America’s most infamous war is the one we call “Civil.” After its brutal conclusion, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman told the citizens of the united Republic, in a speech to school kids, that war is all hell. The chronology of American history is usually depicted as a sequence of these hellacious episodes. Just as the history of the biosphere is revealed by the fossil record—communities of intermingling species interrupted by periodic mass extinctions—we trace our cultural inheritance by narratives of combat that interrupt periods of “peace.”
In this chapter I intend to show that this history of human warfare has some of the same characteristics as the “warfare” between species that we see in nature. That is to say, war is an inevitable feature of all populations. If we view wars as the culmination of incompatible uses or acquisition of resources, it’s easy to understand their inevitability in the course of human events. Just as populations in an ecosystem are thrust together in competition for limited resources (food, nesting sites, home ranges, and so on), human populations eventually intrude on each other as their numbers increase. Nations experience destabilization when this happens to their people, often resulting in destabilization of populations that were once in equilibrium.
None of us were actually present during these conflicts of old, yet we still align ourselves with one side or another. We know who the “good guys” were, at least according to our own historical circumstances. We can make a list of the “bad guys’” deplorable traits.
Conventional warfare tends to mimic some trends seen in wild populations. For instance, many human conflicts can be reduced to wars over resource utilization (think of oil in the Middle East). But human wars differ from population wars in nature because they are predicated as much on ideology as on natural resources (even though wars over oil have raged for decades, the political justification for entering the conflicts has centered on democracy, communism, or some religious doctrine). Ideas can spread like an infectious disease. Although this may sound like a poetic lyric, in fact thoughts are transmitted in culture just as biological traits are passed from one generation to the next. These phenomena simply use different mechanisms of replication and transmission. In the case of organismic traits, genes are the units of replication, and they are passed from parent to offspring. In the case of ideas or ideologies, symbols (words, gestures, rituals, and the like) are the mechanism of replication, and they can be passed from parent to offspring or from any two members of the same culture. Even though it can spread out of control, ideology is manageable to some degree, and therefore we have the potential to alleviate much human suffering.
Ideas spread quickly in our modern industrialized society: new ways of advertising, new products, and new behaviors, some useful, and some not. Our culture—like most populations’—is constantly changing. I like to believe that I can choose to ignore these changes and remain unaffected by them, but if they are too persistent (for instance, the use of the word “dude” or the belief that a moderate candidate is better than my favorite polarized one), I find myself “going with the flow” of things. We live in a culture of material upgrades that favor novelty over necessity. Most of us are aware on some level that these improvements exist simply to get us to spend more money rather than dramatically improve our lives. However, it’s hard to resist the perceived excitement that comes with these purchases. Some people have to upgrade their perfectly functional smartphone as soon as a new model comes out. My weakness is tractors: I’ve owned five different ones in the last four years. My friends laugh when I explain how they each serve distinct functions, but I find it easy to justify the variety to myself.
I try to avoid the majority of movies, gossip magazines, and TV shows that dominate our culture because of their sheer, overwhelming banality. But the truth is that I sometimes get sucked into watching or reading them too; Justin Bieber, the Kardashians, Gordon Ramsay, the Bachelor, or the Bachelorette—it depresses me that I know who these people are. We are lured into reading about or watching them, not because they have anything at all to teach us about living a healthy or logical life, but simply because they have become part of our culture.
Regardless of the rational or intellectual efforts to resist them, fads, trends, and pop culture seem almost impervious to reason, and they quickly “go viral” and infect our daily lives. Some of them are quickly forgotten, like a flare-up of an infectious disease. But others persist longer and can become ingrained in the teaching and routines of our society. Think of the ways conversations have been altered, for instance, by the ubiquitous use of cell phones and tablets. Sure, they are good for communicating at a distance. But my daughter and her friends use them to communicate with each other even when they are in the same room! Often they are talking to one another and at the same time engaged in chatting to a third party via text on their phones. They don’t even look at one another during conversations. Likewise, when I lecture, many students stare at their laptop screens, never making eye contact with me. I know that they are typing notes on the subject material, but I also know they are simultaneously browsing other things online and probably, like my daughter and her friends, engaged in multiple conversations. In the recent past such behavior might have come across as rude—even in the 1980s and 1990s, all eyes were on the lecturer—but this has become standard behavior in our modern, electronically connected society. It’s all justified by the ideal of a connected social network and the ideology that computers are the best tools for a modern education and thus for the improvement of young people’s lives.
Although it’s debatable that computers have helped all citizens get smarter, the example serves to show that new societal norms can arise quickly. Once they do so, it becomes increasingly difficult to debate their appropriateness. These behaviors become tacitly accepted as more and more people engage in them. It’s this unquestioned, ritualistic, habitual behavior that further validates the ideology.
We don’t often think of war in terms of habitual or unquestioned behavior. Wars are supposedly carefully constructed political affairs, passionately deliberated, tightly constrained, and purposeful. Can we really see human wars in this light? Or are they better viewed as ideology gone awry?
The intellectual justification for war seems almost as important in human affairs as does the need for resources. This might be due to the anthropological tenet, mentioned earlier, that humans can be considered half biology and half culture. War is founded on principles of ideology perhaps because of our deep-seated need to act justifiably, in other words to behave in accordance with our culture. But in this chapter I’d like to address the possibility that we might also view warfare in a different light, as a by-product of the deeper biological imperative—population growth.
The geographical spread of people and their ways of life ultimately puts strains on basic environmental needs. Politicians have historically ignored this obvious reality. Perhaps this is because they are “political animals,” and their focus on ideology fans the flame of their public support. But perhaps it is more important to acknowledge that scarce resources often spark the initial conflagration.
The default intellectual position taken by most people is that resources are scarce, and competition determines who gets what. This is based on an ideology informed by Darwinism that originated during the nineteenth century, as we will see in chapter 8. Today it has become tacit: “Without [the] struggle for existence, the agent of the selective process in the state of nature would vanish.”110 The idea here is that selection removes the unfit. But the facts of history trump the ideology. No empire or force for “good” has ever successfully eliminated a population of “evildoers.” The populations we claim to have vanquished are still with us today and contributing to our society in ways that are usually unacknowledged. Perhaps the real “hell” of war is that you can never really win one.
What we usually think of as “vanquished” populations are really just groups of people much reduced in number and influence. But it should be remembered that populations, once established, have a strong tendency to persist. From infectious bacteria to predatory mammals, ancient enemies to modern crime organizations, populations tend to stick around, exert a continuing influence on our day-to-day existence, and lie in wait for circumstances to change. Once populations are established they are very hard to eradicate; they assimilate with more populous groups and new equilibria become the norm. This is true on a microscopic scale, as we saw in the previous chapters, and also on a macroscopic human scale as seen, for instance, in the complex historical accounts of regional “first contacts” between Native Americans and Europeans.
If we want to consider the human costs of population wars, then there is no better place to look than the turbulent and violent history of New York State, specifically the upstate region around the Finger Lakes.
In the centuries after the first contact between Europeans and Indians, settlers streamed into the seemingly underpopulated regions of New York, valleys now known by the modern names Hudson, Delaware, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and the central part of the state—the Finger Lakes region. The area around modern-day Buffalo was sometimes referred to as the Niagara Frontier. Early Europeans saw plenty of potential in these places: lots of seemingly underutilized land, timber to build with, and an abundance of game. European settlers observed what they considered an alien population, and judged them by their own standards of civilization or success—while the native people, the Iroquois, similarly judged the Europeans to be the strange aliens. The Europeans generally failed to see that the Iroquois actually had a well-established civilization that operated under clear social strictures. They were oblivious to the fact that the Iroquois carefully monitored and utilized the wilderness.
Many male Iroquois despised farming, seeing it as woman’s work; instead they hunted and foraged in the woods. They were careful to hunt within reason, leaving enough deer to maintain the herd population. They were, in fact, stewards of the lands that settlers saw as an unmanaged wilderness. Their preferred way of life supported fewer people than intensive agriculture would allow, but they accepted this trade-off in order to maintain a way of life that they preferred. The Indian nations didn’t consider themselves the owners of the land, but each tribe had agreed-upon home ranges. This philosophy was so different from how the settlers viewed the land that it was nearly impossible for either population (Indian or white) to understand the other’s perspective. The settlers saw the Iroquois as lazy savages who were too indolent to make the most of their verdant land. When the Iroquois eventually made land deals with the settlers, they assumed that the Europeans understood that their new property came with an obligation to assist the Iroquois with food (and eventually rum) in perpetuity, and (in most cases) that the land was being leased rather than sold. This fundamental misunderstanding caused perpetual social and political problems.
At first the Iroquois Confederacy benefited from “middleman” status between their Indian neighbors in Canada and the Europeans—France to the north, Britain to the south. Their geographical location meant that they were literally in the middle of two distinct imperial conflicts that bled over to the New World from Europe. As the British and French Empires grew hungrier for the territory and natural resources of North America, the Iroquois found themselves in a geopolitical dilemma. The French concentrated their efforts along the northern bank of the St. Lawrence River, starting in the seventeenth century, establishing trading posts that became towns, such as Montreal, Tadoussac, Trois-Rivières, and Quebec. The English acquired Fort Orange, New York, (later called Albany), an important trading post and later diplomatic center on the Hudson River, from the Dutch in the seventeenth century.
The Iroquois were then one group of five nations that made up only a portion of the large mosaic of ethnologically distinct native groups throughout the Great Lakes and northeastern parts of the New World.111 Though numbering fewer than twelve thousand or so individuals around the time of first contact with Europeans in the 1530s, the Iroquois somehow were able to control the region east of Lake Michigan by decimating or displacing their surrounding tribes and wresting territory from the Hurons, who numbered perhaps one hundred thousand and previously controlled the St. Lawrence–Ottawa Rivers and the Ohio to Upper Mississippi River trade routes. After this successful conquest, the Iroquois nation expanded into the region of the St. Lawrence, where they met resistance from the mighty Algonquians. In the time of Jacques Cartier’s three voyages up the St. Lawrence to Quebec and Montreal (1530s), the settlements had Algonquian names. But by the time Samuel de Champlain arrived (1603), those same towns had Iroquois names. But this was not to last. The Iroquois, in fact, were in the process of retreating and consolidating their small forces in the heartland of New York State, and neighboring tribes cheered when Champlain killed two Iroquois chiefs at Lake George in 1609. This event was inauspicious, casting a dark pall over French relations with the Iroquois for the remainder of the seventeenth century.
The Iroquois, constantly in a cycle of military advances and retreats with respect to neighboring tribes, became the geographically most significant North American group to be in contact with Europeans from vastly different backgrounds—English, French, and Dutch—who settled the various riverine arteries into the nascent American landscape (the St. Lawrence, Susquehanna, Allegheny, Delaware, and Hudson Rivers). They became dependent upon European trade goods—guns and powder from the Dutch, fishhooks, knives, and other metal from the French, alcohol from the English—and they created in the Europeans an equal dependence on the furs they could provide through subjugating their neighbors who had access to prime fur-trapping habitat. The Iroquois were ferocious in defense of their status as intermediaries. Trade was crucial to their long-term success.
Trade, however, then as now, is resource dependent. In order to have any sway over political affairs, the Iroquois knew that they had to produce fur for their European trading partners at Fort Orange and other posts down the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna. Throughout the 1600s they brutalized their neighboring nations to the north (Hurons particularly), intercepted and robbed fur-laden Ottawa flotillas bound for European markets, and stole whatever they could from weaker neighbors because they could not produce enough fur themselves. The prime trapping habitats were all in Canada, lands occupied by Algonquian nations. French and English traders could go directly to these people for goods, but it was the desperate goal of the Iroquois to make sure that they had to pass through Iroquois lands to do so. Sometimes this meant expanding into territories of neighboring nations. Aggression between Indian nations was driven by the same motives as that between Indians and European powers. As we’ve seen throughout this book, resource limitation and habitat utilization are the underpinning of population wars.
By 1684, the English, at war in Europe with the French, could not provide documents to justify their occupation of the Iroquois territory. The French, however, had produced the treaty of 1624, signed by the Iroquois and Champlain, allowing France access to Iroquois territory.112 Although they allowed passage of traders, in reality the Iroquois didn’t want any permanent European presence in their land—they were hostile to any attempted posts—because such posts would eliminate them as middlemen.113 Tribes or families who were able to find a position between groups—that is, middlemen—benefited throughout this period of history. The Iroquois recognized that there was often a lucrative space between two or more groups who—whether because of politics, location, or language—were unable to communicate or interact directly. They had to adapt as the population dynamics shifted. Political or cultural upheaval can be bloody and painful, but it can also create opportunities for populations who are willing to embrace change and take advantage of those opportunities. This is true across the entire spectrum of life, from humans to bacteria. The population that persists is the one that is willing to adapt quickly to a new equilibrium of coexistence. But sometimes adaptation comes with tragic loss of life.
The Indian tribes who lived in the Northeast have often been characterized as warlike. However, this is a misconception. Modern scholars believe that warfare was not as common or as deadly as the early historians suggested. A group known as the “Neutral nation” lived west of the Niagara River, grew tobacco, and enjoyed a land of plenty—fish, game, and boatloads of beaver. They also had a source of flint to supply the growing numbers of guns that made their way into the region from Fort Orange. This tribe remained neutral between the Iroquois to their east and the Hurons to their north, who hated the Iroquois. The Neutrals derived their wealth and prosperity from acting as middlemen between the suppliers of fur (Huron) and the buyers of fur and flints (Iroquois). They didn’t dare trade directly with the French, for doing so would throw off the carefully established trade equilibrium set up by their suppliers, the mighty Huron nation. It would do them no good to fight with either Huron or Iroquois for direct access to European trade centers at Albany or Montreal. Like so many Indian nations, the Neutrals’ prosperity and freedom were tied to trade relations and deeply ingrained traditions of conduct between producing nations and consumers. According to the historian George Hunt, we should not marvel at this peaceful situation, for it was common, not rare. Neutrality in trade was the norm in North America, rather than warfare:
The Seneca, eastern neighbors of the Neutrals, were completely at peace with the Hurons until after 1639, and as they were the most numerous and most powerful of the Iroquois cantons, and as the Hurons outnumbered the Neutrals three to one, an assault upon either would have been a piece of unparalleled stupidity.… For either Hurons or Iroquois to have forced a belligerent status upon the Neutrals would have meant one more enemy for the nation foolish enough to do so. For the Neutrals to have gone to war would have meant participation in a terrible struggle which did not concern them. Therefore, they stayed home … traded their flint, their tobacco, and their furs to the Hurons, and lived at peace and at ease.114
In the 1600s the Algonquian tribes in Canada derived all their wealth from the French, who collected goods from all of Upper Canada and had free trade relations with numerous groups at Quebec, Tadoussac, and Montreal. The English and Dutch, meanwhile, received goods from Canada only by trading with intermediaries, principally the Iroquois, who controlled the valleys and waterways of upstate New York. By the middle of the seventeenth century the English took over Dutch Fort Orange, on the Hudson, while the French controlled the forts on the St. Lawrence drainage farther north. The Iroquois and Hurons ended up bitter rivals because each wanted to protect their exclusive trade relations with Europeans.
Hurons traded far and wide throughout the northern Great Lakes and protected their monopoly on goods produced by the Neutral nation and Petun (corn and tobacco producers) by preventing the French from going directly to them. As middlemen for furs from the West and the French in the East, as well as true middlemen with other tribes, the Huron were vulnerable in the 1600s. Their basic sustenance was all imported: Fish came from Nippissing who traveled to upper Lake Superior in winters, fur came from the Ottawa farther east, and corn came from the Neutrals and Petun. Over time Huron agricultural production waned. Since they depended so much on imports for their basic sustenance items, Huron starved by the thousands, while losing few in actual battles, when the Iroquois stormed in (in 1649) and took away their economic viability as direct suppliers to the French.
This disruption was economically and culturally motivated rather than a war of righteous ideology. The Iroquois wanted the riches that French ships brought from Europe, and they saw most of the best merchandise going to the Hurons. A lot of French traders, however, dealt directly with the Iroquois in the 1630s. Iroquois tried to establish peace treaties from time to time that outlined the terms of trade. The deadly skirmish of Champlain in 1609 was not a lasting strain on the trade relations between the French and Iroquois as much as it was an impediment to the good will and trust between the two nations. Necessity and angling for exclusivity drove much of the contact between Europeans and Native Americans. Furthermore, the French intervened in attempts by the Iroquois to negotiate peace with the Huron for fear that furs would pass through Iroquois to the Dutch at Fort Orange.115
There was much meddling. A French Jesuit missionary, Father Isaac Jogues, was sent to live among Mohawk Iroquois in 1646. His main goal was to persuade the Iroquois to forbid upper nations from using Iroquois lands as passage to Fort Orange so that the French could keep all the upper nations’ goods for themselves. The Iroquois were most interested in trade, not bloodshed. If not for the French intervening for their own benefit, relations between Iroquois and other tribes might have reached an equilibrium perhaps more similar to that of the Neutrals and Petun with their surrounding nations.116 The Iroquois raiding of trade canoes on the St. Lawrence River increased in 1641 and 1642, when they realized that Huron trade goods were going to the French, and the French were disproportionately meting out the best goods to nations other than the Iroquois. Inevitably the Dutch traded guns liberally with the Iroquois, and by 1649 the Iroquois took to annihilating the Hurons freely, out of their envy of Huron relations with the French.117
Hence the imagery of Native Americans as “warlike savages” is part of a false narrative, serving only to characterize their behavior as evil in order to justify an effort to root out and ultimately extinguish it—as if the vanquishing of a population might erase the existence of evil in the world. The correct narrative comes from the understanding that all populations are subject to basic environmental necessities. Humans are economic beings, which means that our actions at the population level are guided ultimately by resource utilization. When we meddle in economics through political or military actions, tragic consequences arise in the form of suffering and bloodshed.
The Iroquois traditionally took prisoners rather than kill all the members of enemy nations. By this tactic the Huron population became devoid of warriors soon after their defeat at the hands of the Iroquois. Despite this, however, the numerous wars waged by the Iroquois throughout the seventeenth century resulted in numerous losses to their warriors. Their Huron enemies, although originally a nomadic nation, were either killed or adopted into Iroquois families that had lost warriors in battle. Other Hurons dispersed and were incorporated into tribes farther west. Still others relocated around the growing towns of the St. Lawrence River—Montreal, Quebec, and Trois-Rivières—where they were baptized and became known as French-Iroquois (later métis). Assimilation was the natural and intended result of warfare between the Iroquois and its “enemies.” Warriors often had numerous wives, some from raids on other nations.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Algonquian and Iroquois, were tired of fighting each other, and the French wanted to facilitate friendly relations in the continuing interest of securing New France as a “land of humanity and peace in a world of cruelty and violence.”118 A tree was planted in Montreal during what came to be called the Tree of Peace Ceremony. This grand summer event was attended by roughly three thousand French and Indian men, women, and children from thirty-nine different nations. Montreal (founded in 1642) was the westernmost European settlement in the New World at the time. With roughly two thousand permanent inhabitants in 1701, it was a bustling town whose shops were filled each summer with visiting Indians from numerous nations eager to exchange their furs for metal goods, gunpowder, and hats. On this particular day, the host city for the ceremony saw Indians from both the Algonquian and Iroquoian nations and others assembled in droves from locales as distant as the Mississippi River. The governor-general of New France at this time was Louis-Hector de Callière, and he presided over the treaty negotiation alongside Philippe de Rigand Vaudreuil, the future governor of Canada. They sat regally perched on a vast open plain alongside the St. Lawrence River, where French officials had built a covered platform to receive all those who wished to speak. One after another, Indian leaders spoke, shared the calumet (peace pipe), and signed the treaty that was presented to them by Callière.
The “tree of peace” became a metaphor in the native culture of many nations who attended the treaty signing in Montreal on August 4, 1701. Shortly thereafter Vaudreuil secretly negotiated a peace between France and the English of New York, agreeing to refrain from attacking each other. In this way the shade from the tree of peace also covered New York.119 The lasting importance of the Tree of Peace Ceremony has been summarized thus: “It was an incredibly resonant symbol and metaphor for coexistence. It structured the ways that Iroquois, French, British, and Algonquians spoke to one another in the colonial era and it remains to this day the symbol of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.120
The relationships between the various Indian nations are a good example of a central truth about human population wars. The end result of war is never complete annihilation of the enemy. A population maybe temporarily subjugated, but it will rarely be destroyed—and it’s foolish to think of this kind of destruction as the most desirable outcome. Instead it is wiser to accept the reality: that at some point in the future the so-called defeated population will remain as survivors and fellow citizens. The “enemy” does not exist in a vacuum. The best we can hope for is that the “victors” in a war might negotiate the terms of the future coexistence.
If a war is costly (in lives and money), then it seems most prudent to foster a mutually beneficial arrangement for all populations involved. The Iroquois did this by marrying the women of enemies, and adopting the defeated warriors and children into their tribes to replace their own dead warriors, a tradition called “mourning wars” or “mourning rituals.”121 By doing this they replenished and strengthened their own populations and limited the chances that their former enemy would try to destroy them once again. The upswing of the mourning wars was that tribal populations became amalgamations of individuals from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.122
It’s a simple lesson and one that the Iroquois understood: Accept that you can’t completely destroy your enemies. In practical modern terms we can use this strategy as a deterrent to warfare before the conflict ensues. I don’t mean to romanticize the actions of the Iroquois; they were often vicious and cruel. However, I admire their grasp of the realities of population wars. The Iroquois understood the pointlessness of a scorched-earth approach against other Indian nations. Instead they adopted a harsh but pragmatic philosophy toward vanquished populations: Assimilate the members with potential value, kill the ones, perhaps, who are determined to kill you, and move forward from there. The dispersion of the Hurons, following the swift and unexpected attack of Iroquois on their towns in 1649, brought them into contact with many a neighboring nation. By 1650 the remaining Hurons who had not starved or succumbed to the elements or disease became incorporated into other tribes. The Huron people’s lifestyle and livelihood were so changed that they were scarcely recognizable as a separate nation any longer. Rather they became an assimilated people distributed across a vast stretch of geography, melding their cultural heritage with those of the various tribes who accepted them.
The Neutrals likewise lost their homeland and were dispersed due to Iroquois raids around this time. Mohawk and Seneca joined forces, and six hundred of them stormed a Neutral town in 1651. Of the sixteen hundred inhabitants, most of the able-bodied fled in panic, while the old, the infants, and the infirm were killed on the spot. Eight hundred Neutrals retreated west to an island near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, and some of them went south to meld with the Catawba tribes in Carolina. The year 1652 was the final blow to the Neutral nation. They became amalgamated with their enemy tribes, just like those who once called themselves Huron.
In 1654 the Erie nation succumbed in a similar manner after a band of seven hundred Iroquois warriors attacked them in their principal town southeast of Lake Erie. Many were enslaved. Most, however, simply moved away to join other tribes, and the Erie, as a recognizable nation of their own, existed no longer. They melded with other Iroquois over time. Some were adopted in mourning rituals by families as far away as Montreal. Some formed new towns and became known as the Black Minqua of the upper Ohio River.
It’s hard to visualize how small bands of Iroquois fighters—akin to guerrilla warriors—using tactics such as the pillaging of canoes filled with trade goods, or the raiding of towns, could have been such a thorn in the side of an empire as important as that of France. But we must remember that in the seventeenth century fur from North America was as valuable as any commodity we can imagine. France’s ability to procure such goods, and trade them with other European countries that had posts in the New World (such as the Dutch or English, for example), or to transport them directly back to home ports in France, was the true measure of the nation’s influence and political power. It seems strange that a simple commodity like beaver fur could destabilize and even destroy Indian nations and lead to seemingly endless bloodshed. However, we should bear in mind that future historians may look at our current geopolitical population wars and shake their heads in bewilderment that such a primitive and unsustainable source of energy as crude oil could cause such suffering and misery.
Reading the history of Iroquois warfare makes it clear why the region between the Finger Lakes of New York State and the prairies of Wisconsin and Illinois was so unpopulated by 1650, and remains so to this day. By the 1650s a great geographic divide was in place. The canoe-bearing tribes of the East, master traders and trappers (including the Iroquois) on the one hand, and the hunters and rice gatherers of the West who had fled their homelands in Michigan and the southern Lake Erie shore to settle in Wisconsin (including the Sauk and the “Fire Nation” Potowatomi) on the other. Between them lay the vast Michigan Peninsula and the Great Lakes shorelines leading to western New York State, all of which were virtually uninhabited. The tribes formerly living there dispersed because they feared incursions by the Iroquois from the East. Most who weren’t assimilated into the Iroquois settled in Wisconsin by 1650.123
The region of upstate New York, specifically the Finger Lakes region, was a land of dense forest and wetlands, crisscrossed by moccasin trails and sparsely populated by humans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not until the Erie Canal was opened in 1827 did a wave of settlement and industry flow through and begin to increase the human population of this region. The easy passage from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes afforded by the canal provided a new option for European immigrants: settlement of lands farther west, on the shores of the western Great Lakes. Some European immigrants stayed in New York, settling along the Erie Canal. But the vast majority bypassed the former Iroquois lands of the Finger Lakes and western New York, never leaving the boat until they reached the nascent cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Milwaukee. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles of forest, marsh, and grassland remained untouched between those places. It is therefore not hard to understand why today, despite having all the creature comforts and utilities of modern life, western New York remains one of the least populated regions in the eastern United States.
And yet, aside from the terror induced by Iroquois raiding parties of the previous century, there seems to be another, equally convincing, argument for why these areas south of the Great Lakes and the Michigan Peninsula became so depopulated: regional depletion of beaver. Upstate New York was devoid of commercial quantities of beaver by the 1640s, and the beaver populations of the Michigan Peninsula met this same fate by the 1670s. By then the vast majority of beaver trade was in the Illinois country (an Indian nation occupying most of present-day Illinois). Iroquois had to roam widely to procure beaver. The region around Green Bay, Wisconsin, was a major trading post for numerous nations from the North and South, with tens of thousands of Indians and traders making seasonal visits there. Most of the furs at these events came from Canada or Illinois. Farther east was Iroquoia, whose borders included Fort Orange on the Hudson, Montreal to the north, and the Delaware and Susquehanna Valleys to the south. Iroquois had better access to European ports (Montreal, New York City, Philadelphia, and the Maryland/Virginia ports), but without a stable supply of fur in their own territory, the privileged geographical position of the Iroquois was moot with respect to trade advantage. Hence fur to the Iroquois was analogous to our modern-day dependence on fossil fuels. The lack of domestic supply required them to travel far and wide in search of suppliers, and to deliver their goods to customers. The Iroquois homeland therefore had no sites that became major trade centers that would grow into major cities.
By 1677 the French—particularly during Réné-Robert de La Salle’s expedition to the Mississippi River—built special boats to travel to the Indian trading posts (like the one at Green Bay) to load up with fur. No longer did the Indians have to travel with flotillas to the French; now the French came to the Indians. Thus the Iroquois could not intercept other tribes’ flotillas. This era was “a new phase of traffic, the actual transportation of furs on a great scale” due to the French construction of cargo boats such as La Salle’s Griffon, a forty-five-ton bark (three-masted sailing ship) launched near the Niagara River in 1679. By the 1680s the Iroquois were no longer supplying the majority of beaver pelts. Fully two-thirds of the supply going to France came from the Ottawa nation north of Montreal and Quebec.
A major geopolitical shift took place in 1665, when Louis XIV sent soldiers to New France (the Carignan-Salières Regiment), they defeated the Mohawk Iroquois in battle, and the rest of the Iroquois made peace with France. After 1667 the Iroquois split up, many going north to settle near Montreal and follow the French lifestyle to some degree, while the other groups followed English ways and settled towns farther south. The Mohawk came to be one of the groups that settled near French missions along the St. Lawrence River, where they were converted to Christianity by Jesuits and became autonomous residents of New France. The raids on villages now ceased for a time, and a period of prosperity in trade and commercial exploitation resulted. Unfortunately however, alcohol and disease had begun taking a heavy toll on the Indians of the New World.
It is hard to generalize about the political will of the Iroquois population. Early writers of American history observed that they were a nation in constant flux. A fundamental economic need drove their most obvious activity: they coveted the furs that the Huron traded to the French at Montreal and Three Rivers (Trois-Rivières). Their aboriginal political institutions were based on values unlike those we take for granted today; so judging them as seekers of peace or warlike “barbarians” in the 1600s and before can be done only through the lens of ethnocentrism. Since the casualties of their wars were generally few, and their customs in warfare included adoption and forced assimilation of prisoners, it’s hard to paint them as barbaric. One thing is certain; they had a uniquely advantageous circumstance in the history of the New World.
In terms of military advantage, any European nation of the 1600s, looking to expand its empire in North America, would covet the Iroquois homeland. They occupied a position of strength through their military tactics, agile command of the water highways (rivers and lakes) of the Northeast and upper Midwest, and territorial control over the headwaters of the farthest reaching drainages on the continent (the Mississippi, Susquehanna, and St. Lawrence). From the major ports on the Eastern Seaboard—where all European nations entered North America—to the valuable interior headwaters, all nations had to pass through Iroquoia. Because of this, war between them and Europeans was inevitable based solely on the expansionist ethic that drove nearly all Western empires. But the French, who made it their goal to deal directly with the Iroquois in building New France, failed to occupy Iroquoia and failed to subdue or to exterminate them. The English and the Dutch fared no better in the early years of contact.
By the start of the eighteenth century the Iroquois had endured nearly two hundred years of contact with Europeans. They had persisted through countless rounds of trade, military skirmishes, and political engagements with foreign empires and neighboring tribes. Despite these challenges they were not in any meaningful way a colonized people.124 And yet their home range was shrinking as European settlers encroached on its borders. Even though France was expelled from most of Iroquoia after 1760 (when British flags were hoisted over Montreal, marking the birth of modern Canada), what was to become the United States already had a citizenry active in horticulture, clearing forests, and settling the backcountry that previously was Iroquois hunting grounds. The settlers didn’t understand that the Iroquois were, ecologically speaking, previously in harmonious equilibrium with the land, in the sense that they had reached a carrying capacity that sustained their population size.
Many scholars believe that the administrators of the empire back in Paris were just not dedicated enough to oversee the affairs of New France because they had more pressing concerns on the European continent. England, however, invested more of its manpower in military and emigration throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than did France. The settlers in the eighteenth century were predominantly Anglo-Saxon and, by the Revolutionary War, they found themselves fighting for the right to live peaceably on the land their grandparents had come to cultivate, under a new flag, and against the native Iroquois who had no “mother country” or European empire left to aid their defense.
The story of pre-Revolutionary New York is interesting both for its own sake, and for what it can teach us about just how delicate the balance can be between human populations. It’s important to remember that despite some bloody interactions, there had been a long period in which the main participants more or less got along with one another in peaceful coexistence. When one of the first bloody encounters occurred, it nearly jeopardized the potential for friendly relations between the French and Iroquois for a century—the killing of two Iroquois chiefs by Champlain in 1609 mentioned earlier.
In the century and a half that followed, the lands around my house, like most of the American Indian homelands, were increasingly being visited, hunted, and settled by a mix of different ethnic and political groups from Europe. European settlers and frontiersmen, trappers and farmers, lived for many generations in homesteads that were scattered throughout Indian territory, interacting with the tribes and nations of Indians who had their own governments and expectations from political agreements. But there were other factions as well. Adventurous farmers and homesteaders from Germany, Sweden, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg all contributed to the complex mosaic of human relations before and during the Revolutionary War. It’s easy to forget that Europeans had been settling in this Indian backcountry for nearly two hundred years by the time Washington was inaugurated. The Indians, British, and various other settlers weren’t necessarily friends, but they had achieved a sort of equilibrium with one another.
For decades prior, the English had had a more respectful relationship with the Iroquois in New York than did their French counterparts. In 1734 Britain named Sir William Johnson the superintendent of Indian affairs in New York. Johnson was an Irish emigrant who inherited a vast estate from his uncle in the Mohawk Valley near present-day Florida, New York. The behavior of Johnson (the most important representative of the British Empire in the region) toward the Indian natives shows how his political methods won the hearts and minds of the Iroquois. This excerpt from an important nineteenth-century book on the history of New York reveals clues of cultural assimilation that were highly significant in this period of history:
He appears to have possessed the rare faculty of thoroughly adapting himself to surrounding circumstances, and … ingratiating himself in the favor of those with whom he was brought in contact. He could conform to all requirements, and was particularly happy in making himself beloved by all sorts of people. With his Dutch neighbors he would smoke his pipe and drink his flip [a kind of eggnog], as the incidents of frontier life or the prospects of the settlements were discussed, while, if occasion required, he could sustain his part in the most genteel company. With the Indians he was equally at home. He soon acquired their language and spoke it with great fluency. Their habits and peculiarities he studied, their wants he anticipated, and by a wise course he secured their confidence and an ascendancy over them which has scarcely a parallel in history. He is said to have possessed a hardy vigorous constitution, a strong coarse mind, unsusceptible to the finer feelings and “unconfined by those moral restraints which bridle men of tender conscience,” he here saw the path open to wealth and distinction and determined to make the most of his opportunity. He often donned the Indian dress, out of compliment to his dusky friends, and at his mansion they were always welcome guests. Frequently when they came to consult him on some important matter, they made his house and grounds their home. He had on the Mohawk river two spacious residences known as Johnson Hall and Johnson Castle. Returning from their summer excursions and exchanging their furs for firearms and ammunition, the Indians used to spend several days at the castle when the family and domestics were at the Hall. There they were all liberally entertained by Sir William and 500 of them have been known, for nights together, after drinking pretty freely, to lie around him on the ground while he was the only white person in a house containing great quantities of everything that was to them valuable or desirable.125
What is left out of this account is the fact that Johnson fathered eight children with a woman, Molly (sometimes referred to as Mary) Brant,126 a Mohawk Indian, whom he took as a common-law wife after the death of his first wife, a German woman named Catherine Weisenberg. Molly lived with Sir William at the palatial Johnson Hall, and they raised their children there together.
It should come as no surprise, then, due to a long tradition of shared respect and friendship instilled by Sir William Johnson—especially during the French and Indian War—that a significant faction of the Iroquois Confederacy sided with the British in the Revolutionary War.127
After William Johnson died in 1774, his son-in-law Guy Johnson (who was also Sir William’s nephew) took over his estate and was eventually granted his father-in-law’s superintendent position. Alas, Sir Guy lacked his uncle’s subtle genius for connecting with the Iroquois. The Iroquois felt a strong sense of loyalty to the Johnson family, but Sir Guy did little to earn their continuing regard. His primary focus was on solidifying his family’s power as the go-between for the British government and the Iroquois.
The most important character to emerge around this time was not a Johnson but rather Joseph Brant, a younger brother of Molly. Brant had been taken under the wing of Sir William and sent to school in Connecticut to live among Europeans and learn their ways. Afterward he returned to the Mohawk Valley to live near his sister at Johnson Hall, and work alongside Sir William. By doing so he garnered much respect among all Indians and impressed the British officials as well. Eventually he would become secretary to the British superintendent of Indian affairs.
Brant was a physically impressive and handsome man. There are several surviving oil paintings and drawings of him, probably because he presented such a striking and unusual figure. He dressed in a blend of European and Iroquois styles, and by all accounts he could move easily between the two worlds. When the Revolutionary War turned against the English and Iroquois alliance, he traveled to London in 1776 to plead the Iroquois case in front of the “Great Father,” King George III. There he was received by sophisticated society and interviewed by the great British diarist (and Samuel Johnson’s biographer) James Boswell. Brant seemed the perfect example of an assimilated man. He retained all the Indianhood of his Iroquois origins while accepting the knowledge and traditions of his adopted British culture. He was confident, bold, charismatic, and a passionate and wise leader. Brant had no hesitation in taking up arms against the Continental Army, detesting the city-dwelling colonists and many rural settlers alike. He was egged on by Sir Guy and his brother-in-law John (Sir William’s son with Catherine), who displayed little of their father’s humanistic spirit, restraint, and deliberating wisdom. Brant’s excellent skill at oratory helped to garner much support in manpower and sentiment among his people for the British cause. It was he, after all, who would come face-to-face with Washington’s dutiful Gen. John Sullivan in the opening battle of the bloody march through Iroquoia in 1779.
Brant grew increasingly resentful of the intrusions by the incipient American settlers and their appointed military officials. With increasing encouragement from the Johnsons, he traveled throughout Iroquoia as a go-between communicating the covert wishes of British Loyalists. The Johnson brothers—the cowards of this episode—later retreated to Canada when the fighting intensified, but continued to meddle through Brant and interfere with any attempts for peace between the British settlements of New York, the Indians, and the young American military.
The Indians, British, and American colonials met at various councils as the Revolutionary War picked up steam, and they all agreed that peace was preferable to war. One such meeting took place in Albany in 1775, another one in 1776 at German Flats, near Utica, and another one there as late as 1777. All these councils resulted in the sachems (tribal leaders) of the Six Nations proclaiming their desire for neutrality. The official resolution of the Indians, stated by the Mohawk sachem Little Abraham in 1775, was that the war between Britain and the colonies was a “family affair” and that therefore the Indians were content to sit by and watch them fight it out.
But neutrality was not easy to maintain in the face of bribery and promises of prosperity from the British. The Johnson family had such a powerful pull on the sentiments of the Iroquois that they could manipulate the entire Iroquois Confederacy through their loyal warrior-agent, Brant. The Johnsons were rich and influential among the Loyalist faction in North America, and they didn’t hesitate to assert their wishes on the malleable emotions of the Iroquois.128 Along with the promises of goods for all those who enlisted in the British army, a bounty was placed on every scalp brought in from the heads of settlers, colonials, and friends of the American Revolutionary cause.
The Battle of Oriskany took place in 1777 at a site just outside the bounds of today’s Finger Lakes region, about twenty miles east of Lake Oneida. This battle was considered one of the bloodiest contests in the Revolutionary War, and it highlights the splintering effects that the war had on the native populations. One faction of the Iroquois nation, the Seneca, lured and tricked into battle by the English, became loyal to the Crown afterward. Shortly after the battle another faction, comprised of the Oneida and Tuscarora, became loyal to the colonials. In other words, the Iroquois Confederacy, after 1777, became engaged in its own civil war as a result of other populations at war, namely European and colonials.
The English accomplished much of their treachery via the ranger divisions, bands of English fighters who would today be called military “advisers” sent in to battle zones to organize fighters into formal armed divisions. The Seneca were told by English rangers to come and observe the battle at Oriskany and enjoy the rout, but they were not encouraged to fight. Almost all men from Seneca towns near the battle site went to watch what they hoped would be an English slaughter of the colonial army. Instead they found themselves targets. The colonial force, led by Gen. Nicholas Herkimer with eight hundred men, engaged the band of rangers, led by Capt. John Butler (the Johnsons’ ally, in official military garb) and reinforced by Joseph Brant. Some of Herkimer’s men were Oneida warriors, and the Seneca, perceived by their brethren as supporting the enemy English, had to fight for their lives. The great loss of life to the Seneca created a desire for revenge and, alongside the already allied Mohawk led by Joseph Brant, they drew deeper toward English loyalty in the Revolutionary War.129
The settlements of the Finger Lakes region were essentially hung out to dry during the American Revolutionary War. Indians, colonials, and Europeans, tried to go about their day-to-day business of raising families, producing goods, and getting along as neighbors. But the fear of battles, raids on villages, or the risk of being singled out as belonging to “the enemy” made life unbearable, forcing many to evacuate their homesteads and villages for safer havens in the larger cities to the east.130 This rural backcountry, far away from the continental capitals, started out as a mélange of citizens primarily focused on the basics of subsistence farming, trapping, and survival. They would have followed the rituals of their Old World heritage, but they probably didn’t have a lot of time to think about the bigger political picture that was about to engulf them. Instead they were pawns in a global struggle of imperial power that stretched across the Atlantic Ocean.
When the French were in control of New France, roughly 1600 to 1760, they were more focused on the major waterways and were content to leave this region as hunting grounds and sacred territory for the Indians, occasionally allowing their Jesuits to penetrate and set up shop. In the late eighteenth century, the British, like the French, focused on their forts along the waterways: Niagara on the passage between the lakes, Oswego on Lake Ontario, and Stanwix on the Mohawk/Hudson drainage. The British encouraged local production of goods, and the king sanctioned the building of roads and waterways to connect the interior towns, much more so than did the French. But a significant change happened in the Revolutionary War. By desperately desiring the Indians’ assistance in their imperial affairs, they essentially abandoned their long-term imperial goal known as New England and America. After 150 years of intercourse between Europeans and natives, Britain turned its back on the settlers, and encouraged the Indians to brutalize settlements on the frontier that encroached on their turf.
British loyalists congregated around Fort Niagara, and Col. John Butler had a residence near the fort in 1777. He commanded a large body of British refugees, Tories who escaped or retreated from skirmishes farther east during the early years of the Revolutionary War. Joseph Brant fixed his residence at Lewiston, near Niagara, along with almost the entire population of the Mohawk tribe who had followed him there. From this location, on the border between Niagara Falls and the present-day city of Buffalo, Butler and Brant sent out predatory expeditions to the Mohawk and Susquehanna Valleys to pillage villages and murder European settlers who once lived in relative harmony with Indians in Iroquoia.
While concerted British military efforts were undertaken in 1777— to retake their now-occupied (by the Continental Army) stronghold in the Mohawk Valley, Fort Stanwix131—smaller raids were undertaken by Butler’s and Brant’s military expeditions. Now an official captain of the British military, Brant led his Mohawk warriors to sleeping villages and massacred women, children, and the elderly. Most of the fighting men of these towns had already shipped off to join Washington’s Continental Army. British soldiers and Indian warriors joined forces to lay siege to helpless settlements. One of the most outrageous of these raids was known as the Wyoming massacre, near present-day Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1778.
The British military brutally murdered English-speaking settler families simply because their settlements had been targeted for destruction. Some were murdered by their own family members who had taken off to join the Tory army. The Indians didn’t fare much better in this respect. These settlers were often mixed families, the children of Indians who had married Europeans. Indians in the British military killed their own kind if they were found living in settler’s villages. Brant and his men showed no mercy with their tomahawks and scalping knives. They followed an ancient tradition of brutalizing some of the defeated warriors and tortured them for days.
Such incidents illustrate a fundamental propensity of populations: They are thrust into upheaval at various stages of coexistence. When human populations commingle, a complex chain reaction ensues, resulting from geographic and environmental codependence, leading eventually to a mixing of ideology. A group of people who once shared core beliefs can be torn apart if some members adopt new ideas or beliefs about their place in the world. Some Iroquois warriors performed these grim deeds in part because they desperately wanted to prove their loyalty to the king and show that they were worthy of the gifts promised for their service. Others wanted revenge for losses in their tribes or families.
These kinds of backcountry hostilities were nothing new. They had been going on for decades as Europeans of German, Dutch, English, and Swedish origin settled lands bordering Iroquoia.132 Settlers’ lives were always dangerous; they knew that if the European and Indian cultures clashed, they might have to take up arms and fight as well. George Washington had a vested interest in the lands of the Ohio Valley, having surveyed and staked claims on huge tracts of that land as his own. Eventually he became the leader of a revolution, and would tolerate neither a British claim to control of those lands, nor Indian harassment of colonial settlers who might become productive tenants throughout the backcountry of the United States.
Washington’s army was battered, poor, and of low morale by 1778. Soldiers were unpaid, and most had left their families alone, some in the wilderness villages now beset by murderous Indians spurred on by the English military. Washington decided that his troops needed rest, and that the fall and winter of 1778 would be a time of relative calm as he deliberated and meditated on what to do as a punishment for the Indian attacks. During this period the commander came up with a new campaign. He believed that an offensive in the heart of Indian territory—that region between Lake Ontario and the Susquehanna drainage west to Ohio—would destroy the Six Nations and their homeland, and send them running to seek shelter with their masters at Fort Niagara. This in turn would strain the English army and neutralize its dominion over the wilderness regions of the Western frontier.
On February 25, 1779, Congress gave a direction to their commander in chief: “to take effective measures for the protection of the inhabitants (of the western frontier in New York and Pennsylvania) and chastisement of the savages.”133 It is worth noting, however, that Washington knew very few specifics about who the inhabitants were. Maps at the time showed almost no detail about the towns of the interior in upstate western New York except that it was the heartland of the Iroquois, and that many settlers’ villages existed there, which were beset by violence caused by the Indians.
Washington spent much of the winter of 1778 studying imprecise maps of Indian territory and reading reports that described Iroquoia. Orders were sent to General Horatio Gates to head the army for the expedition, but he refused, claiming that a younger man was needed to lead the war party (much to Washington’s displeasure). The command was handed to General Sullivan. It was agreed that a five thousand-man army be assembled and led into the heart of Iroquoia. Each volunteer who joined the march would be given Continental Army rations and a one-hundred-dollar bounty per Indian.
Two thousand men would assemble in the southern part of New York’s backcountry, along the present-day border of Pennsylvania at Tioga on the Susquehanna River drainage. Three thousand men would assemble in the north to block access along the Mohawk Valley, which drains to the east, toward Albany, thereby preventing a retreat of the enemy toward that city. The only path for the enemies’ retreat from this five-thousand-man march into Iroquoia was west toward Fort Niagara, which could then be taken by force by the Continental Army and New York militia.
According to Washington, the goals of this expedition didn’t even require a surrender at Fort Niagara. The mission was intended to “cut off those Indian nations, and to convince others that we have it in our power to carry the war into their own country, whenever they commence hostilities, it will be necessary that the blow should be sure and fatal, otherwise they will derive confidence from an ineffectual attempt, and become more insolent than before.”134 And furthermore the attack was to be waged against the Six Nations (Iroquois), their associates (British commanders and soldiers), and adherents (British Loyalists, and possibly French traders or translators as well). “The immediate object is their total destruction and devastation, and the capture of as many persons of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground, and prevent their planting more … and should be done in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” Washington told Sullivan that if the Iroquois were subdued and wanted to sue for peace, “You should encourage it, on condition that they will give some decisive evidence of their sincerity, by delivering up some of the principal instigators of their past hostilities into our hands—Butler, Brant, and the most mischievous of the Tories that have joined them.”135
And so commenced the first extermination campaign against human beings in American history. The major battle of the Sullivan expedition took place about twenty miles south of where I am now writing at my desk, at Newtown (today we call it Elmira). During my research for this chapter, I happened to be on tour in England with my band. One bright, sunny August morning I popped into a London used bookshop. In the history section were a few titles on the history of New York. Paging through the book that I subsequently purchased, an 1885 commemorative volume on the history of the Sullivan campaign, I read some grisly journal entries that detailed the killing of Indians in the Battle of Newtown, and the skinning of dead battle victims in the woods only miles from my house.136 It was a surreal moment for me, being in London and finding a very rare book that detailed little-known facts about the topography and physical features of the forests surrounding my home, the land with which I was so familiar. The geographical expanse of thirty-five hundred miles that separated me from my home on that day was analogous to the bewildering distance of disbelief that overcame me when I read the eyewitness accounts of atrocities that transpired there in historical times. These are tales not taught in American schools. I thought, Did I have to come to London to discover this?
Newtown sat on the bank of a major navigable river, the Chemung/Susquehanna, and it was a logical place for a battle. Boats of military supplies were shipped upstream from the Wyoming Valley (the home of present-day Scranton), where Sullivan had his headquarters in June 1779. After nearly three months of stagnation in Wyoming Valley—much of it spent waiting for basic supplies (a third of the fighting men who enlisted didn’t even have shirts on their backs)—Sullivan and his army marched north and west and built a fort in late August at Tioga, New York, about twenty miles downstream from Newtown. On August 22, Gen. James Clinton of the northern Continental Army, whose troops numbered roughly three thousand, met Sullivan’s army of nearly two thousand at this fort, later named Fort Sullivan.
With nearly five thousand men preparing to head into the heart of Iroquoia, British and Indian scouts were keen to pick a spot to engage the advancing American army. Newtown was just such a place. The British and Indian force had built breastworks that stretched more than a mile long and turned a settler’s house into a fort along the line.
On August 29, 1779, General Sullivan’s army marched toward Newtown and engaged the enemy. Among the 1,500 or so defenders of Iroquoia, roughly 250 were British military personnel, including the Johnsons, the Butlers (both General John and his son, Walter), and Joseph Brant, who led the roughly 1,200 Indian warriors into battle.
Drastically outnumbered, after a spirited fight lasting roughly six hours, the Indians and British fell back and scattered into the forest, retreating deeper into the Iroquois homeland. The tallies of the dead were less than twenty on the side of the Iroquois and British, and three on the American side. Wounded numbered less than fifty on both sides. During the retreat some wounded Indians were pursued by a detachment of Americans, and after about two miles they were left to die of their wounds sustained in battle. The vast majority of Iroquois and their British instigators withdrew northward, up the Catharine Valley toward Seneca Lake, and by the next morning arrived at the largest Indian town in the region, Catharine’s Town.
This was a pivotal moment in the history of America, but it’s unlikely that the participants fully understood how the last two centuries had led to this moment. The British and Iroquois had retreated first to a town that perfectly symbolizes the complex history of this region, and whose most famous inhabitant symbolizes the diversity of the American Indians of this region at this juncture in history. The town was called Catharine’s Town (sometimes called French Catharine’s Town, or by its Iroquoian name, variously spelled Gasheoquago, Sheoquaga, or She-Qua-Ga). Today it’s known as Montour Falls, New York. It was a clearing in the forest, roughly a hundred acres in size, sited along the flats of a rushing stream that today is prized and frequented by local fishermen. Much of the town was devoted to producing corn and beans, a surplus of which was supplied to, and subsidized by, the British to help with subsistence on the frontier.
Catharine’s Town was named after Catharine Montour, a multilingual Seneca “queen” whose husband was the most important Seneca chief, Thomas Hudson (or his Iroquois name, Telenemut). Catharine married the chief when she reached womanhood, and together they kept and sold horses. Maintaining her command of French and simultaneously learning Iroquoian languages throughout her life, she was admired as an orator and for her captivating personality, and had a great influence on the affairs of the tribe. Before the Revolutionary War, she and her husband were often invited to attend important gatherings in the homes of Philadelphia’s elite.
Catharine and her family were the end results of a complex story of cultural assimilation. The Montours were legendary among the French and Indians. They can be traced back to Isabel Montour, a woman whose parents were French (father) and Algonquian (mother). Such ancestry was fairly common in those days (a “race” known today as métis).137 Isabel was born around Trois-Rivière into a family whose wealth was built on the fur trade, facilitating agreements between French, Iroquoian, and Algonquian merchants. The métis could communicate comfortably with all three of these cultures and were naturally suited to earning their confidence. Their cultural assimilation paid off; families such as the Montours lived in the most comfortable houses in town and wore the finest clothing, which resembled European high fashion mixed with Native American styles and accessories.
Isabel Montour, a child of this cultural milieu, experienced all the luxuries and creature comforts of the highest society in New France for her first ten years. She was kidnapped, however, at the age of ten by a raiding party of Iroquois warriors, adopted, and taken to live among them.
The early 1700s were a time of active trade between Europeans and Iroquois, and Isabel was seen as a useful intermediary as she grew up. Speaking both Iroquoian, French, and Algonquian tongues, she became a valuable interpreter and respected member of her tribe. Eventually she entered the highest levels of European colonial society when she was hired as the personal interpreter for the governor of New York, Robert Hunter, in 1710. This job, and her reputation as a gracious intermediary, ingratiated the Montour name to the Iroquois for generations to come. Her granddaughter, Catharine, born to Isabel’s son, Andrew, continued the métis tradition of living in Indian villages and creating a culture of assimilation.
Having the genes of Algonquians and Europeans, and raised in the culture of the Iroquois with a strong command of French language and customs, the Montours and their heritage represent one of the best examples of human assimilation. Similar episodes of cultural and genetic mixing doubtlessly occurred time and again in the populating of the United States.
Historical records are vague, but the Montour descendants included daughters and sons, many of whom were important cultural go-betweens in Indian and European affairs. Serving equally important roles for Indian chiefs, European officials, and settlers alike, interpreters in the eighteenth-century were more than just linguistic specialists, they also acted as guides, advisers, escorts to important social gatherings, mediators, and negotiators. The Montour legacy is typical of many citizens of the North American population during this time who were neither purely European nor purely American Indian. It is a legacy that forms the core of the American identity.
Queen Catharine, the granddaughter of Isabel Montour, was greatly respected by her tribe, the Seneca. Catharine perpetuated a tradition of friendly relations between two cultures. She must have felt extreme dismay at the news of the advancing armies. As a true ambassador of goodwill between both European and American Indian culture, and as the inheritor of her father’s deep wishes for his children to live freely in both the white and Indian worlds, Catharine was now in peril of losing her status and legacy at the hands of the Americans. Having already lost her husband in battle in a skirmish with southern tribes years before, and having sons off in battle elsewhere on the frontier, she fled in advance of Sullivan’s army, and reached Fort Niagara, where she was well treated by the British.
In the hours before Sullivan and Clinton arrived at Catharine’s Town on September 2, 1779, British military advisers deliberated with Indian sachems there about the best course of action to take against the advancing Americans. Some wanted to fight, others wanted to retreat to Niagara. Many Iroquois were fearful; they had lost faith in the “Great Father” (The king of England), and they no longer believed that the English would take care of them after the war. They knew that they were in a dangerous position, no longer truly supported by their allies and vulnerable to being destroyed by their enemies. The American army was on its way to erase all their villages—by burning the crops and houses—and kill anyone who stood in the way. The Indian chiefs and British officers decided, in advance of Sullivan’s troops, that it was best to abandon Catharine’s Town and all others along the way and proceed with the British army to Fort Niagara (some 140 miles northwest), where they would be under the protection of the British fort.
When Sullivan’s army reached Catharine’s Town they found it abandoned. The only remaining resident of the town was an elderly Cayuga Indian woman who spoke of the deliberations between the English officers and the sachems from many Indian nations that occurred there the night before. The woman could not walk; she was described as more than seventy years old. Here the historical records contradict themselves: Some say that Sullivan destroyed the village and burned every last house, but left a suitable hut for the woman and provisioned her with food for a lengthy subsistence. Other records, however, state that two soldiers crept back, locked the old woman (in this version, with a teenage girl) in the hut, and set it on fire.
Having sent the enemy on a routed retreat, Sullivan’s passage through Iroquois country was a relatively easy march after the decisive battle of Newtown. This victory is a turning point in the Revolutionary War that is often overlooked. The Americans needed something to feel good about; their army was desperate in 1779. The soldiers’ morale was wretchedly low, and they were poor, tattered, and worn down by the long, slow grind of war. Sullivan’s campaign was the major effort of Washington’s army that year. Had they failed in their mission, British confidence in controlling the western frontier would have swelled, and the British bond with the Indian stewards of Iroquoia would have been unbreakable.
In short, the “progress” of the American enterprise might have failed utterly if Sullivan’s campaign had failed to reach its goal of subduing the British and Indians in the Iroquois backcountry. If the British had continued their incursions into the American backcountry at this time, the colonies might have been restricted to the cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Sullivan’s expedition is credited with “opening up” an area soon to become the main thoroughfare for the growing nation.138 It must be remembered that within fifty years of this campaign, the Erie Canal passed through the heartland of Iroquoia, bringing a flood of hopeful emigrants, a population as numerous as in any of the eastern cities, into the new nation’s “Midwest” to form the American industrial heartland—cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester.
The Iroquois lost relatively few warriors in this battle, yet they still fled in terror of Sullivan’s advancing army. They weren’t necessarily frightened for their own lives, but for the lives of their families and the welfare of their communities. Washington’s instructions to destroy the Iroquois homeland paid off. No crops were left standing; no house or hut escaped the torch of the American army. They extended their march throughout the Finger Lakes region, up the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, and westward to the Genesee Valley that leads to present-day Rochester.
By mid-September, Sullivan began his return march from the heart of Iroquoia. Having reached the most important Seneca villages in the Genesee Valley, Sullivan sent detachments southward on three separate warpaths, all to join up with his own troops at their original starting point near Fort Sullivan (Tioga, New York). On their southward journey the troops found and torched no fewer than thirty additional Indian villages and hundreds of acres of their cornfields and peach orchards (this was in addition to the destruction of between five and ten other villages, including Catharine’s Town, destroyed on the northward march). Each one of the villages was abandoned by the time the detachments from Sullivan’s army arrived. Barring one unexpected attack on one of the scouting parties, the entire expedition after Newtown was essentially free of casualties.
According to the historian A. T. Norton (1879), many of the towns Sullivan’s party came upon had houses that were framed in a European manner, unlike the typical, traditional Iroquois “longhouse.” The influence of European carpenters had by this time made its way deep into the interior of Indian territory. Although no mention was made of white settlers among these houses, Sullivan did encounter white captives on his march, brought into Iroquois country from raids on settlers’ villages. Their forced assimilation ended as soon as Indian scouts brought the news of the Newtown battle. The Indians dispersed days in advance of Sullivan’s party, leaving white captives and white children behind for Sullivan’s men to discover in various stages of health.
When the expedition was over, in October 1779, Sullivan was congratulated formally in a letter from George Washington to the entire Continental Army, which read:
The Commander-in-chief has now the pleasure of congratulating the army on the complete and full success of Maj. Gen. Sullivan, and the troops under his command, against the Seneca and other tribes of the Six Nations, as a just and necessary punishment for their wanton depredations, their unparalleled and innumerable cruelties, their deafness to all remonstrances and entreaty, and their perseverance in the most horrid acts of barbarity. Forty of their towns have been reduced to ashes, some of them large and commodious; that of the Genesee alone containing one hundred and twenty-eight houses. Their crops of corn have been entirely destroyed, which, by estimation it is said would have provided 160,000 bushels, besides large quantities of vegetables of various kinds. Their whole country has been overrun and laid waste, and they themselves compelled to place their security in a precipitate flight to the British fortress at Niagara. And the whole of this has been done with the loss of less than forty men on our part, including the killed, wounded, captured, and those who died natural deaths.139
Sullivan himself was content with the success of his expedition, believing that he and his men had covered “every creek and river and the whole country explored in search of Indian settlements … except one town situated near the Alleghany, about 58 miles (southwest of Genesee) there is not a single town left in the country of the Five Nations.”140
The congratulations, however, proved premature. Now more embittered than ever at the loss of their villages, the Indians resumed raids on border towns. In their own summary of the Sullivan expedition, the Iroquois chiefs assured their British allies that they considered themselves very much an intact fighting force: “We do not look upon ourselves as defeated for we have never fought.”141 They vowed to exact revenge on the whites when the harsh winter was over.
By the next spring, 1780, many Iroquois refugees left the protection of the British fort at Niagara and set out across their former home range to resettle towns and villages that were destroyed.142 Returning home after the war, Catharine continued her residency at a reinvigorated Catharine’s Town until her death sometime in the early years of the nineteenth century. It is said that she met with Louis Philippe, the future French king, and a historical marker today commemorates his visit to Montour Falls in 1797.143 Today Catharine’s memorial grave site lies only a mile from the historical marker (her actual grave site is unknown). No roads lead to this spot tucked away in a deep forest clearing; It is only accessible by hiking trail. A moss-covered stone monument can be found there, engraved with Iroquoian symbols. The translation reads: “Every one of you always remember this.” As moving as these words are, the memorial site itself is the most important thing symbolized here: Catharine’s story is one of countless pieces of historical evidence, scattered throughout the American landscape, that demonstrate the complexity of cultural assimilation.
It’s important to pause here for a moment and remember that this often forgotten episode of American history—the fighting in New York, 1779—represents perfectly the complexity and undeniable blending of traits seen in all population wars. All of the interactions between English and French empires in the New World involved nations or people whose heritage was not European. Many of the outstanding characters in this chapter, such as the Brants, Johnsons, and Montours, were of mixed parentage or were themselves parents of multiethnic families. It is furthermore well-known—although tangential to our story here—that at least one of our founding fathers had children with non-European mothers.144
These examples should not be seen as remarkable or unique. From the population perspective, they should be regarded as normal; the natural progression, if you will, of what happens to populations that come into contact with other populations. Traditional human warfare brings with it numerous unpleasant (and hopefully unnecessary in the future) side effects. But one unavoidable conclusion from this or any historical survey of human conflict is that the end result produces a commingled human population.
Sadly, the nineteenth century is also characterized by forced captivity of American Indians on reservations. In New York, most notably, is the large Iroquois community at Buffalo Creek (along today’s Buffalo River) which began as a forty-nine-thousand-acre tract of Seneca land, settled by roughly one thousand refugees from the war. This community continued the traditions of their Iroquois people, holding annual councils around a fire where sachems from all across the land assembled to unify decisions for the national interest. Eventually this council fire was moved back to its original (and current) location on the land of the Onondaga people, just south of present-day Syracuse, New York. Many of the inhabitants of Buffalo Creek, however, were forced to relocate farther west in 1838 during President Andrew Jackson’s Indian-removal program.
Not all Iroquois, however, were content to rebuild their old towns. Some had had enough fighting and moved to Canada, where Joseph Brant negotiated for a large land grant along the Grand River in Ontario. Today that land grant still remains, and a branch of the Iroquois nation, the Six Nations Reserve, lives there still. Other warriors, however, preferred to exact revenge on the Americans after Sullivan’s campaign. These fighters became tools of the British, who used the seething resentment of the defeated Indians to fuel their imperial cause.
The Tories orchestrated raids throughout the backcountry and the Iroquois-British forces attacked towns in the Mohawk and Susquehanna Valleys. These raids destroyed roughly one thousand homes, one thousand barns, and six hundred thousand bushels of grain. The back-and-forth cycle of raid and retribution stopped only because the British had larger problems. The Revolutionary War was coming to an end due to events near the major cities farther east, which caused a withdrawal of Continental Army and British troops from Iroquoia. Finally, violence in the backcountry ceased for a time. Indeed, by the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which limited the support that the British were allowed to offer the Iroquois, the Six Nations of Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, and Tuscarora were essentially on their own. Unfortunately most of their heartland had been laid waste.
The ancient country of the Six Nations, the residence of their ancestors, from the time far beyond their earliest traditions, was included in the boundary granted to Americans.145
Human populations follow the same principle as those in nature: All populations inherit the fallout from their ancestors and create new relations among old templates. Populations are amalgamations of history and can only be appreciated in the context of that ancient narrative, lest we trivialize them and shortchange their significance. If, for instance, we think it is important to understand American history, then starting the tale at the Battle of Lexington seems an arbitrary decision. Just as trying to understand the causes of a flu epidemic is shortsighted without the knowledge of evolutionary history and the relationships of organisms involved in its transmission. The French were the first Europeans to make contact with the Indian nations in the Northeast. When the British pushed back the French, they became inheritors of an already long history of contact between Native Americans and Europeans, circumstances that were put in place by New France in the two centuries prior to the Treaty of Montreal in 1760. Instead of acting like good stewards of coexistence, the English often treated the Indians as enemies. When American colonists inherited this same attitude after the Revolutionary War, they proceeded to spend the next century attempting the futile act of extermination. Today we can look back in anger at such atrocities.
The original American Indian population is changed but not vanquished. The Six Nations are a larger population now than at any previous point in history. They take part in, and contribute to, many cultural norms that transcend any particular ethnic group, such as modern education, entertainment, and consumerism, activities that can be characterized simply as the modern industrialized way of life for all humans. In many instances American Indians blend this modernism with preservation and continuation of their original cultural traditions. Some nations have become wealthy from owning and operating casinos.
Current social problems of modern America, such as poverty and alcoholism, also afflict many people on reservations. These problems, however, are being countered by increases in available cash from gambling profits and other sources, money that is redistributed to build infrastructure, health-care facilities, cultural museums, and schools for the members of the tribal nation. More families are taking advantage of the American Indian College Fund, and other university programs that provide scholarships for Native American students. More universities than ever before have curricula devoted to Native American history and culture. Cornell University, for example, has an American Indian Program with its own devoted residence hall and administration building (the building name is Akwe:kon), purpose-built to celebrate American Indian heritage. Their mission is “to develop new generations of educated Native and non-Native peoples who will contemplate, study and contribute to the building of Nation and community in Native America.146
Although it’s easy to argue that the American Indians as a whole are not equal in social status to many Caucasian subsets of our population, they are a far cry from being exterminated. In fact, suffering from poverty, disease, lack of education, and drug and alcohol addiction is on the increase for all groups of modern humans, and this is perhaps the most unfortunate result of population growth. If we care to only focus on one aspect of human life, the absolute number of suffering individuals, we encounter an inescapable truth, and one of the recurring themes of this book: As populations grow, the amount of conflict and suffering is inevitable. Therefore it should be our primary goal, as an assimilated group of humans arriving here from disparate historical trajectories and ethnic heritages, to alleviate the ravages of population wars as best we can in the interest of reducing suffering while increasing the longevity of our species. As a preliminary prerequisite to achieve these ends, the narrative of war, justified by the improper characterization of populations, must be changed.