The Boundaries Between Us

Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850

Daniel P. Barr

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612774527
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

New essays on the settlement of the Old Northwest

Although much has been written about the Old Northwest territory, The Boundaries between Us fills a void in this historical literature by examining lesser known forms of interaction between Euro-Americans and native peoples and their struggles to gain control of the region and its vast resources. Comprised of eleven original essays, The Boundaries between Us presents unique perspectives on the history and significance of the contest for control of the Old Northwest territory.

The essays examine the sociocultural contexts in which natives and newcomers lived, traded, negotiated, interacted, and fought, asking new questions about power, identity, and violence, both ahead of and behind the frontiers of Euro-American settlement. The essays do not attempt to present a unified interpretation but, rather, focus on both specific and general topics, revisit and reinterpret well-known events, and underscore how cultural, political, and ideological antagonisms divided the native inhabitants from the newcomers. Together, these thoughtful analyses offer a broad historical perspective on nearly a century of contact, interaction, conflict, and displacement. This volume promises to be of great importance to students and scholars of early America, the frontier, and cultural interaction.

1

The Shawnees and the English

Captives and War, 1753–1765

IAN K. STEELE

For a quarter of a millennium, the Ohio Shawnees were maligned and misunderstood participants in the Seven Years’ War. They were seen as bloodthirsty opportunists who accepted French inducements to commence war against the English in 1754, with whom they fought with demonic cruelty. Then, in making peace, they were known “for their deceit and perfidy, paying little or no regard to their word and most solemn engagements,” as Robert Rogers claimed in 1765.¹ These self-serving claims need to be reexamined to provide a more balanced account of the Shawnees. One particularly fruitful way of reviewing them comes through the study of Shawnee captivities. Despite all the scholarly attention to surviving white captivity narratives, as culturally defining popular literature or even as cultural “liberation” for white women, there has been little general analysis of the experiences of Shawnee captives or any understanding of the persisting Shawnee views of captivity in the face of growing English rigidity on the subject. The Shawnees’ decision to engage in the Seven Years’ War, their conduct in the war, and their prolonged and unfinished route to peace are more comprehensible if captives are seen as central.²

Although the Shawnees’ road to war against the English had preconditions in land disputes and personal grievances, it was unintentionally triggered in Wakatomika (Waketummaky, Lapitchuna, Upper Shawnee Town) on the Muskingum River in April of 1753, when thirteen warriors undertook an arduous, risky, and time-honored quest to raid the distant Catawbas for prisoners and scalps. The intent was to weaken and humiliate a traditional enemy, replace specific war casualties, and enhance the reputations of the captors. Even as it began, this particular raid had at least one additional purpose. The Iroquois Confederacy, with British colonial encouragement, had claimed a dubious authority over the Shawnees during the previous decade. The Iroquois had finally made a tentative peace with the British-allied Catawbas in 1751, and the pro-British Shawnees of Wakatomika were challenging the Iroquois overlordship by launching this highly visible attack on the Catawbas in the spring of 1753.³

This Shawnee raid was destined to become a fiasco with serious consequences. The party set off equipped with horses and several prized rifled guns, evidences of cultural adaptability, status, and prosperity. The expedition was also accompanied by its leader’s medicine bundle, which included a belt of black wampum, sacred buffalo hair “prisoner ties” for anticipated captives, and silver bracelets and a silver cross. This mix of traditional and alien accouterments suggests the hybridity of these Shawnees, who were long familiar with Europeans. The leader was Itawachcomequa, “the Pride,” who once had attacked Pennsylvanian traders along the Allegheny River but more recently had become a prominent pro-English chief whom one Shawnee spokesman called “a noted Man among the Shawonese, a great Warrior and a true Friend to the English.” Staying “out of the Way, and by the Heads of the Rivers” the group reportedly lost their way in the Appalachian Mountains and seven of them turned back, including two who had become lame and two others who agreed to see them safely home. The remaining six persevered in their quest. “After we had marched a very long Way, not knowing the Path, we found ourselves in the white People’s Country. The white People told us that if we should be taken, we should be carried Prisoners to Charles Town.”⁴

These Shawnees later indicated that they understood English quite well, but they did not know how dangerous the South Carolina frontier had become. A series of incidents had prompted a panic in 1751 that caused mutually antagonistic South Carolinians and Cherokees to migrate or fortify. South Carolinians continued to be witnesses, and occasionally victims, of raiding bands of Caughnawaga Iroquois and various poorly identified “Northern Indians,” thought to have been encouraged by the increasingly belligerent French. In April 1753, South Carolina’s veteran governor, James Glen, issued a proclamation offering £100 to anyone who captured or killed Indians involved in a recent murder. The proclamation also offered £50 to those who captured or killed any “other Northern Indians who shall come into our Settlements after the Expiration of Three Months, unless such Indians shall have in their Company some white Man, and be coming down on any Business or Message to this Government.” To counter the northern Indians, the nervous South Carolina government offered identical rewards for Indians taken dead or alive, and bounty hunters could be expected to kill Indian strangers, who would then pose no threat to either the lives or the explanations of their “captors.” Itawachcomequa and his band had entered very dangerous territory.⁵

Responding to reports of suspicious strangers, thirty South Carolina militiamen surrounded the six Ohio Shawnees in a farmhouse near the Salkehatchie River in the southeastern corner of the colony. Surprisingly, the Shawnees agreed to surrender their weapons and be conducted to the governor “under the Care and Protection of a Party of our Militia, rather than as Prisoners of War, that they may go without Fear,” as Lt. Gov. William Bull explained in sending them on to Governor Glen in Charles Town. Bull added, “I have treated them kindly, for which they seem very thankful, and told them they are a going to hear your Excellency’s Talk.” The non-violent capture of well-armed warriors by white militiamen was extraordinary, especially since Indian warriors abhorred incarceration, seldom surrendered to whites, and were rarely taken as captives.⁶

Might Shawnee captives fare well in peacetime if they understood some English, surrendered without inflicting any casualties, were supported by a lieutenant governor’s sympathetic letter, and arrived during Governor Glen’s declared three-month period of grace? The initial reception in Charles Town was certainly not encouraging. On June 18, 1753, the South Carolina Gazette printed an article that stated the hope that other militia would act similarly and “soon clear the Country of these French and Northern Indians that have for some Years past infested this Province,” an item that was widely reprinted in the British colonies. Governor Glen immediately ordered the Shawnees to be jailed and then, together with his Council, grilled the prisoners individually, accusing them of murder and of contradicting each other. Once an adequate translator was found, the Council heard Itawachcomequa say, “I am a Friend to all the People here. I am a Shavanah and loyal to the English.”⁷

The clearest statement of the warriors’ purpose was offered by the youngest Shawnee, a teen captured with his father and initially interrogated with him as well. The youth admitted that they came to capture Catawba prisoners but had taken none, and he insisted that white people had promised the Shawnees freedom if they went to talk with the governor. Another Shawnee prisoner reported that the entire war party was drunk when it set out and some had turned back when they sobered. Others gave various accounts of their purpose, including a visit to “Shartier’s [sic] people,” a Shawnee band said to include 185 warriors and their families who, several years earlier, had followed métis Peter Chartier in migrating from the Ohio to join the Upper Creeks.⁸

Strangers, even those captured during peacetime, seemed easier to exploit than to set free. The South Carolina governor and council, admitting that “there are [sic] not any positive Proof that they had actually killed any of our People,” nonetheless kept the Shawnees in jail, underestimating or disregarding how much Indians detested imprisonment. When a Catawba chief gloated about the sickly look of his jailed Shawnee enemies, the governor insisted that the prisoners were being treated well. Nonetheless, he voiced concern to the Commons House of Assembly two weeks later: “I should be sorry that any of them should die in Prison, [and] I think the sooner we get rid of them, the better.” Glen did not hesitate to authorize imprisonment of the Shawnees, but his insistence on good treatment of the imprisoned was a badge of his civility. It was only the prospect of a captive dying in jail that raised serious concern.⁹

Glen and his council decided to send two of the Shawnees home, accompanied by letters to the lieutenant governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Robert Dinwiddie and James Hamilton, that made clear that the other four Shawnees had become hostages who would be released when headmen of their tribe came to Charles Town and gave assurances for the future good behavior of their people. The South Carolina Commons House balked even at sending these two back, “till the People of the Nation to whom they shall belong shall restore such Slaves as they have taken in this Province and carried away Captives into their Country.” Finally, after the Shawnees had been imprisoned for nearly four months, Glen personally decided to send two of the captives home by way of Pennsylvania. Glen’s calculations now included his assembly’s demand that the Shawnee tribe return all “our friendly Indians or Mustee Slaves,” noting with surprise that northern raiders were carrying off “such of our Slaves as had the least Tincture of Indian Blood in them.” Hamilton was asked to call Shawnee headmen down to Philadelphia or to send “some proper Person” to the Ohio Country with the two returnees to explain the terms under which the other four would be released. Six disarmed Shawnees had become prisoners without being charged; four of them were now held as involuntary hostages by a British colonial government willing to act on the widely shared assumption that one alien could be punished for the behavior of inadequately identified others.¹⁰

News of their brethren’s capture had reached the Ohio Shawnees within two months. While they seldom made an effort to recover warriors captured in battle, they regarded this entrapment and incarceration in peacetime as outrageous.¹¹ That September, at conferences with evasive Virginians and Pennsylvanians at Winchester and Carlisle, respectively, Ohio Shawnees and Delawares asked both those governments to intervene to secure the release of the six captives. The Ohio Iroquois leader Scarouady, who regarded the raid, the imprisonments, and the diplomatic petitions as embarrassing violations of the Iroquois diplomatic overlordship that he embodied, had to be restrained from going to Charles Town himself to retrieve those he regarded as errant Shawnee subordinates. Dinwiddie and Hamilton had written Glen about the captives, with Hamilton noting that they were “the Flower of their Nation for Courage and Activity,” very pro-English, and much needed in Ohio Country during the developing confrontation with the French.¹²

A week after the two hostages had left Charles Town for Philadelphia, three of the four detained Shawnees escaped from the Charles Town watch house “by cutting out one of the Iron Barrs [sic] of a Window, and bending two others.” The South Carolina council admitted that “through the Negligence of the Centinel [they] escaped out of the Prison, and as they have not been retaken, have, as we suppose, bent their Course to their own Country.” Glen did not give up so easily, pressing Creek chiefs to help in recovering the escaped hostages. He again insisted that the prisoners had been treated well, that they were given good beef and corn or bread every day and rum “very often,” and he claimed to be puzzled that three had decided to escape. Conflicting accounts of the escape can be reconciled if it is presumed that Itawachcomequa died during the escape, either in jail or in the woods. Glen likely projected his own values when he claimed that the one Shawnee hostage remaining in custody, who may have been ill,“thought it dishonorable to go and still continues here.”¹³

The two Shawnees originally returned by Glen arrived in Philadelphia in mid-November of 1753. After a month-long delay due to “a bloody Flux” that affilicted one of them, they were escorted home by John Patten, a Pennsylvanian Indian trader recently returned from captivity in the Ohio Country and in France. Patten’s assignment was to see these Shawnees safely through Pennsylvania to the frontier town of Carlisle, then pick up the colony’s leading frontier diplomats and translators, Andrew Montour and George Croghan, at the latter’s station at Aughwick. Hamilton envisaged that, once this party had crossed the Allegheny Mountains, it would proceed to Shannopintown at the forks of the Ohio River to find the Six Nations chiefs Scarouady and Tanaghrisson. These Iroquois leaders were to receive Hamilton’s formal message and a validating string of wampum, and then the whole party was expected to proceed down the Ohio to Lower Shawnee Town at the mouth of the Scioto River. Once there, Scarouady and Tanaghrisson would conduct a meeting with the principal Shawnee leaders, conveying the messages of Glen and Hamilton with appropriate dignity. Then the Iroquois and British would release the two healthy and reclothed Shawnee captives to their grateful people, who would acknowledge the supposed power of the Iroquois-British covenant chain and would confirm their own loyalty at that crucial time.¹⁴

Behind this proposed public drama, Hamilton’s secret instructions to Patten called for him to measure the road from Carlisle to Shannopintown carefully to see if this increasingly contested site was within Pennsylvania....