Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 1 (of 8) / Aboriginal America

by Unknown

CHAPTER V.

THE RED INDIAN OF NORTH AMERICA IN CONTACT WITH THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH.

BY GEORGE E. ELLIS, D. D., LL. D.

President of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

THE relations into which the first Europeans entered with the aborigines in North America were very largely influenced, if not wholly decided, by the relations which they found to exist among the tribes on their arrival here. Those relations were fiercely hostile. The new-comers in every instance and in every crisis found their opportunity and their immunity in the feuds existing among tribes already in conflict with each other. This state of things, while it gave the whites enemies, also furnished them with allies. So far as the whites could learn in their earliest inquiries, internecine strife had been waging here among the natives from an indefinite past.

Starting, then, from this hostile relation between the native tribes of the northerly parts of the continent, we may trace the development of our subject through five periods:—

1. The first period, a very brief one, is marked by the presence of a single European nationality here, the French, for whom, under stringency of circumstance that he might be in friendly alliance with one tribe, Champlain was compelled to espouse its existing feud with other tribes.

2. The next period opens with the appearance and sharp rivalry here of a second European nationality, the English, the hereditary foe of the French, transferring hither their inherited animosities, amid which the Indians were ground as between two mill-stones.

3. Upon the extinction of French dominion on the continent by the English, the former red allies of the French, with secret prompting and help from the dispossessed party, were stirred with fresh animosities against the victors.

4. Yet again the open hostilities of contending Indian tribes were largely turned to account, to their own harm, in their respective alliances with the English colonies or with the mother-country in the War of Independence.

5. The closing period is that which is still in progress as covering the relations with them of the United States government. The old hostilities between those tribes have been steadily of less account in affecting their later fortunes; and our government has not found it essential or expedient to aggravate its own severity against its Indian subjects, or “wards,” by availing itself of the feuds between them.

The same antagonisms which had kept the Indian tribes in hostility with each other prevented their effective alliance among themselves against the whites, and also embarrassed the English and French rivals, who sought to engage them on their respective sides. Many attempts were made by master chiefs among the savages, from the first intrusion of the Europeans, to organize combinations, or what we call “conspiracies,” of formerly contending tribes against the common foe. The first of them, formidable though limited in its consequences, was made in Virginia in 1622. Only two of these schemes proved otherwise than wholly abortive. That of King Philip in New England, in 1675, was effective enough to show what havoc such a combination might work. That of Pontiac, in 1763, was vastly more formidable, and was thwarted only by a resistance which engaged at several widely severed points all the warlike resources of the English. But the inherent difficulties, both of combining the Indian tribes among themselves, and of engaging some of them in alliance on either side with the French and the English contestants, were vastly increased by the seeds of sharp dissension sown among them through the rivalries in trade and temptations offered in the fluctuating prices of peltries. Even the long-standing league of the Five Nations was ruptured by the resolute English agent Johnson. He succeeded so far as to secure a promise of neutrality from some of them, and a promise of friendly help from one of them. There were some in each of the tribes falling not one whit behind the sharpest of the whites in skilled sagacity and calculation, who were swift to mark and to interpret the changes in the balance of fortune, as one or the other of the parties of their common enemies made a successful stroke for ascendency.

The facilities for alliance with one or another native tribe against its enemies made for the Europeans a vast difference in the results of their warfare with the aborigines. One might venture positively to assert that the occupancy of this continent by Europeans would have been indefinitely deferred and delayed had all its native tribes, in amity with each other, or willing for the occasion to arrest their feuds, made a bold and united front to resist the first intrusion upon their common domains. Certainly the full truth of this assertion might be illustrated as applicable to many incidents and crises in the first feeble and struggling fortunes of our original colonists in various exposed and inhospitable places. In many cases absolute starvation was averted only by the generous hospitality of the Indians. Taking into view the circumstances under which, from the first, tentative efforts were made for a permanent occupancy by the whites on our whole coast from Nova Scotia to Florida, and along the lakes and great western valleys, we must admit that their fortunes had more of peril than of promise. While, of course, we must refer their success and security in large measure to the forbearance, tolerance, and real kindliness of the natives, yet it was well proved that as soon as the jealousy of these natives was stirred at any threatened encroachment, only their own feuds disabled them from any united opposition, and gave to one or another tribe the alternative of fighting the white intruders or of an alliance with them against their neighbor enemies. The whole series of the successive encroachments of Europeans on this continent is a continuous illustration of the successful turning to their own account of the strife of Indians against Indians. And when two rival European nationalities opened their two centuries of warfare for dominion on this continent, each party at once availed itself of red allies ready to renew or prolong their own previous hostilities.

The French Huguenots in Florida and the Spaniards who massacred them had each of them allies among the tribes which were in mutual hostility. Champlain was grievously perplexed by the pressure, to which none the less he yielded, that if he would be in amity with the Hurons he must espouse their deadly enmity with the Iroquois. Even the poor remnants of the tribe with which the Pilgrims of Plymouth made their treaty of peace, which lasted for fifty years, were the vanquished and tributary representatives of a broken people. A sharp war and a more deadly plague had made that colony a possibility.

And so it comes to pass that, if we attempt to define at any period during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the conflicts between the savages and Europeans on this continent, we have to look for the explanation of any special change in the relations of the Indian tribes to the varying interests and collisions of the different foreign nationalities in rivalry here. The hostilities between the French and the English were chronic and continuous. Frenchman’s Bay, at Mt. Desert, preserves the memorial of the first collision, when Argall, from Virginia, broke up the attempted settlement of Saussaye.[1340] As to the later developments of the antagonism, resulting in the extinction of French possession here, we are to refer them in about equal measure to two main causes,—the jealousy of the home governments, and the keen rivalry of the respective colonists for the lucrative spoils of the fur trade. The profit of traffic may be regarded as furnishing the prompting for strife on this side of the water, while the passion for territorial conquest engaged the intrigues and the armies of foreign courts in the stakes of wilderness warfare.

In tracing the course of such warfare we must take into our view two very effective agencies, which introduced important modifications in the methods and results of that warfare. In its progress these two agencies became more and more chargeable with very serious consequences. The first of these is the change induced in the warfare of the Indians by their possession of, leading steadily to a dependence upon, the white man’s firearms and supplies. The second is the usage, which the Indians soon learned to be profitable, of reserving their white prisoners for ransom, instead of subjecting them to death or torture.

When we read of some of the earliest so-called “deeds” by which the English colonists obtained from the sachems wide spaces of territory on the consideration of a few tools, hatchets, kettles, or yards of cloth, we naturally regard the transaction as simply illustrating the white man’s rapacity and cunning in tricking the simplicity of the savage. But we may be sure that in many such cases the Indian secured what was to him a full equivalent for that with which he parted. For, as the whites soon learned by experience, the savages supposed that in such transactions they were not alienating the absolute ownership of their lands, but only covenanting for the right of joint occupancy with the English. And then the coveted tools or implements obtained by them represented a value and a use not measurable by any reach of wild territory. A metal kettle, a spear, a knife, a hatchet, transformed the whole life of a savage. A blanket was to him a whole wardrobe. When he came to be the possessor of firearms and ammunition, having before regarded himself the equal of the white man, he at once became his superior. We shall see how the rivalry between the French and the English for traffic with the Indians, the enterprise of traders in pushing into the wilderness with pack-horses, the establishment of trucking houses, the facility with which the natives could obtain coveted goods from either party, and the occasional failure of supplies in the contingencies of warfare, were on many occasions the turning-points in the fights in the wilderness, and in the shifting of savage partisanship from one side to the other, as the fickle allies found their own interests at stake.

It was in 1609, when Champlain invaded the Iroquois country, on the lake that bears his name, that the astounded savages first saw the flash and marked the deadly effect of his arquebuse. But the shock soon spent itself. The weapon was found to be a terrestrial one, made and put to service by a man. The Dutch on the Hudson very soon supplied the Mohawks with this effective instrument for prosecuting the fur trade. The French began the general traffic with the Indians near the St. Lawrence, in metal vessels, knives, hatchets, awls, cotton and woollen goods, blankets, and that most coveted of all the white man’s stores, the maddening “fire-water.” But farther north and west for full two hundred years, from 1670 quite down to our own time, annual cargoes of these commodities were imported through Hudson Bay by the chartered company, and had been distributed by its agents among those who paid for them in peltries, in such abundance that the savages became really dependent upon them, and gradually conformed their habits to the use of them. Of course, in their raids upon English outposts, the spoils of war in the shape of such supplies added rapacity to their ferocity. It was with a proud flourish that Indian warriors, enriched by the plunder on the field of Braddock’s disastrous defeat, strutted before the walls of Fort Duquesne, arrayed in the laced hats, sashes, uniform, and gorgets of British officers.

When Céloron was sent, in 1749, by the governor of Canada, to take possession of interior posts along the Alleghanies, he found at each of the Indian villages, as at Logstown, a chief centre, from a single to a dozen English traders, well supplied with goods for a brisk peltry traffic. He required the chiefs, on the threat of the loss of his favor, to expel them and to forbid their return. But the Indians insisted that they needed the goods. Some of these traders were worthless reprobates, mostly Scotch-Irish, from the frontiers of Pennsylvania. When Christopher Gist was sent, the next year, by the Ohio Land Company, to follow Céloron and to thwart his schemes, he complained strongly of these demoralized and demoralizing traders. In the evidence given before the British House of Commons on the several occasions when the monopoly and the mode of business of the Hudson Bay Company were under question, the extent to which the natives had come to depend upon European supplies was very strongly brought into notice. It was urged that some of the tribes had actually, by disuse, lost their skill in their old weapons. It was even affirmed that in some of the tribes multitudes had died by freezing and starvation, because their recent supplies had failed them. This dependence of the natives upon the resources of civilization, observable from the opening of their intercourse with the whites, has been steadily strengthening for two hundred years, till now it has become an absolute and heavy exaction upon our national treasury.

The custom which soon came in, to soften the atrocities of Indian warfare by the holding of white prisoners for ransom, was grafted upon an earlier usage among the natives of adopting prisoners or captives. There was a formal ceremonial in such cases, and after its performance those who would otherwise have been victims were treated with all kindness. The return of a war-party to its own village was attended with widely different manifestations according to the fortune which had befallen it. If it consisted only of a baffled and flying remnant that had failed in its hazardous enterprise, its coming was announced, and received by the old men, women, and youths in the village with howls and lamentations. If, however, it had been successful, as proved by rich plunder, reeking scalp-locks, and prisoners, some runners were sent in advance to announce its approach. Then began a series of orgies, in which the old squaws were the most demonstrative and hideous. While the scalp-locks were displayed and counted, the well-guarded prisoners were exultingly escorted by their captors, the squaws gathering around them with taunts and petty tormentings. The woful fate which was waiting these prisoners was foreshadowed in prolonged rehearsals for its final horrors. One by one they were forced to run the gauntlet from goal to goal, between lines of yelping fiends, under blows and missiles, stones, sticks, and tomahawks, while efforts were made to trip them in their course, that they might be pounded in their helplessness when maddened with pain. Any exhibition of weakness or dread did but intensify the malignant frenzy of their tormentors. Those who lived through this ordeal, which was intended to be but a preliminary in the barbaric entertainment, and to stop short of the actual extinction of life, were afterwards, by deliberate preparations made in full view of the prisoners, subjected to all the ingenuities of rage and cruelty which untamed savage fiendishness could devise. The hero who bore the trial without flinching, singing his song of defiance, and in his turn mocking his tormentors because they failed to break his spirit, was most likely to find mercy in a finishing stroke dealt by a magnanimous foe.

Anything like an alleviation of these dread revenges of savage warfare being unallowable, there was open one way of complete relief in the usage of adoption, just referred to. This, however, was never available to the prisoner from his own first motion or prompting. He was wholly passive in the matter. It came solely from the inclination of any one in the village, a warrior or a squaw who, having recently lost a relative, or one whose service was necessary, might select a prisoner from the group as desirable to supply a place that was vacant. There would seem to have been a large liberty allowed in the exercise of this privilege, especially for those who were mourning for a relative lost in the encounter in which the prisoner was taken. Sometimes the merest caprice might prompt the selection. Scarcely, except in the rare case of some proud captive who would haughtily scorn to avail himself of a seeming affinity with the tribe of a hated or abject enemy, would the offered privilege of adoption be refused. For, in any case, an ultimate escape from an enforced durance might be looked to. Of course those who were thus adopted were mostly the young and vigorous. The little children were not especially favored in the process,—except, as soon to be noted, the children of the whites. The ceremonial for adoption was traditional. Beginning generally with somewhat rough and intimidating treatment, the captive was for a while left in suspense as to his fate. When at length the intent of the arbiter of his life was made known to him, the method pursued has been very frequently described to us in detail by the whites who were the subjects of it.[1341] The candidate was plunged and thoroughly soused in a stream to rinse out his white blood; the hair of his head, saving the scalp-lock, was plucked out; and after some mouthings and incantations, completing the initiation, all winning blandishments, arts, and appliances were engaged to secure the confidence of the adopted captive, and to draw from him some responsive sign of affection. He was arrayed in the choicer articles of forest finery, and nestled in the family lodge. The father, the squaw, or the patron, in whatever relation, to whom he henceforward belonged, spared no effort to engage and comfort him. Watchful eyes, of course, jealously guarded any restless motions looking towards an escape. The final aim was to secure a fully nationalized and acclimated new member of a tribe, ready to share all its fortunes in peace and war.

Naturally there were differences in this whole process and its results, as they concerned these attempted affiliations between the members of Indian tribes and in the adoption of white captives.[1342]

In their early conflicts with the whites, the Indians generally practised an indiscriminate slaughter. There were a few exceptions to the rule in King Philip’s war.[1343] In the raids of the French, with their Indian allies, upon the English settlements, prisoners taken on either side came gradually to have the same status as in civilized warfare, and to be held for exchange. This, however, would proceed upon the supposition that both parties had prisoners. But before there was anything like equality in this matter, the captives were for the most part such as had been seized from among the whites in inroads upon their settlements, not in the open field of warfare. A midnight assault upon some frontier cabins, or upon the lodge of some lonely settler, left the savages to choose between a complete massacre or upon a selection of some of their victims for leading away with them to their own haunts, if not too cumbersome or dangerous for the wilderness journey. It soon came to be understood among the raiding parties of Indians in alliance with the French in Canada that white captives had a ransom value. Contributions were often gathered up in neighborhoods that had been raided, and in the meeting-houses of New England on Sundays, for redeeming such captives as were known to be in Canada. And, curiously enough, Judge Sewall in his journal records appeals for charity in the same form for the redemption of captives in the hands of our own savages, and for the ransom of our seamen and traders who were kept in durance by African corsairs.

In the raids of desolation on either side of the Alleghanies and along the sources of the Susquehannah and the Ohio, from the outbreak of the French and Indian war, down to and even after the crushing of Pontiac’s conspiracy, while more than a thousand cabins of the borderers were burned and their inmates mostly slaughtered, several hundred captives were borne off by the Indians and distributed among their villages. The ultimate fate of these captives always hung in dread uncertainty. If a panic arose among the lodges in apprehension of an onset from a war-party of the whites, the captives might be massacred. But the force of circumstances and the urgency of interested motives steadily made it an object for their captors to retain their prisoners unharmed, and even to make captivity tolerable to them. The alternative of death or life to them generally depended upon whether they might escape or be released by an avenging party without compensation, or could be held for redemption through a ransom. The knowledge that the Indians retained such captives of course became a very effective motive in inducing their relatives in the settlements to gather parties of neighbors for following the victims into the forest depths. Temporary truces also, when made by victorious parties of the whites, were conditioned upon the surrender of all their surviving countrymen who were supposed to be in duress. The savages practised all their artifices and subterfuges in concealing some of their prisoners, alleging that they had been carried deeper into the country by new masters, or by positively denying all knowledge of their whereabouts. But the persistency and threats of those who had learned how to deal with these red diplomates, with a few resolute strokes generally brought about their surrender. When Bouquet had secured possession of Fort Duquesne with his army of 1,500 men, he stoutly followed up his success beyond the Ohio to the Indian settlements near the Muskingum, and with his sturdy pluck and strong force he overawed the representatives of the neighboring tribes which he had summoned to meet him. He insisted, as the first condition of a truce, upon the delivery of all the white prisoners secluded among them, not only without the payment of any ransom, but upon their being brought in with a protecting escort and with means of sustenance. Of course there was always ignorance or doubt as to the number of captives in any particular place, and as to the hands into which any individual known or supposed to be in durance might have fallen. The word of an Indian on these points was worthless unless backed by other testimony. A stimulating of the tongue into unguarded speech by a dram of rum might in some cases serve the purpose of the rack or the thumb-screw in more civilized cross-examinations. An uncertainty of course always hung over the survival or the whereabouts of individuals or members of a family whose bodies had not been found on the scene of an Indian frontier raid. Bouquet was accompanied by friends and relatives of supposed survivors held in captivity as the spoils of some massacre, and these might be depended upon to circumvent the falsehoods and cunning of the captors, and to insist upon their giving up their prizes. The persistency and the plain evidence of resolved purpose manifested by Bouquet finally compelled from the representatives of the tribes in council a pledge to surrender all the prisoners in their hands, and messengers were sent out to gather and bring them in, though with some plausible excuses for delay, and the grudging return of only a part of them. But those who were given up became the best witnesses as to the deception practised by the cunning culprits in holding back others. Only after repeated exposures of falsehood by those so grudgingly surrendered, asserting of their own knowledge that there were others held in durance, whom they might even know by name, was there brought about a full deliverance, saving that, whether truly or falsely, in the case of a few individuals demanded the excuse was alleged that they belonged to some chief or tribe absent at a distance on a hunt, and so not to be reached by a summons. Bouquet was also absolute in his demand for all such white captives, young or old, as were alleged to have been adopted or married among the tribes. His firmly insisting upon this, and the compliance with it in many cases, led to some scenic manifestations in the wilderness, of a highly dramatic character, full of the matter of romance in their revelations of the working of human nature under novel and strange conditions. Such manifestations often attended similar scenes in the ransom or forced surrender of whites who had been in captivity among the Indians. But in this special instance of Bouquet’s resolute course with the Ohio tribes, numbers, variety, picturesqueness in those manifestations, gave to the bringing in and the reception of captives features and incidents which strongly engage alike the sympathies and antipathies of human nature. Some of those brought into Bouquet’s camp, who had once at least been whites, came with full as much reluctance on their part as that which was felt by those who gave them up. Indeed, several of them could be secured only by being bound and guarded.

Approximation in all degrees to the manners and habits of Indian life and to all the qualities of Indian nature had been realized by Europeans from the first contact of the races on this continent. Of course the instances were numerous and very decisive in which this approximation was completed, and resulted in a substitution of all the ways and habits of savagery for those of civilization. Many of those who were forced back into Bouquet’s camp clung to their Indian friends, and repelled all the manifestations of joy and affection of their own nearest kin by blood. They positively refused to return to the settlements. They had been won by preference to the fascinations and license of a life in the wilderness. This preference was by no means inexplicable, even for some full-grown men and women who had been reared in the white settlements. Life in scattered cabins on the frontiers had more points of resemblance than of difference in hard conditions and privations, when compared with savage life in the woods. Such society as these scattered cabins afforded was rude and rough, all experiences were precarious, daily drudgery was severe, the solitary homes were gloomy, and only exceptional cases of early domestic and mental training alleviated the stern exigencies of the condition of the first generation of the settlers. For women and children especially, the outlook and the routine of life were dismal enough. As for the men, the more they conformed themselves in many respects to the actual habits and resources of the Indians in the training of their instincts, in their garb, their food, their adaptation of themselves to the ways and resources of nature, the easier was their lot. Many women, likewise made captives by the savages, in some cases of mature age, and having looked forward to the usual lot of marriage, found an Indian to be preferable, or at all events tolerable, as a husband. Children who preserved but a faint remembrance of home and parents very readily adopted savage tastes, and testified by their shrieks and struggles their unwillingness to part from their red friends. Specimens from each of these classes were the most marked and demonstrative among the groups brought in to Bouquet from Indian lodges, being in number more than two hundred. Doubtless, however, the majority of them had had enough of the experiences of savage life to make a return to the settlements a welcome release. Such persons thenceforward constituted a useful class as interpreters, mediators, and messengers between the contending parties. Their knowledge of Indian character, superstitions, limitations, weak and strong points, impulsive excitability, stratagems, and adaptability to circumstance proved on many emergent occasions of good account. Such of these returned captives as had had the rudiments of an education, and were trustworthy as narrators, have made valuable contributions to local history.

Among many such intelligent and trustworthy reporters was Col. James Smith, captured on the borders of Pennsylvania in 1755, when eighteen years of age, and kept in captivity five years. Another was John McCullough, taken at about the same time and from the near neighborhood, when eight years old. He was retained eight years, and, being a quick-witted and observing youth, he kept his eyes and ears open to all that he could learn. From such sources we derive the most authentic information we possess of that transition period in the condition and fortunes of many of our aboriginal tribes when the intrusion of Europeans upon them with their tempting goods and their rival schemes, which equally tended to dispossess them of their heritage, introduced among them so many novel complications. Some of the narratives of the whites, who, under the conditions just referred to, lived for years and were assimilated with the Indians, present us occasionally by no means unattractive pictures of the ordinary tenor of life among them. In the brief intervals of peace, and in some favored recesses where game abounded and the changing seasons brought round festivals, plays, and scenes of jollity, there were even fascinations to delight one of simple tastes, who could enjoy the aspects of nature, share the easy tramp over mossy trails, content himself with the viands of the wilderness, employ the long hours of laziness in easy handiwork, delight in basking beneath the soft hazes of the Indian summer, or listening to the traditional lore of the winter wigwam. The forests very soon began to be the shelter and the roving haunts of a crew of renegades and outlaws from the settlements, who assimilated at all points with the savages, and often used what remained to them of the knowledge and arts of civilization for ingenious purposes of mischief. It has always proved a vastly more easy and rapid process for white men to fall back into barbarism than for an Indian to conform himself to civilization. Wild life brought out all reversionary tendencies, and revived primitive qualities and instincts. It gave those who shared it a full opportunity to become oblivious of all fastidious tastes and of all the squeamishness of over-delicacy. The promiscuous contents of the camp-kettle, with its deposits and incrustations from previous banquets, were partaken of with a zestful appetite. The circumstances of warfare in the woods quickened all the faculties of watchfulness, made even the natural coward brave, imparted endurance, and multiplied all the ingenuities of resource and stratagem. There is something that surpasses the merely marvellous in the feats of sturdy and persevering scouts, escaped captives, remnants of a butchery, messengers sent to carry intelligence in supreme peril, and lonely wayfarers treading the haunted forests, or creeping stealthily through ambushed defiles, penetrating marshes, using the sky and their woodcraft for guidance, fording or swimming choked or icy streams, climbing high tree-tops for a wider survey from the closed woods and thickets, subsisting on roots and berries and moss, and yielding to the exhaustion of nature only when all perils were passed and the refuge was reached. Alike on the march of armies and in the siege of some little forest stronghold surrounded by yelping savages, it was necessary from time to time to send out a single plucky hero to carry or to obtain intelligence. When such a messenger was not designated by the commander, and the extremity of the emergency left the dismal honor to a volunteer, such was never found to be lacking. It confounds all calculations of the law of chances to learn how, even in the majority of such dire enterprises as are on record, fortune favored the brave. Narratives there are which for ages to come will gather all the exciting elements of tragedy and romance, and occasionally even of comedy, as, set down in the language of the woods, without the constraints of art or grammar, they make us for the moment companions of some imperilled man or woman who borrowed of the bear, the deer, the fox, or the beaver, their several instincts and stratagems for outwitting pursuit and clinging to dear life. Rare, it may be, but still well authenticated, are cases of victims with a strong tenacity of vitality, who, left as dead, mutilated and scalped, reasserted themselves when the foe had gone, found their way back to their homes, and, after such reconstruction as the art of the time would allow, enjoyed a long life afterwards.

The conditions attending the entrance of European war-parties, with their necessary supplies, into the depths of the wilderness were of the most severe and exacting character. They involved equally the outlay of toil and an exposure to perils requiring the most watchful vigilance. Well-worn trails made by the natives, and always sufficiently travelled to keep them open, had long been in use for such purposes as were needed in primitive conditions. These were very narrow, necessitating that progress should be made through them singly, in “Indian file.” At portages or carrying-places, burdens were borne on the back from one watercourse to another, round a rapid or across an elevation. Some of these trails are even now traceable in the oldest settled portions of the country, where the woods have never been wholly cleared. Part of that which was availed of by the whites two hundred and fifty years ago between Plymouth and Boston, and others in untilled portions of the Old Colony, are clearly discernible. The thickets and undergrowths came close to the borders of these trails, and the overhanging branches of the trees were found a grievous annoyance when the earliest traders with pack-horses traversed them. In a large part of our present national domain and in Canada, it may safely be said that nineteen twentieths of all movement from place to place was made by the savages by the watercourses of lake and stream, and the same was done by the Europeans till they brought into use horses first, and then carts. These were first put to service by the traders from the English settlements on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The pack-horses, heavily laden, trained to their rough service for rocky and marshy grounds, as well as for the thick and stifling depths of the forest, and able to subsist on very poor forage, carried goods most prized by the natives, and generally in inverse ratio to their real worth. They returned to the settlements from the Indian villages with a burden of precious furs, the traffickers mutually finding their account in their respective shares in barter and profit. These traders with their pack-horses were for a long time the pioneers of the actual settlers. The methods and results of their traffic, trifling as they may seem to be, had the two leading consequences of critical importance: first, they made the Indians acquainted with and dependent upon the white man’s goods, and then they provoked and embittered the rival competition between the French and the English for the considerable profits.

What we now call a military road was first undertaken on a serious scale in the advance of the disastrous expedition of General Braddock, in 1755, over the Alleghanies to the forks of the Ohio. The incumbrances with which he burdened himself might wisely have been greatly reduced in kind and in amount. But the exigencies of the service in which he was engaged were but poorly apprehended by him. As in the case of the even more disastrous campaign of General Burgoyne, twenty-two years later, (1777) though his route was mainly by water, the camp was lavishly supplied with appliances of luxury and sensuality. Braddock’s way for his cattle, carts, and artillery was slowly and poorly prepared by pioneers in advance, levelling trees, stiffening marshy places, removing rocks and bushes, and then leaving huge stumps in the devious track to rack the wagons and torment the draught animals. It is not without surprise that we read of the presence of domestic cattle far off in the extreme outposts of single persevering settlers. But when, on the first extensive military expeditions for building a fort on the shore of a lake, at river forks, or to command a portage, we find mention of cannon and heavy ammunition, we marvel at the perseverance involved in their transportation. The casks of liquor, of French brandy and of New England rum, which generally, without stint, formed a part of the stores of each military enterprise, furnished in themselves a motive spirit which facilitated their transport. Flour and bread could, with many risks from stream and weather, be carried in sacks. But pork and beef in pickle, the mainstay in garrisons which could not venture out to hunt or fish, required to be packed in wood. After all the persevering toil engaged in this transportation, the dire necessities of warfare under these stern conditions often compelled the destruction of the stores, every article of which had tasked the strained muscles and sinews of the hard-worked campaigners. When it was found necessary to evacuate a forest post, the stockade was set on fire, the magazine was exploded, the cannon spiked, the powder thrown into the water, and everything that could not be carried off in a hasty retreat was, if possible, rendered useless as booty. As the French and English military movements steadily extended over a wider territory and at more numerous points, with increased forces, the waste and havoc caused by disasters on either side involved an enormous destruction of the materials of war. Vessels constructed with incredible labor on the lakes, anvils, cordage, iron, and artillery having been gathered for their building and arming by perilous ocean voyages and by transit through inner waters and portages, and thousands of bateaux for Lakes Champlain and George, now lie sunken in the depths, most of them destroyed by those in whose service they were to be employed. The “Griffin,” the first vessel on Lake Erie, built by La Salle in 1679, disappeared on her second voyage, and lies beneath the waters still. After Braddock’s defeat, when the fugitive remnant of his army had reached Dunbar’s camp, a hundred and fifty wagons were burned, and fifty thousand pounds of powder were emptied into a creek, after the incredible toil by which they had been drawn over the mountains and morasses.

There were many occasions and many reasons which prompted the Europeans to weigh the gain or loss which resulted to them from the employment of Indian allies, who were always an incalculable element in any enterprise. They could never be depended upon for constancy or persistency. A bold stroke, followed, if successful, with butchery, and a rush to the covert of the woods if a failure, was the sum of their strategy. They had a quick eye in watching the turning fortunes and the probable issue of a venture, and they acted accordingly. They were wholly disinclined for any protracted siege operations. In the weary months of the investment of Detroit, the only enterprise of the sort engaged in by large bodies of savages acting in concert, we find a single exceptional case of their uniform impatience of such prolonged strategy. And even in that case there were intervals when the imperilled and starving garrison had breathing-spells for recuperation. Charges and counter-charges, pleas and criminations of every kind, plausible, false, or sincere, are found in the journals and reports of English and French officers, prompted by accusations and vindications of either party, called out by the atrocities and butcheries wrought by their savage allies in many of the conflicts of the French and Indian war. In vain did the commanders of the white forces on either side promise that their red allies should be restrained from plunder and barbarity against the defeated party. It was an attempt to bridle a storm. From the written opinions expressed by various civil and military officials during all our Indian wars one might gather a list of judgments, always emphatically worded, as to the qualities of the red men as allies. Governor Dinwiddie, writing in May 28, 1756, to General Abercrombie, on his arrival here to hold the chief command till the coming of Lord Loudon, expresses himself thus: “I think we have secured the Six Nations to the Northward to our Interest who, I suppose, will join your Forces. They are a very awkward, dirty sett of People, yet absolutely necessary to attack the Enemy’s Indians in their way of fighting and scowering the Woods before an Army. I am perswaded they will appear a despicable sett of People to his Lordship and you, but they will expect to be taken particular Notice of, and now and then some few Presents. I fear General Braddock despised them too much, which probably was of Disservice to him, and I really think without some of them any engagement in the Woods would prove fatal, and if strongly attached to our Interest they are able in their way to do more than three Times their Number. They are naturally inclined to Drink. It will be a prudent Stepp to restrain them with Moderation, and by some of your Subalterns to shew them Respect.”[1344] Baron Dieskau, in 1755, had abundant reason for expressing himself about his savage auxiliaries in this fashion: “They drive us crazy from morning to night. One needs the patience of an angel to get on with these devils, and yet one must always force himself to seem pleased with them.”[1345]

It would seem as if the native tribes, when Europeans first secured a lodgment, were beguiled by a fancy which in most cases was very rudely dispelled. This fancy was that the new-comers might abide here without displacing them. The natives in giving deeds of lands, as has been said, had apparently no idea that they had made an absolute surrender of territory. They seem to have imagined that something like a joint occupancy was possible, each of the parties being at liberty to follow his own ways and interests without molesting the other. So the Indians did not move off to a distance, but frequented their old haunts, hoping to derive advantage from the neighborhood of the white man. King Philip in 1675 discerned and acutely defined the utter impracticability of any such joint occupancy. He indicated the root of the impending ruin to his own race, and he found a justification of the conspiracy which he instigated in pointing to the white man’s clearings and fences, and to the impossibility of joining planting with hunting, and domestic cattle with wild game.

The history of the Hudson Bay Company and that of the enterprises conducted by the French for more than a century, when set in contrast with the steady development of colonization by English settlers and by the people of the United States succeeding to them, brings out in full force the different relations into which the aborigines have always been brought by the presence of Europeans among them, either as traders or possessors of territory. The Hudson Bay Company for exactly two centuries, from 1670 to 1870, held a charter for the monopoly of trade with the Indians here over an immense extent of territory, and in the later portion of that period held an especial grant for exclusive trade over an even more extended region, further north and west. The company made only such a very limited occupancy of the country, at small and widely distant posts, as was necessary for its trucking purposes and the exchange of European goods for peltries. During that whole period, allowing for rare casualties, not a single act of hostility occurred between the traders and the natives. A large number of different tribes, often at bitter feud with each other, were all kept in amity with the official residents of the company, and each party probably found as much satisfaction in the two sides of a bargain as is usual in such transactions. Deposits of goods were securely gathered in some post far off in the depths of the wilderness, under the care of two or three young apprentices of the company, and here bands of Indians at the proper season came for barter. Previous to the operations of this company, beginning as early as 1620, large numbers of Frenchmen, singly or in parties, ventured deep into the wilderness in company with savage bands, for purposes of adventure or traffic, and very rarely did any of them meet a mishap or fail to find a welcome. Such adventurers in fact became in most cases Indians in their manner of life. Nor did the jealousy of the savages manifest itself in a way not readily appeased when they found the French priests planting mission stations and truck-houses. In no case did the French intruders ask, as did the English colonists, for deeds of territory. It was understood that they held simply by sufferance, and with a view to mutual advantage for both parties, with no purpose of overreaching. The relations thus established between the French and the natives continued down till even after the extinction of the territorial claims of France. And when, just before the opening of the great French and Indian hostilities with the English colonists, the French had manifested their purpose to get a foothold on the heritage of the savages by pushing a line of strongly fortified posts along their lakes and rivers, the apprehensions of the savages were craftily relieved by the plea that these securities were designed only to prevent the encroachment of the English.

A peaceful traffic with the Indians, like that of the Hudson Bay Company and the French, had been from the first but a subordinate object of the English colonists. These last, while for a period they confined themselves to the seaboard, supplemented their agricultural enterprise by the fishery and by a very profitable commerce. As soon as they began to penetrate into the interior they took with them their families and herds, made fixed habitations, put up their fences and dammed the streams. Instead of fraternizing with the Indians, they warned them off as nuisances. We must also take into view the fact that this steadily advancing settlement of the Indian country directly provoked and encouraged the resolute though baffled opposition of the savages. They could match forces with these scattered pioneers, even if, as was generally the case, a few families united in constructing a palisadoed and fortified stronghold to which they might gather for refuge. If a body of courageous men had advanced together well prepared for common defence, it is certain the warfare would not have been so desultory as it proved to be. All the wiles of the Indians in conducting their hostilities gave them a great advantage. They thought that the whites might be dislodged effectually from further trespasses if once and again they were visited by sharp penalties for their rash intrusion. It was plain that they were long in coming to a full apprehension of the pluck of their invaders, of their recuperative energies, and of the reserved forces which were behind them. From the irregular base line of the coast the English advanced into the interior, not by direct parallel lines, but rather by successive semicircles of steadily extending radii. The advances from the middle colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia marked the farthest reaches in this curvature. The French, in the mean while, aimed from the start for occupying the interior.

The period which we have here under review is one through which the savages, for the most part, were but subordinate agents, the principals being the French and the English. So far as the diplomatic faculties of the savages enabled them to hold in view the conditions of the strife, there were doubtless occasions in which they thought they held what among civilized nations is called the balance of power. Nor would it have been strange if, at times, their chiefs had imagined that, though it might be impossible for them again to hold possession of their old domains free from the intrusion of the white man, they might have power to decide which of the two nationalities should be favored above the other. In that case the French doubtless would have been the favored party. We have, however, to take into view the vast disproportion between the numbers, if not of the resources, of these two foreign nationalities, when the struggle between them earnestly began. In 1688 there were about eleven thousand of the French in America, and nearly twenty times as many English. The French were unified under the control of their home government. Its resources were at their call: its army and navy, its arsenals and treasury, its monarch and ministers, might be supposed to be serviceable and engaged for making its mastery on this continent secure. The English, however, were only nominally, and as regards some of the colonies even reluctantly and but truculently, under the control of their home government. It had been the jealous policy of the New England colonists, from their first planting, to isolate themselves from the mother-country, and to make self-dependence the basis of independence. Their circumstances had thrown them on their own resources, and made them feel that as their foreign superiors could know very little of their emergencies, it was not wise or even right in them to interpose in their affairs. Indeed, it is evident that all the British colonists felt themselves equal, without advice or help from abroad, to take care of themselves, if they had to contend only against the savages. But when the savages had behind them the power of the French monarch, it was of necessity that the English should receive a reinforcement from their own countrymen. In the altercations with the British ministry which followed very soon after the close of the French and Indian war, a keenly argued question came under debate as to the claim which the mother-country had upon the gratitude of her colonists for coming to their rescue when threatened with ruin from their red and white enemies. And the answer to this question was judged to depend upon whether, in sending hither her fleets and armies, Britain had in view an extension of her transatlantic domains or the protection of her imperilled subjects. At any rate, there were jealousies, cross-purposes, and an entire lack of harmony between the direct representatives of English military power and the coöperating measures of the colonial government. Never, under any stress of circumstances, was England willing to raise even the most serviceable of the officers of the provincial forces to the rank of regulars in her own army. The youthful Washington, whose sagacity and prowess had proved themselves in field and council where British officers were so humiliated, had to remain content with the rank of a provincial colonel. Nor did the provincial legislatures act in concert either with each other, or with the advice and appeals of their royal governors in raising men, money or supplies for combined military operations against common enemies. Each of the colonies thought it sufficient to provide for itself. Each was even dilatory and backward when its own special peril was urgent. These embarrassments of the English did very much to compensate the French for their great inferiority in numerical strength. We are again to remind ourselves of the fact that the French, alike from their temperament and their policy, were always vastly more congenial and influential with the savages.

The French in Canada from the first adopted the policy of alliance with native tribes. Though their warfare with the English was hardly intermittent, there were several occasions when it was specially active. Beginning with the first invasion of the Iroquois territory by Champlain, in 1609, already mentioned, under the plea of espousing the side of his friends and allies, the Hurons and Algonquins, other like enterprises were later pursued. Courcelles, in 1666, made a wild and unsuccessful inroad upon the Iroquois. Tracy made a more effective one in the same year. De la Barre in 1684, Denonville in 1687, and Frontenac in 1693 and 1696, repeated these onsets. The last of these invasions of what is now Central New York was intended to effect the complete exhaustion of the Indian confederacy. Its havoc was indeed well-nigh crushing, but there was a tenacity and a recuperative power in that confederacy of savages which yielded only to a like desolating blow inflicted by Sullivan, under orders from Washington, in our Revolutionary War.

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.

We must class with these records of the Jesuits, though not equalling them in value, the volumes of Champlain, Sagard, Creuxius, Boucher,[1365] and the later Lafitau and Charlevoix. Parkman[1366] tells us that no other of these early books is so satisfactory as Lafitau’s Mœurs des Sauvages (1724); and Charlevoix gave similar testimony regarding his predecessor.[1367] For original material on the French side we have nothing to surpass in interest the Mémoires et documents, published by Pierre Margry, of which an account has been given elsewhere,[1368] as well as of the efforts of Parkman and others in advancing their publication.[1369] There is but little matter in these volumes relating to the military operations which make the subject of this chapter, though jealousy and rivalry of the schemes of the English, and the necessity of efforts to thwart them in their attempts to gain influence and to open trade with the Indians, are constantly recognized. In the diplomatic and military movements which opened on this continent the Seven Years’ War, the English, who had substantially secured the alliance of the Iroquois, or the Six Nations, insisted that they had obtained by treaties with them the territory between the Alleghanies and the Ohio, which the Six Nations on their part claimed to have gained by conquest and cession of the tribes that had previously occupied it. But when the English vindicated their entrance on the territory on the basis of these treaties with the Six Nations, the Shawanees and the Delawares, having recuperated their courage and vigor, denied this right by conquest. The French could not claim a right either by conquest or by cession. Their assumed occupancy and tenure through mission stations and strongholds were maintained simply and wholly on grounds of discovery and exploration. Margry’s volumes furnish the abundant and all-sufficient evidence of the priority of the French in this enterprise. The official documents interchanged with the authorities at home are all engaged with advice and promptings and measures for making good the claim to dominion founded on discovery. These volumes also are of the highest value as presenting to us from the first explorers, every way intelligent and competent as observers and reporters, the scenes and tenants of the interior of the continent. Here we have the wilderness, its primeval forests, its sea-like lakes, its threading rivers, shrunken or swollen, its cataracts and its confluent streams, its marshy expanses, bluffs, and plains, and its resources, abundant or scant, for sustaining life of beasts or men, all touched in feature or full portrayal by the charming skill of those to whom the sight was novel and bewildering.[1370] These French explorers will henceforth serve for all time as primary authorities on the features and resources of the interior of this continent just before it became the prize in contest between rival European nationalities. That contest undoubtedly had more to do in deciding the fate of the savage tribes from that time to our own. There are many reasons for believing that if the French had been able to hold alone an undisputed dominion in the interior of the continent, their relations with the Indian tribes, if not wholly pacific, would have been far more amicable than those which followed upon the hot rivalry with the English for the possession of their territories. The French were the wiser, the more tolerant and friendly of the two, in their intercourse with and treatment of the savages, with whom they found it so easy to affiliate. Under other circumstances the Indians might have come to hold the relation of wards to the French in a sense far more applicable than that in which the term has been used by the government of the United States.

Of the early English material there is no dearth, but it hardly has the same stamp of authority. The story of the Moravian and other missions on the Protestant and English side has less of such invariable devotedness and success than is recorded in the general summaries of the Jesuit and Recollet missions, like Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions, 1529-1854 (N. Y., 1855).[1371] The Indian Nations of Heckewelder,[1372] the service of the United Brethren, and the labors instituted by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,[1373] are records not without significance; but they yield to the superior efficacy of the French.[1374] Among the English administrative officers, the lead must doubtless be given to Sir William Johnson, for his personal influence over the Indian mind, winning their full confidence by fair and generous treatment of them, by a free hospitality, by assimilating with their habits even in his array, and by mastering their language. His deputy, Col. George Croghan, as interpreter and messenger, was kept busily employed in constant tramps through the woods, and in fearless errands to parties of vacillating or hostile tribes, to hold or win them to the English interest. The principal and the deputy, in this hazardous diplomacy, were specially qualified for their office by having mastered the gift and qualities of Indian oratory, by a familiarity with Indian character in its strength and weakness, and by endeavoring to keep faith with them, and to imitate the adroit methods of the French rather than the contemptuous hauteur of most of the English in intercourse with them.[1375]

The reader will naturally go to the biographies of Johnson, Washington, and the other military leaders of their time, to those of a few civilians, like Franklin, and to the general histories of the French and Indian wars and of their separate campaigns, for much light upon the Indian in war; and these materials have been sufficiently explored in another volume of the present History.[1376] These more general accounts are easily supplemented in the narratives of adventures and sufferings by a large class of persons who fell captive to the Indians, and lived to tell their tales.[1377]

The earlier travellers, like P. E. Radisson,[1378] Richard Falconer,[1379] Le Beau,[1380] and Jonathan Carver,[1381] not to name others; the later ones, like Prinz Maximilian;[1382] the experiences of various army officers on the frontiers, like Randolph B. Marcy[1383] and J. B. Fry,[1384]—all such books fill in the picture in some of its details.

The early life in the Ohio Valley was particularly conducive to such auxiliary helps in this study, and we owe more of this kind of illustration to Joseph Doddridge[1385] than to any other. He was a physician and a missionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and in both his professions a man highly esteemed. He was born in Maryland in 1769, and in his fourth year removed with his family to the western border of the line between Pennsylvania and Virginia. With abundant opportunities in his youth of familiarity with the rudest experiences of frontier life near hostile Indians, he was a keen observer, a skilful narrator, and a diligent gatherer-up of historical and traditional lore from the hardy and well-scarred pioneers. He had received a good academic and medical education, and was a keen student of nature as well as of humanity. His pages give us most vivid pictures of life under the stern and perilous conditions; not, however, without their fascinations, of forest haunts, of rude and scattered cabins, of domestic and social relations, of the resources of the heroic whites, and of the qualities of Indian warfare in the desperate struggle with the invaders.[1386]

Another early writer in this field was Dr. S. P. Hildreth of Ohio, who published his Pioneer History (Cincinnati, 1848) while some of the pioneers of the Northwest were still living, and the papers of some of them, like Col. George Morgan, could be put to service.[1387] Dr. Hildreth, in his Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1852), included a Memoir of Isaac Williams, who at the age of eighteen began a course of service and adventure in the Indian country, which was continued till its close at the age of eighty-four. When eighteen years of age he was employed by the government of Pennsylvania, being already a trained hunter, as a spy and ranger among the Indians. He served in this capacity in Braddock’s campaign, and was a guard for the first convoy of provisions, on pack-horses, to Fort Duquesne, after its surrender to General Forbes in 1758. He was one of the first settlers on the Muskingum, after the peace made there with the Indians, in 1765, by Bouquet. His subsequent life was one of daring and heroic adventure on the frontiers.[1388]

Passing to the more general works, the earliest treatment of the North American Indians, of more than local scope, was the work of James Adair, first published in 1775, a section of whose map, showing the position of the Indian tribes within the present United States at that time, is given elsewhere.[1389] This History of the American Indians was later included by Kingsborough in Antiquities of Mexico (vol. viii. London, 1848).[1390] At just about the same time (1777), Dr. Robertson, in his America (book iv.), gave a general survey, which probably represents the level of the best European knowledge at that time.

It was not till well into the present century that much effort was made to summarize the scattered knowledge of explorers like Lewis and Clarke and of venturesome travellers. In 1819, we find where we might not expect it about as good an attempt to make a survey of the subject as was then attainable, in Ezekiel Sanford’s History of the United States before the Revolution,—a book, however, which was pretty roundly condemned for its general inaccuracy by Nathan Hale in the North American Review. The next year the Rev. Jedediah Morse made A report to the secretary of war, on Indian affairs, comprising a narrative of a tour in 1820, for ascertaining the actual state of the Indian tribes in our country (New Haven, 1822), which is about the beginning of systematized knowledge, though the subject in its scientific aspects was too new for well-studied proportions. The Report, however, attracted attention and instigated other students. De Tocqueville, in 1835, took the Indian problem within his range.[1391] Albert Gallatin printed, the next year, in the second volume of the Archæologia Americana (Cambridge, 1836), his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; and though his main purpose was to explain the linguistic differences, his introduction is still a valuable summary of the knowledge then existing.

There were at this time two well-directed efforts in progress to catch the features and life of the Indians as preserving their aboriginal traits. Between 1838 and 1844 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall published at Philadelphia, in three volumes folio, their History of the Indian tribes of North America, with biographical sketches of the principal chiefs. With 120 portrs. from the Indian gallery of the Department of war, at Washington;[1392] and in 1841 the public first got the fruits of George Catlin’s wanderings among the Indians of the Northwest, in his Letters and notes on the manners, customs and condition of the North American Indians, written during eight years’ travel among the wildest tribes of Indians in North America, in 1832-39 (N. Y., 1841), in two volumes. The book went through various editions in this country and in London.[1393] It was but the forerunner of various other books illustrative of his experience among the tribes; but it remains the most important.[1394] The sufficient summary of all that Catlin did to elucidate the Indian character and life will be found in Thomas Donaldson’s George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in the U. S. Nat. Museum, with memoirs and statistics, being part v. of the Smithsonian Report for 1885.[1395]

The great work of Schoolcraft has been elsewhere described in the present volume.[1396]

The agencies for acquiring and disseminating knowledge respecting the condition, past and present, of the red race have been and are much the same as those which improve the study of the archæological aspects of their history: such publications as the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (1845-1848); the Reports of the governmental geological surveys, and those upon trans-continental railway routes; those upon national boundaries; those of the Smithsonian Institution, with its larger Contributions, and of late years the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology; the reports of such institutions as the Peabody Museum of Archæology; and those of the Indian agents of the Federal government, of chief importance among which is Miss Alice C. Fletcher’s Indian Education and Civilization, published by the Bureau of Education (Washington, 1888). To these must be added the great mass of current periodical literature reached through Poole’s Index, and the action and papers of the government, not always easily discoverable, through Poore’s Descriptive Catalogue.

The maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, in addition to the reports of traders, missionaries, and adventurers, the means which we have of placing the territories of the many Indian tribes which, since the contact of Europeans, have been found in North America; but the abiding-places of the tribes have been far from permanent. Many of these early maps are given in other volumes of the present History.[1397] Geographers like Hutchins and military men like Bouquet found it incumbent on them to study this question.[1398] Benjamin Smith Barton surveyed the field in 1797; but the earliest of special map seems to have been that compiled by Albert Gallatin, who endeavored to place the tribes of the Atlantic slope as they were in 1600, and those beyond the Alleghanies as they were in 1800. The map in the American Gazetteer (London, 1762) gives some information,[1399] and that of Adair in 1775 is reproduced elsewhere.[1400] In 1833, Catlin endeavored to give a geographical position to all the tribes in the United States on a map, given in his great work and reproduced in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885). In 1840 compiled maps were given on a small scale in George Bancroft’s third volume of his United States, and another in Marryat’s Travels, vol. ii. The government has from time to time published maps showing the Indian occupation of territory, and the present reservations are shown on maps in Donaldson’s Public Domain and in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885).[1401]

The migrations and characteristics of the Eskimos have already been discussed,[1402] and the journals of the Arctic explorers will yield light upon their later conditions. We find those of the Hudson Bay region depicted in all the books relating to the life of the Company’s factors.[1403] The Beothuks of Newfoundland, which are thought to have become extinct in 1828,[1404] are described in Hatton and Harvey’s Newfoundland; by T. G. B. Lloyd in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (London), 1874, p. 21; 1875, p. 222; by A. S. Gatschet in the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions (Philad., 1885-86, vols. xxii. xxiii.); and in the Nineteenth Century, Dec., 1888. Leclercq in his Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691) gives us an account of the natives on the western side of the gulf.[1405]

The Micmacs of Nova Scotia are considered in Lescarbot and the later histories and in the documentary collections of that colony; and as they played a part in the French wars, the range of that military history covers some material concerning them.[1406]

For the aborigines of Canada, we easily revert to the older writers, like Champlain, Sagard, Creuxius, Boucher, Leclercq, Lafitau; the Voyage curieux et nouveau parmi les sauvages of Le Beau (Amsterdam, 1738); the Nouvelle France of Charlevoix; the Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1753) of Bacqueville de la Potherie;[1407] and to the later historians, like Fernald (ch. 7, 8), Garneau (2d book), and Warburton’s Conquest of Canada (ch. 6, 7, 8). The Abenaki, which lay between the northeastern settlements of the English and the French, are specially treated by Bacqueville (vol. iv.), in the Maine Hist. Soc. Collections, vol. vi., and in Maurault’s Histoire des Abenakis (1866).[1408]

The rich descriptive literature of the early days of New England gives us much help in understanding the aboriginal life. We begin with John Smith, and come down through a long series of writers like Governor Bradford and Edward Winslow for Plymouth; Gorges, Morton, Winthrop, Higginson, Dudley, Johnson, Wood, Lechford, and Roger Williams for other parts. These are all characterized in another place.[1409] The authorities on the early wars with the Pequots and with Philip, the accounts of Daniel Gookin, who knew them so well,[1410] and chance visits like those of Rawson and Danforth,[1411] furnish the concomitants needful to the recital. The story of the labors of Eliot, Mayhew, and others in urging the conversion of the natives is based upon another large range of material, in which much that is merely exhortative does not wholly conceal the material for the historian.[1412] Here too the chief actors in this work help us in their records. We have letters of Eliot, and we have the tracts which he was instrumental in publishing.[1413] There is also a letter of Increase Mather to Leusden on the Indian missions (1688).[1414] Gookin tells us of the sufferings of the Christian Indians during the war of 1675,[1415] and he gives also reports of the speeches of the Indian converts.[1416] The Mayhews of Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas, Matthew, and Experience, have left us records equally useful.[1417]

The principal student of the literature, mainly religious, produced in the tongue of the natives, has been Dr. James Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, and he has given us the leading accounts of its creation and influence.[1418] It was this propagandist movement that led Eleazer Wheelock into establishing (1754) an Indian Charity School at Lebanon, Connecticut, which finally removed to Hanover, in New Hampshire, and became (1769) Dartmouth College.[1419]

The New England tribes have produced a considerable local illustrative literature. The Kennebecs and Penobscots in Maine are noticed in the histories of that State, and in many of the local monographs.[1420] For New Hampshire, beside the state histories,[1421] the Pemigewassets are described in Wm. Little’s Warren (Concord, 1854), and the Pemicooks in the N. H. Hist. Collections, i.; Bouton’s Concord, Moore’s Concord, and Potter’s Manchester.

The Archives of Massachusetts yield a large amount of material respecting the relations of the tribes to the government, particularly at the eastward, while Maine was a part of the colony;[1422] and the large mass of its local histories, as well as those of the State,[1423] supply even better than the other New England States material for the historian.[1424]

The Indians of Rhode Island are noted by Arnold in his Rhode Island (ch. 3), and some special treatment is given to the Narragansetts and the Nyantics.[1425] Those of Connecticut have a monographic record in De Forest’s Indians of Connecticut, as well as treatment otherwise.[1426]

Palfrey (Hist. New England, i. ch. 1, 2), in his general survey of the Indians of New England, delineates their character with much plainness and discrimination, and it is perhaps as true a piece of characterization as any we have.[1427]

The Iroquois of New York have probably been the subject of a more sustained historical treatment than any other tribes. We have the advantage, in studying them, of the observations of the Dutch,[1428] as well as of the French and English. The French priests give us the earliest accounts, particularly the relations of Jogues and Milet.[1429]

The story of the French missions in New York is told elsewhere;[1430] those of the Protestant English yield us less.[1431]

We have another source in the local histories of New York.[1432] The earliest of the general histories of the Iroquois is that of Cadwallader Colden, and the best edition is The history of the five Indian nations depending on the province of New-York. Reprinted exactly from Bradford’s New York edition, 1727; with an introduction and notes by J. G. Shea (New York, 1866).[1433] The London reprints of 1747, and later, unfortunately added to the title Five Indian Nations [of Canada] the words in brackets. This was the very point denied by the English, who claimed that the French had no territorial rights south of the lakes. Otherwise his title conveys two significant facts: first, that the English had come to regard the Five Nations as their “dependants”; and second, that these Indians actually were a barrier between them and the French. There was something farcical in the formula used by Sir Wm. Johnson in a letter to the ministry: “The combined tribes have taken arms against his Britannic Majesty.” The Mohawks had been induced to ask that the Duke of York’s arms should be attached to their castles. This had been assented to, and allowed as a security against the inroads of the French—a sort of talismanic charm which might be respected by European usage. But those ducal bearings did not have their full meaning to the Iroquois as binding their own allegiance, nor were the Six Nations ever the gainers by being thus constructively protected.

Colden was born in Scotland in 1688, and died on Long Island in 1776. He was a physician, botanist, scholar, and literary man, able and well qualified in each pursuit. The greater part of his long life was spent in this country. As councillor, lieutenant-governor, and acting governor, he was in the administration of New York from 1720 till near his death. He was a most inquisitive and intelligent investigator and observer of Indian history and character. In dedicating his work to General Oglethorpe, he claims to have been prompted to it by his interest in the welfare of the Five Nations. He is frank and positive in expressing his judgment that they had been degraded and demoralized by their intercourse with the whites. He says that he wrote the former part of his history in New York, in 1727, to thwart the manœuvres of the French in their efforts to monopolize the western fur trade. They had been allowed to import woollen goods for the Indian traffic through New York. Governor Burnet advised that a stop be put to this abuse. The New York legislature furthered his advice, and built a fort at Oswego for three hundred traders. When the Duke of York was represented here by Governor Dongan, and “Popish interests” were allowed sway,—there being at the time a mean pretence of amity between England and France,—the interests of the former were sacrificed to those of the latter. This, of course, had a bad influence on the Five Nations, as leading them to regard the French as masters. The whole of the first part of Colden’s History deals with the Iroquois as merely the centre of the rivalry between the French and the English with their respective savage allies. The English had the advantage at the start, because from the earliest period when Champlain made a hostile incursion into the country of the Iroquois, attended by their Huron enemies, the relations of enmity were decided upon, and afterwards were constantly imbittered by a series of invasions. The French sought to undo their own influence of this sort when it became necessary for them to try to win over the Iroquois to their own interest in the fur traffic. The Confederacy which existed among the Five, and afterwards the Six, Nations was roughly tried when there was so sharp a bidding for alliances between one or another of the tribes by their European tempters. An incidental and very embarrassing element came in to complicate the relations of the parties, English, French, and Indians, on the grounds of the claim advanced by the English to hold the region beyond the Alleghanies by cession from the Iroquois in a council in 1726. The question was whether the Iroquois had previous to that time obtained tenable possession of the Ohio region, by conquest of the former occupants. It would appear that after that conquest that region was for a time well-nigh deserted. When it was to some extent reoccupied, the subsequent hunters and tenants of it denied the sovereignty of the Iroquois and the rights of the English intruders who relied upon the old treaty of cession.

The rival French history while Colden was in vogue was the third volume of Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Hist. de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1753); and another contemporary English view appeared in Wm. Smith’s Hist. of the Province of New York (1757).[1434] Nothing appeared after this of much moment as a general account of the Six Nations till Henry R. Schoolcraft made his Report to the New York authorities in 1845, which was published in a more popular form in his Notes on the Iroquois, or Contributions to American history, antiquities, and general ethnology (Albany, 1847), a book not valued overmuch.[1435]

Better work was done by J. V. H. Clark in what is in effect a good history of the Confederacy, in his Onondaga (Syracuse, 1849). The series of biographies by W. L. Stone, of Sir William Johnson, Brant, and Red Jacket, form a continuous history for a century (1735-1838).[1436] The most carefully studied work of all has been that of Lewis H. Morgan in his League of the Iroquois (1851), a book of which Parkman says (Jesuits, p. liv) that it commands a place far in advance of all others, and he adds, “Though often differing widely from Mr. Morgan’s conclusions, I cannot bear too emphatic testimony to the value of his researches.”[1437] The latest scholarly treatment of the Iroquois history is by Horatio Hale in the introduction to The Iroquois Book of Rites (Philad., 1883), which gives the forms of commemoration on the death of a chief and upon the choice of a successor.[1438]

Moving south, the material grows somewhat scant. There is little distinctive about the New Jersey tribes.[1439] For the Delawares and the Lenni Lenape, the main source is the native bark record, which as Walam-Olum was given by Squier in his Historical and Mythological Traditions of the Algonquins,[1440] as translated by Rafinesque,[1441] while a new translation is given in D. G. Brinton’s Lenâpé and their legends; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity (Philadelphia, 1885), making a volume of his Library of aboriginal American literature; and the book is in effect a series of ethnological studies on the Indians of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.[1442]

In addition to some of the early tracts[1443] on Maryland[1444] and Virginia and the general histories, like those of Beverly, and Stith for Virginia, and particularly Bozman for Maryland, with Henning’s Statutes, and some of the local histories,[1445] we have little for these central coast regions.[1446] In Carolina we must revert to such early books as Lawson and Brickell; to Carroll’s Hist. Collections of South Carolina, and to occasional periodic papers.[1447]

Farther south, we get help from the early Spanish and French,—Herrera, Barcia, the chroniclers of Florida, Davilla Padilla, Laudonnière, the memorials of De Soto’s march, the documents in the collections of Ternaux, Buckingham Smith, and B. F. French, all of which have been characterized elsewhere.[1448]

The later French documents in Margry and the works of Dumont and Du Pratz give us additional help.[1449] On the English side we find something in Coxe’s Carolana, in Timberlake, in Lawson,[1450] in the Wormsloe quartos on Georgia and South Carolina,[1451] and in later books like Filson’s Kentucke, John Haywood’s Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tennessee (down to 1768), Benjamin Hawkins’s Sketch of the Creek Country (1799), and Jeffreys’ French Dominion in America. Brinton, in The National Legend of the Chata-Mus-ko-kee tribes (in the Hist. Mag., Feb., 1870), printed a translation of “What Chekilli the head chief of the upper and lower Creeks said in a talk held at Savannah in 1735,” which he derived from a German version preserved in Herrn Philipp Georg Friederichs von Reck Diarium von seiner Reise nach Georgien im Jahr 1735 (Halle, 1741).[1452] This legend is taken by Albert S. Gatschet, in his Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, with a linguistic, historic, and ethnographic introduction (Philad., 1884), as a centre round which to group the ethnography of the whole gulf water-shed of the Southern States, wherein he has carefully analyzed the legend and its language, and in this way there is formed what is perhaps the best survey we have of the southern Indians.

This we may supplement by Pickett’s Alabama. Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., has given us a sketch (1868) of Tomo-chi-chi, the chief who welcomed Oglethorpe.[1453]

C. C. Royce has given us glimpses of the relations of the Cherokees and the whites in the Fifth Report, Bureau of Ethnology. A recent book is G. E. Foster’s Se-Quo-Yah, the American Cadmus and modern Moses. A biography of the greatest of redmen, around whose life has been woven the manners, customs and beliefs of the early Cherokees, with a recital of their wrongs and progress toward civilization (Philadelphia, etc., 1885.)[1454] Gatschet cites the Mémoire of Milfort, a war chief of the Creeks.[1455] The Chippewas are commemorated in a paper in Beach’s Indian Miscellany.[1456] The Seminole war produced a literature[1457] bearing on the Florida tribes. Bernard Romans’ Florida (1775) gave the comments of an early English observer of the natives of the southeastern parts of the United States. Dr. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula and the paper of Clay Maccauley on the Seminoles in the Fifth Rept. Bureau of Ethnology help out the study. The Natchez have been considered as allied with the races of middle America,[1458] and we may go back to Garcilasso de la Vega and the later Du Pratz for some of the speculations about them, to be aided by the accounts we get from the French concerning their campaigns against them.[1459]

The placing of the tribes in the Ohio Valley is embarrassed by their periodic migrations.[1460] Brinton follows the migrations of the Shawanees,[1461] and C. C. Royce seeks to identify them in their wanderings.[1462] O. H. Marshall tracks other tribes along the Great Lakes.[1463] Hiram W. Beckwith places those in Illinois and Indiana.[1464] The Wyandots[1465] have been treated, as affording a type for a short study of tribal society, by Major Powell in the Bureau of Ethnology, First Report.[1466] G. Gale’s Upper Mississippi (Chicago, 1867) gives us a condensed summary of the tribes of that region, and Miss Fletcher’s Report will help us for all this territory. Use can be also made of Caleb Atwater’s Indians of the Northwest, or a Tour to Prairie du Chien (Columbus, 1850). Dr. John G. Shea and others have used the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society to make known their studies of the tribes of that State.[1467] One of the most readable studies of the Indians in the neighborhood of Lake Superior is John G. Kohl’s Kitchi-Gami (1860). The authorities on the Black Hawk war throw light on the Sac and Fox tribes.[1468] Pilling’s Bibliography of the Siouan Languages (1887) affords the readiest key to the mass of books about the Sioux or Dacotah stocks from the time of Hennepin and the early adventurers in the Missouri Valley. The travellers Carver and Catlin are of importance here. Mrs. Eastman’s Dacotah, or life and legends of the Sioux (1849) is an excellent book that has not yet lost its value; and the same can be said of Francis Parkman’s California and the Oregon Trail (N. Y., 1849), which shows that historian’s earliest experience of the wild camp life. Miss Alice C. Fletcher is the latest investigator of their present life.[1469] Of the Crows we have some occasional accounts like Mrs. Margaret J. Carrington’s Absaraka.[1470] On the Modocs we have J. Miller’s Life among the Modocs (London, 1873). J. O. Dorsey has given us a paper on the Omaha sociology in the Third Rept. Bureau of Ethnology (p. 205); and we may add to this some account in the Transactions (vol. i.) of the Nebraska State Hist. Society, and a tract by Miss Fletcher on the Omaha tribe of Indians in Nebraska (Washington, 1885). The Pawnees have been described by J. B. Dunbar in the Mag. Amer. Hist. (vols. iv., v., viii., ix.) The Ojibways have had two native historians,—Geo. Copway’s Traditional Hist. of the Ojibway Nation (London, 1850), and Peter Jones’ Hist. of the Ojibway Indians, with special reference to their conversion to Christianity (London, 1861). The Minnesota Hist. Soc. Collections (vol. v.) contain other historical accounts by Wm. W. Warren and by Edw. D. Neill,—the latter touching their connection with the fur-traders. Miss Fletcher’s Report (1888) will supplement all these accounts of the aborigines of this region.

Our best knowledge of the southwestern Indians, the Apaches, Navajos, Utes, Comanches, and the rest, comes from such government observers as Emory in his Military Reconnaissance; Marcy’s Exploration of the Red River in 1852; J. H. Simpson in his Expedition into the Navajo Country (1856); and E. H. Ruffner’s Reconnoissance in the Ute Country (1874). The fullest references are given in Bancroft’s Native Races,[1471] with a map.

We may still find in Bancroft’s Native Races (i. ch. 2, 3) the best summarized statement with references on the tribes of the upper Pacific coast, and follow the development of our knowledge in the narratives of the early explorers of that coast by water, in the account of Lewis and Clark and other overland travels, and in such tales of adventures as the Journal kept at Nootka Sound by John R. Jewitt, which has had various forms.[1472]

The earliest of the better studied accounts of these northwestern tribes was that of Horatio Hale in the volume (vi.) on ethnography, of the Wilkes’ United States Exploring Expedition (Philad., 1846), and the same philologist’s paper in the Amer. Ethnological Society’s Transactions (vol. ii.). Recent scientific results are found in The North-West Coast of America, being Results of Recent Ethnological Researches, from the Collections of the Royal Museums at Berlin, published by the Directors of the Ethnological Department, by Herr E. Krause, and partly by Dr. Grunwedel, translated from the German, the Historical and Descriptive Text by Dr. Reiss (New York, 1886), and in the first volume of the Contributions to North Amer. Ethnology (Powell’s Survey), in papers by George Gibbs on the tribes of Washington and Oregon, and by W. H. Dall on those of Alaska.[1473]

For the tribes of California, Bancroft’s first volume is still the useful general account; but the Federal government have published several contributions of scientific importance: that of Stephen Powers in the Contributions to No. Amer. Ethnology (vol. iii., 1877);[1474] the ethnological volume (vii.) of Wheeler’s Survey, edited by Putnam; and papers in the Smithsonian Reports, 1863-64, and in Miss Fletcher’s Report, 1888.[1475]

This survey would not be complete without some indication of the topical variety in the consideration of the native peoples, but we have space only to mention the kinds of special treatment, shown in accounts of their government and society, their intellectual character, and of some of their customs and amusements.[1476] Their industries, their linguistics, and their myths have been considered with wider relations in the appendixes of the present volume.

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