In a word, close approximation was made to the methods followed in the Republic of Holland for centuries, and established in the New Netherlands by the first settlers from the Fatherland. After the Revolution, under the Surveyor-General of the United States, Simeon De Witt, a Hollander by descent, and familiar with the Dutch methods, this system, enlarged and improved, became that of the whole nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is this system, lying at the basis of the land laws of the United States, which so won the encomium of Daniel Webster in his great address at Plymouth, when he said that our laws relating to land had made the American Republic.
Some time afterward, the Mohawks, who had forgotten the covenants of the past, thereby showing the worthlessness of mere tradition or unsupported assertions freshly fabricated, claimed that “the great flat,” or large tract of fertile land near Schenectady, had not been purchased of them, but had been lent to the Dutch settlers simply as pasture-land. On their making complaint to Johnson, the documents were called for, and duly produced by the magistrates of Schenectady. The deed of sale to Van Curler and his fellow-settlers, made in Fort Orange, July 27, 1661 (“Actum in de fortss Orangie den 27e July A. 1661”), was first produced. On it were the signatures or marks of the sachems Cantuquo, Aiadne, and Sonareetsie, with the totem-signs of the Bear, Tortoise, and Wolf. Other papers of later date were shown, which set more definite boundaries to the patent of eighty thousand acres. Johnson declared the Schenectady men in the right. The Indians, with perfect confidence in Johnson as arbitrator, went to their bark houses satisfied.
From this time forth until the end of his life, a large part of Johnson’s time was occupied in the settlement of land disputes between whites and Indians. Ceasing to be any longer a political factor in the future development of the continent, the Indian’s course was steadily downward. Having exhausted the benefit of his service, the British and colonial governments were both only too ready to ignore the red man’s real or supposed rights. Steadily the frontiers of civilization were pushed forward upon the broad and ancient hunting-grounds of the West. In the old and thickly settled domain of the Iroquois, it was now scarcely possible for an Indian to chase deer without running into a fence or coming unexpectedly upon a clearing where the white man stood, gun in hand, to warn off intruders. The saw-mills of the pale-face spoiled the primeval forests, choked the trout-streams with sawdust, and killed the fish, even as his traps and ploughed land drove off the game. Henceforth, though Johnson’s business with the Indians was greater than ever before, it was largely matter of laborious detail and settled routine. Important as was his work to the perfecting of the results attained by the annulling of French pretensions, it would be monotonous to tell the whole story. His toil was necessary to the uniformity desirable in all the king’s dominions, yet it lacked the picturesque element dominant in his early life, and need not here be set forth. We may take notice only of the most important of his labours as examiner of claims, as advocate for the right, and as judge and decider.
After inviting the sachems of the Six Nations to assemble at his house to hear his report of the Detroit Council, he examined into the famous Kayaderosseras or Queensborough patent of several hundred thousand acres granted in 1708. This patent was one of several which the Mohawks claimed were fraudulently obtained. Johnson heard both sides fully, and decided that the Indian claim was the correct one, and that the white man was in the wrong. The result was that the alleged owner gave full release. In the matter of the lands on the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, but claimed by Connecticut, the Iroquois were so excited that they sent a delegation of five chiefs to Hartford. These were led by Guy Johnson, and bore a letter from Sir William. The Connecticut people held tenaciously to their claim, and were about to settle, to the number of three hundred families, in the Wyoming Valley. In the speech of the Onondaga orator at Hartford, after rehearsing the story of the covenant with Corlaer, and denouncing men like Lydius and Kloch, who fraudulently obtained the Indians’ land, he declared the Six Nations would resist, even unto blood, the loss of their Susquehanna lands. Governor Fitch heartily agreed with the Iroquois, and so actively seconded the royal order that the proposed settlement was, at least, postponed.
Johnson predicted in a letter to Amherst, March 30, 1763, “the dangerous consequences which must inevitably attend the settlement of these people in the Wyoming Valley.” The Susquehanna Company persevered, however, and at the council held at Fort Stanwix succeeded in getting from some of the chiefs—after Johnson had been warily approached with bribes to take the vice-presidency of the company—a title-deed to the lands. Into this beautiful valley, twenty-one miles long, and now one of the richest and most lovely in all Pennsylvania, forty families from Connecticut settled in 1769. The unsleeping vengeance of the Senecas did not find its opportunity until 1778. Then, led by Butler and his Tories, the awful massacre was perpetrated which has furnished the poet Campbell with his mournful theme.
During the great conspiracy and war of Pontiac, Johnson was ceaselessly active in measures tending to holding the loyalty of the Indians. The Senecas, always the most wayward, because most easily influenced by the French, and more susceptible to Indian arguments, at first espoused the cause of Pontiac. The baronet had no sooner heard of this than he called a council of all the Six Nations at German Flats, and secured a tremendous advantage to the cause of civilization, by winning them over to neutrality. He sent Captain Claus with the same end in view to Caughnawaga, or the Sault St. Louis. At this place, formerly called La Prairie, whence had so often issued in the old days, from 1690 and onward, scalping-parties on the English and Dutch settlements, Claus met the Caughnawaga, St. Francis, and other tribes of Indians, thus cutting off another possible contingent for Pontiac. So successful was Claus, that these Canadian tribes not only sent deputies to dissuade the Western braves, but also warned them that in case of hostilities they would fight for the king with their English brethren.
Not knowing what roving bands of Western savages might make sudden raids, Johnson ordered out the Valley militia, despatched Indian scouts to Crown Point, built a stockade of palisades around Johnson Hall, and armed his own tenants and the people of Johnstown. The two stone towers or block-houses flanking the Hall were mounted with cannon,—the weapons most objectionable to savages, one of them being a piece captured at Louisburg, and presented by Admiral Warren. Seeing that the Mohawk Valley was thus so guarded, the Western braves, though harrying the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, kept out of New York. Indeed it seems not too much to assert that the influence of Johnson over the Indians east of Detroit was the chief cause of the failure of Pontiac’s great plot. Angry with this one man because of his power to thwart their designs, the followers of Pontiac intended to penetrate to Johnstown and take his life. Hearing of their purpose, the Mohawks, coming in a great delegation to their Great Brother, offered to serve as his body-guard.
Pontiac’s attempt to recover this continent to barbarism failed, but the scattered war continued for years. Half of the warriors of the Seneca castles were out on the war-path with the Delawares and Shawanese; and against these Johnson sent out many a war-party from Johnson Hall, selecting his men from among the most loyal of the Iroquois. These three tribes were already in possession of a large number of rifles which Swiss hunters of the chamois and German skilled artisans made at Lancaster and other places in Pennsylvania. Being thus more effectively armed and able to move with less ammunition, they were also less dependent on the white man,—a condition of things which Johnson viewed with alarm. We find him writing to the Lords of Trade, requesting that traffic in such deadly weapons should be prohibited. Colonel Bouquet, the gallant Swiss officer, avenged Braddock’s defeat by his brilliant victory at Bushy Run; and the Moravian Indians in Pennsylvania were ruthlessly slaughtered by wild beasts in white skins who wore the clothes of civilization. All this was part of “Pontiac’s War.”
“War is hell,” as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman insisted in our own days; and the barbarities in Johnson’s times seemed to have made devils of both white and red men. We find Johnson again making himself a trader in scalps by offering out of his own private pocket fifty dollars apiece for the heads of the Delaware chieftains. In a word, he continued a policy becoming obsolete in other colonies. He thus encouraged the retention by the British Government, long after the Revolution had broken out, of a custom worthy of Joshua and his Hebrews in Canaan, or of the pagan Anglo-Saxons in Celtic Britain, but not of Christian England or of modern America. Was he encouraged to do this by his squaw wife, Mollie Brant?
Teedyuscung was no more; but his son, Captain Bull, was an active warrior. The famous Delaware chief had perished in the flames of a house in which he was lying in a drunken stupor. An incendiary and hostile savage had been bribed by enemies to do the vile deed. Captain Bull, while on his way to surprise a white settlement, was himself surprised, July 26, 1764, by the interpreter, Montour, now become a captain, who led a band of two hundred Oneidas and Tuscaroras. The Delawares were all captured and taken by way of Fort Stanwix to Johnson Hall. Those who were not adopted into the Confederacy found their way into the jails of New York. Joseph Brant, leading another party of Iroquois into the country of the head-waters of the Susquehanna, surprised other Delaware braves, killed their chief, and burned seven villages.