The Indians were strenuously exhorted to use all means to bring the western natives into the league. At the Conference of 1746, held at Albany, it became sufficiently evident for what object all this conciliation and these endeavours to extend their alliance amongst the Indians were used. A great and decisive attack upon Canada was planning: and it is really awful to read the language addressed to the assembled Indians, to inflame them with the spirit of the most malignant hatred and revenge against the French. Mr. Cadwallader Colden, one of His Majesty’s Council and Surveyor-general of New York, and the historian of the Five Nations, on whose own authority these facts are stated, addressed the Indians, owing to the Governor’s illness, in the speech prepared for the occasion. He called upon them to remember all the French had done to them; what they did at Onondaga; how they invaded the Senekas; what mischiefs they did to the Mohawks; how many of their countrymen suffered at the fire at Montreal; how they had sent priests amongst them to lull them to sleep, when they intended to knock them on the head. “I hear,” then added he, “they are attempting to do the same now. I need not remind you what revenge your fathers took for these injuries, when they put all the isle of Montreal, and a great part of Canada, to fire and sword. Can you think the French forget this? No! they are watching secretly to destroy you. But if your fathers could now rise out of their graves, how would their hearts leap with joy to see this day, when so glorious an opportunity is put into your hands to revenge all the injuries of your country, etc. etc.” He called on them to accompany the English, to win glory, and promised them great reward.
But these horrible fire-brands of speech,—these truly “burning words” were not all the means used. English gentlemen were sent amongst the tribes to arouse them by every conceivable means. The celebrated Mr. William Johnson of Mohawk, who had dreamed himself into a vast estate in that country,[46] and who afterwards, as Sir William Johnson, was so distinguished as the leader of the Indians at the fall of Quebec, and the conquest of Canada, now went amongst the Mohawks, dressed like a Mohawk chief. He feasted them at his castle on the Mohawk river; he gave them dances in their own country style, and danced with them; and led the Mohawk band to this very conference.
This enterprise came to nothing; but for the successful one of 1759 the same stimulants were applied, and the natives, to the very Twightwees and Chickasaws, brought into the league, either to march against the French, or to secure quiet in the states during the time of the invasion of Canada. And what was their reward? Scarcely was Canada reduced, and the services of the Indians no longer needed, when they found themselves as much encroached upon and insulted as ever. Some of the bloodiest and most desolating wars which they ever waged against the English settlements, took place between our conquest of Canada and our war against the American colonies themselves. It was the long course of injuries and insults which the Indians had suffered from the settlers that made them so ready to take up the tomahawk and scalping-knife at the call, and induced by the blood-money, of the mother-country against her American children. The employment and instigation of the Indians to tomahawk the settlers brings down British treatment of the Indians to the very last moment of our power in that country. What were our notions of such enormities may be inferred from their being called in the British Parliament “means which God and nature have put into our hands,”—and from Lord Cornwallis, our general then employed against the Americans, expressing, in 1780, his “satisfaction that the Indians had pursued and scalped many of the enemy!”
This was our conduct towards the Indians to the last hour of our dominion in their country. We drove them out of their lands, or cheated them out of them by making them drunk. We robbed them of their furs in the same manner; and on all occasions we inflamed their passions against their own enemies and ours. We made them ten times more cruel, perfidious, and depravedly savage than we found them, and then upbraided them as irreclaimable and merciless, and thereon founded our convenient plea that they must be destroyed, or driven onward as perishing shadows before the sun of civilization.
Before quitting the English in America, we need only, to complete our view of their treatment of the natives, to include in it a glance at that treatment in those colonies which we yet retain there; and that is furnished by the following Parliamentary Report, (1837.)
NEWFOUNDLAND.
To take a review of our colonies, beginning with Newfoundland. There, as in other parts of North America, it seems to have been, for a length of time, accounted a “meritorious act” to kill an Indian.[47]
On our first visit to that country, the natives were seen in every part of the coast. We occupied the stations where they used to hunt and fish, thus reducing them to want, while we took no trouble to indemnify them, so that, doubtless, many of them perished by famine; we also treated them with hostility and cruelty, and “many were slain by our own people, as well as by the Micmac Indians,” who were allowed to harass them. They must, however, have been recently very numerous, since, in one place, Captain Buchan found they had “run up fences to the extent of 30 miles,” with a variety of ramifications, for the purpose of conducting the deer down to the water, a work which would have required the labour of a multitude of hands.
It does not appear that any measures were taken to open a communication with them before the year 1810, when, by order of Sir. J. Duckworth, an attempt was made by Captain Buchan, which proved ineffectual. At that time he conceived that their numbers around their chief place of resort, the Great Lake, were reduced to 400 or 500. Under our treatment they continued rapidly to diminish; and it appears probable that the last of the tribe left at large, a man and a woman, were shot by two Englishmen in 1823. Three women had been taken prisoners shortly before, and they died in captivity. In the colony of Newfoundland, it may therefore be stated that we have exterminated the natives.[48]