In 1775, a piece of startling news reached the Ohio Valley towns of the Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Wyandot nations. The thirteen tribes of Americans had held a great council in Philadelphia and formed a confederacy to drive their Father, King George, from North America. The unbelievable part of this story was not that the Americans had rebelled against King George. It was that they were trying to cooperate.
The Indians were careful observers of the Anglo-Americans who had been pushing west of the Appalachian Mountains since the 1740s. The Natives had names for the two tribes they knew best. One tribe was generally called by an Iroquois name: Onas. It meant “bird quill,” and it was a multilingual pun. It referred partly to the quill pens these mercantile people used as their primary tool of interaction with the Indians. The tribe of Onas seemed to solve everything by writing: account books, ledgers, and treaties, mainly. But it also referred to the name of their founder, William Penn. They called themselves Penn-sylvanians.1
The other tribe’s name, also rendered in Iroquois, was Ashalacoa. It meant “Long Knife.” This, too, was a pun. In a 1684 council, the Iroquois asked these people the meaning of their leader’s name, which was Governor Howard. The Dutch translator improvised. Observing that “Howard” sounded much like the Dutch word for “cutlass,” he translated it that way, and the name stuck. It also had a more straightforward meaning. When wanting Indian land, the Long Knives did not reach for their pens, as Pennsylvanians did; they went straight for their swords. Their preferred method of interacting with others was military conquest. They called themselves Virginians.2
In 1774, the Ohio Valley tribes had looked on aghast as the Onas and Ashalacoa had fought a very peculiar war against one another over ownership of the town of Pittsburgh. It was a war that, like many frontier conflicts, had ended up with a good many Indians losing their lives. It had confirmed the Indian diagnosis that, as one Wyandot told a Virginian emissary in 1775, “the People of Virginia were a different and distinct Nation from the other Colonies.”3
The Indians were on to something. When we look at the record of what happened in Pittsburgh in 1774, it is impossible not to conclude that there were two strains of American culture represented there—cultures that were thrown into conflict by their different approaches to the issues of the frontier. The dispute between Pennsylvania and Virginia in 1774 is usually portrayed as a squabble over colonial boundaries that was settled by the extension of the Mason-Dixon line in 1780. But a closer look shows that the argument went far deeper. It was about social philosophy, the economics of the frontier, Indian relations, and the nature of the future society of the West. In fact, the Onas and Ashalacoa represented two different constructions of colonialism. It is a terrible oversimplification to imagine that American reactions to the frontier were monolithic or uniform. By looking at Pittsburgh in 1774, when the town and the fort became opposing headquarters of warring camps, we can start to tease apart the different threads of American frontier thought and behavior.
To call Pittsburgh in 1774 a “city” is to stretch the definition. It had sprung up at the intersection of several transportation routes. Not only did it lie where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers joined to form the Ohio (historically called “the Forks”), it also was at the terminus of two major land routes across the mountains from the east. It was thus a strategic site from both military and commercial perspectives.
In 1774 Pittsburgh was only twenty years old but had already been through two wars. It had nominally bounced back and forth between the control of Virginia, France, Britain, and Pennsylvania, although it was not ceded by any Indian tribe until 1769, and then only by the Iroquois, who conveniently did not live there. It was not the first trading town to be located near the source of the Ohio. As early as 1724 the Delaware town of Kittaning had been founded where a pack-horse route from the Susquehanna Valley met the Allegheny River about forty-five miles north of Pittsburgh. By 1731 there were at least nine towns around it, including three near the Forks—Chartier’s Town (Shawnee), Shannopin’s Town (Delaware), and Queen Aliquippa’s town (Seneca). After 1744, three more important towns would cluster at the northernmost curve of the Ohio, just thirty miles downstream from the Forks: Kuskuskies, Sauconk, and Logstown. The last, a multitribal emporium with a population between three thousand and four thousand in 1753, became the headquarters for the trading empire of George Croghan, an irrepressible Irish rogue who ran franchise posts all the way to Pickawillany on the western border of present Ohio. Pittsburgh eventually replaced all of these towns as a commercial hub after the French and Indian War.4
In its short history, the town’s heyday had been between 1758 and 1763, when the British Empire made a major infrastructure investment there in the form of Fort Pitt, one of three anchor posts of the British Army in the West. During its boom time as a garrison town, Pittsburgh contained (according to a census) 219 men, 75 women, and 38 children, living in 160 houses, although only 78 of these were substantial enough “to take notice of.” It was fueled by coal from a mine across the Monongahela River, where residents helped themselves by loading bags full and rolling them down the steep hill. There was a sawmill on a stream called Sawmill Run across the river, and a boatyard that in 1766 supplied over sixty-five barges for a single trading company. Pack horse trains shuttled constantly across the Appalachian Mountains delivering flour, rum, and butter, but locally produced beef, bread, mutton, veal, milk, venison, beans, turkeys, and bear grease—much of it delivered by nearby Indians—rounded out the diet. There was postal service to Philadelphia by horse, and a school with twenty “Schollars.” However, the town’s civility should not be overstated. James Kenny, a Quaker trader, complained that “So many Roberies [are] Commited here at Nights that all [the] Noise tends to keep me from Sleep.” Col. Henry Bouquet, the fort’s commandant, felt that the town was a bad influence on his soldiers. “This Place is Particularly infested with a number of Inhabitants the Scum of the neighboring Provinces who have no visible means to live, except a [trading] License, & [I] think it bad Consequence for the garrison.” He finally made the town off limits to his soldiers after dark.5
None of this lasted. First came the blow of Pontiac’s War in 1763, when the nearby tribes burned the town and besieged the fort; then came the 1772 closure of the town’s major employer, Fort Pitt, in a cost-cutting move by the British government. What remained in 1774 was a shadow of its former prosperity. But the fort’s closure was not as fatal a blow as might be supposed, since the town had always stood on two legs—military and commercial—and now it simply fell back on trade. David McClure, a missionary describing Pittsburgh in August of 1772, wrote, “It is the headquarters of Indian traders, & the resort of Indians of different & distant tribes, who come to exchange their peltry & furs for rum, blankets & ammunition etc. . . . The Village . . . consists of about 40 dwelling houses made of hewed logs & stands on the bank of the Monongehala. . . . The inhabitants of this place are very dissipated. They seem to feel themselves beyond the arm of government, & freed from the restraining influence of religion.”6
In what sense could Pittsburgh be called a city? Not physically: though laid out in 1765, its gridwork plan had scarcely filled in.7 Nor was it much of a concentration of population, except seasonally; and though it still had considerable shipbuilding, warehousing, and even retail businesses, these tended to wax and wane with the times. Yet it filled many of the functional roles of a city. It was a gathering place for workers—boatmen, laborers, hunters, artisans—seeking employment in the Allegheny and Ohio valleys, and adventurers needing to be outfitted. It was a transshipment point where manufactured goods from the east and frontier products from the west (skins, livestock, food, and furs) were brought, sorted, sold, and reshipped. It was a nascent financial center where small entrepreneurs, both Indian and white, went or sent to get credit. It was a diplomatic and political center where representatives gathered to resolve disputes and forge relationships. It was, in short, a place that existed to facilitate transitions between cultural, political, and economic worlds. Its lifeblood was in the flow between those worlds.
Another symptom of urbanism was that Pittsburgh was growing increasingly at odds with the countryside around it. After 1769, when the Treaty of Fort Stanwix ostensibly extinguished the Indian title to the slice of land between the Appalachians and the Ohio, a flood of Euro-American settlers and land speculators poured in. Pittsburgh was at the intersection of two streams of migration: one from Virginia via Braddock’s Road and one from eastern Pennsylvania along the Forbes Road. There is some evidence that the two groups had different ethnic compositions, with the Pennsylvanians being more diverse and Germanic, the Virginians being more homogeneous English and Celtic. But regardless of national origin, the newcomers brought values and interests quite different from those of the established residents of Pittsburgh. It was these uneasy neighbors who would come into violent conflict in 1774.8
There was one thing on which all Anglo-Americans around Pittsburgh agreed: they wanted to make money out of the West. They just wanted to do it in different ways.
Courtesy of Broadway, we all know that the farmer and the cowman can’t be friends. If someone ever writes a rollicking musical about the Ohio Valley frontier (and they have written musicals about stranger things), then we will all be able to hum a tune about a similar legendary frontier enmity, that of traders and settlers—or as they would have said in the eighteenth century, the sutler and the settler.
The first British North Americans to arrive in the Pittsburgh region were the sutlers, who came in the 1740s, pursuing their Shawnee and Delaware customers as the Indians moved west. By the 1770s the most successful of them—men like the brothers Richard and William Butler, John and George Gibson, John Anderson, and Aeneas McKay—formed a rough-cut commercial elite in the town. The organization of the Pittsburgh fur trade was similar to the Montreal fur trade at the same time: merchant importers in Philadelphia formed annual partnerships with western traders, with the merchants providing the capital and goods, and the traders in turn hiring boatmen, clerks, and translators to run the stores in the Indian towns. Each partnership, called an “adventure,” represented a separate shipment of goods and had its own books; the partnership was dissolved once the furs returned and the books were closed. A single merchant might be involved in several simultaneous adventures in different locations, and traders were continually reorganizing into new partnerships, so competitors one year might be partners the next. No one company dominated, but there was continual jostling for monopoly. The 1760s and 1770s saw a cutthroat competition between two Philadelphia merchant firms—the Quaker-Anglican partnership of Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan and a Jewish consortium including David and Moses Franks, Joseph Simon, Solomon and Andrew Levy, and Bernard and Michael Gratz.9
The commercial community of Pittsburgh was not all Pennsylvanian in origin, but their business ties were to Philadelphia, so their loyalties gravitated that way. But they had other loyalties as well, for these were men who existed on the Middle Ground, with one foot in the Indian community. That fact—and the power it gave them to interfere with imperial policy—earned them the opprobrium of officials such as Sir William Johnson and General Thomas Gage. The latter described them memorably as “a Sett of People . . . near as wild as the Country they go in, or the People they deal with, & by far more vicious & wicked.”10
As a reality check on Gage’s oft-quoted description, let us look at one example of a Pittsburgh trader, John Gibson. He was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was well educated by his French Huguenot mother; he spoke English, German, and French and was steeped in the classics. At age eighteen he ran off to join the British army, which brought him to Fort Pitt. After his discharge, Gibson stayed in the west to trade. In 1763, he was descending the Ohio in a canoe with two employees when they were captured by a Delaware war party that began executing the men by burning them at the stake one by one. When the twenty-three-year-old Gibson was the only one left, an elderly woman took pity and adopted him in place of her own dead son. He lived with his Delaware mother, learning the language and assisting the tribe by writing letters, till he was freed at the end of the war. But, like many prisoners, he had formed attachments in the Indian community, and he continued to live with them. By 1765 he was importing enough dry goods, hoes, spirits, and sugar from Philadelphia to require a pack train of forty-one horses and seven drivers. He married, strategically, a Shawnee woman whose sister was the wife of a prominent Mingo named Logan. David Jones, a missionary, wrote that Gibson was “a man both of sense and learning.” White Eyes, speaking for the Delaware, said, “We esteem him as one of ourselves.” Like others in the tradition of Onas, Gibson had successfully straddled the cultures, and earned respect in both.11
The Ashalacoa arrived a decade after the first traders, in 1754. True to Long Knife tradition, they first came on a military mission: to pick a fight with the French, a task at which they were wildly successful, since they managed to set off the global conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. But after 1769, a new wave of Long Knives arrived in search of land. This pre–Revolutionary War land rush was less about settlement than speculation. The main reason was the uncertainty of land titles. While the Fort Stanwix Treaty had ceded the land east and south of the Ohio, the Proclamation of 1763 was still in effect, making it technically illegal to settle west of the Appalachian Mountains. Even Pittsburgh was a squatter settlement, though the British Army needed the town so badly to serve the fort that they had reached a tortured compromise by allowing people to erect buildings there but forbidding them to sell or rent them. Starting in 1769, Pennsylvania created a land office to issue deeds in the so-called new purchase, but its authority was questioned by Virginia, as we will see. Moreover, a number of private land companies and individuals had claims, and were issuing rival deeds of unknown value. As a result, anyone who took up land there was doing it at his own risk—a state of legal limbo that attracted rootless young men and speculators, but not steady citizens.12
To these younger sons and aspiring immigrants, land ownership and sale was a more honorable means of achieving economic independence and self-determination than was trade. Landed estates represented a gentleman’s social status, personal honor, and public reputation, as mere commercial wealth never would. In a world where the vote was tied to land ownership, it was also enfranchisement. Land meant independence from the propertied oligarchs of the East, so it was inextricable from democratic ideologies. In the heated pre-Revolutionary political atmosphere, anyone who blocked universal access to land was suspected of tyrannical tendencies.13
The newcomers and the established residents of Pittsburgh—the settlers and the sutlers—had opposing interests. The traders made their living in a classic extractive industry, furs. The land-hunters sought to make money exploiting a frontier resource that did not fit so well into mercantilist theory, for land could not be shipped to Europe; the money was in shipping people to it. Britain adamantly opposed this reversal of the “proper” flow of commodities, which, instead of enriching the national treasury, only threatened to extract money and labor from Britain. The land-hunters also threatened the wildlife habitat and Indian customers that were necessary to the fur trade. They brought with them a tradition of hostility toward Indians. It was not just that the Indians possessed the land they wanted. Indian-hating in America was never simple, but in this instance it was particularly tied up in social and economic grievances against fellow whites.14 In one eloquent statement of their viewpoint, penned in 1764, Pennsylvania frontiersmen described how the British policy of appeasing the tribes, adopted after Pontiac’s War, together with the diplomatic policies of the colony’s Quaker leaders, came at the expense of poor whites on the frontiers. “The exorbitant Presents, and great Servility therein paid to Indians, have long been oppressive Grievances we have groaned under,” they wrote. Not only was “Publick Money lavishly prostituted . . . to protect his Majesty’s worst of Enemies . . . while at the same Time hundreds of poor distressed Families of his Majesty’s Subjects . . . were left to starve neglected.” They also watched “with Indignation” as Indians were “cherished and caressed as dearest Friends” while the “shocking Barbarities committed by Indians on His Majesty’s Subjects are covered over and excused under the charitable Term of this being their Method of making War.” To see a conspiracy in this toleration, they did not have to look farther than the merchant importers who profited from “allowing them [the Indians] a plenteous Trade of all kinds of Commodities.” The westerners saw themselves caught between wealthy, eastern elitists and “imbittered Enemies,” two groups in league to enrich one another at the expense of settlers.15
Figure 5.1. A map of Pittsburgh lies at the center of the war honors drawn by Delaware war chief Wingenund in 1775 to celebrate his role in the French and Indian and Pontiac’s wars. He depicted the town as a gridwork upriver from the fort at the forks of the rivers. Courtesy Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
In short, race hatred was a coded and socially sanctioned form of class hatred. Settlers hated Indians not just because they were savages, but because they were coddled by eastern elites.
In Pittsburgh, the corrupt alliance of wealth and savagery was embodied in the traders. They enriched the Indians beyond the means of many white frontiersmen. They supplied arms and ammunition to potential combatants. They were known to buy stolen horses from Indian raids on backcountry homes. But the issues that touched closest were ones of values. A trader’s success depended on tolerance for cultural interpenetration and interdependence. By blurring the boundaries, they opened themselves to suspicion of being race traitors, or “white Indians.” And then there was the stain of miscegenation. Missionary David McClure wrote, “The greater part of the Indian traders keep a squaw . . . as a temporary wife. Was sorry to find friend Gibson in the habit. . . . They allege the good policy of it, as necessary to a successful trade.”16 It was a custom of Indian society to which they had unapologetically adapted. But it threatened not just the cultural purity of European civilization, but the racial purity of whites, so it aroused a visceral response.
Figure 5.2. The alliance between merchant elites and Indian tribes was the target of this anti–fur trade political cartoon. German and Irish frontiersmen are forced to carry a rich Quaker merchant and a grinning Indian on their backs through scenes of carnage. The caption begins, “The German bleeds & bears ye furs of Quaker Lords and Savage Curs.” Courtesy The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
In 1774, the divided economic and social camps of Onas and Ashalacoa became mapped onto the colonial identities of Pennsylvania and Virginia, both of which claimed the Pittsburgh region. Contrary to many historians’ assumptions, colony of origin was not always a good predictor as to whether a given individual would end up on the Onas or Ashalacoa side. There were Pennsylvanian Long Knives and Virginian pen people. Nor did individuals always remain in the same camp over the course of the subsequent war. It was a conflict about social boundaries masquerading as colonial ones.17
The state seals of Pennsylvania and Virginia, both adopted around 1776, give a sense of their contrasting self-images. The central motif of the Pennsylvania state seal shows the sources of its prosperity: a shield holding a sailing ship, a plow, and three sheaves of wheat. The shield is framed by a stalk of Indian corn and an olive branch. The olive branch, of course, represents diplomacy and peace; the corn suggests who the diplomacy was aimed at.
The Virginia state seal gets right to the point: it shows a woman warrior in helmet, brandishing a sword and spear. She stands with her foot on the throat of a fallen adversary. The motto is “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (Thus Always to Tyrants).
The reality of the two colonies was as different as their logos. Pennsylvania was founded as a community of pacifist Quakers; Virginia was founded by a joint stock company. Pennsylvania’s economy was based on commerce and grain agriculture; Virginia’s was based on tobacco plantations tilled by slaves. Pennsylvania had the largest city in British North America; Virginia was almost entirely rural. Pennsylvania was the most prosperous of the thirteen colonies; Virginia’s economy was collapsing in an ecological catastrophe brought on by extractive agriculture, which had ruined the soil.18
In the 1770s, both colonies suffered from a sharp political divide between east and west. Migrants from Ireland and Scotland had fanned out to the western frontiers, giving the Appalachian valleys an underprivileged, Celtic flavor. Western settlers tended to gravitate toward Virginia. They moved there physically, in great numbers down the Shenandoah Valley, but also politically. Even though Piedmont and Appalachian Virginians were often at odds with the Anglican landed gentry of the Tidewater, both groups shared a clannish mindset and a martial tradition that the Quaker elite of Pennsylvania lacked.
The two colonies projected their own economic and historical traditions onto the West. In 1774, no one imagined that the settlement of the West would happen the way it actually did; instead, they assumed the method used in the East would be replicated. The King would grant tracts of land by charter to prominent individuals or companies that would undertake the expense, risk, and responsibility of peopling the land in an orderly fashion—providing surveys, deeds, town plans, courts, and so forth in exchange for the proceeds from land sales. Land companies from both Pennsylvania and Virginia vied for royal grants prior to the Revolution, but they did so in revealingly different ways. When Pennsylvanians campaigned for western development, they generally spoke of colonies. Their arguments stressed the benefit of an orderly and equitable process of settlement, in which the land company would provide civil administration until such time as the colonists were able to provide it for themselves. In their own eyes, they were going to be founding “new governments.” It reflected Pennsylvania’s founding by a religious community dedicated to social justice.19
When Virginians talked of western development, they spoke of companies. They stressed the enterprise, investments, and daring explorations of the company proprietors, and “the extension of Trade and the enlargement of the revenue” from opening the West to private sale and settlement. It reflected Virginia’s founding as a profit-making enterprise.20
The two colonies’ approaches to social organization on their own frontiers followed the same divergent pattern. As they expanded westward, both colonies organized newly settled territories into counties. The first thing Pennsylvania did when creating a new county was to establish a court system, and the highest officials were the magistrates. When organized in 1773, Westmoreland County (where Pittsburgh lay) had no county government or bureaucracy; all it had was a court, based in Hannastown, and a sheriff to do the court’s bidding. Virginia also had courts, of course; but the most important official in its western counties was the County Lieutenant, whose main role was command of the militia. When Virginia created West Augusta County in 1774 to challenge Pennsylvania’s claim to Pittsburgh, no court met for an entire year, but the county had an active militia and a Lieutenant from the outset. Pennsylvania, true to its pacifist origins, did not even have a formal militia system until 1777, when the Revolutionary War was two years old.21
The two colonies also had different approaches to distribution of power. This was seen most clearly in their policies toward land, the source of most wealth. The process for acquiring land in Pennsylvania was an egalitarian one, designed to discourage speculation and favor settlement by small farmers. New land claims were limited to three hundred acres. The cost of land was £5 per one hundred acres, payable at the time of purchase, to prevent large tracts from being assembled under pseudonyms with borrowed money. The procedures for getting a deed were complex and time-consuming. By contrast, Virginia’s land law had been designed to perpetuate the system of landholding practiced in that state, plantation agriculture. The normal limit of a claim was four hundred acres, but provisions were made for tracts of up to one thousand acres. The cost was ten shillings per one hundred acres—a tenth of Pennsylvania’s. The Virginia system was procedurally simpler, but made it easy for wealthy speculators, in collusion with county officials, to assemble large tracts into estates.22
The young land seekers, regardless of origin, gravitated to the Long Knife camp. A petition signed by 587 of them in May 1774 gave some of their reasons. These government-averse westerners complained that Pennsylvania’s taxes were too high, its officials too intrusive, and its system gave too much power to lawyers. On the other hand, they thought Pennsylvania wasn’t aggressive enough at enforcing security against the “faithless and barbarous natives.”23 On top of this, they preferred the Virginia land law. This last grievance is a little harder to understand, since on the face of it these young men of limited means should have benefited more from a system that distributed land fairly in small parcels to all, as Pennsylvania’s did. Instead, they opted for a land system that favored big winners and big losers—because, of course, they all thought they would be winners. Supporting Pennsylvania meant accepting a share of wealth and power equal to their neighbor’s. Supporting Virginia meant having an equal chance to strike it fabulously rich at their neighbor’s expense. So they sided with the system that would eventually lead to their own impoverishment and the enrichment of elites. You might call it the casino theory of economics.
In January 1774, there arrived in Pittsburgh a swashbuckling soldier of fortune named John Connolly, who was the agent of the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore. Connolly issued a proclamation. Pittsburgh, he declared, was not in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. It was in West Augusta County, Virginia, and he was there to take charge.
Connolly summoned the able-bodied men of Pittsburgh to assemble and form a militia. Naturally, Pennsylvania’s court officials showed up to intervene. Their leader was Arthur St. Clair, the county clerk—the same Arthur St. Clair who would later be governor of the Northwest Territory. He watched as eighty Virginians paraded through town shooting off their guns, then marched to the remains of Fort Pitt, where a cask of rum was opened and free booze offered to all. “This was a very effectual way of recruiting,” St. Clair remarked drily. He then ordered the sheriff to arrest Connolly and told the crowd to disperse. They did, but not before taking some potshots at a peaceable Indian village across the Allegheny River, greatly alarming the women and children there.24
But the problem was not so easily gotten rid of. Connolly was at heart a populist demagogue who appealed to the disenfranchised by demonizing their imagined enemies. Today he might be a talk show host; he had a pitch-perfect ear for inflammatory issues. He also had the gift of blarney, for he soon talked his way out of the Westmoreland County jail. Assembling a bodyguard of twenty men to prevent his re-arrest, he left for Virginia. On March 28 he was back with an armed party, and Pittsburgh then became “the scene of anarchy and confusion.”25
This time Connolly occupied the fort and raised a militia of “men without character and without fortune,” as one resident put it. When the Pennsylvania court dared to bring Connolly to trial for disturbing the peace, he showed up at the head of 150 armed men “with colors flying and . . . their swords drawn,” and proceeded to surround the courthouse. The Pennsylvania magistrates, thoroughly intimidated, allowed him to go free. Two days later he returned and arrested three of them, shipping them off to jail in Staunton, Virginia. Panic-stricken western Pennsylvanians worried that “their property, their liberty, and their lives, are at the mercy of a lawless desperate banditti!” “The militia here, by Conolly’s orders, shoot down the cattle, sheep and hogs, belonging to the inhabitants, as they please; they also press horses, and take by force any part of our property they think proper, and tell us that they have authority so to do.”26
There have been quite a few theories about what Connolly was up to, ranging from the international to the local. The Virginia Assembly suspected Lord Dunmore of sending Connolly to foment discord between the colonies to prevent them uniting in opposition to King George. This was probably true, but not the whole truth. The reason Dunmore gave—that he was defending Virginia’s charter boundaries against usurpation by Pennsylvania—was also partly true. Some historians have charged that it was all about land speculation—and indeed, Connolly’s invasion followed closely on the heels of a Pennsylvanian land company’s victory in securing royal assent to a land grant named “Vandalia,” just south of Pittsburgh. The major partners in the Vandalia Company were Pennsylvania fur traders, including John Gibson, George Croghan, and their merchant backers, Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. Their main rival was the Virginia-based Ohio Company, whose partners were prominent war veterans. The divisions between the warring land companies thus mirrored other divisions in Pittsburgh’s society.27
In Pittsburgh, Connolly’s victims were not chosen randomly. “Conolly told us that . . . he would not suffer one Pennsylvanian to live on this side the [Allegheny Mountains],” reported one resident. But in the Pittsburgh context, “Pennsylvanian” largely meant “Indian trader.” On June 18, Connolly issued a proclamation prohibiting trade with the Indians. It said, “Certain imprudent people continue to carry on a correspondence with, and supply the said enemies with dangerous commodities to the infinite prejudice of all his Majesty’s subjects.” It dawned on the Pennsylvanians that “the Virginians are determined to put a stop to the Indian trade with this Province”—which meant, in essence, putting a stop to Pittsburgh’s reason for being.28
None of this would have been possible if Connolly had not also trumped up an Indian war. The Pennsylvanians contended from the outset that “The Virginians in this part of the country seem determined to make war with the Indians,” but at first they could not imagine who would benefit from a war. Arthur St. Clair theorized that Connolly needed to concoct some “disturbances . . . that may give his manoeuvres the appearance of necessity,” but it took him a long time to realize that attacks on the Indians were designed to boomerang back on the traders. An Indian war also served Dunmore’s purposes. Back East, he was faced with the rebellion of the Virginia House of Burgesses over the British blockade of Boston. He needed to distract attention from Revolutionary issues and recoup his popularity. What better device than a war?29
The triggering event of the war, the Yellow Creek Massacre, has been endlessly dissected; but in the context of the division between the Americans, the Indians almost appear like surrogate victims.
In April 1774, a large camp of young Long Knives assembled at the mouth of the Kanawha River, intending to seek land down the Ohio; but false rumors that the Indians were on a rampage stopped them in their tracks. Eighty or ninety of them retreated to Wheeling, led by a man named Michael Cresap. There, an alarming letter arrived from John Connolly, warning the residents to protect themselves from Indian attack. One of the Long Knife mob, a twenty-one-year-old George Rogers Clark, later recalled, “A new post was planted . . . and war declared in the most solemn manner; and the same evening two scalps were brought into camp.”30
But the scalps did not belong to enemy combatants. They belonged to two Indian employees of traders Richard and William Butler who were on their way to the Scioto with a shipment of goods. The next day the Long Knives attacked a group of Shawnee and Delaware diplomats returning from peace talks in Pittsburgh, their canoes loaded with gifts from Pittsburgh’s traders. The atmosphere at Wheeling had become very volatile and ugly by now. The gang had grown to about 150 men when another set of canoes appeared on the river, led by two men who embodied everything the Long Knives abominated: John Gibson and a fellow trader, Matthew Elliott. Both were Pennsylvanians. Both were traders. Both were married to Indian women. Soon they were waylaid.31
Gibson later testified, “They behaved in the most disorderly manner, threatening to kill us, and saying the damned traders were worse than the Indians and ought to be killed. In the morning Captain Michael Cresap came to the camp. . . . he advised me by no means to think of proceeding any further, as he was convinced the present party would fall on and kill every Indian they met on the river.”32
The vigilantes could not kill Gibson without answering for it, so they selected a related target: the village of Mingo Indians at Yellow River, where Gibson’s Indian wife lived with her family. Around April 30, a number of them set up an ambush across the river from the village and lured some Indians over, including Gibson’s wife. She carried her infant daughter, Gibson’s child, on a cradleboard. After some preliminary socializing, the Long Knives sprang their trap. They killed at least nine people outright. But the most sadistic treatment was reserved for the woman who had dared to violate racial boundaries. As they were preparing to kill Gibson’s wife, she begged them to spare her child because “it was a Kin to themselves.” In answer, a man shot her in the forehead, severing the strap that held the baby’s cradleboard to her back. In an act of sexually charged rage, the men then mutilated her by cutting open her belly. They were preparing to dash her daughter’s brains out when they thought better of it, and decided to take the child hostage instead. She was eventually returned to Gibson, who raised her.33
It is hard to imagine that this was a conflict about colonial boundaries.
News of the atrocity spread quickly, and set off a panic-stricken exodus of settlers fearful of Indian retribution. But the greatest immediate danger was to around a hundred Pittsburgh traders and their employees who were scattered through the Indian villages. “God knows what fate they have met with,” one Pennsylvanian wrote. “We hope they are still alive.” But the Indians’ response made a sharp distinction between the Onas and Ashalacoa. “The Indians . . . say, that they will not kill or touch a Pennsylvanian,” said one report. Proof came when Richard Butler and some of his employees arrived from the west in ten canoes piled high with furs, escorted by three Shawnees. They brought the news that the rest of the traders were coming overland with two hundred horses loaded with furs, all protected by a Shawnee guard.34
Connolly’s response was revealing: he sent a troop of militia to arrest the Shawnees who had escorted Butler to safety. The traders were forewarned, and managed to smuggle the Indians across the river and out of Connolly’s clutches. Arthur St. Clair expressed the collective Pennsylvanian outrage: “honour, generosity, gratitude, every manly principle, must have prompted them to be kind, and afford protection to those poor savages, who had risked their own lives to preserve the lives and property of their fellow-subjects.” On almost the same day, Dunmore was writing Connolly to have his militia attack: “make as many prisoners as they can of women and children; and should you be so fortunate as to reduce those savages to sue for peace, I would not grant it to them on any terms, till they were effectually chastised for their insolence.”35
The traders were not pacifists by any means, and they contemplated armed resistance to Connolly. But they had no support from Philadelphia, and minimal support from Pennsylvanian settlers. By July, St. Clair was convinced that “the trading people must leave Pittsburgh.” Many did so that summer, moving up the Allegheny River to Kittaning for their own safety and the safety of their customers. Those who remained endured harassment from the Long Knives. In one incident, the Delaware businessman White Eyes, who maintained a house in the town, returned from a diplomatic mission to find his property broken into and £30 of goods stolen—enough to buy six hundred acres of land. The remnant of Pittsburgh’s trading community finally erected a stockade around the town—not to protect it from the Indians, but from the Virginians in the fort. In September Lord Dunmore arrived with an army to put down his imaginary Indian uprising—for, apart from the Min-goes affected by Yellow Creek, the western Indians were still protesting that they were at peace. Nevertheless, Dunmore launched an invasion of Ohio, and finally goaded them into defending themselves.36
By the end of 1774, Pittsburgh had gone through a kind of ideological purge. Connolly and his extremists had driven out many of the moderates, the mediators, and the compromisers, who tended to be the more prosperous and commercially oriented frontiersmen. The Long Knives had transformed Pittsburgh from a frontier town that grew wealthy as a hub of cross-cultural connections into one that defined itself in polar opposition to the Indian country and its inhabitants. It became a place where vigilantes felt free to make death threats against visiting Indian diplomats, and where Indian property was no longer safe. That transition happened in other frontier cities, but rarely so quickly or so violently.
If we left the story there, the implication would be that America had made a fateful transition from one method of interacting with the frontier to another. But in fact, the forces of Onas made a counterstrike using their own characteristic weapon, the pen. The only reason that Dunmore’s War was remembered in later years was because it produced a masterpiece of American literature that was reprinted in magazines all across Europe, quoted by Thomas Jefferson to prove the native genius of the New World, reprinted in McGuffy’s Readers throughout the nineteenth century, and recited by generations of schoolchildren. That work was the speech delivered by the Mingo chief Logan, lamenting the massacre in which his family had perished. What is less well known is that the speech was originally delivered not to Dunmore, but to John Gibson, Logan’s brother-in-law and just as much a victim of the Yellow Creek atrocity as Logan himself. When it was delivered to Dunmore, electrifying the gathered officers, it was not Logan speaking, but Gibson. And so Gibson’s dead wife, whose name is not even recorded, achieved a belated moral victory. The immortal speech was a collaboration of two men her death had brought together in grief, a true product of the Middle Ground.37
Eric Hinderaker has written about Ohio Valley history as a succession of colonial models: an empire of trade, an empire of land, and an empire of liberty.38 In one sense the events of 1774 were a transition from one imperial model to another. But the triumph of the Long Knives did not wipe out the older model. By 1775 Pittsburgh was once again hosting a great multitribal council in which diplomats from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia strove to keep the Indians neutral in the new conflict against King George. The purge of Pittsburgh could not last because it was not in the nature of a city to be a monoculture. The frontier needed such a place of intersections, where contradictions and conflicting views could play out. As long as that need existed, no side could permanently win Pittsburgh.
The subsequent history of the West continued the dialog (or dialectic) between the Onas and Ashalacoa traditions. One of the enduring contradictions of United States Indian policy was that we never chose between the two approaches. Rather, we chose both—both the pen and the sword, both treaties and military conquest, both assimilation and separatism. As a result, we have had a bewildering and often hypocritical relationship to our First Peoples. As it turns out, they have been telling us the reason for quite some time.
