Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations

by William Elliot Griffis

In trading, a coin was rare. The money used was seewant, or wampum, but most of the business done was by barter; peltries, corn, venison, ginseng, roots, herbs, brooms, etc., being the red man’s stock in trade. The white settlers paid for their groceries and necessities of civilization in seewant, or wampum, potash, and cereals. One of the earliest in the collection of Johnson’s papers at Albany is a letter to “Dear Billy” from Captain Warren at Boston, suggesting a shipment in the spring, from the farm at Warrensburg, of grain and other produce to Boston by way of Albany.

Being of robust health, with a strong frame and commanding figure, jovial in disposition and easy in manners, Johnson was not only able to show habitual industry, but in the field-sports and athletic games to take part and make himself popular alike with the muscular young Dutch and Germans and with the more lithe red men. The famous castle or palisaded village of the Mohawks on the hill-slopes back of Auriesville, now visible to all passengers by railway, and marked by the shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, was but a short distance to the westward. Here Johnson soon became known as a friend as well as an honest trader. His simple and masterly plan was, never to lie, cheat, or deceive, and never to grant what he had once refused. To the red men much of a white man’s thinking was a mystery; but truth was always simple, and as heartily appreciated as it was easily understood.

As early as May 10, 1739, we find this man of restless activity planning to locate a branch trading-house on the Susquehanna, two hundred miles to the south. Already he had seen the advantages and prospect of speedy wealth in the fur-trade, a privilege won years before by his Schenectady neighbours. He now entered diligently into it, employing a number of runners or bos-lopers, who scoured the woods and valleys populated with Indians, in his interest, diverting the trade from Albany to his own post. This was the beginning of jealous quarrels between him and the Albanians. That his eye was keenly open to every new advantage or possibility of progress, was seen in his buying as early as 1739, after one year’s residence in the valley, a lot of land across the Mohawk, on which ran a stream of water, the Chucktununda Creek, with abundance of potential mill-power. To ride horseback with bags fifteen miles to Caughnawaga every time meal was needed, was too much loss of time and energy. The German women had long carried bags of wheat and maize from Schoharie to Schenectady, traversing the distance on foot, bearing corn in coming and grist in returning, on their backs. There was a mill at Caughnawaga, and one owned by the Dutch Church at Schenectady, both sufficiently distant. Johnson saw at once in a mill ease and revenue. The Indian name of the stream, Chucktununda, is said to mean “stone roofs or houses,” and was applied to other watercourses with banks of overhanging rocks which formed shelter during rain. This coveted spot became later the famous “Mount” Johnson, on which the stone fortress-mansion still stands, at Akin, three miles west of Amsterdam and visible to all railway travellers as they fly between the great Lake City and New York.

The appearance of the Mohawk Valley, though still unchanged in its great cosmic features of sky, mountain, and main watercourses, was vastly different a century and a half ago. On its surface were many minor features quite different from those which to-day greet the eye of traveller, denizen, or palace-car inmate. Then the primeval forest, rich in game, covered hill and dale, except along the river-flats, where were great expanses of meadow in the wide level of the valley. Here were maize-fields surrounding the Indian villages for miles.

Owing, however, to the largeness of forest area, the streams were of greater proportions and much more numerous than at present. Fish were vastly abundant, and so tame as to be easily caught, even with the hand of Indian or white skilled in wood and water craft. Animal life was rich and varied to a degree not now easily imaginable or even credible, did not the records of geology, of contemporary chronicles, and the voices of tradition all agree on this point. Then the “wild cow” or bison, though rapidly diminishing, owing to the introduction of fire-arms, was still a source of fur and food. Besides the elk, deer were plentiful on the hills, often seen drinking at night and early in the morning at the river’s brink, and occasionally were killed inside of the new settlements. A splendid specimen of elk horns from a buck shot by Johnson on his own grounds, was presented by him to Chief Justice Thomas Jones, who wrote a loyalist history of New York during the Revolutionary War, and long adorned the hall of Fort Neck mansion on Long Island. Smaller fur-bearing animals were beyond the power of arithmetic. Wolves were uncomfortably numerous, active, and noisy. To their ceaseless nocturnal music there were slight pauses of silence, except when some gory battle-field or scalping-party’s raid or unusual spoil of hunters became the storm-centre, and gathered them together from a radius of many miles. Most notable of all the animals, in physical geography, in commerce, and for clothing, was the beaver. This amphibious creature of architectural instincts was the great modifier of the earth’s surface, damming up tens of thousands of the hill streams which fed the great rivers, and thus causing a vast surface of the land, otherwise dry, to be covered with water, while it greatly changed the appearance of the landscape. There are to-day thousands of grassy and mossy dells which even the inexperienced eye sees were once the homes of the beavers, while thousands of others have long since, under the open sun, become fertile meadows. The beaver, by yielding the most valuable of the furs, furnished also the standard of value in trade. The beaver as seen on the seal of the city of York, like the prehistoric pecus, or cattle, which made pecuniary value, or the salt of the ancient salary or rice in old Japan, was quoted oftener than coin.

The Indian trails of New York were first obliterated by wagon-roads or metaled turnpikes, and then covered by iron rails and wooden ties. The flanged iron wheels have taken the place of the moccasin, as loco-motor and freight-carrier; but in Johnson’s time the valleys, passes, and portages or “carries” were all definitely marked, and generally easily visible, on account of the long tramping of inturned feet. There are places to-day on the flinty rock polished by long attrition of deer-leather soles; and wherever the natural features of the landscape point to the probable saving of linear space, there skilled search usually reveals the old trail. One of the first proofs of the genius of Johnson and the entrance in his mind of continental ideas was his thorough study of the natural highways, trails, and watercourses of the Iroquois empire, and the times and methods of their punctual migrations. He soon found that while late autumn, winter, and spring was their season for trapping and shooting their game, June, July, and August formed the period when the peltries were brought in for sale. In early autumn they went fishing, or their travelling-parties were on peaceful errands, such as attending those council-fires which filled all the atmosphere with blue haze. As a rule, the Indians avoided the mountains, and dwelt in the valleys and well-watered regions, where fish and game for food, osiers and wood fibres for their baskets, clay for their rude pottery abounded, and where pebbles of every degree of hardness were at hand, to be split, clipped, drilled, grooved, or polished for their implements of war, ceremony, and religion. In savage life, vast areas of the earth’s surface are necessary for his hunting and nomad habits. Agriculture and civilization, which mean the tilling and dressing of the earth, enable a tribe to make a few acres of fertile soil suffice, where one lone hunter could scarcely exist. The constant trenching upon the land of the wild hunter and fisherman, by the farmer and manufacturer, who utilize the forces of Nature, and the resistance of the savage to this process, make the story of the “Indian question.”

Apart from the pretext of religion, equally common to all, the main object of French, Dutch, and English traders was fur, as that of the New England coast men was fish. The tremendous demand of Europe and China kept the prices of peltries high, and it was in this line of commercial effort that fortunes were most quickly made, most of the early profits being reckoned at twenty times the amount of outlay. Until 1630 a strict monopoly of two trading-companies shut out all interlopers from the Indian country.

In 1639, at the foundation of Rensselaerwyck, trade was nominally thrown open to all. What was formerly done covertly by interlopers and servants of the company, became the privileges of every burgher. Though still rigidly denied to outsiders, traders’ shops soon sprung up along the muddy streets of the colony, and an immense business was done over the greasy counters. The gallon kegs of brandy, called ankers; a puncheon of beer; a pile of shaggy woollen stuffs, then called duffles, and now represented most nearly by Ulster or overcoat cloth; a still coarser fabric called strouds, for breech clouts and squaws’ clothes, with axes and beads, formed the staple of the cheaper order of shopkeepers. In the better class of dealers in “Indian haberdashery,” and in peltries, potash, and ginseng, the storehouses would have an immense array of all sorts of clothes, hats and shoes, guns, knives, axes, powder, lead, glass beads, bar and hoop iron for arrow-heads, and files to make them, red lead, molasses, sugar, oil, pottery, pans, kettles, hollow ware, pipes, and knick-knacks of all sorts. It was not long before the desire to forestall the markets entered the hearts of the Dutch as well as the French; and soon, matching the courier du bois, or hardy rangers of the Canadian forests, emerged the corresponding figure of the bos-lopers, or commercial drummers. This prototype of the present natty and wide-awake metropolitan, in finest clothes, hat, and gloves, with most engaging manners and invincible tongue, was a hardy athlete in his prime, able to move swiftly and to be ever alert. He was well versed in the human nature of his customers. Skilled in woodcraft, he knew the trails, the position of the Indian villages, the state of the tides, currents, the news of war and peace, could read the weather signs, the probabilities of the hair and skin crops, the fluctuations of the market, and was usually ready to advance himself by fair advantage, or otherwise, over his white employer or Indian producer. Rarely was he an outlaw, though usually impatient of restraint, and when in the towns, apt to patronize too liberally the liquor-seller.

In this way the market was forestalled, and the choicest skins secured by the Albany men, who knew how to select and employ the best drummers. So fascinating and profitable was this life in the woods, that agriculture was at first neglected, and breadstuffs were imported. The evil of the abandonment of industry, however, never reached the proportions notorious in Canada, where it sometimes happened that ten per cent of the whole population would disappear in the woods, and the crops be neglected. When, too, Schenectady, Esopus, and the Palatine settlements in the Mohawk Valley were fully established, the farmers multiplied, the acreage increased, and grain was no longer imported. It was, from the first, the hope and desire of the Schenectady settlers to break the Albany monopoly, and obtain a share of the lucrative trade. This was bitterly opposed for half a century, and many were the inquisitorial visits of the Albany sheriffs to Schenectady and the Valley settlements, to seize contraband goods; but usually, on account of the steady resistance of both magistrates and citizens, they who came for wool went home shorn. The foolish Governor Andros went so far as to lay upon the little village an embargo,—one of the silly precedents of the “Boston Port Bill,”—by a most extraordinary proclamation forbidding any wagons and carts to ply between the city of Albany and the Dorp of Schenectady, except upon extraordinary occasions; and only with the consent of the Albany magistrates could passengers or goods be carried to the defiant little Dutch town. All such official nonsense ultimately proved vain, and its silliness became patent even to the Albany monopolists; and Schenectady won the victory of free trade with the Indians.

This point of time was shortly after the coming of Johnson, who thus arrived at a lucky moment; and at once entering to reap where others had sown, he became a man of the new era. He found the situation free for his enterprise, which soon became apparently boundless. He cultivated the friendship not only of the Indians, but of the white wood-runners, trappers, and frontiersmen generally; and by his easy manners, generosity, and strict integrity, bound both the red and the white men to himself. He was a “hail-fellow-well-met” to this intelligent class of men, and all through his wonderful career found in them a tremendous and unfailing resource of power. Johnson laid the foundations of permanent success, deep and broad, by the simple virtues of truth and honesty. He disdained the meanness of the petty trader. His word was kept, whether promise or threat. He refused to gain a temporary advantage by a sacrifice of principle, and soon the poorest and humblest learned to trust him. His word, even as a young man, soon became bond and law. The Indians, who were never able to fathom diplomacy, could understand simple truth. Two of the most significant gestures in the sign language of the Indians are, when the index finger is laid upon the mouth and moved straight forward, as the symbol of verity; and the same initial gesture expresses with sinuosities, as of a writhing serpent, symbolical of double dealing, prevarication or falsehood. The tongue of the truth-speaker was thus shown to be as straight as an arrow, while that of the liar was like a worm, or the crooked slime-line of a serpent. In this simple, effective way Johnson’s business enlarged like his land domains from year to year, while on knowledge of the Indians and their language, and of the physical features of the Mohawks’ empire, he soon became an authority. As early as 1743 he succeeded in opening a direct avenue of trade with Oswego, doing a good business not only in furs, but in supplying with provisions and other necessaries both the white trappers and petty traders who made rendezvous at the fort. He was now well known in Albany and New York, and soon opened correspondence with the wealthy house of Sir William Baker & Co., of London, as well as with firms in Atlantic seaports and the West Indies.