Previous to 1700 the Iroquois had scoured bare of their enemies a portion, at least, of the Ohio country; but during the first half of the last century, the old hunting grounds were reoccupied in part by the Wyandots, while the Delawares centred upon the Muskingum River, and the Shawanoes, or Shawnees, coming from the south, scattered along the Scioto and Miami valleys,[1203] and allied themselves with the French. The Ottawas were grouped about the Sandusky and Maumee rivers in the north.[1204]
Respecting the Indians of the Ohio Valley we have records of the eighteenth century, in a Mémoire on those between Lake Erie and the Mississippi, made in 1718.[1205]
Among the Cass MSS. is a paper on the life and customs of the Indians of Canada[1206] in 1723, which has been translated by Col. Whittlesey.[1207]
A report (1736) supposed to be by Joncaire, dated at Missilimakinac, is called, as translated, “Enumeration of the Indian tribes connected with the government of Canada.”[1208]
Conrad Weiser’s notes on the Iroquois and the Delawares (Dec., 1746) have been also translated.[1209]
An account of the Miami confederacy makes part of a book published at Cincinnati in 1871, Journal of Capt. William Trent from Logstown to Pickawillany in 1752, edited by Alfred T. Goodman, secretary of the Western Reserve Hist. Soc. It includes papers from the English archives, secured by John Lothrop Motley.[1210] In 1759 Capt. George Croghan made “a list of the Indian nations, their places of abode and chief hunting.”[1211]
The subject of the dispersion and migrations of the Indians of the Ohio Valley has engaged the attention of several of the Western antiquaries.[1212] The most exhaustive collation of the older statements regarding these tribal movements is in Manning F. Force’s lecture before the Historical and Philosophical Soc. of Ohio, which was printed at Cincinnati in 1879 as Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio. “In the latter half of the seventeenth century, after the destruction of the Eries in 1656 by the Five Nations,” he says, “the great basin, bounded north by Lake Erie, the Miamis, and the Illinois, west by the Mississippi, east by the Alleghanies, and south by the headwaters of the streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico, seems to have been uninhabited except by bands of Shawnees, and scarcely visited except by war parties of the Five Nations.” He then confines himself to tracing the history of the Eries and Shawnees. He tells the story of the destruction of the Eries, or “Nation du Chat,” in 1656; and examines various theories about remnants of the tribe surviving under other names. The Chaouanons of the French, or Shawanoes of the English (Shawnees), did not appear in Ohio till after 1750. Parkman[1213] says: “Their eccentric wanderings, their sudden appearances and disappearances, perplex the antiquary and defy research.” Mr. Force adds to the investigations of their history, but still leaves, as he says, the problem unsolved. The earliest certain knowledge places them in the second half of the seventeenth century on the upper waters of the Cumberland, whence they migrated northwest and northeast, as he points out in tracking different bands.
The claim of the English to the Ohio Valley and the “Illinois country,” as for a long series of years the region east of the upper Mississippi and north of the Ohio was called,[1214] was based on a supposed conquest of the tribes of that territory by the Iroquois in 1672 or thereabouts. No treaty exists by which the Iroquois transferred this conquered country to the English, but the transaction was claimed to have some sort of a registry,[1215] as expressed, for instance, in a legend on Evans’ map[1216] (1755), which reads: “The Confederates [Five Nations], July 19, 1701, at Albany surrendered their beaver-hunting country to the English, to be defended by them for the said Confederates, their heirs and successors forever, and the same was confirmed, Sept. 14, 1728 [1726], when the Senecas, Cayugaes, and Onondagoes surrendered their habitations from Cayahoga to Oswego and six miles inland to the same for the same use.” The same claim is made on Mitchell’s map[1217] of the same year (1755), referring to the treaty with the Iroquois at Albany, Sept., 1726, by which the region west of Lake Erie and north of Erie and Ontario, as well as the belt of land from Oswego westward, was confirmed to the English.[1218]
Not much is known of the Indian occupation of the Ohio Valley before 1750,[1219] and any right by conquest which the Iroquois might have obtained, though supported at the time of the struggle by Colden,[1220] Pownall,[1221] and others,[1222] was first seriously questioned, when Gen. W. H. Harrison delivered his address on the Aborigines of the Ohio Valley.[1223] He does not allow that the Iroquois pushed their conquests beyond the Scioto.
The uncertainty of the English pretensions is shown by their efforts for further confirmation, which was brought about as regards westerly and northwesterly indefinite extensions of Virginia and Pennsylvania by the treaty of Lancaster in 1744 (June 22-July 4).[1224]