Like living fires;—that dart and scream—
A million little knights that run
Warring for wild-flowers in the sun;—
His eye might rove through earth and sky,
His soul was in the days gone by.
We may pass rapidly over this space. The colonial principles of action were established regarding the Indians, and they went on destroying and demoralizing them till the reduction of Canada by the English. That removed one great source of Indian destruction; for while there was such an enemy to repulse, the Indians were perpetually called upon and urged forward in the business of slaughter and scalping. It was the same, indeed, on every frontier where there was an enemy, French or Spanish. We have the history of Adair, who was a resident in the south-western states for above forty years. This gentleman, who has given us a very minute account of the manners, customs, and opinions of the Choctaws, Cherokees, and Chickasaws, amongst whom he chiefly resided in the Carolinas, and who is firmly convinced that they are descended from the Ten Tribes of Israel, and, moreover, gives us many proofs of the excellence of their nature—yet, most inconsistently, is loud in praise of the French policy of setting the different Indian nations by the ears; and condemnation of anything like conciliation and forbearance. Speaking of some such attempts in 1736, he says—“Our rivals, the French, never neglect so favourable an opportunity of securing and promoting their interests. We have known more than one instance wherein their wisdom has not only found out proper means to disconcert the most dangerous plans of disaffected savages, but likewise to foment, and artfully to encourage, great animosities between the heads of ambitious rival families, till they fixed them in an implacable hatred against each other, and all of their respective tribes.”[43]
That he was in earnest in his admiration of such a policy, he goes on to relate to us, with the greatest naiveté and in the most circumstantial manner, how he recommended to the Governor of South Carolina to employ the Choctaws to scalp and extirpate the French traders in Louisiana, who, no doubt, interfered with his own gains. He lets us know that he got such a commission; and informs us particularly of the presents and flatteries with which he plied a great Choctaw chief, called Red Shoes, to set him on this work; in which he was successful. “I supplied each of them with arms, ammunition, and presents in plenty; gave them a French scalping-knife, which had been used against us, and even vermilion, to be used in the flourishing way, with the dangerous French snakes, when they killed and scalped them.... They soon went to work—they killed the strolling French pedlars—turned out against the Mississippi Indians and Mobillians, and the flame raged very high. A Choctaw woman gave a French pedlar warning: he mounted his horse, but Red Shoes ran him down in about fifteen minutes, and had scalped him before the rest came up.... Soon after a great number of Red Shoes’ women came to me with the French scalps and other trophies of war.”... “In the next spring, 1747,” he tells us “a large body of Muskohges and Chickasaws embarked on the Mississippi, and went down it to attack the French settlements. Here they burned a large village, and their leader being wounded, they in revenge killed all their prisoners; and overspread the French settlements in their fury like a dreadful whirlwind, destroying all before them, to the astonishment and terror even of those that were far remote from the skirts of the direful storm.” This candid writer tells us that the French Louisianians were now in a lamentable state—but, says he, “they had no reason to complain; we were only retaliating innocent blood which they had caused to be shed by their red mercenaries!” He laments that some treacherous traders put a stop to his scheme, or they would soon have driven all the French out of Alabama.[44]
Who were the savages? and how did the English expect the Indians, under such a course of tuition, to become civilized? This was the state of things in the south. In the north, not a war broke out between England and France, but the same scenes were acting between the English American settlements and Canada. In 1692 we find Captain Ingoldsby haranguing the chiefs of the Five Nations at Albany, and exhorting them to “keep the enemy in perpetual alarm by the incursions of parties into their country.” And the Indian orator shrewdly replying—“Brother Corlear (their name for the governor of New York) is it not to secure your frontiers? Why, then, not one word of your people that are to join us? We will carry the war into the heart of the enemy’s country—but, brother Corlear, how comes it that none of our brethren, fastened in the same chain with us, offer their hand in this general war? Pray, Corlear, how come Maryland, Delaware River, and New England to be disengaged? Do they draw their arms out of the chain? or has the great king commanded that the few subjects he has in this place should make war against the French alone?”[45]
It was not always, however, that the Indians had to complain that the English urged them into slaughter of the French and did not accompany them. The object of England in America now became that of wresting Canada entirely from France. For this purpose, knowing how essential it was to the success of this enterprise that they should not only have the Indians well affected, so as to prevent any incursions of the French Indians into their own states while the British forces were all concentrated on Canada, and still more how absolutely necessary to have a large body of Indians to pioneer the way for them through the woods, without which their army would be sure to be cut off by the French Indians—great endeavours were now made to conclude treaties of peace and mutual aid with all the great tribes in the British American colonies. Such treaties had long existed with the Five Nations, now called the Six Nations, by the addition of the remainder of the Tuscarora Indians who had escaped from our exterminating arms in North Carolina, and fled to the Five Nations; and also with the Delaware and Susquehanna Indians. Conferences were held with the chiefs of these tribes and British Commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York and Virginia, and, ostensibly, a better spirit was manifested towards the Indian people. The most celebrated of these conferences were held at Philadelphia in 1742; at Lancaster in Pennsylvania in 1744; and at Albany, in the state of New York, in 1746. The details of the conferences developed many curious characteristics both of the white and the red men. Canassateego, an Onondaga chief, was the principal speaker for the Indians on all these occasions, and it would be difficult to point to the man in any country, however civilized and learned, who has conducted national negotiations with more ability, eloquence, and sounder perception of actual existing circumstances, amid all the sophistry employed on such occasions by European diplomatists—