British Buckeyes

The English, Scots, and Welsh in Ohio, 1700-1900

William Van Vugt

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781612774503
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How early British immigrants shaped Ohio

Because of their similar linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, English, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants are often regarded as the "invisible immigrants, " assimilating into early American society easily and quickly and often losing their ethnic identities. Yet, of all of Ohio's immigrants, the British were the most influential in terms of shaping the state's politics and institutions. Also significant were their contributions to farming, mining, iron production, textiles, pottery, and engineering.

Until British Buckeyes, historians have all but ignored and neglected these industrious settlers. Author William E. Van Vugt uses hundreds of biographies from county archives and histories, letters, Ohio and British census figures, and ship passenger lists to identify these immigrants and draw a portrait of their occupations, settlement patterns, and experiences and to underscore their role in Ohio history.

1

The First British Buckeyes

Ohio: Iroquoian word for “Great River”

SINCE the early eighteenth century, Ohio has had an intimate relationship with the people of Great Britain. Traders, adventurers, and soldiers from England, Scotland, and Wales followed the river systems into much of Ohio and made it a strategic part of the western fringe of the British Empire. And many returned home with tantalizing tales of a beautiful virgin land with exotic native peoples. One of the first persons to travel through the region and write about it was the famous Welsh cartographer and geologist, Lewis Evans. By 1743 Evans completed an expedition that traversed the southern shores of the Great Lakes, and in 1755 he published “A General Map of the Middle British Colonies in America.” This included the first printed description of the Ohio territory. Evans called Ohio the “Flower of the whole Globe” and “the finest Country on Earth.” The timing of such glowing accounts was perfect. After the Ohio Company was established in 1748, land beyond the Alleghenies was granted to British subjects and formal explorations of Ohio began in earnest. Then came the influx of early settlers, many from Great Britain, who heartily agreed with Evans’s assessment. Ohio was indeed “the Flower of the whole Globe.”¹

Most British immigrants and travelers entered Ohio from Pittsburgh and took the water route down the Ohio River. These adventurers did not necessarily intend to stay in Ohio, but some did. Their influence was often profound and indelible, and their relationship with the natives was more complex than one might expect. Along with imperialism and dispossession came acculturation and interethnic cooperation. On the vast Ohio frontier, the very edge of the British Empire, there was in fact a great deal of cultural exchange, mediation, and interpenetration between the British and the American Indians. Something new resulted—a “middle ground” between cultures, peoples, and empires, a distinctly frontier American culture that had not been seen before, and that thrived until the young United States government stepped in.²

The natural river highways—the Ohio, Scioto, Great and Little Miamis, Muskingum, and Maumee—allowed British traders, soldiers, and immigrants to penetrate Western Ohio at remarkably early dates. By 1710 Pennsylvania traders of British origin or ancestry were using the Ohio River to channel British goods to Ohio’s natives. Most of their contact was with the Miami and Shawnee Indians. Although the French were already in Ohio, the British arrived in greater numbers and eventually, after 1750, superseded the French by offering better goods to natives at lower prices. Already in 1749 the Marquis de la Galissoniére, governor-general of New France, remarked: “Behold, then, the English already far within our territory; and, what is worse, they are under the protection of a crowd of savages whom they entice to themselves, and whose number increases every day.” And when Captain Pierre-Joseph de Celoron de Blainville set out to punish natives for trading with the English, he was told that “to separate them from the English would be like cutting a man into halves, and expecting him to live.”³

The English enjoyed a trading advantage because some of the goods were made in the colonies and did not require shipment across the ocean, unlike many French wares. But more importantly, they were able to entice the natives through their modernized textiles industry, which produced a variety of colorful cloths the Miami and other Indians found attractive.⁴ They were capitalizing on their leadership in manufacturing and trade and using the marketplace to their geopolitical advantage in the remote corners of Ohio. As a “nation of shopkeepers” on the cusp of launching the world’s first industrial revolution, the English were becoming the economic powerhouse of Europe, with financial resources that could determine the outcome of wars and strip the French of their North American empire. Altogether, Britain’s commercial enterprise, their professed sense of individual liberty, and their growing demographic might in America enabled them to prevail over the French in Ohio, but not without conflict and temporary setbacks.

The Indians’ preference for British goods and traders, and the shift of their alliance from France to Britain, was noticeable in some parts of Ohio by the mid–eighteenth century. The most remarkable episode involved a Piankashaw chief named Memeskia (Dragonfly), whom the French called La Demoiselle. His village was in northeastern Indiana but he also traveled extensively in Ohio where he frequently met and befriended British traders. Already by 1736 he had developed a pro-British stance and the British affectionately nicknamed him “Old Briton.” Becoming disenchanted with the French because their policy was confining and their goods were exploitatively priced, Old Briton relocated his village near Kekionga (Fort Wayne) by 1745. Here he urged the Miamis of Indiana and Ohio to join him in allying with the British, whose political control over western tribes was minimal in comparison with that of the French and whose goods were of better quality and price.⁵

Old Briton was not the only chief in Ohio who was turning away from the French. The Huron chief Nicolas, based at Sandusky and influenced by Senecas and British traders, encouraged attacks on French forts. Old Briton joined a plan in which Nicolas would lead an attack against Detroit, the Chippewas would take Michilimackinac, and Old Briton would attack the French post at Fort Miami, near the headwaters of the Maumee River. Unfortunately for the Indians, the French learned of the plot, foiled Nicolas’s plans, and prevented the others from being fully executed.

After the failure to drive the French out of the area, Old Briton led some Miamis from Kekionga to a new British fort called Pickawillany, at the confluence of the Great Miami River and Loramie Creek, just north of Piqua in what is now Shelby County, Ohio. Pickawillany quickly grew to include some fourteen hundred Indians from several tribes, though mostly Miami, and Old Briton’s influence grew with the support of the British traders and military personnel. Here the British embraced Old Briton and his people with an agreement of “Friendship and Alliance” and assured them that the Miami were “our own Flesh and Blood, and what hurts them will equally hurt us.” On July 23, 1748, the British commissioners and Miami delegates signed a formal treaty in Philadelphia. This elated Old Briton, who felt assured that the British would ensure prosperity and protection from French reprisals.⁶

These developments concerned the French, of course, who saw Old Briton’s community and the British at Pickawillany as a threat to their control over the Ohio Valley. Accordingly, the Marquis de la Galissonière made plans to drive the British out and destroy Old Briton and his people. He ordered Captain de Celoron to find Old Briton and negotiate his return to Kekionga, if necessary by force. In September of 1749 Celoron and 265 men met with Old Briton, but the negotiations came to nothing. Old Briton had no intention of leaving Pickawillany, which was looking better to him all the time. In late 1749 the Scotch Irish trader George Croghan arrived from Pennsylvania with a large group of British traders, and they and their plentiful goods pleased Old Briton greatly. After a failed attempt to bribe Old Briton into returning, the French launched a raid in 1750, which convinced the chief to take up arms. To show his anger he ordered three captured French soldiers killed and a fourth to have his ears cut off before sending him back to the governor as a warning.

In 1752 the French organized another raid led by the influential French Ottawa officer Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade. He assembled a force of about 180 Chippewas, 30 Ottawas, and 30 French soldiers from Detroit and headed for Pickawillany. On the morning of June 21 the raiders—composed mainly of Indians and a few Frenchmen—attacked and overwhelmed Old Briton’s people and a handful of British traders. Most of the Indian men had gone hunting and many of the British traders and soldiers were also absent. The Indian force, led by the French, struck so suddenly that many Miami women were captured while working in their cornfields. The violence and aftermath were ghastly. The raiders seized one English trader, cut his heart out, and ate it in the presence of horrified British and Indian captives. Old Briton was killed, butchered and boiled, and eaten. For the Chippewas and Ottawas who ate the unlucky Englishman and Indian, cannibalism was a ritual that transferred their enemies’ power literally into themselves. But for the English, such a hideous and ignominious death was proof of the Indians’ savagery. Such were the experiences of some of the first British Buckeyes.⁷

In effect, the destruction of Pickawillany was but a prelude to the French and Indian War, part of the Seven Years’ War which affected the world so deeply. Even while the slaughter at Pickawillany was taking place, the Ohio Company of Virginia was planning a settlement at the Forks of the Ohio River to challenge French hegemony in that region. The French were equally determined to exclude the British from the Ohio Country in order to ensure their access to the vital Ohio River system and preserve the links between their settlements in Canada and those in the Mississippi Valley. The British, on the other hand, viewed Ohio as a vast area for future settlement, and more arrived after war broke out in 1756.

The prosperity and viability of the British Empire in the Great Lakes region depended on the fur trade, which required good relations with the Indians. In the summer of 1758 an important turning point in favor of the British occurred when Ohio Indians broke their alliance with the French and made peace with the British. The peace treaty to which the Indians signed their marks called the native peoples “children” and “subjects” of George III, and it proclaimed the King’s “Sovereignty Over all and every part” of the Ohio Country. It is doubtful the chiefs fully comprehended the extent of the subordination. But the new alliance did require the British to offer favorable terms of trade and to hold back the encroaching white Americans, who were still British subjects.

During the period of British control over the Ohio Country, from the start of the French and Indian War through the American Revolution, many British soldiers and traders interacted extensively with Ohio’s natives. They made a lasting impression on native culture, and were themselves changed.⁸ As for the soldiers, recent scholarship has challenged the simplistic American stereotype of the British redcoats as the dregs of society—rough, uncouth, and stupid, and held in order only by coercion and brutal military discipline. Though that type of redcoat could certainly be found—especially among the foot soldiers—the officer corps and even some of the rank and file came from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. Many regulated their behavior according to incentives and a sense of honor and duty as much as the threat of the lash. Redcoats of all varieties found themselves in Ohio during the French and Indian War, sometimes against their will and that of the British military. For the Scotsman Robert Kirk, a cooper from Ayrshire and a member of Colonel Archibald Montgomery’s 1st Highland Battalion, his ten months in Ohio was a mixture of horror and adventure but also an opportunity to gain an appreciation of Ohio’s native peoples. Wounded and captured by Shawnees after a failed British attack on Fort Duquesne in September 1758, Kirk was taken west into Ohio. Here he was tortured and nearly scalped, until the brave who captured him intervened, treated him kindly, and reassured him in broken English that he would not be harmed further. Fortunately for Kirk, his captor had lost his own brother to the Cherokee several months earlier and saw the redcoat as a replacement sent by the gods. Unfortunately, the eight other redcoats taken prisoner were not so treated: Kirk witnessed five of them burned to death “in the most cruel manner.”⁹

As the “brother” of a Shawnee warrior, Robert Kirk was taken west down the Ohio River into Ohio Country, was dressed in Indian clothing, had his hair cut “after the Indian form,” and was painted and greased like his brother. He was given a gun, ammunition, a tomahawk, and a scalping knife, and he even inherited the wife and son and cornfield of the dead warrior he had replaced. Kirk spent the next ten months in Ohio with Shawnee hunting parties, and he showed his worth as a successful trapper and skillful trader of furs and skins with the French. With his proceeds he even obtained a blanket that he gave “as a present to my adopted spouse, which was received as a great mark of my love and affection.” Through May 1759 Robert Kirk lived the life of an Ohio Shawnee, and he even volunteered to join a party of forty warriors to attack their Cherokee rivals. He took part in a dance, with his face “black’d, in token of the destruction and immediate death which we meant to give our enemies.” But as the war party dispersed to forage for food, Kirk saw his chance to escape. He abandoned his Indian life and three weeks later stumbled into Fort Cumberland.¹⁰

Robert Kirk rejoined his regiment and resumed fighting the French. The British took Fort Duquesne in 1759 and rebuilt it as Fort Pitt, in honor of the great prime minister whose military strategy and financial genius allowed victory and the taking of France’s North American empire. Then at Bushy Run, in 1763, Kirk fought Ohio Indians to save Fort Pitt. He saw his duty and destiny with the British Army; nevertheless, he was deeply affected by his life as a Shawnee brother and warrior. While serving in the Royal Highland Regiment under Colonel Henry Bouquet during the Muskingum campaign, Kirk was actually reunited with his “brother” and Shawnee friend at a peace conference. The Shawnees were overjoyed to see Kirk again—assuming that he had been killed by the Cherokee on the day of his escape—and they begged him to return to his “family.” Kirk, though he eventually returned to Britain, likewise felt deep devotion and affection for his brother and recalled, “I believe I shall always have a high regard for him, as his friendship was the most sincere I ever met in all my life and if it is ever in my power I will requite his kindness.”¹¹ Thus in the remarkable story of Robert Kirk we have a glimpse of how some Britons left deep impressions and memories on Ohio natives, and how the natives also transformed the spirit and understanding of some Britons.

One part of Ohio where the British and Indian cultures intermingled in complex and interesting ways was the Maumee River Basin, which embraces northeastern Indiana, parts of Michigan, and northwestern Ohio. During the French and Indian War and the Revolution, the center of activity in this region was in Ohio, at a place known as the Glaize, at the center of the basin, where the Auglaize and Maumee rivers join (near present-day Defiance). Here the buffalo had long wallowed in the mud, before their extinction from the area. The Glaize was also the birthplace of Pontiac, born to an Ottawa father and Miami mother, who at the urging and support of the French after their defeat in the French and Indian War led his “rebellion” against the British in May 1763. The revolt occurred after Lord Jeffrey Amherst—Britain’s military commander of North America—eliminated ritual gift giving in 1762 and slashed the budget of the Indian Department.

Just before the rebellion, English captain Thomas Morris of the 17th Regiment was sent to negotiate with Pontiac to prevent hostilities. Morris might have been killed by warriors except for the intervention of Pontiac, who treated him roughly but respected his ambassadorial office. Pontiac allowed Morris to proceed up the Maumee to negotiate for peace with other Indians as well, and here he met a mixture of harassment and indignation. But Morris also reaped the rewards from the interactions between English and Indian culture. When he met a leader named “Little Chief,” Morris traded some of his gunpowder for a volume of Shakespeare that the Indians had somehow obtained. Later one day Morris was observed relaxing in a canoe, totally absorbed in his reading of Antony and Cleopatra.¹²

Unfortunately these negotiations came to naught, and the “conspiracy” of the warrior tribes to do what the French could not—expel the British—was launched. They managed to destroy the British outpost of Sandusky and inflict heavy losses, including the capture of two hundred English soldiers at the Battle of Bloody Run in July of 1763. But the following year, after Bouquet’s expedition into the Muskingum and Scioto River Valleys to subdue Mingo, Delaware, and Shawnee resistance, the tide turned and the British maintained their hold on Ohio.

After the French and Indian War, relations between the British and many of Ohio’s Indians improved. With the Proclamation Line of 1763 Britain showed some resolve to limit further white expansion, preserve the Indians’ lands, and keep the peace. Among its main intentions was that “the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed.”¹³ Though these noble intentions were never perfectly implemented as policy, it is not surprising that during the American Revolution most Indians in Ohio sided with the British, keenly aware that a patriot victory would unleash an unstoppable tide of white settlement.

While the colonists in Boston began resisting British authority, Britons continued to enter Ohio and exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The First British Buckeyes
• 2. The Nineteenth Century: Migration Patterns and Assimilation
• 3. Communities and Settlements
• 4. Agriculture
• 5. Crafts and Industry
• 6. Religion and Reform
• 7. The Professions, Arts, and Civil Service
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The County Histories
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index