohio territory to decide on the possible location for a settlement and the best itinerary to this location.

Similar to the transatlantic journey that many European immigrants of the nineteenth century had to make, and for good reasons were afraid of, in the second half of the eighteenth century, traveling across the Alleghenies into the territory west of the Ohio was a very strenuous and even dangerous affair. Jacob Eyerly, who was already quoted above, wrote for example, after several days of traveling and surveying land in the Presque Isles area:

We all badly needed rest, the horse included, having had to make the journey from Pittsburg to this place [i.e. French Creek, Presque Isles] – to say nothing of the return to Fort Franklin [ah...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Experiences, actors, spaces: dimensions of settler colonialism in transnational perspective
• 1. Good land–bad land: ecological knowledge and the settling of the old Northwest, 1755–1805
• 2. ‘The intrusion therefore of cattle is by itself sufficient to produce the extirpation of the native race’: social ecological systems and ecocide in conflicts between Hunter–Gatherers and commercial stock farmers in Australia
• 3. Invariably genocide? When hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash
• 4. Poor, white, and useful: settlers in their petitions to US Congress, 1817–1841
• 5. ‘I am frightened out of my life’: Black War, white fear
• 6. Arms & amelioration: negotiating Quaker peace testimony and settler violence in 1830s Van Diemen’s Land
• Index