Almost as violent and exasperating were the animosities engendered between the disciples of different Protestant fellowships. The Quakers, backed by proprietary rights, by the prestige of an original peace policy and friendly negotiations with the Indians, and for the most part secure and unharmed in the centralized homes of Philadelphia and its neighborhood, imagined that they might refuse all participation in the bloody work enacting on their frontiers. The adventurous settlers on the borders were largely Presbyterians. The course of non-interference by the Quakers, who controlled the legislature, seemed to those who were bearing the brunt of savage warfare monstrously selfish and inhuman. There was a fatuity in this course which had to be abandoned. When a mob of survivors from the ravaged fields and cabins of the frontiers, bringing in cartloads of the bones gathered from the ashes of their burned dwellings, thus enforced their remonstrances against the peace policy of the legislature, the Quakers were compelled to yield, and to furnish the supplies of war.[1353] But sectarian hatred hardly ever reached an intenser glow than that exhibited between the Pennsylvania Quakers and Presbyterians. Meanwhile, the mild and kindly missionary efforts of the Moravians, in the same neighborhood, were cruelly baffled. Their aim was exactly the opposite of that which guided the Jesuit priests. They sought first to make their converts human beings, planters of the soil, taught in various handicrafts, and weaned from the taste of war and blood.
When the frontier war was at its wildest pitch of havoc and fury, the Moravian settlements, which had reached a stage giving such promise of success as to satisfy the gentle and earnest spirit of the missionaries who had planted them, were made to bear the brunt of the rage of all the parties engaged in the deadly turmoil. The natives timidly nestling in their settlements were regarded as an emasculated flock of nurslings, mean and cowardly, lacking equally the manhood of the savage and the pride and capacity of the civilized man. Worse than this, their pretended desire to preserve a neutrality and to have no part in the broil was made the ground of a suspicion, at once acted upon as if fully warranted, that they were really spies, offering secret information and even covert help as guides and prompters in the work of desolation among the scattered cabins of the whites. So a maddened spirit of distrust, inflamed by false rumors and direct charges of complicity, brought upon the Moravian settlers the hate and fury of the leading parties in the conflict.[1354]
It is noteworthy that the most furious havoc of savage warfare should have been wreaked on the frontiers of Pennsylvania, the one of all the English colonies in America whose boast was, and is, that there alone the entrance of civilized men upon the domains of barbarism was marked and initiated by the Christian policy of peace and righteousness. Penn and his representatives claimed that they had twice paid the purchase price of the lands covered by the proprietary charter to the Indian occupants of them,—once to the Delawares residing upon them, and again to the Iroquois who held them by conquest. The famous “Walking Purchase,” whether a fair or a fraudulent transaction, was intended to follow the original policy of the founder of the province.[1355]
In the inroads made upon the English settlements by Frontenac and his red allies, New York and New England furnished the victims. The middle colonies, so far as then undertaken, escaped the fray. Trouble began for them in 1716, when the French acted upon their resolve to occupy the valley of the Ohio. The Ohio Land Company was formed in 1748 to advance settlements beyond the Alleghanies, and surveys were made as far as Louisville. This enterprise roused anew the Indians and the French. The latter redoubled their zeal in 1753 and onward, south of Lake Erie and on the branches of the Ohio. The English found that their delay and dilatoriness in measures for fortifying the frontiers had given the French an advantage which was to be recovered only with increased cost and enterprise. In an earlier movement, had the English engaged their efforts when it was first proposed to them, they might have lessened, at least, their subsequent discomfiture. Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, in 1720 had urged on the British government the erection of a chain of posts beyond the Alleghanies, from the lakes to the Mississippi. But his urgency had been ineffectual. The governor reported that there were then “Seven Tributary Tribes” in Virginia, being seven hundred in number, with two hundred and fifty fighting-men, all of whom were peaceful. His only trouble was from the Tuscaroras on the borders of Carolina.[1356]
The erection of Fort Duquesne may be regarded as opening the decisive struggle between the French and the English in America, which reached its height in 1755, and centred around the imperfect chain of stockades and blockhouses on the line of the frontiers then reached by the English pioneers.
About the middle of the eighteenth century the number of French subjects in America, including Acadia, Canada, and Louisiana, was estimated at about eighty thousand. The subjects of England were estimated at about twelve hundred thousand. But, as before remarked, this vast disparity of numbers by no means represented an equal difference in the effectiveness of the two nationalities in the conduct of military movements. The French were centralized in command. They had unity of purpose and in action. In most cases they held actual defensive positions at points which the English had to reach by difficult approaches; and more than all, till it became evident that France was to lose the game, the French received much the larger share of aid from the Indians. Pennsylvania and Virginia were embarrassed in any attempt for united defensive operations on the frontiers by their own rival claims to the Ohio Valley. The English, however, welcomed the first signs of vacillation in the savages. When Céloron, in 1749, had sent messengers to the Indians beyond the Alleghanies to prepare for the measures he was about to take to secure a firm foothold there, he reported that the natives were “devoted entirely to the English.” This might have seemed true of the Delawares and Shawanees, though soon afterwards these were found to be in the interest of the French. In fact, all the tribes, except the Five Nations, may be regarded as more or less available for French service up to the final extinction of their power on the continent. Indeed, as we shall see, the mischievous enmity of the natives against the English was never more vengeful than when it was goaded on by secret French agency after France had by treaty yielded her claims on this soil. Nor could even the presumed neutrality of the Five Nations be relied upon by the English, as there were reasons for believing that many among them acted as spies and conveyed intelligence. Till after the year 1754 so effective had been the activity of the French in planting their strongholds and winning over the savages that there was not a single English post west of the Alleghanies.
At the same critical stage of this European rivalry in military operations, the greed for the profits of the fur trade was at its highest pitch. The beavers, as well as the red men, should be regarded as essential parties to the struggle between the French and the English. The latter had cut very deep into the trade which had formerly accrued wholly to the French at Oswego, Toronto, and Niagara.
Up to the year 1720 there had come to be established a mercantile usage which had proved to be very prejudicial to the English, alike in their Indian trade and in their influence over the Indians. The French had been allowed to import goods into New York to be used for their Indian trade. Of course this proved a very profitable business, as it facilitated their operations and was constantly extending over a wider reach their friendly relations with the farther tribes. Trade with Europe and the West Indies and Canada could be maintained only by single voyages in a year, through the perilous navigation of the St. Lawrence. With the English ports on the Atlantic, voyages could be made twice or thrice a year. A few merchants in New York, having a monopoly of supplying goods to the French in Canada, with their principals in England, had found their business very profitable. Goods of prime value, especially “strouds,” a kind of coarse woollen cloth highly prized by the Indians, were made in and exported from England much more cheaply than from France. The mischief of this method of trade being realized, an act was passed by the Assembly in New York, in 1720, which prohibited the selling of Indian goods to the French under severe penalties, in order to the encouragement of trade in general, and to the extension of the influence of the English over the Indians to counterbalance that of the French. Some merchants in London, just referred to, petitioned the king against the ratification of this act. By order in council the king referred the petition to the Lords of Trade and Plantations. A hearing, with testimonies, followed, in which those interested in the monopoly made many statements, ignorant or false, as to the geography of the country, and the method and effects of the advantage put into the hands of the French. But the remonstrants failed to prevent the restricting measure. From that time New York vastly extended its trade and intercourse with the tribes near and distant, greatly to the injury of the French.[1357]
The first white man’s dwelling in Ohio was that of the Moravian missionary, Christian Frederic Post.[1358] He was a sagacious and able man, and had acquired great influence over the Indians, which he used in conciliatory ways, winning their respect and confidence by the boldness with which he ventured to trust himself in their villages and lodges, as if he were under some magical protection. He went on his first journey to the Ohio in 1758, by request of the government of Pennsylvania, on a mission to the Delawares, Shawanees, and Mingoes. These had once been friendly to the English, but having been won over by the French, the object was to regain their confidence. The tribes had at this time come to understand, in a thoroughly practical way, that they were restricted to certain limited conditions so far as they were parties to the fierce rivalry between the Europeans. The issue was no longer an open one as to their being able to reclaim their territory for their own uses by driving off all these pale-faced trespassers. It was for them merely to choose whether they would henceforward have the French or the English for neighbors, and, if it must be so, for masters. Nor were they left with freedom or power to make a deliberate choice. But Post certainly stretched a point when he told the Indians that the English did not wish to occupy their lands, but only to drive off the French.
As Governor Spotswood, in the interest of Virginia, had attempted, in 1716, to break the French line of occupation by promoting settlements in the west, Governor Keith, of Pennsylvania, followed with a similar effort in 1719. Both efforts could be only temporarily withstood, and if baffled at one point were renewed at another. The English always showed a tenacity in clinging to an advance once made, and were inclined to change it only for a further advance. Though Fort Duquesne was blown up when abandoned by the French, with the hope of rendering it useless to the English, the post was too commanding a one to be neglected. After it had been taken by General Forbes in November, 1758, and had been strongly reconstructed by General Stanwix, though it was then two hundred miles distant from the nearest settlement, the possession of it was to a great extent the deciding fact of the advancing struggle. Colonel Armstrong had taken the Indian town of Kittanning in 1756.
The treaty negotiations between English and French diplomates at a foreign court, in 1763, which covenanted for the surrender of all territory east of the Mississippi and of all the fortified posts on lake and river to Great Britain, was but a contract on paper, which was very long in finding its full ratification among the parties alone interested in the result here. There were still three of these parties: the Indians; the French, who were in possession of the strongholds in the north and west; and the English colonists, supported by what was left of the British military forces, skeleton regiments and invalided soldiers, who were to avail themselves of their acquired domain. During the bloody and direful war which had thus been closed, the Indians had come to regard themselves as holding the balance of power between the French and the English. Often did the abler savage warriors express alike their wonder and their rage that those foreign intruders should choose these wild regions for the trial of their fighting powers. “Why do you not settle your fierce quarrels in your own land, or at least upon the sea, instead of involving us and our forests in your rivalry?” was the question to the officers and the file of the European forces. Though the natives soon came to realize that they would be the losers, whichever of the two foreign parties should prevail, their preferences were doubtless on the side of the French; and by force of circumstances easily explicable, after the English power, imperial and provincial, had obtained the mastery of the territory, the sympathies and aid of the natives went with the British during the rebellion of the colonies. But before this result was reached England won its ascendency at a heavy sacrifice of men and money, in a series of campaigns under many different generals. The general peace between England, France, and Spain, secured by the treaty of 1763, and involving the cession of all American territory east of the Mississippi by France to Britain, was naturally expected to bring a close to savage warfare against the colonists. The result was quite the contrary, inasmuch as the sharpest and most desolating havoc was wrought by that foe after the English were nominally left alone to meet the encounter. The explanation of this fact was that the French, though by covenant withdrawn from the field, were, hardly even with a pretence of secrecy, perpetuating and even extending their influence over their former wild allies in embarrassing and thwarting all the schemes of the English for turning their conquests to account. General Amherst was left in command here with only enfeebled fragments of regiments and with slender ranks of provincials. The military duty of the hour was for the conquerors to take formal possession of all the outposts still held by French garrisons, announcing to those in command the absolute conditions of the treaty, and to substitute the English for the French colors, henceforward to wave over them. This humiliating necessity was in itself grievous enough, as it forced upon the commanders of posts which had not then been reached by the war in Canada, a condition against which no remonstrance would avail. But beyond that, it furnished the occasion for the most formidable savage conspiracy ever formed on this continent, looking to the complete extinction of the English settlements here. The French in those extreme western posts had been most successful in securing the attachment of the neighboring Indian tribes, and found strong sympathizers among them in their discomfiture. At the same time those tribes had the most bitter hostility towards the English with whom they had come in contact. They complained that the English treated them with contempt and haughtiness, being niggard of their presents and sharp in their trade. They regarded each advanced English settlement on their lands, if only that of a solitary trader, as the germ of a permanent colony. Under these circumstances, the French still holding the posts, waiting only the exasperating summons to yield them up, found the temptation strong and easy of indulgence to inflame their recent allies, and now their sympathizing friends, among the tribes, with an imbittered rage against their new masters. Artifice and deception were availed of to reinforce the passions of savage breasts. The French sought to relieve the astounded consternation of their red friends on finding that they were compelled to yield the field to the subjects of the English monarch, by beguiling them with the fancy that the concession was but a temporary one, very soon to be set aside by a new turn in the wheel of fortune. Their French father had only fallen asleep while his English enemies had been impudently trespassing upon the lands of his red children. He would soon rouse himself to avenge the insult, and would reclaim what he had thus lost. Indeed, on the principle that the size and ornamentings of a lie involved no additional wrong in the telling it, the Indians were informed that a French army was even then preparing to ascend the Mississippi with full force, before which the English would be crushed.
There was then in the tribe of Ottawas, settled near Detroit, a master spirit, who, as a man and as a chief, was the most sagacious, eloquent, bold, and every way gifted of his race that has ever risen before the white man on this continent to contest in the hopeless struggle of barbarism with civilization. That Pontiac was crafty, unscrupulous, relentless, finding a revel in havoc and carnage, might disqualify him for the noblest epithets which the white man bestows on the virtues of a military hero. But he had the virtues of a savage, all of them, and in their highest range of nature and of faculty. He was a stern philosopher and moralist also, of the type engendered by free forest life, unsophisticated and trained in the school of the wilderness. He knew well the attractions of civilization. He weighed and compared them, as they presented themselves before his eyes in full contrast with savagery, in the European and in the Indian, and in those dubious specimens of humanity in which the line of distinction was blurred by the Indianized white man, the “Christian” convert, and the half-breed. Deliberately and, we may say, intelligently, he preferred for his own people the state of savagery. Intelligently, because he gave grounds for his preference, which, from his point of view and experience, had weight in themselves, and cannot be denied something more than plausibility even in the judgment of civilized men, for idealists like Rousseau and the Abbé Raynal have pleaded for them. Pontiac was older in native sagacity and shrewdness than in years. He had evidence enough that his race had suffered only harm from intercourse with the whites. The manners and temptations of civilization had affected them only by demoralizing influences. All the elements of life in the white man struck at what was noblest in the nature of the Indian,—his virility, his self-respect, his proud and sufficing independence, his content with his former surroundings and range of life. With an earnest eloquence Pontiac, in the lodges and at the council fires of his people, whether of his own immediate tribe or of representative warriors of other tribes, set before them the demonstration that security and happiness, if not peace, depended for them on their renouncing all reliance upon the white man’s ways and goods, and reverting with a stern stoicism to the former conditions of their lot. He told his responsive listeners that the Great Spirit, in pouring the wide salt waters between the two races of his children, meant to divide them and to keep them forever apart, giving to each of them a country which was their own, where they were free to live after their own method. The different tinting of their skin indicated a variance which testified to a rooted divergence of nature. For his red children the Great Spirit had provided the forest, the meadow, the lake, and the river, with fish and game for food and clothing. The canoe, the moccasin, the snow-shoe, the stone axe, the hide or bark covered lodge, the fields of golden maize, the root crops, the vines and berries, the waters of the cold crystal spring, made the inventory of their possessions. They belonged to nature, and were of kin to all its other creatures, which they put freely to their use, holding everything in common. The changing moons brought round the seasons for planting and hunting, for game, festivity, and religious rite. Their old men preserved the sacred traditions of their race. Their braves wore the scars and trophies of a noble manhood, and their young men were in training to be the warriors of their tribes in defence or conquest.
These, argued Pontiac, were the heritage which the Great Spirit had assigned to his red children. The spoiler had come among them from across the salt sea, and woe and ruin for the Indian had come with him. The white man could scorn the children of the forest, but could not be their friend or helper. Let the Indian be content and proud to remain an Indian. Let him at once renounce all use of the white man’s goods and implements and his fire-water, and fall back upon the independence of nature, fed on the flesh and clothed with the skins secured by bow and arrow and his skill of woodcraft.
Such was the pleading of the most gifted chieftain and the wisest patriot, the native product of the American wilderness. There was a nobleness in him, even a grandeur and prescience of soul, which take a place now on the list of protests that have poured from human breasts against the decrees of fate. Pontiac followed up his bold scheme by all the arts and appliances of forest diplomacy. He formed his cabinet, and sent out his ambassadors with their credentials in the reddened hatchet and the war-belt. They visited some of even the remoter tribes, with appeals conciliatory of all minor feuds and quarrels. Their success was qualified only by the inveteracy of existing enmities among some of these tribes. It would be difficult to estimate, even if only approximately, the number of the savages who were more or less directly engaged in the conspiracy of Pontiac. A noted French trader, who had resided many years among the Indians, and who had had an extended intercourse with the tribes, stayed at Detroit during the siege, having taken the oath of allegiance to the king of Great Britain. Largely from his own personal knowledge, he drew up an elaborate list of the tribes, with the number of warriors in each. The summing up of these is 56,500. In the usual way of allowing one to five of a whole population for able-bodied men, this would represent the number of the savages as about 283,000, which slightly exceeds the number of Indians now in our national domain.[1359]
The lake and river posts which had been yielded up by the French, on the summons, were occupied by slender and poorly supplied English garrisons, unwarned of the impending concentration. The scheme of Pontiac involved two leading acts in the drama: one was the beleaguerment of all the fortified lake and river garrisons; the other was an extermination by fire and carnage of all the isolated frontier settlements at harvest time, so as to cause general starvation. The plan was that all these assaults, respectively assigned to bodies of the allies, should be made at the same time, fixed by a phase of the moon. Scattered through the wilderness were many English traders, in their cabins and with their packh-orses and goods. These were plundered and massacred.[1360] The assailed posts were slightly reinforced by the few surviving settlers and traders who escaped the open field slaughter. The conspiracy was so far effective as to paralyze with dismay the occupants of the whole region which it threatened. But pluck and endurance proved equal to the appalling conflict. Nearly all the posts, after various alternations of experience, succumbed to the savage foe. Such was the fate of Venango, Le Bœuf, Presqu’ Isle, La Bay, St. Joseph, Miamis, Ouachtanon, Sandusky, and Michilimackinac. Detroit alone held out. The fort at Niagara, being very strong, was not attacked. The Shawanees and Delawares were active agents in this conspiracy. The English used all their efforts and appliances to keep the Six Nations neutral. The French near the Mississippi were active in plying and helping the tribes within their reach. The last French flag that came down on our territory was at Fort Chartres on the Mississippi.[1361]
By Dr. Ellis and the Editor.
ON some few historical subjects we have volumes so felicitously constructed as to combine all that is most desirable in original materials with a judicious digest of them. Of such a character is Francis Parkman’s France and England in North America, A Series of Historical Narratives. So abundant, authentic, and intelligently gathered are his citations from and references to the journals, letters, official reports, and documents, often in the very words of the actors, that, through the writer’s luminous pages, we are, for all substantial purposes, made to read and listen to their own narrations. Indeed, we are even more favored than that. So comprehensive have been his researches, and so full and many-sided are the materials which he has digested for us, that we have all the benefit of an attendance on a trial in a court or a debate in the forum, where by testimony and cross-examination different witnesses are made to verify or rectify their separate assertions. The official representatives of France, military and civil, on this continent, like their superiors and patrons at home, were by no means all of one mind. They had their conflicting interests to serve. They made their reports to those to whom they were responsible or sought to influence, and so colored them by their selfishness or rivalry. These communications, gathered from widely scattered repositories, are for the first time brought together and made to confront each other in Mr. Parkman’s pages. Allowing for a gap covering the first half of the eighteenth century, which is yet to be filled, Mr. Parkman’s series of volumes deals with the whole period of the enterprise of France in the new world to its cession of all territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain. His marvellously faithful and skilful reproduction of the scenic features of the continent, in its wild state, bears a fit relation to his elaborate study of its red denizens. His wide and arduous exploration in the tracks of the first pioneers, and his easy social relations with the modern representatives of the aboriginal stock, put him back into the scenes and companionship of those whose schemes and achievements he was to trace historically. After identifying localities and lines of exploration here, he followed up in foreign archives the missives written in these forests, and the official and confidential communications of the military and civic functionaries of France, revealing the joint or conflicting schemes and jealousies of intrigue or selfishness of priests, traders, monopolists, and adventurers. The panorama that is unrolled and spread before us is full and complete, lacking nothing of reality in nature or humanity, in color, variety, or action. The volumes rehearse in a continuous narrative the course of French enterprise here, the motives, immediate and ultimate, which were had in view, the progress in realizing them, the obstacles and resistance encountered, and the tragic failure.[1363]
The references in Parkman show that he depends more upon French than upon English sources, and indeed he seems to give the chief credit for his drawing of the early Indian life and character to the Relations of the French and Italian Jesuits,[1364] during their missionary work in New France.
We must class with these records of the Jesuits, though not equalling them in value, the volumes of Champlain, Sagard, Creuxius, Boucher,[1365] and the later Lafitau and Charlevoix. Parkman[1366] tells us that no other of these early books is so satisfactory as Lafitau’s Mœurs des Sauvages (1724); and Charlevoix gave similar testimony regarding his predecessor.[1367] For original material on the French side we have nothing to surpass in interest the Mémoires et documents, published by Pierre Margry, of which an account has been given elsewhere,[1368] as well as of the efforts of Parkman and others in advancing their publication.[1369] There is but little matter in these volumes relating to the military operations which make the subject of this chapter, though jealousy and rivalry of the schemes of the English, and the necessity of efforts to thwart them in their attempts to gain influence and to open trade with the Indians, are constantly recognized. In the diplomatic and military movements which opened on this continent the Seven Years’ War, the English, who had substantially secured the alliance of the Iroquois, or the Six Nations, insisted that they had obtained by treaties with them the territory between the Alleghanies and the Ohio, which the Six Nations on their part claimed to have gained by conquest and cession of the tribes that had previously occupied it. But when the English vindicated their entrance on the territory on the basis of these treaties with the Six Nations, the Shawanees and the Delawares, having recuperated their courage and vigor, denied this right by conquest. The French could not claim a right either by conquest or by cession. Their assumed occupancy and tenure through mission stations and strongholds were maintained simply and wholly on grounds of discovery and exploration. Margry’s volumes furnish the abundant and all-sufficient evidence of the priority of the French in this enterprise. The official documents interchanged with the authorities at home are all engaged with advice and promptings and measures for making good the claim to dominion founded on discovery. These volumes also are of the highest value as presenting to us from the first explorers, every way intelligent and competent as observers and reporters, the scenes and tenants of the interior of the continent. Here we have the wilderness, its primeval forests, its sea-like lakes, its threading rivers, shrunken or swollen, its cataracts and its confluent streams, its marshy expanses, bluffs, and plains, and its resources, abundant or scant, for sustaining life of beasts or men, all touched in feature or full portrayal by the charming skill of those to whom the sight was novel and bewildering.[1370] These French explorers will henceforth serve for all time as primary authorities on the features and resources of the interior of this continent just before it became the prize in contest between rival European nationalities. That contest undoubtedly had more to do in deciding the fate of the savage tribes from that time to our own. There are many reasons for believing that if the French had been able to hold alone an undisputed dominion in the interior of the continent, their relations with the Indian tribes, if not wholly pacific, would have been far more amicable than those which followed upon the hot rivalry with the English for the possession of their territories. The French were the wiser, the more tolerant and friendly of the two, in their intercourse with and treatment of the savages, with whom they found it so easy to affiliate. Under other circumstances the Indians might have come to hold the relation of wards to the French in a sense far more applicable than that in which the term has been used by the government of the United States.
Of the early English material there is no dearth, but it hardly has the same stamp of authority. The story of the Moravian and other missions on the Protestant and English side has less of such invariable devotedness and success than is recorded in the general summaries of the Jesuit and Recollet missions, like Shea’s History of the Catholic Missions, 1529-1854 (N. Y., 1855).[1371] The Indian Nations of Heckewelder,[1372] the service of the United Brethren, and the labors instituted by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,[1373] are records not without significance; but they yield to the superior efficacy of the French.[1374] Among the English administrative officers, the lead must doubtless be given to Sir William Johnson, for his personal influence over the Indian mind, winning their full confidence by fair and generous treatment of them, by a free hospitality, by assimilating with their habits even in his array, and by mastering their language. His deputy, Col. George Croghan, as interpreter and messenger, was kept busily employed in constant tramps through the woods, and in fearless errands to parties of vacillating or hostile tribes, to hold or win them to the English interest. The principal and the deputy, in this hazardous diplomacy, were specially qualified for their office by having mastered the gift and qualities of Indian oratory, by a familiarity with Indian character in its strength and weakness, and by endeavoring to keep faith with them, and to imitate the adroit methods of the French rather than the contemptuous hauteur of most of the English in intercourse with them.[1375]
The reader will naturally go to the biographies of Johnson, Washington, and the other military leaders of their time, to those of a few civilians, like Franklin, and to the general histories of the French and Indian wars and of their separate campaigns, for much light upon the Indian in war; and these materials have been sufficiently explored in another volume of the present History.[1376] These more general accounts are easily supplemented in the narratives of adventures and sufferings by a large class of persons who fell captive to the Indians, and lived to tell their tales.[1377]
The earlier travellers, like P. E. Radisson,[1378] Richard Falconer,[1379] Le Beau,[1380] and Jonathan Carver,[1381] not to name others; the later ones, like Prinz Maximilian;[1382] the experiences of various army officers on the frontiers, like Randolph B. Marcy[1383] and J. B. Fry,[1384]—all such books fill in the picture in some of its details.
The early life in the Ohio Valley was particularly conducive to such auxiliary helps in this study, and we owe more of this kind of illustration to Joseph Doddridge[1385] than to any other. He was a physician and a missionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and in both his professions a man highly esteemed. He was born in Maryland in 1769, and in his fourth year removed with his family to the western border of the line between Pennsylvania and Virginia. With abundant opportunities in his youth of familiarity with the rudest experiences of frontier life near hostile Indians, he was a keen observer, a skilful narrator, and a diligent gatherer-up of historical and traditional lore from the hardy and well-scarred pioneers. He had received a good academic and medical education, and was a keen student of nature as well as of humanity. His pages give us most vivid pictures of life under the stern and perilous conditions; not, however, without their fascinations, of forest haunts, of rude and scattered cabins, of domestic and social relations, of the resources of the heroic whites, and of the qualities of Indian warfare in the desperate struggle with the invaders.[1386]
Another early writer in this field was Dr. S. P. Hildreth of Ohio, who published his Pioneer History (Cincinnati, 1848) while some of the pioneers of the Northwest were still living, and the papers of some of them, like Col. George Morgan, could be put to service.[1387] Dr. Hildreth, in his Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1852), included a Memoir of Isaac Williams, who at the age of eighteen began a course of service and adventure in the Indian country, which was continued till its close at the age of eighty-four. When eighteen years of age he was employed by the government of Pennsylvania, being already a trained hunter, as a spy and ranger among the Indians. He served in this capacity in Braddock’s campaign, and was a guard for the first convoy of provisions, on pack-horses, to Fort Duquesne, after its surrender to General Forbes in 1758. He was one of the first settlers on the Muskingum, after the peace made there with the Indians, in 1765, by Bouquet. His subsequent life was one of daring and heroic adventure on the frontiers.[1388]
Passing to the more general works, the earliest treatment of the North American Indians, of more than local scope, was the work of James Adair, first published in 1775, a section of whose map, showing the position of the Indian tribes within the present United States at that time, is given elsewhere.[1389] This History of the American Indians was later included by Kingsborough in Antiquities of Mexico (vol. viii. London, 1848).[1390] At just about the same time (1777), Dr. Robertson, in his America (book iv.), gave a general survey, which probably represents the level of the best European knowledge at that time.
It was not till well into the present century that much effort was made to summarize the scattered knowledge of explorers like Lewis and Clarke and of venturesome travellers. In 1819, we find where we might not expect it about as good an attempt to make a survey of the subject as was then attainable, in Ezekiel Sanford’s History of the United States before the Revolution,—a book, however, which was pretty roundly condemned for its general inaccuracy by Nathan Hale in the North American Review. The next year the Rev. Jedediah Morse made A report to the secretary of war, on Indian affairs, comprising a narrative of a tour in 1820, for ascertaining the actual state of the Indian tribes in our country (New Haven, 1822), which is about the beginning of systematized knowledge, though the subject in its scientific aspects was too new for well-studied proportions. The Report, however, attracted attention and instigated other students. De Tocqueville, in 1835, took the Indian problem within his range.[1391] Albert Gallatin printed, the next year, in the second volume of the Archæologia Americana (Cambridge, 1836), his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; and though his main purpose was to explain the linguistic differences, his introduction is still a valuable summary of the knowledge then existing.
There were at this time two well-directed efforts in progress to catch the features and life of the Indians as preserving their aboriginal traits. Between 1838 and 1844 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall published at Philadelphia, in three volumes folio, their History of the Indian tribes of North America, with biographical sketches of the principal chiefs. With 120 portrs. from the Indian gallery of the Department of war, at Washington;[1392] and in 1841 the public first got the fruits of George Catlin’s wanderings among the Indians of the Northwest, in his Letters and notes on the manners, customs and condition of the North American Indians, written during eight years’ travel among the wildest tribes of Indians in North America, in 1832-39 (N. Y., 1841), in two volumes. The book went through various editions in this country and in London.[1393] It was but the forerunner of various other books illustrative of his experience among the tribes; but it remains the most important.[1394] The sufficient summary of all that Catlin did to elucidate the Indian character and life will be found in Thomas Donaldson’s George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in the U. S. Nat. Museum, with memoirs and statistics, being part v. of the Smithsonian Report for 1885.[1395]
The great work of Schoolcraft has been elsewhere described in the present volume.[1396]
The agencies for acquiring and disseminating knowledge respecting the condition, past and present, of the red race have been and are much the same as those which improve the study of the archæological aspects of their history: such publications as the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (1845-1848); the Reports of the governmental geological surveys, and those upon trans-continental railway routes; those upon national boundaries; those of the Smithsonian Institution, with its larger Contributions, and of late years the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology; the reports of such institutions as the Peabody Museum of Archæology; and those of the Indian agents of the Federal government, of chief importance among which is Miss Alice C. Fletcher’s Indian Education and Civilization, published by the Bureau of Education (Washington, 1888). To these must be added the great mass of current periodical literature reached through Poole’s Index, and the action and papers of the government, not always easily discoverable, through Poore’s Descriptive Catalogue.
The maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, in addition to the reports of traders, missionaries, and adventurers, the means which we have of placing the territories of the many Indian tribes which, since the contact of Europeans, have been found in North America; but the abiding-places of the tribes have been far from permanent. Many of these early maps are given in other volumes of the present History.[1397] Geographers like Hutchins and military men like Bouquet found it incumbent on them to study this question.[1398] Benjamin Smith Barton surveyed the field in 1797; but the earliest of special map seems to have been that compiled by Albert Gallatin, who endeavored to place the tribes of the Atlantic slope as they were in 1600, and those beyond the Alleghanies as they were in 1800. The map in the American Gazetteer (London, 1762) gives some information,[1399] and that of Adair in 1775 is reproduced elsewhere.[1400] In 1833, Catlin endeavored to give a geographical position to all the tribes in the United States on a map, given in his great work and reproduced in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885). In 1840 compiled maps were given on a small scale in George Bancroft’s third volume of his United States, and another in Marryat’s Travels, vol. ii. The government has from time to time published maps showing the Indian occupation of territory, and the present reservations are shown on maps in Donaldson’s Public Domain and in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885).[1401]
The migrations and characteristics of the Eskimos have already been discussed,[1402] and the journals of the Arctic explorers will yield light upon their later conditions. We find those of the Hudson Bay region depicted in all the books relating to the life of the Company’s factors.[1403] The Beothuks of Newfoundland, which are thought to have become extinct in 1828,[1404] are described in Hatton and Harvey’s Newfoundland; by T. G. B. Lloyd in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (London), 1874, p. 21; 1875, p. 222; by A. S. Gatschet in the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions (Philad., 1885-86, vols. xxii. xxiii.); and in the Nineteenth Century, Dec., 1888. Leclercq in his Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691) gives us an account of the natives on the western side of the gulf.[1405]
The Micmacs of Nova Scotia are considered in Lescarbot and the later histories and in the documentary collections of that colony; and as they played a part in the French wars, the range of that military history covers some material concerning them.[1406]
For the aborigines of Canada, we easily revert to the older writers, like Champlain, Sagard, Creuxius, Boucher, Leclercq, Lafitau; the Voyage curieux et nouveau parmi les sauvages of Le Beau (Amsterdam, 1738); the Nouvelle France of Charlevoix; the Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1753) of Bacqueville de la Potherie;[1407] and to the later historians, like Fernald (ch. 7, 8), Garneau (2d book), and Warburton’s Conquest of Canada (ch. 6, 7, 8). The Abenaki, which lay between the northeastern settlements of the English and the French, are specially treated by Bacqueville (vol. iv.), in the Maine Hist. Soc. Collections, vol. vi., and in Maurault’s Histoire des Abenakis (1866).[1408]
The rich descriptive literature of the early days of New England gives us much help in understanding the aboriginal life. We begin with John Smith, and come down through a long series of writers like Governor Bradford and Edward Winslow for Plymouth; Gorges, Morton, Winthrop, Higginson, Dudley, Johnson, Wood, Lechford, and Roger Williams for other parts. These are all characterized in another place.[1409] The authorities on the early wars with the Pequots and with Philip, the accounts of Daniel Gookin, who knew them so well,[1410] and chance visits like those of Rawson and Danforth,[1411] furnish the concomitants needful to the recital. The story of the labors of Eliot, Mayhew, and others in urging the conversion of the natives is based upon another large range of material, in which much that is merely exhortative does not wholly conceal the material for the historian.[1412] Here too the chief actors in this work help us in their records. We have letters of Eliot, and we have the tracts which he was instrumental in publishing.[1413] There is also a letter of Increase Mather to Leusden on the Indian missions (1688).[1414] Gookin tells us of the sufferings of the Christian Indians during the war of 1675,[1415] and he gives also reports of the speeches of the Indian converts.[1416] The Mayhews of Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas, Matthew, and Experience, have left us records equally useful.[1417]
The principal student of the literature, mainly religious, produced in the tongue of the natives, has been Dr. James Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, and he has given us the leading accounts of its creation and influence.[1418] It was this propagandist movement that led Eleazer Wheelock into establishing (1754) an Indian Charity School at Lebanon, Connecticut, which finally removed to Hanover, in New Hampshire, and became (1769) Dartmouth College.[1419]
The New England tribes have produced a considerable local illustrative literature. The Kennebecs and Penobscots in Maine are noticed in the histories of that State, and in many of the local monographs.[1420] For New Hampshire, beside the state histories,[1421] the Pemigewassets are described in Wm. Little’s Warren (Concord, 1854), and the Pemicooks in the N. H. Hist. Collections, i.; Bouton’s Concord, Moore’s Concord, and Potter’s Manchester.
The Archives of Massachusetts yield a large amount of material respecting the relations of the tribes to the government, particularly at the eastward, while Maine was a part of the colony;[1422] and the large mass of its local histories, as well as those of the State,[1423] supply even better than the other New England States material for the historian.[1424]
The Indians of Rhode Island are noted by Arnold in his Rhode Island (ch. 3), and some special treatment is given to the Narragansetts and the Nyantics.[1425] Those of Connecticut have a monographic record in De Forest’s Indians of Connecticut, as well as treatment otherwise.[1426]
Palfrey (Hist. New England, i. ch. 1, 2), in his general survey of the Indians of New England, delineates their character with much plainness and discrimination, and it is perhaps as true a piece of characterization as any we have.[1427]
The Iroquois of New York have probably been the subject of a more sustained historical treatment than any other tribes. We have the advantage, in studying them, of the observations of the Dutch,[1428] as well as of the French and English. The French priests give us the earliest accounts, particularly the relations of Jogues and Milet.[1429]
The story of the French missions in New York is told elsewhere;[1430] those of the Protestant English yield us less.[1431]
We have another source in the local histories of New York.[1432] The earliest of the general histories of the Iroquois is that of Cadwallader Colden, and the best edition is The history of the five Indian nations depending on the province of New-York. Reprinted exactly from Bradford’s New York edition, 1727; with an introduction and notes by J. G. Shea (New York, 1866).[1433] The London reprints of 1747, and later, unfortunately added to the title Five Indian Nations [of Canada] the words in brackets. This was the very point denied by the English, who claimed that the French had no territorial rights south of the lakes. Otherwise his title conveys two significant facts: first, that the English had come to regard the Five Nations as their “dependants”; and second, that these Indians actually were a barrier between them and the French. There was something farcical in the formula used by Sir Wm. Johnson in a letter to the ministry: “The combined tribes have taken arms against his Britannic Majesty.” The Mohawks had been induced to ask that the Duke of York’s arms should be attached to their castles. This had been assented to, and allowed as a security against the inroads of the French—a sort of talismanic charm which might be respected by European usage. But those ducal bearings did not have their full meaning to the Iroquois as binding their own allegiance, nor were the Six Nations ever the gainers by being thus constructively protected.
Colden was born in Scotland in 1688, and died on Long Island in 1776. He was a physician, botanist, scholar, and literary man, able and well qualified in each pursuit. The greater part of his long life was spent in this country. As councillor, lieutenant-governor, and acting governor, he was in the administration of New York from 1720 till near his death. He was a most inquisitive and intelligent investigator and observer of Indian history and character. In dedicating his work to General Oglethorpe, he claims to have been prompted to it by his interest in the welfare of the Five Nations. He is frank and positive in expressing his judgment that they had been degraded and demoralized by their intercourse with the whites. He says that he wrote the former part of his history in New York, in 1727, to thwart the manœuvres of the French in their efforts to monopolize the western fur trade. They had been allowed to import woollen goods for the Indian traffic through New York. Governor Burnet advised that a stop be put to this abuse. The New York legislature furthered his advice, and built a fort at Oswego for three hundred traders. When the Duke of York was represented here by Governor Dongan, and “Popish interests” were allowed sway,—there being at the time a mean pretence of amity between England and France,—the interests of the former were sacrificed to those of the latter. This, of course, had a bad influence on the Five Nations, as leading them to regard the French as masters. The whole of the first part of Colden’s History deals with the Iroquois as merely the centre of the rivalry between the French and the English with their respective savage allies. The English had the advantage at the start, because from the earliest period when Champlain made a hostile incursion into the country of the Iroquois, attended by their Huron enemies, the relations of enmity were decided upon, and afterwards were constantly imbittered by a series of invasions. The French sought to undo their own influence of this sort when it became necessary for them to try to win over the Iroquois to their own interest in the fur traffic. The Confederacy which existed among the Five, and afterwards the Six, Nations was roughly tried when there was so sharp a bidding for alliances between one or another of the tribes by their European tempters. An incidental and very embarrassing element came in to complicate the relations of the parties, English, French, and Indians, on the grounds of the claim advanced by the English to hold the region beyond the Alleghanies by cession from the Iroquois in a council in 1726. The question was whether the Iroquois had previous to that time obtained tenable possession of the Ohio region, by conquest of the former occupants. It would appear that after that conquest that region was for a time well-nigh deserted. When it was to some extent reoccupied, the subsequent hunters and tenants of it denied the sovereignty of the Iroquois and the rights of the English intruders who relied upon the old treaty of cession.
The rival French history while Colden was in vogue was the third volume of Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Hist. de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1753); and another contemporary English view appeared in Wm. Smith’s Hist. of the Province of New York (1757).[1434] Nothing appeared after this of much moment as a general account of the Six Nations till Henry R. Schoolcraft made his Report to the New York authorities in 1845, which was published in a more popular form in his Notes on the Iroquois, or Contributions to American history, antiquities, and general ethnology (Albany, 1847), a book not valued overmuch.[1435]
Better work was done by J. V. H. Clark in what is in effect a good history of the Confederacy, in his Onondaga (Syracuse, 1849). The series of biographies by W. L. Stone, of Sir William Johnson, Brant, and Red Jacket, form a continuous history for a century (1735-1838).[1436] The most carefully studied work of all has been that of Lewis H. Morgan in his League of the Iroquois (1851), a book of which Parkman says (Jesuits, p. liv) that it commands a place far in advance of all others, and he adds, “Though often differing widely from Mr. Morgan’s conclusions, I cannot bear too emphatic testimony to the value of his researches.”[1437] The latest scholarly treatment of the Iroquois history is by Horatio Hale in the introduction to The Iroquois Book of Rites (Philad., 1883), which gives the forms of commemoration on the death of a chief and upon the choice of a successor.[1438]
Moving south, the material grows somewhat scant. There is little distinctive about the New Jersey tribes.[1439] For the Delawares and the Lenni Lenape, the main source is the native bark record, which as Walam-Olum was given by Squier in his Historical and Mythological Traditions of the Algonquins,[1440] as translated by Rafinesque,[1441] while a new translation is given in D. G. Brinton’s Lenâpé and their legends; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity (Philadelphia, 1885), making a volume of his Library of aboriginal American literature; and the book is in effect a series of ethnological studies on the Indians of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.[1442]
In addition to some of the early tracts[1443] on Maryland[1444] and Virginia and the general histories, like those of Beverly, and Stith for Virginia, and particularly Bozman for Maryland, with Henning’s Statutes, and some of the local histories,[1445] we have little for these central coast regions.[1446] In Carolina we must revert to such early books as Lawson and Brickell; to Carroll’s Hist. Collections of South Carolina, and to occasional periodic papers.[1447]
Farther south, we get help from the early Spanish and French,—Herrera, Barcia, the chroniclers of Florida, Davilla Padilla, Laudonnière, the memorials of De Soto’s march, the documents in the collections of Ternaux, Buckingham Smith, and B. F. French, all of which have been characterized elsewhere.[1448]
The later French documents in Margry and the works of Dumont and Du Pratz give us additional help.[1449] On the English side we find something in Coxe’s Carolana, in Timberlake, in Lawson,[1450] in the Wormsloe quartos on Georgia and South Carolina,[1451] and in later books like Filson’s Kentucke, John Haywood’s Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tennessee (down to 1768), Benjamin Hawkins’s Sketch of the Creek Country (1799), and Jeffreys’ French Dominion in America. Brinton, in The National Legend of the Chata-Mus-ko-kee tribes (in the Hist. Mag., Feb., 1870), printed a translation of “What Chekilli the head chief of the upper and lower Creeks said in a talk held at Savannah in 1735,” which he derived from a German version preserved in Herrn Philipp Georg Friederichs von Reck Diarium von seiner Reise nach Georgien im Jahr 1735 (Halle, 1741).[1452] This legend is taken by Albert S. Gatschet, in his Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, with a linguistic, historic, and ethnographic introduction (Philad., 1884), as a centre round which to group the ethnography of the whole gulf water-shed of the Southern States, wherein he has carefully analyzed the legend and its language, and in this way there is formed what is perhaps the best survey we have of the southern Indians.
This we may supplement by Pickett’s Alabama. Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., has given us a sketch (1868) of Tomo-chi-chi, the chief who welcomed Oglethorpe.[1453]
C. C. Royce has given us glimpses of the relations of the Cherokees and the whites in the Fifth Report, Bureau of Ethnology. A recent book is G. E. Foster’s Se-Quo-Yah, the American Cadmus and modern Moses. A biography of the greatest of redmen, around whose life has been woven the manners, customs and beliefs of the early Cherokees, with a recital of their wrongs and progress toward civilization (Philadelphia, etc., 1885.)[1454] Gatschet cites the Mémoire of Milfort, a war chief of the Creeks.[1455] The Chippewas are commemorated in a paper in Beach’s Indian Miscellany.[1456] The Seminole war produced a literature[1457] bearing on the Florida tribes. Bernard Romans’ Florida (1775) gave the comments of an early English observer of the natives of the southeastern parts of the United States. Dr. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula and the paper of Clay Maccauley on the Seminoles in the Fifth Rept. Bureau of Ethnology help out the study. The Natchez have been considered as allied with the races of middle America,[1458] and we may go back to Garcilasso de la Vega and the later Du Pratz for some of the speculations about them, to be aided by the accounts we get from the French concerning their campaigns against them.[1459]
The placing of the tribes in the Ohio Valley is embarrassed by their periodic migrations.[1460] Brinton follows the migrations of the Shawanees,[1461] and C. C. Royce seeks to identify them in their wanderings.[1462] O. H. Marshall tracks other tribes along the Great Lakes.[1463] Hiram W. Beckwith places those in Illinois and Indiana.[1464] The Wyandots[1465] have been treated, as affording a type for a short study of tribal society, by Major Powell in the Bureau of Ethnology, First Report.[1466] G. Gale’s Upper Mississippi (Chicago, 1867) gives us a condensed summary of the tribes of that region, and Miss Fletcher’s Report will help us for all this territory. Use can be also made of Caleb Atwater’s Indians of the Northwest, or a Tour to Prairie du Chien (Columbus, 1850). Dr. John G. Shea and others have used the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society to make known their studies of the tribes of that State.[1467] One of the most readable studies of the Indians in the neighborhood of Lake Superior is John G. Kohl’s Kitchi-Gami (1860). The authorities on the Black Hawk war throw light on the Sac and Fox tribes.[1468] Pilling’s Bibliography of the Siouan Languages (1887) affords the readiest key to the mass of books about the Sioux or Dacotah stocks from the time of Hennepin and the early adventurers in the Missouri Valley. The travellers Carver and Catlin are of importance here. Mrs. Eastman’s Dacotah, or life and legends of the Sioux (1849) is an excellent book that has not yet lost its value; and the same can be said of Francis Parkman’s California and the Oregon Trail (N. Y., 1849), which shows that historian’s earliest experience of the wild camp life. Miss Alice C. Fletcher is the latest investigator of their present life.[1469] Of the Crows we have some occasional accounts like Mrs. Margaret J. Carrington’s Absaraka.[1470] On the Modocs we have J. Miller’s Life among the Modocs (London, 1873). J. O. Dorsey has given us a paper on the Omaha sociology in the Third Rept. Bureau of Ethnology (p. 205); and we may add to this some account in the Transactions (vol. i.) of the Nebraska State Hist. Society, and a tract by Miss Fletcher on the Omaha tribe of Indians in Nebraska (Washington, 1885). The Pawnees have been described by J. B. Dunbar in the Mag. Amer. Hist. (vols. iv., v., viii., ix.) The Ojibways have had two native historians,—Geo. Copway’s Traditional Hist. of the Ojibway Nation (London, 1850), and Peter Jones’ Hist. of the Ojibway Indians, with special reference to their conversion to Christianity (London, 1861). The Minnesota Hist. Soc. Collections (vol. v.) contain other historical accounts by Wm. W. Warren and by Edw. D. Neill,—the latter touching their connection with the fur-traders. Miss Fletcher’s Report (1888) will supplement all these accounts of the aborigines of this region.