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Fort Stanwix, 1768

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, held at present-day Rome, New York, in 1768 was the biggest Indian treaty council and the biggest land cession in colonial America. For two weeks, three thousand Indians talked, ate, and drank with Crown agents; delegates from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia; merchants; various interested parties; and assorted hangers-on. When it was over, the British gave the Indians twenty boatloads of goods and £10,000 in cash; the Indians gave the British millions of acres of land in the Ohio Valley that they claimed but did not occupy.1 Ostensibly carried out to ensure an orderly movement of a boundary line dividing Indians and colonists, the Treaty of Stanwix instead turned the ceded lands into a racial killing ground, dismantled the world that both sets of signatories hoped to preserve, and rendered the Ohio River a battle line that Indians fought to defend and whites to breach for almost thirty years.

Searching for a Boundary

After the Peace of Montreal in 1701, the Iroquois negotiated the treacherous waters of international, intercolonial, and intertribal competition by playing off rival powers and asserting their primacy in intertribal affairs at colonial conferences. By offering each colonial power the possibility of allegiance but never totally committing to such allegiance, they maintained their independence from European control while simultaneously maintaining access to European goods.2 By claiming sovereignty over peoples who inhabited lands where their war parties had ranged in the seventeenth century, Iroquois leaders created a mythology of conquest and domination that the British bought into and that allowed the Six Nations to negotiate away other peoples’ lands in their dealings with the British colonies. At the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744, for example, Iroquois delegates ceded title to a vast territory in the interior, lands occupied by other Indian nations. They would do the same thing at Fort Stanwix, but that would be the last time.

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FIGURE 2.1 Sir William Johnson. Copy after a lost portrait painted by Thomas McIlworth at Johnson Hall in 1763. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

The Iroquois held a preeminent position in British-Indian relations, and the Mohawks in particular enjoyed a privileged role, in large part due to their relations with Sir William Johnson (see figure 2.1). Johnson had migrated from Ireland and settled in the Mohawk Valley in 1738. Starting out as an Indian trader, he developed close ties with the Mohawk community at Canajoharie, became a prosperous merchant and landlord, and expanded his trading ties westward. He presided over an Anglo-Irish-Iroquois household and took readily to Indian ways. As early as 1746, he rode into a treaty conference in Albany “dressed and painted after the Manner of an Indian War Captain.” He participated in Indian dances and sang Indian war songs. He married an indentured German servant girl named Catherine Weisenberg and had three children with her, but he also slept with Indian women and when Catherine died he took sixteen-year-old Mary or Molly Brant as his common-law wife. Johnson developed a close friendship with the Mohawk sachem Hendrick, who helped him gain acceptance in Iroquois communities and attendance at council meetings. Like Johnson, Hendrick knew how to operate on a multicultural frontier: he accepted Christianity, dealt regularly with colonial officials and, in Timothy Shannon’s phrase, “dressed for success” on the frontier, melding indigenous and European styles of clothing.3 Supported by large sums of Crown money, Johnson, in Cadwallader Colden’s judgment, “made a greater figure and gained more influence among the Indians, than any person before him.” Governor George Clinton of New York believed no one on the continent could hold the Iroquois allegiance “so much as this gentleman.” It was clearly a mutually beneficial relationship: “you have been A Great Good Standing tree amongst us a long time,” the Mohawks told Johnson.4

Johnson resigned from public office in 1751 when British-Iroquois relations hit a low point but he had made himself indispensable to the British and to the Iroquois and his star continued to rise. Hendrick was killed at the Battle of Lake George with the French in 1755 but Johnson’s action in the same engagement saved the day and earned him a baronetcy. With the support of Iroquois leaders who wrote letters to the Crown recommending him for the position, William Johnson was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs north of the Ohio. (A Scotsman, John Stuart, was appointed in the South.) One thousand Indians assembled in conference at Fort Johnson in the summer of 1755 and from that point onward Johnson seemed to be engaged in an endless stream of meetings, councils, and negotiations to restore and keep bright the Covenant Chain. He cultivated personal alliances with Iroquois chiefs, bolstered the standing of chiefs with whom he was allied, exerted influence in the appointment of chiefs, and did not hesitate to circumvent the sachems and deal directly with war chiefs when the empire needed Iroquois warriors. He built a network of connections and his marriage to Molly Brant took him into the kinship networks of Iroquois society. He understood, as he told the Iroquois, “your Women are of no small consequence in relation to public affairs,” and he took account of them in his conduct of business. However, he also manipulated Iroquois gender relations and tried to exclude women when he felt their presence hindered or complicated the business at hand. Molly evidently did not: according to contemporaries, “she was of great use to Sir William in his Treaties” and “often persuaded the obstinate chiefs into a compliance with the proposals for peace, or sale of lands.” “He knew that Women govern the Politics of savages as well as the refined part of the World and therefore always kept up a good understanding with the brown Ladies,” Tench Tilghman wrote in his journal the year after Johnson’s death.5 Sir William sent Molly’s younger brother, Joseph, to school in Connecticut to study under the Congregationalist minister Eleazar Wheelock, the future founder of Dartmouth College, and Joseph became both Johnson’s protégé and an important ally. The British increasingly looked to Johnson to conduct the Crown’s Indian affairs, and Johnson artfully advanced British interests and his own standing among the Iroquois. He lavishly bestowed gifts, food, and even cash, demonstrating that the king, and he himself, was a true father, and binding the Iroquois to the empire with ties of economic dependence and reciprocal obligation.

He made his home in the Mohawk Valley, which was the favored site for intertribal meetings and the diplomatic hub for British-Indian relations, trumping Albany and Onondaga. He built his first estate, Mount Johnson, on the north bank of the Mohawk. Ten years later, he moved a few miles downriver to a larger, stone-built house that became known as Fort Johnson. In 1763, with the French defeated and future prospects looking bright, he built a new mansion, Johnson Hall. Johnson’s homes reflected his increasing fortunes and Britain’s growing empire. They were also places where peoples and cultures mingled. He employed Dutch, German, and Irish workers; had African American slaves; and attracted Highland Scots as tenants on his estates. And Indians were there constantly. He hosted, lodged, fed, and entertained Indian visitors, and he complained to his superiors that Indians ate him out of house and home. He and Molly had eight children together. Johnson donned Indian attire and hosted feasts of bear meat; Molly donned European clothes and served tea in porcelain crockery.6

Johnson described himself to the Iroquois as “one Half Indian and one Half English.”7 He learned Iroquois ways, adopted Iroquois customs, and loved Iroquois women, but in truth he had no intention of becoming Iroquois. He went native to the extent that doing so promoted his own and his empire’s interests. The trader John Long related a story, one of several versions, that though likely apocryphal, illustrates how Johnson exploited his knowledge of Indian ways. During a council meeting with a party of Mohawks, a chief (identified as Hendrick in other versions) told Johnson that he had dreamed the night before that Sir William had given him a fine laced coat, and he believed it was the same one he was wearing. “Well, then,” said Sir William, observing Indian custom, “you must have it,” and pulling off his coat, he handed it to the chief. The next time they met in council, Johnson told the chief that he, too, “had dreamed a very surprising dream”: the chief “had given him a tract of land on the Mohawk River to build a house on and make a settlement, extending about nine miles in length along the banks.” The chief smiled and said that “if he really dreamed it he should have it; but that he would never dream again with him.”8

Johnson built his career on Iroquois trade and friendship. He regarded a well-regulated Indian trade as vital to the prosperity and security of Britain’s North American empire, and he thought the Iroquois were “the only barrier against our troublesome Neighbours the French.”9 He used his position to promote the transfer of Iroquois land to the Crown, to private purchasers, and to himself. He portrayed himself to William Pitt as “a man who was willing to Sacrifice his own ease, & business to the public Welfare,”10 but he linked his own fortunes to those of the empire and the Iroquois and he was adept at serving the king and himself. By the 1750s, Johnson was “the most famous American in the British Empire,” far surpassing men like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, whose historical reputations rose as Johnson’s world, and the Iroquois power on which it rested, fell apart.11

Iroquois skills in intercultural diplomacy and representing themselves to the British as the dominant voice in Indian country, together with Johnson’s skill in building his power base and managing the Iroquois role in his vision of empire, combined to create a mystique of Iroquois influence: “What Johnson was for British policy, the Iroquois League was assumed to be for Indian policy.” Britain’s propensity for dealing with other Indians via the Iroquois meant that other tribes often had to deal with the British through the Iroquois and by attending multitribal gatherings at Johnson Hall.12 But Britain’s total defeat of France after more than half a century of recurrent conflict in North America meant the Iroquois were no longer able to play off European rivals. They must now deal only with King George and his representatives, or, more accurately, with his main representative: Sir William Johnson.

Even before the Peace of Paris in 1763 officially ended the great Anglo-French conflict, colonists were encroaching on eastern Iroquois lands in growing numbers. “We have sometime past heard that our Brethren the English were wanting to get more Lands from us,” said an Oneida chief named Conoghquieson. The Iroquois had sold their English brothers land as long as they had any to spare but they no longer had enough left for hunting; they would not consider further cessions until all that land was fully settled, and any future land deals would have to be made with the consent of all the Six Nations. “We have had our lands from the beginning of the World, and we love them as we do our lives,” said Conoghquieson. He handed Johnson a six-row wampum belt to keep at his home so “that when any person shall be desirous of purchasing any more you may shew them thereby, that the six Nations are all determined not to part with more of their Lands on any account whatsoever.”13 Conoghquieson (also spelled Kanaghwaes, Kanaghqweasea, and Kanongweniyah, and meaning “standing ears of corn”) appears to have been one of the fifty league chiefs. Johnson already knew him. He was present in 1755 when the Oneida chief was ceremonially “raised up” in the place of his deceased predecessor and given the same name.14 Three years later Conoghquieson asked Johnson to put a stop to “the selling of any Strong Liquors to our People” because it “disturbs us in our Meetings & Consulations where the drunken People come in quarelling” and it caused many deaths.15 Despite his strong voice in defense of Iroquois lands, Conoghquieson would continue to talk with Johnson about selling Indian lands. Their conversations would culminate with the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

The Iroquois strategy of claiming, and sometimes selling, other peoples’ lands reduced their influence among the western tribes at a time when the focus of British-Indian relations was shifting westward, undermining the League’s once-pivotal position. Indian peoples who had migrated into the Ohio country earlier in the eighteenth century—not just the Delawares and Shawnees but also western Iroquois who became known as the Mingos—increasingly asserted their independence from the Confederacy.16 The British had assured Ohio Indians that their lands would be protected when the Seven Years’ War was won, and the surrender terms at Montreal in 1760 stated that France’s Indian allies were to “be maintained in the Lands they inhabit.”17 The victorious King George III had it “much at heart to conciliate the Affection of the Indian Nations, by every Act of strict Justice, and by affording them His Royal Protection from any Incroachment on the Lands they have reserved to themselves, for their hunting Grounds, & for their own Support & Habitation.”18

The king had to afford his protection sooner than he expected. The Peace of Paris in 1763 redrew the map of North America. More American territory changed hands than at any other treaty before or since. France handed over to Britain Canada and its claims east of the Mississippi. Louisiana went to Spain, mainly to keep it out of the hands of the British. Britain now had to try and govern its hugely expanded empire in North America, regulate the frontier, and deal with powerful Indian nations formerly allied with the French. British garrisons occupied French outposts and many British officers treated the Indians as a defeated people. Alarmed by the presence of British garrisons and offended by the absence of British gifts, Indians took action even before the war was officially over. As early as 1761 the Seneca chief Guyasuta (or Kayusuta) carried a red wampum belt to Detroit and “under the nose of the British commandant” exhorted the Indians in the region to take up arms against the redcoats. In 1763, Guyasuta, the Ottawa Pontiac, and other war chiefs of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes tribes launched assaults that destroyed every British fort west of the Appalachians except for those at Detroit, Niagara, and Fort Pitt. The Senecas inflicted a bloody defeat on a British convoy at Devil’s Hole near Fort Niagara. Once the fighting was over, Sir William Johnson demanded that the Senecas cede the Niagara portage route to the Crown as reparation.19 General Amherst advocated using germ warfare and when Indian emissaries came to Fort Pitt a trader named William Trent confided in his journal that the British “gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”20 Backcountry settlers fled east to escape Indian raiding parties and Indian hating escalated: in December, Scotch-Irish frontiersmen in Pennsylvania known as the Paxton Boys slaughtered peaceful Conestoga Indians and marched on Philadelphia to vent frustration at their colonial government’s failure to defend the frontier.21

The imperial response to the Indians’ war of independence triggered a series of unanticipated events that culminated in another war of independence a dozen years later.22 The government hoped to bring peace and order to the frontier by separating Indians and Europeans. In October 1763 King George signed a proclamation establishing the Appalachian Mountains as the boundary between British settlement and Indian lands. The Royal Proclamation also stipulated “that no private Person do presume to make any Purchase from the said Indians of any Lands reserved to the said Indians within those parts of our Colonies where We have thought proper to allow Settlement.” Only Crown representatives acting in formal council with Indian nations could negotiate land transfers, and only licensed traders would be permitted to operate in Indian country. By such measures, the government sought to prevent “all just Cause of Discontent, and Uneasiness” among the Indians in the future.23 In the winter after the proclamation was issued, Indian delegates carrying copies of the document and strings of wampum traveled Indian country from Nova Scotia to the Mississippi, summoning the tribes to meet Sir William Johnson in council at Niagara. “At this Treaty,” Johnson informed General Gage, “we should tye them down according to their own forms of which they take the most notice, for Example by Exchanging a very large belt with some remarkable & intelligible figures thereon, expressive of the occasion which should be always shewn at public Meetings, to remind them of their promises; and that we should Exchange Articles with the Signatures of the Chiefs of every Tribe.” At Niagara, in the summer of 1764, Sir William read the terms of the proclamation to two thousand Indians from two dozen nations, and they sealed the agreement with an exchange of gifts and wampum.24 In Canada, the principles and protections established by the proclamation made it “the single most important document in the history of treaty-making,”25 and it is recognized in section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the first part of the Constitution Act of 1982. In the area that became the United States, it produced a rather different outcome.

The proclamation attempted to bring order by running a line through a morass of competing, intersecting, and overlapping colonial, tribal, and individual claims. Many non-Indians already lived west of the mountains (and many Indians still lived east of them) and it failed to keep colonists off Indian lands. Four years after the proclamation, Indians complained that settlers were making “more incroachments on their Country, than ever they had before.”26 By concentrating land purchasing in the hands of the government, the proclamation transformed the land market. Squatters could ignore the proclamation; land speculators could not: their ability to make profits in the West depended on being able to convey clear title to the lands in which they invested and now they could not buy and sell western lands legally. The new measures “infuriated Virginia land speculators” who saw tyranny in the Crown’s attempt to monopolize granting and acquiring land and in Britain’s interference with their freedom to make a fortune. In their eyes, a new British and Indian barrier had replaced the old French and Indian barrier.27

But the imperial government had no intention of permanently halting the westward expansion of the colonies; the boundary line was a device for regulating and not eliminating frontier expansion. Eventually the line would be abolished as old colonies grew and new ones were created. Once the barrier was moved west, deeds of Indian land could be converted into clear title. Between 1763 and 1768, under the authority of superintendents Sir William Johnson and John Stuart, Britain and the various tribes negotiated a series of agreements that attempted to define a new boundary line.28

Johnson, like Stuart, believed strongly in regulating the frontier and he supported the proclamation line as a blueprint for peace in British North America, although he never expected that it should be permanent or restrict his own land-dealing activities. In November 1763 he recommended that the Board of Trade establish a boundary “beyond which no settlement should be made, until the whole Six Nations should think proper of selling part thereof.” He recommended himself as the person to carry it out. “I am certain, I can at any time hereafter perswade them to cede to His Majesty more land, if it may be found wanting from encrease of people,” he said. If such a boundary was needed, Johnson stood ready to “make the Indians acquainted therewith, and settle the same in such manner, as may prove most to their satisfaction, and the good of the public.”29 In Johnson’s view a clearly defined boundary, moved periodically by “fair purchase” of land from the Indians, in treaties that he orchestrated and carried out with the Iroquois, would permit peaceful imperial expansion.30

To help implement and maintain the proclamation line, the Board of Trade in 1764 circulated among colonial governors and Indian superintendents a plan for the future management of Indian affairs. Imperial officials, rather than the individual colonies, were to be responsible for conducting Indian relations. Johnson had advocated such a move for years, urging that his department should function as an independent administrative branch, reporting only to the imperial government. The Indian department, not the army or the colonies, should control Indian affairs; the superintendents should call Indian councils, conduct political relations with the tribes, and exercise jurisdiction over Indian country and the traders who did business there.31

In Johnson’s world the Indian department was a personal and, almost literally, a family affair. Johnson and three other men effectively managed Indian affairs north of the Ohio. The Deputy Superintendent for the Indians of Ohio and Pennsylvania was George Croghan, an Irish emigré like Johnson and of the same age. He married the daughter of a Mohawk chief named Nickus in 1757 and his Mohawk daughter, Catherine (in matrilineal Mohawk society, the child of the mother was Mohawk, no matter the identity of the father), later married Joseph Brant, the brother of Sir William’s wife, Molly. Deputy agent Guy Johnson was Sir William’s nephew and son-in-law: he married one of Johnson’s daughters by Catherine Weisenberg. In 1768 the Deputy Superintendant for Canadian Indians was Daniel Claus, a German emigré who had accumulated a wealth of experience in Indian affairs and knowledge of Mohawk, and he married Johnson’s other daughter by Catherine Weisenberg. With these three close associates Johnson dominated British-Indian relations north of the Ohio.

Croghan was almost a replica on the Ohio and Pennsylvania frontier of what Johnson was on the New York frontier. “No colonial fur trader earned greater respect from Indians, or traveled farther on that respect,” notes James Merrell, and “no one was more enamored of Indian lands.” The historian Alan Taylor describes Croghan as “the most avid, indeed manic,” land speculator in colonial North America.32 Croghan migrated from Ireland in 1741 and worked as a trader in western Pennsylvania and in the Ohio Valley from about 1745 to 1754. In 1749 three Iroquois chiefs granted him some two hundred thousand acres of land around the Forks of the Ohio (a gift the Iroquois would confirm in 1768). Croghan said it was in recognition of his services but a huge quantity of goods changed hands as well. In 1753 Scarouady, the Oneida chief and “Half King” representing the Ohio Six Nations, named Croghan to speak for the Indians in their dealings with the governor of Pennsylvania. Croghan was with General Edward Braddock and George Washington at the rout of Braddock’s army on the Monongahela in 1755, and he accompanied General John Forbes at the capture of Fort Duquesne (rechristened Fort Pitt) in 1758. Appointed Deputy Superintendent for the Ohio and Pennsylvania Indians in 1756, he operated primarily out of Fort Pitt, regulating the Indian trade there, traveling extensively in the West, and exerting his influence to undermine French-Indian alliances.33 No one exerted greater influence on affairs in the West. Johnson relied on the old trader’s knowledge of Indian affairs and Croghan occasionally interpreted for him.

Croghan was not known for his honesty and integrity. He was a heavy drinker and on one occasion he suffered from such a severe case of venereal disease that he took to wearing a Scottish kilt to ease his discomfort.34 He was easygoing and generous, but, in the words of one biographer, he was “a born actor, a master of the poker face,” “devious and dangerously speculative.” He knew how to talk people into loaning him money but he “did not keep his promises; he was not candid; he misrepresented; he lied.”35 He was notorious in government circles for his lavish expenditures on Indian presents.36 He was also up to his neck in land speculations in the West and he needed to have the proclamation line moved to make his land purchases “legal.” The proclamation offered a land bounty to each soldier who had served in the French and Indian War. The highest amount offered to any officer was five thousand acres, but Croghan sent a memorial to the Board of Trade in 1765 asking for a grant of twenty thousand acres in New York as a reward for his services; he received a grant of ten thousand acres but in 1768 submitted another memorial for the additional ten thousand acres, which were granted.37 In addition, he sought compensation for losses that his trading operations had suffered in the Indian wars. Croghan “almost always positioned imperial assignments to act as vehicles to settle personal debts and speculate in trade and land.” After 1763, his future “depended on the careful readjustment of the Indian boundary.”38

Like Johnson, Croghan had kinship ties in Iroquois society through his Mohawk wife and also had kinship ties to many of the men who had their eyes on Indian land. His brother-in-law, the Pennsylvania merchant William Trent, was on hand when smallpox blankets were given to Indians visiting Fort Pitt; his half-brother, Edward Ward, built the original Virginia fort at the forks of the Ohio; his nephew William Croghan married the sister of an Indian fighter named George Rogers Clark who would later serve as a US treaty commissioner; his cousins Thomas Smallwood and William Powell were leading merchants of early Pittsburgh.

Croghan and Trent “figured conspicuously” among a group of traders who had lost merchandise during the Indian wars. Samuel Wharton, a merchant from Philadelphia (figure 2.2), in partnership with John Baynton, George Morgan, and Croghan, had attempted to gain control of the Indian trade of the Ohio Valley but Pontiac’s War brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Wharton, “characteristically, enlarged his ambitions in the face of adversity.” He directed Trent, his agent, to buy up the claims of other traders for the losses they had incurred between 1754 and 1763. Then, calling themselves “the suffering traders,” Wharton and his fellow merchants sought compensation for their losses.39

They tried first to obtain reimbursement from the British Treasury and, after a meeting at the Indian Queen Tavern in Philadelphia, chose Croghan to go to England to represent their claims. Croghan’s trip was financed by a company headquartered in Burlington, New Jersey, and headed by William Franklin, the governor of New Jersey and illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. Croghan carried letters of introduction from Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. He set sail from Philadelphia in December 1763, was shipwrecked off the coast of France, but reached London early in 1764. After waiting for three months, he declared he was “sick of London” and ready for home: “there has been Nothing Don Sence I Came to London by the Grate ones butt Squebeling & fighting See who will keep in power,” he wrote to Johnson; “it will Larn Me to be Contented on a Litle farm in America if I Can gett one when I go back.” Back in America, the memory of that lesson quickly faded. Finding that direct payment of their claims for compensation would require a special act of Parliament, the suffering traders tried instead to get a compensatory grant of land from the Indians when the boundary negotiations began. In February 1765 they presented their claims to Sir William who promised to do the group “an essential Piece of Service” when he next met with the Indians to renegotiate the boundary line.40

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FIGURE 2.2 Samuel Wharton. From a woodcut of a miniature painted in England. (The Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Johnson and Croghan made themselves indispensable in the negotiations. Promoting the notion that many of the western tribes were dependents of the Iroquois, Johnson “felt that the intended partition of much of North America could be worked out exclusively between himself, as the King’s representative, and the Iroquois, as the owners of the land.”41 Croghan was the pivotal link in the West, “the man who could go among the western Indians, sit down with them, and discuss indemnity to the merchants as well as the Indian-white boundary.”42 With his finger in land schemes that had to fall on the eastern side of the new boundary, he was not above using his position to try and whip up fears of an Indian war to help speed up the government’s plans for moving the boundary westward.43

In April and May 1765, Johnson held a conference with some nine hundred Indians—Six Nations and Delawares—at Johnson Hall and broached the subject of working out a new boundary. The Onondaga speaker responded that they thought it was “very necessary, provided the White People will abide by it.” Having been cheated so often in the past, they were suspicious. “We were always ready to give, but the English don’t deal fairly with us, they are more cunning than we are, they get our names upon paper very fast, and we often don’t know what it is for.” Croghan, not long returned from London, conducted negotiations with the western nations at Fort Pitt. In July, Shawnee, Delaware, and Iroquois delegates convened at Johnson Hall and agreed to the terms that had been worked out in principle in the spring meetings.44 These were preliminary agreements without official authorization, but if implemented they would transfer vast amounts of territory to colonial hands, most of it from non-Iroquois nations who, in Johnson’s view, deserved to pay for their part in the recent wars. Johnson next sent Croghan to initiate peace talks with the nations of the Wabash and the Illinois country. It was a perilous journey and Croghan’s mission almost ended in disaster when a war party of Kickapoos and Mascoutens attacked them, and killed and wounded several people, including three of the Shawnee delegates accompanying Croghan as escorts. Croghan himself took a hatchet blow to the head (“but my Scull being pretty thick,” he later joked to Johnson, “the hatchet would not enter”) and was taken captive. But once the Kickapoos realized they had killed Shawnees and might bring down vengeance on their heads, they hastened to make amends and allowed Croghan’s party to proceed.45

The government in London faced mounting difficulties administering its new American empire and dealing with its existing colonies; it was three years before Johnson received the instructions he was waiting for to renegotiate the boundary. Johnson, Croghan, and the traders mounted an intensive lobbying campaign to convince the home government that a new boundary was vital to avert an Indian war and that the tribes were willing to grant land. Both Johnson and Croghan wrote to the Board of Trade, and Croghan and Governor Franklin enlisted the support of Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania’s agent in London. Croghan told Benjamin Franklin that the Shawnees, Delawares, and other Indians who had robbed and killed traders had informed him “they were not only very willing but anxious, to make a REPARATION to the representatives of the unhappy Sufferers” but they had no way of doing it “except by a Surrender of a part of their Country, which they would most chearfully do, and especially of that part, which lies on this side of the River Ohio (on the back part of Virginia) as it is now, of no use to them, for Hunting Ground.” Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan made sure Benjamin Franklin understood the connection between the boundary line and the land grant: Johnson had done them “an essential piece of service” by getting the Indians to grant part of the land encompassed by the new boundary when the treaty was held, but unless the government authorized a new boundary, the Indians “cannot give us the Land.” Benjamin Franklin never set foot west of the Appalachian Mountains but he wanted to see the West populated with British Protestants rather than French Catholics, just as he would later want it settled by American citizens rather than British subjects. He lost no time in bringing the boundary issue to the government’s attention.46 By Christmas 1766, Samuel Wharton who, in addition to his claim as a “suffering trader” had land schemes in the Illinois country, told William Franklin that he expected to be “Ere long, a Considerable Proprietor of Terra Firma.”47

Meanwhile, Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan kept the pressure on Johnson: “We really blush, to be so free,” they wrote, but a letter from the superintendent to the Earl of Shelburne now could be just what was needed to secure confirmation of the land grant—“the great & long sighed for Object”—to the poor traders.48 In the fall of 1767 William Trent sent Benjamin Franklin a list of the traders’ losses. Croghan and Wharton each wrote to Franklin urging prompt action on the boundary line: an Indian war was imminent unless the government seized the moment to establish a boundary, they claimed, and the Indians had already agreed to it in principle. “Indians, you well know Sir,” wrote Wharton, “are not always in a Temper to dispose of a large Part of their Country. What a Pity is it Therefore, That so fair an Opportunity should be lost, When the Crown might for a small Consideration purchase Land sufficient for Us to settle or hunt On, And at the same Time remove the present unfavorable Disposition of The Natives, by fixing a Line between Them And Us, beyond Which, No Englishman should presume to settle or hunt!”49 Franklin duly pushed the matter in London, over dinner with Lord Shelburne and on the following morning with Lord Clare of the Board of Trade.50 Croghan, meanwhile, was on the road again in his capacity of deputy superintendent: leaving Fort Pitt in mid-October, he reached Detroit a month later and held council with the Great Lakes tribes; by December 9 he was back at Fort Pitt where he held a council with the Shawnees, Senecas, and Delawares.51

Pennsylvania had its eyes on the Wyoming Valley lands along the Susquehanna River. It was contested ground. The Susquehanna Company, a joint-stock company formed in 1753 by Connecticut land speculators, believed that Connecticut’s colonial charter, which granted sea-to-sea land rights, entitled the province to the valley. The eastern Delaware chief Teedyuscung had protested English settlement in the area. He declared “he did not unders[tan]d what the White People meant by settling in their Country unless they intended to steal it from them,” and he warned off colonial settlers and speculators he found on the land. The Crown feared the colonists’ intrusions would provoke “all the horrors and Calamities of an Indian war,” and orders were issued to desist. But the Susquehanna Company “were Determined to Settle Immediately on the Land, to the Amount of a Thousand families and Upwards.” Iroquois, Delawares, and Pennsylvanians all watched with growing alarm as settlers from Connecticut pushed into the Susquehanna Valley. Then, in April 1763, as Teedyuscung lay sleeping in the town of Wyoming on the north branch of the Susquehanna (near present-day Wilkes-Barre), someone set his log cabin on fire. The sixty-three-year-old chief, a veteran of many battles and treaties, was burned to death. Within weeks, colonists from New England, most of them people Teedyuscung had chased away the previous fall, were building cabins and planting fields in the Wyoming Valley. Iroquois delegates complained to the Connecticut Assembly in Hartford. Teedyuscung’s son, Captain Bull, went to Philadelphia to protest. Then, after drunken militiamen murdered his cousin, a baptized Delaware named Zacharias, along with his wife and child, Captain Bull took his revenge, killing twenty-six Wyoming settlers.52

Thomas Penn, the elder proprietor and oldest surviving son of William Penn (and one of the men behind the infamous “Walking Purchase” in 1737), now saw a chance to settle the issue. He wrote to William Johnson in December 1767, urging him to get from the Indians as much land for “us” as he could between the west branch of the Susquehanna and Delaware rivers. To “prevent the possibility of the people from Connecticut giving us any more trouble there,” Sir William should get the Iroquois to agree that “when they incline to sell the rest, they will sell it only to us.”53 Pennsylvania’s interests would be well represented at the Fort Stanwix treaty and the Iroquois looked favorably on Pennsylvania representatives who acknowledged Iroquois authority over the disputed lands.

Benjamin Franklin’s lobbying and the warnings of impending bloodshed in the West paid off. Convinced that a new boundary was necessary “to prevent the fatal consequences of an Indian War,” the Lords of Trade advised Shelburne to send immediate orders to Johnson to negotiate the final settlement of the line. They cautioned, however, that the new line should extend no lower down the Ohio than the Kanawha River; going any farther might furnish colonists with a pretext for settling land that, though claimed by the Six Nations, was occupied by the Cherokees as part of their hunting territory.54 Shelburne, too, thought the new boundary “essential for the Preservation of Peace and Harmony,” and he instructed Johnson in December 1767 “to convey the proper Intelligence to the different Tribes of Indians concerned, that they may be ready to co-operate with you in bringing it to a Conclusion.”55 Johnson was already on it. In November he had sent an Onondaga with a large string of wampum to let the Six Nations know “that I intended a General Meeting with them Some time in ye. Spring.”56 The wampum belt not only summoned the tribes but also informed them of the agenda for the conference. He followed up with a series of meetings with various groups and sent additional wampum through the Ohio Valley. On January 5, 1768, in one of his last actions in office, Shelburne authorized Johnson to negotiate a new boundary line.57

By then, the government had dropped its plan for imperial management of Indian affairs. Political unrest following passage of the Stamp Act and the need to reduce the cost of imperial administration rendered the plan impractical. Shelburne concluded by the summer of 1767 that management of the Indian trade should be returned to the colonies and the following spring the Board of Trade recommended that imperial regulation of Indian affairs be abandoned. But at least Johnson finally had official permission to negotiate a new boundary. According to the historian Peter Marshall, Johnson accepted the decline of his official authority and “turned to the advancement of his private interests.”58 But at Fort Stanwix he managed to promote an imperial as well as a personal agenda.

In January 1768, Lord Hillsborough was appointed to a newly created cabinet-level position, secretary of state for the colonies. Benjamin Franklin was quick to press the boundary issue with the new secretary and Hillsborough confirmed Shelburne’s instructions to Johnson to carry the boundary line to the Great Kanawha in western Virginia.59 The Lords of Trade recommended to George III “that this boundary line should as speedily as possible be ratified by your Majesty’s Authority” and that the superintendents be “impowered to make Treaties in your Majesty’s name with the Indians for that purpose.” Johnson had secured preliminary Indian agreement three years earlier to the boundary being extended some seven hundred miles lower down the Ohio to the mouth of the Cherokee or Tennessee River, but his instructions, and an accompanying map, made it clear that the Kanawha River was to be the western boundary. The boundary was to begin at Owego on the New York–Pennsylvania border, run south along the Susquehanna River to Shamokin, along the west branch of the Susquehanna to Kittaning, and then southwest along the Ohio to the mouth of the Kanawha. There the northern line negotiated by Johnson would join up with one being negotiated by John Stuart with the Cherokees in the South.60

Negotiating the new boundary required getting the Iroquois and Cherokees to settle their differences. The “Great Warriors’ Path,” the traditional war trail between the Iroquois and the Cherokees, ran through the territory that colonial officials hoped to acquire by pushing the line westward. Attakullakulla, known to the British as Little Carpenter because of his ability to fashion diplomatic agreements, the Great Warrior Oconostota, and other Cherokee delegates sailed for New York in November 1767. After attending a performance of Richard III (Attakullakulla was getting to be a regular theatergoer—he had attended performances at Sadlers’ Wells and the Theatre Royal when he visited London with a Cherokee delegation in his youth),61 they set off for Johnson Hall, arriving at the end of December. The Iroquois delegates did not arrive until March. Bad roads and deep snow delayed them; besides, said Thomas King, the Oneidas’ speaker, making peace with their old enemies the Cherokees was such a weighty issue that they had taken a long time to discuss it before coming to the meeting. The Cherokees presented wampum belts to each of the Six Nations, and “a Belt and a Calumet with an Eagles tail” to Johnson, “that he may always keep it so that any of our friends resorting hither may smoak out of the Pipe, and See that we have been about Peace.” They also brought a belt from the Cherokee women for the Iroquois women, as “they must feel Mothers pains for those killed in War, and be desirous to prevent it.” The Iroquois and Cherokees “buryed the Axe and opened the Road.”62

Johnson assured the Iroquois at the conference that a boundary line to preserve their hunting grounds would soon be settled. The eastern Iroquois were glad to hear it. They had enjoyed relatively harmonious relationships of coexistence and exchange with colonists on their eastern frontier for much of the eighteenth century,63 but the pressure on Mohawk and Oneida lands had increased alarmingly since the end of the French and Indian War. “We and our dependants have been for some time like Giddy People not knowing what to do,” Conoghquieson told Johnson. “Wherever we turned about we saw our Blood.” When they went hunting they found the country covered with fences, the trees cut down, and the animals driven away. If the British were unable to protect the Mohawks’ land, keep their own settlers away from the Ohio, “and keep the Road open making Pennsylvania and Virginia quiet,” the Iroquois would “get tired of looking to you, and turn our faces another way.”64 The stage was set and the issues were clear for the great council to be held at Fort Stanwix: if Johnson hoped to shift the boundary to the west he must protect Iroquois lands in the east. Sir William made a point of cultivating men like Conoghquieson. “I have always made use of a few approved Chiefs of the several Nations, whose fidelity I have had occasion to test on many occasions for above twenty years past, who have never yet deceived me,” Johnson confided to Shelburne in August 1767.65 He was not likely to switch strategy a year later at Fort Stanwix when the stakes were so high.

The meeting between the Iroquois and Cherokees in March “was held in the open Air at a severe season,” and Sir William caught a cold. The next month, on his doctor’s advice, he took a trip to the seaside in Connecticut, “having for some time laboured under a violent disorder of the Bowels, as well as severe pains from his old Wound, with both of which he has been much afflicted for some Years past.” (He would make return trips to the sea for his health in years to come.)66 But his mind was on the upcoming treaty, and interested parties sought him out in Connecticut. Meanwhile, Croghan met with one thousand Indians, primarily western Senecas, Delawares, and Shawnees, at Fort Pitt in April and May, to settle differences and restore the chain of friendship. The Ohio Indians were worried by the presence of British forts and the encroachments of British settlers. Nimwha, a Shawnee chief, said they were “uneasy to see that you think yourselves Masters of this Country, because you have taken it from the French, who you know had no Right to it, as it is the Property of us Indians.” Croghan responded that after the British defeated the French and opened a road into the Ohio country, the Six Nations agreed to it, “and we thought the Six Nations had a Right so to do, as we always understood that they were the original Proprietors of this Country.”67 Croghan was placing on record the justification for purchasing that same country from other people who “had no right to it” less than six months later.

In Johnson’s absence on the coast, Guy Johnson presided over a three-week council at Johnson Hall in June where the Mohawks voiced concerns about encroachments on their land, especially by claimants to the Kayaderosseras patent, some four hundred thousand acres of land west of the Hudson and north of the Mohawk River originally patented more than sixty years before but which, the Iroquois speaker at Albany in 1754 said, “upon inquiry among our old men, we cannot find was ever sold.”68 When Sir William got home, he negotiated a settlement of the contested area, confirming a substantially reduced area of the patent: for $5,000 the Mohawks agreed to “give up all pretensions to this Tract.” In return, the Mohawk chief Abraham made clear, they expected Johnson “to procure some good Strong writing, as a security for the Land we live upon, that we may no more be disturbed.” Johnson assured them he would “endeavor to the utmost of his power to have their Lands secured to them, and their Posterity, in the most effectual manner.”69 The agenda and much of the content for the upcoming treaty was in place well before the participants gathered at Fort Stanwix in the fall.

The Great Giveaway

Fort Stanwix sat at the Oneida Carrying Place or the Oneida Carry, the critical portage between Wood Creek and the Mohawk River that in turn linked the Great Lakes and the Hudson. It took several months for everyone to assemble. Sir William thought it “best for me to Conclude the affair on behalf of the Crown for the whole,” but he had to inform the various colonial governments concerned in the upcoming treaty, consult them “on such points as may effect them,” and invite them to send commissioners to ratify the agreement. He invited Delawares and Shawnees because their proximity to Virginia and Pennsylvania meant they could be troublesome and “makes their perfect Agreement necessary.” But they had fought against the British in the French and Indian War and Pontiac’s War and Johnson included them as interested parties and dependants of the Six Nations, “not as Owners of the Land.” He made it clear that he intended to deal with the Six Nations as spokesmen for all the tribes.70

The treaty proceedings were scheduled to begin at Fort Stanwix on September 20 but the Indians drifted in slowly—the Seneca contingent was detained by the death of a chief and the necessary ceremonies of condolence—so the start of the conference was delayed by more than a month. Given the Senecas’ role in Pontiac’s War, it was important that they be there. While the Indians who were already at Fort Stanwix waited, complained Johnson, they consumed enormous quantities of food.71

As soon as Samuel Wharton heard that Johnson had received royal instructions to settle the boundary, he and William Trent, the attorney for the “suffering traders,” set off for Mohawk country. Trent, Croghan, William Franklin, and Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan had organized the Indiana Company to consolidate their claims. Johnson’s ill health delayed things and Wharton and Trent stayed with him at Johnson Hall, using the time to promote their cause with the Indians for “a Reimbursement for the Losses, which we and others had sustained, by the Depredation of the Shawanese and Delawares in the year 1763.”72 Johnson left home on September 15 and traveled by boat up the Mohawk River, accompanied by William Franklin and “other Gentlemen,” probably Trent and Wharton. They arrived at Fort Stanwix the day before the conference was due to start, and Trent and Wharton promptly handed Johnson and some of the Iroquois chiefs “an account of the Traders losses in 1763, together with their Powers of Attorney for obtaining a retribution of lands, pursuant to an article of the Treaty of peace in 1765.”73 Twenty boatloads of goods made their way upriver, intended as presents for the anticipated cession of land to the king. Johnson represented New York as well as the Crown. His three deputies, George Croghan, Daniel Claus, and Guy Johnson, were present.74 Croghan had been preparing for the big event for months and now, in the words of one biographer, he was “by far the most active of the speculators who busied themselves in making last minute purchases from the Indians before the Crown obtained title to the ceded area”; in the words of another, he “was busy looking after the interests of the empire, the Penns, the traders, and himself.”75 In addition to serving as the deputy superintendent for the Indians of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, Croghan also represented the “suffering traders”; he, Trent, and Wharton drew up a deed ceding to the king to be held in trust for the traders about 2.5 million acres bounded by the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, the Ohio, the Little Kanawha, and the Monongahela.76

Dr. Thomas Walker and Colonel Andrew Lewis, the commissioners from Virginia, had learned on August 18 that the treaty conference was to begin on September 1. Both had financial interests in the claims of the Loyal Land Company. Walker, the company’s agent for more than forty years, “had his finger in every official land activity in Virginia in the second half of the eighteenth century.” He had explored and surveyed parts of southeastern Kentucky eighteen years before and had given the Cumberland Gap its name (one of a number of sites named in honor of William, Duke of Cumberland—Butcher Cumberland to the Highland Scots—who had defeated the Jacobite clans at Culloden in 1746). Walker had acquired property when he married a widowed cousin of George Washington and he had become the guardian of Thomas Jefferson when the boy’s father, his friend, neighbor, and fellow surveyor Peter Jefferson, died in 1757. Lewis, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and a surveyor in western Virginia, was also a major player in the Greenbrier Company of land speculators. Like George Washington and other Virginian veterans of the French and Indian War, he had a claim to lands based on bounties that Governor Dinwiddie had promised. Walker and Lewis hurried to Johnson Hall and arrived on August 27, only to be told by Johnson that the Indians would not assemble until September 20. They stayed “at a dirty Tavern near the Hall till the 14th from thence proceeded to Fort Stanwix where we arrived on the 17th and waited for the Indians till the 12th of October.” It was then decided that Lewis should leave to attend John Stuart’s treaty with the Cherokees scheduled to begin at Hard Labor, nine hundred miles away. (In the event, for a variety of reasons, no Virginian representatives attended the Cherokee treaty.) Walker later claimed that he merely witnessed the treaty at Fort Stanwix but, representing the interests of Washington, Jefferson, and other Virginians speculating in lands beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains, he doubtless arrived early to speak with Johnson in private and advance those interests without making a public record of it. In doing so, noted the late Iroquoian scholar William Fenton, he was not departing from council protocol, but simply exploiting a well-established Iroquois negotiating device.77

Lieutenant Governor John Penn and the commissioners from Pennsylvania, Richard Peters and James Tilghman, arrived on September 21, although Penn had to return to Philadelphia before negotiations got under way. Penn and Peters were experienced in the business of acquiring land by treaty: they had both figured prominently as the Penn family’s agents at the Albany Congress in 1754 where they executed a land deed.78 Peters, an Anglican clergyman, provincial secretary, and sometime business partner of George Croghan, once called Croghan a “vile Rascal.”79 It took one to know one. The son of a well-to-do family, Peters had attended the Westminster School in London. While there, he married a serving maid and his parents whisked him off to Leyden for several years to escape the disgrace and the clutches of the “impossible and vulgar person” who had “ensnared” their teenage son. Returning to London, he read law at the inner Temple and then was ordained in the Church of England. He married the daughter of the Earl of Derby but just as she was about to give birth to their child, his first wife turned up. Once again, Peters fled the country, this time to Philadelphia to make a new start.80 There he became Thomas Penn’s adviser and rose within the government of Pennsylvania. He had “a talent for deception,” was “equally at home in saving souls and making fortunes,” and wasted no time in getting into the Indian land business.81 As secretary, Peters spent years tampering with the written records of treaty conferences to undermine Delaware sovereignty and separate the Delawares from their land.82 Chief Justice Frederick Smith of New Jersey also attended, as did “Sundry Gents” from different colonies.

At the beginning of October 800 Indians had arrived; by the 22nd there were 2,200, with more expected the next day; eventually more than 3,000 attended, “the greatest Number of Indians, That ever met at any Treaty in America.”83 The great majority were men from the Six Nations. Women regularly attended treaty conferences but this was harvest time in Iroquois villages. Moreover, Johnson, whether to keep down expenses or to ensure the absence of a group that might balk at the huge land cession he was planning, had sent word to Iroquois headmen not to bring women to the treaty “as business is best carried on when none but fit men go about it.”84 The Iroquois delegates included the Mohawk warrior and orator Abraham or Little Abraham (his Mohawk name was variously recorded as Tayorheasere, Teyarhasere, Tyorhansera, Tigoransera, and Teirhenshsere). Conoghquieson, the chief sachem of Old Oneida, and Tagawaron from Kanonwalohale represented the Oneidas. Bunt and Diaquanda or Teyohaquende, a “chief Warrior and Sachim” and a close ally and friend of Sir William, spoke for the Onondagas. With fences still to mend with Johnson, the Senecas sent the old Genesee chief Guastrax and the noted war chief Sayenqueragtha (or Old Smoke), who had been with Johnson at the capture of Fort Niagara in 1759. Now in his sixties he was still a commanding figure, over six feet tall, and, said the Seneca chief Blacksnake, he towered “far above his fellows” in intellect.85 A handful of Shawnees and Delawares attended, more as observers than as active participants. Amid the throng of governors, Indian agents, land speculators, colonial commissioners, traders, interpreters, missionaries, and hundreds of Iroquois, they were “lost in the crowd.”86 Killbuck and Turtle’s Heart represented the Delawares. Turtle’s Heart had met the trader William Trent before. He was one of the two Indians who came to parlay at Fort Pitt in 1763 and had been given blankets from the smallpox hospital. Evidently, Turtle’s Heart survived Trent’s germ warfare (many others did not); perhaps he had had smallpox before.

Guy Johnson served as the secretary and Andrew Montour, John Butler, and Philip Philips acted as interpreters. Sir William could get by in Mohawk but a formal multinational council such as this demanded the multilingual skills of an experienced interpreter like Montour who, in addition to being fluent in French and English, spoke Mohawk, Oneida, Wyandot, Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee. Montour had developed a pivotal role as well as an ambiguous identity as a cultural broker on the eighteenth-century frontier. The son of a famous Oneida-French woman, Madam Montour, he had grown up among the Oneidas in New York and the Delawares and Shawnees on the Susquehanna River. Also known by his Indian names Sattelihu or Eghnisera, Montour favored elaborate European clothing while wearing Indian facial paint, applied with bear’s grease, and ear ornaments. He worked as an agent and interpreter for Pennsylvania from 1742 to 1756 and was commissioned to raise a company of scouts for George Washington’s campaign into Ohio country in 1754. Richard Peters called him “a dull stupid Creature, in great Esteem with the Indians.” The Ohio Iroquois made him a chief councilor in 1752, which meant he could “transact any publick Business in behalf of us, the Six Nations.” At the Treaty of Logstown that year the Seneca Half King, Tanagharison, handed Eghnisera a ten-row wampum belt to remind him “that you are one of our own People.” They were pleased to have him there as an interpreter, “for we are sure our Business will go on well & Justice be done on both Sides,” but he should remember that he had done “a great Deal of Business among us” before Pennsylvania and Virginia employed him: “you are not Interpreter only; for you are one of our Council, have an equal Right with us to all these Lands.” In 1756 Montour transferred to the northern department of Indian affairs and the service of William Johnson; from 1766 to 1772 he served as a post interpreter at Fort Pitt. He had a turbulent life, marked by recurrent problems with alcohol, indebtedness, and failed marriages. His contemporaries never quite figured him out or trusted him—was he Indian or white, loyal to Britain or in the employ of the French?—but they relied on him to negotiate and interpret the complex cultural landscape of his world.87

John Butler was born in Connecticut and moved to the Mohawk with his family when his father, an officer in the British army, was posted to Fort Hunter. He was a trader at Fort Oswego from 1745 to 1755, served as an Indian agent, saw action in the French and Indian War, and worked as an interpreter for William Johnson. Like Johnson, he accumulated considerable landholdings in the Mohawk Valley, some twenty-six thousand acres, making him the second wealthiest man in the valley after Sir William.88 Philip Philips, a “Dutchman,” had been captured by Kahnawake Mohawks at age fourteen in 1747 during King George’s War, and he had refused to return with other released captives at the end of the war. He had participated in an Indian attack on George Croghan’s trading party in 1753.89

Most of the negotiations at Fort Stanwix were conducted privately. Johnson complained afterward that he was in poor health and worn out by sitting “whole nights generally in the open woods in private conferences with the leading men.” These private meetings “where most points are discussed & settled” did not usually make it into the record; “if they had it would have been too Voluminous,” said Johnson.90 Private meetings always raised suspicions of shady dealing, and often with good reason, but “talk in the bushes”—to arrange an agenda, discuss an issue, or hash out a disagreement prior to more formal negotiation in open council—was not unusual. The real business often took place behind the scenes.91

On Monday, October 24, Johnson opened the formal negotiations. Speaking through the Mohawk chief Abraham, he welcomed the Indians “to this place where I have kindled a Council Fire for affairs of importance.” He and the delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania had waited a month to see them. “I hope therefore that you are now come fully prepared and with Hearts well inclined to the great business for which we are convened, and in order to prepare you the better for these purposes, I do now, agreeable to the antient custom established by our Forefathers, proceed to the ceremony of Condolence usual on these occasions.” He then duly presented strings of wampum to wipe away tears, clear throats, and open ears and hearts. He gave a wampum belt to rekindle their council fires, another to bid them assemble, and another to dispel darkness. He took “the clearest water” to cleanse their insides, advised the sachems to consult with their war chiefs and the war chiefs to listen to their sachems, and urged the different nations to be unanimous. Also, “as there are but two Council Fires for your confederacy, the one at my house and the other at Onondaga, I must desire that you will always be ready to attend either of them, when called upon, by which means business will I hope, always be attended & properly carried on for our mutual Interest.” Johnson punctuated each statement with the presentation of a wampum belt and the Indians “gave the Yo-hah at the proper places.” With the proper rituals completed, the council adjourned until the following day.92

Conoghquieson opened proceedings the next day, giving his own name to Governor Franklin, as he was the only one of the several governors on whom the Iroquois had not yet bestowed a ceremonial name. Then Conoghquieson thanked Johnson for his adherence to the ancient rituals, “repeated all that Sir William had said,” and thanked him for each statement and belt, giving belt for belt in response. That done, the council adjourned again until the next day.93 As William Fenton noted, Johnson “had learned that adhering to Iroquois customary ways was the sure way to get what he wanted out of a council. Others of his contemporaries who found Indian ceremony tedious and who bridled at the waste of time accomplished far less.”94

On Wednesday Conoghquieson got to his feet and announced that, not being satisfied with his giving his own name to Franklin, the Six Nations now bestowed on the governor the name Saorghweyoghsta, or Doer of Justice, in recognition of New Jersey having recently imposed the death penalty on some Indian killers. (In fact, the chiefs may have not wanted to give him the name of one of the league’s founders.)95 Sir William moved the proceedings along, producing a fifteen-row wampum belt with human figures at each end, representing their alliance, and he renewed and confirmed the Covenant Chain, “rubbing off any rust which it may have contracted that it might appear bright to all Nations as a proof of our love and Friendship.” Then he got down to business. Three years before, the Indians had agreed in principle to settling a boundary and they and he both knew only too well that until such a firm and clear line was established trespass and trouble would continue. “After long deliberation on some means for your relief, and for preventing future disputes concerning Lands,” the great and good king of England had ordered Johnson to fix a boundary line and give the Indians “handsome proof of his Generosity proportiond to the nature and extent of what Lands shall fall to him.” According to Wharton, “in order that all the different Tribes might clearly understand his Speech,” Johnson “departed from the Usual Method of treating with Them and had it translated into the Mohock Tongue by an Indian, who spoke and wrote, both English and Mohock excellently well.” Abraham repeated what Sir William had said, thanked him for saying it, and called for an adjournment so that they could give this “weighty affair” their “most serious consideration.”96

On Thursday, September 27, Johnson’s Onondaga ally Diaquanda and eighty-six other Indians came to Sir William’s quarters “to pay him the usual compliments.” Johnson returned the compliments and “ordered them paint, Pipes, Tobacco & a dram around and dismissed them.” On Friday, the weather turning cold, he “clothed the old chiefs of every Nation for which they returned many thanks.”97 The Indians continued discussing the boundary issue among themselves until four in the afternoon, and then they informed Johnson that they were ready to speak with him. They acknowledged that a firm line between the Indians and the English would be to everyone’s advantage. Experience had taught them “we cannot have any great dependence on the white People, and that they will forget their agreements for the sake of our Lands,” but Johnson had done much to assure them that things could be different this time and they moved from debating the concept of a boundary to discussing the details. In particular, they worried that their northern towns would lay open if the line stopped at Owego on the Susquehanna River, the northern point of the boundary negotiated in 1765. What was the point of drawing a line between Iroquois country and Pennsylvania and Virginia “whilst the way to our Towns lay open?” They needed to extend the line northward to close off the Finger Lakes region from colonial settlers. Johnson was ready for this issue. He invited the chiefs of each nation back to his quarters, saying, “I have prepared a Map on which the Country is drawn large & plain which will enable us both to judge better of these matters.”98

Johnson’s instructions were to fix the boundary line at the Kanawha River, where it would meet the southern line negotiated by John Stuart with the Cherokees. The Iroquois speaker, probably Conoghquieson, reminded Johnson that the Tennessee River, not the Kanhawha, marked the proper limit to their lands. The Six Nations had “a very good & clear Title to the Lands as far as the Cherokee River,” and they expected Britain to recognize it. The understanding was clear: by accepting a land grant from the Iroquois reaching as far as the Tennessee River, Britain would implicitly recognize Iroquois dominance over the region. There were few surprises at Fort Stanwix. Johnson and his associates had been laying the groundwork for years and he knew what the Iroquois would be willing to grant. Even if he did not orchestrate Conoghquieson’s assertion and offer, Johnson was ready to act on it. To accept such an offer would require Johnson to disobey his orders from London, but how could he do otherwise?99

The Iroquois were more concerned about land closer to home. They had been generous in the past and had given white people lands from which they had “often had bad Returns,” but they intended to be as generous as they could be now “without ruining our Children.” The country from Owego to Oswego was full of Iroquois towns and villages and “we can not be expected to part with what lies at our Doors, besides your people are come already too close to us.” Like Joseph Brant’s village of Conajoharie, Abraham’s village lay on the wrong side of the proclamation line and the proposed Stanwix line and stood to be engulfed by colonial settlements. They suggested instead a boundary that would run from the Delaware to the upper Mohawk River and across to Lake George. Johnson replied that the king had no intention of disturbing them on the lands where they lived but countered with the suggestion that the line run as far as Lake Ontario. The Indians withdrew, taking the map with them, to discuss the matter among themselves. That night “Sir William had a private conference with the Cheifs [sic] of the most Influence with whom he made use of every argument to bring matters to an agreeable issue.”100

The Indians debated in council all Saturday morning and then said they needed more time and hoped to give their answer on Monday. Johnson agreed to wait but made clear “that he was really become very impatient through the delays which was given to the business, that the security of their Lands depended upon their dispatch and the freedom of the Cession.” That night, belts arrived from the Shawnees carrying news that French and Spanish agents were stirring up trouble among the Ohio nations and telling them the English planned to drive them from their homelands. The western Indians were on the verge of going to war against the English but were waiting to hear the outcome of the negotiations at Fort Stanwix. Concerned about the prospect of pushing the Ohio Indians to war, Conoghquieson, Tagawaron, Tyearuruante, and Abraham the next morning told Johnson “they would not part with any Lands to the Westward of Oriscany or down towards Wioming or the Great Island, as they reserved that part of the Country for their Dependants.” Sir William responded to the four chiefs with “a long and warm speech.” The Crown had spent a lot of time and money negotiating the boundary line and “if they rejected this opportunity now offered them and drew the Line so as to interfere with Grants, or approach almost to our settlements, he could not see that any thing more effectual could thereafter be proposed for preventing encroachments.” In other words, this is your best offer: think again. “After these and many other arguments, & further explaining the several courses laid down on the draft, they agreed to take the Map back to their Council Hutt for farther consideration, promising to use their Interest with the rest for a more favorable Line.” Sir William assured them “they should be particularly rewarded for their services or endeavours to shew the Indians the reasonableness of the requisition.” That night, Tagawaron returned the map to Sir William. He said the Indians were still debating the issue. Johnson promptly went to work and “had many other private conferences which occupied a great part of the night.”101

The Oneidas took a lot of work. They made up nearly five hundred of the three thousand Indians in attendance, which meant that almost one-third of the Oneida population was present, and, Tagawaron told Johnson, they were “much divided in opinion.” The sachems were expected to function as peacemakers and they also saw the treaty as a way to obtain goods and maintain their influence among the young warriors, but the warriors were intent on preserving their hunting territories and their access to the Carrying Place between Wood Creek and the Mohawk where they could earn money as porters.102 Johnson said “the greatest trouble and difficulty I met with was to bring the Oneidas to allow the line to run any farther West than Oriskane Creek” and that the negotiations on that question “engaged all my interest three Days & almost 3 nights,” more than all the rest of the line.103 At nine o’clock on Sunday evening, October 30, six Oneida chiefs came to see Johnson in private and proposed running the line from the Susquehanna north to Fort Newport on Wood Creek. Johnson rejected it because the crucial portage would be left in Indian hands. He offered the Oneidas an additional $500 and promised each of the chiefs “a handsome present” if they could persuade the nation to give up the Carrying Place, but the Oneidas would not budge. The next morning the chiefs returned to tell Johnson “that their people positively refused to agree to any other Line than they had proposed the last night”; game was growing scarce and they needed to keep the Carrying Place so that they could supplement their declining income from hunting by transporting traders’ goods. Johnson refused to accept their decision and some of the other chiefs by this time were pressing the Oneidas to close the deal. The Oneida chiefs “withdrew to consult further upon it,” and returned soon after with their final offer: for $600 “over and besides the several Fees which were given in private,” they would share the Carrying Place and accept a line ending slightly farther west at Canada Creek, a tributary of the Mohawk. “Sir William finding it best not to urge this matter farther told them that he acquiesced for the present leaving it to be confirmed or rejected by His Majesty.”104 Conoghquieson returned that night to tell Johnson the Indians were ready to present their final resolves: they insisted on the Cherokee River as their western limit and they would agree to make a cession to Pennsylvania on payment of $10,000.105

The Rev. Eleazar Wheelock had sent two missionaries to the treaty to lobby for setting aside some land for the new college he hoped to build “in the heart of the Indian country.” Johnson had initially supported the missionary work of the Congregationalist minister and had recruited students for his Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut. One of Wheelock’s students, Rev. Samuel Kirkland, was the resident missionary among the Oneidas. But Johnson, an Anglican, grew cold to Wheelock and withdrew his support for the work. Johnson blamed the missionaries for encouraging the Oneidas to oppose extending the boundary to the north or west, in order to “reserve those Lands for the purposes of Religion,” and to refuse selling land along the Susquehanna, where Wheelock also had his eyes on a grant for his college. “The Arguments they made use of in private amongst the Inds. Their misrepresentations of our Religion, & the Extraordinary private Instructions of Mr. Wheelock of wch I am accidentally possessed would shew them in a very odd Light,” Johnson wrote later.106 (Unsuccessful in his efforts to secure lands in the Susquehanna, Wheelock built his new school, Dartmouth College, in the upper Connecticut Valley in New Hampshire.)

The general congress reconvened on Tuesday, November 1. The Iroquois speaker reviewed the history of relations with the English and, presenting a wampum belt to Johnson, pledged to keep the Covenant Chain “so long as you shall preserve it strong & bright on your part.” After “sundry Meetings amongst ourselves and with you,” the Iroquois had reached a final resolution, on the understanding that this would be the final line, that there would be no more demands for land, and that none of the colonies or colonists should attempt to breach it “under color of any old Deeds, or other pretences whatsoever for in many of these things we have been imposed on.” The boundaries they agreed to would

begin on the Ohio at the mouth of the Cherokee River which is now our just right, and from thence we give up on the South side of Ohio to Kittanning above Fort Pitt, from thence a direct Line to the nearest Fork of the West Branch of Susquehanna thence through the Allegany Mountains along the south side of the said West Branch till we come opposite to the mouth of the Creek called Tiadaghton thence across the West Branch & along the East side of that Creek and along the ridge of Burnets Hills to a Creek called Awandae thence down the same to the East Branch of the Susquehanna, and across the same and up the East side of that River to Oswegy, from thence Eastward to Delaware River, and up that River to opposite where Trinaderha falls into Susquehanna, thence to Trinaderha and up the West side thereof and its West Branches to the Head thereof thence by a straight Line to the mouth of Canada Creek where it emptys itself into Wood Creek at the end of the long carrying place beyond Fort Stanwix, and this we declare to be our final Resolves and we expect that the conditions of this our Grant will be observed.

Another wampum belt handed to Johnson encoded the message. The Indians were to retain the right to hunt in the ceded territory “as they have no other means of subsistence,” but white people were restricted from hunting on the Indian side of the line “to prevent contensions.” Two Mohawk towns and the Oneida town of Oriske lay east of the new line and were to remain as enclaves of Indian country. Handing Johnson another belt, they addressed the King of England on behalf of the Six Nations, Shawnees, Delawares, “and all other our Friends, Allies, & Dependants.” They were giving him “a great and valuable Country, and we know that what we shall now get for it must be far short of its value.” They did so on condition that the relationship forged at Fort Stanwix be maintained into the future and that the king should not forget his commitments or allow the chain to rust.107

The Mohawks, whose villages in the Mohawk Valley fell within the area opened to colonial settlement, insisted that the lands they occupied “be considered as their sole property and at their disposal both now, and as long as the sun shines,” and that any grants or agreements they had made be considered as “Independent of this Boundary.” In other words, they could sell their lands if they saw fit. The final deed stipulated that “the Lands occupied by the Mohawks around their villages … may effectually remain to them and to their posterity.”108

The Iroquois agreed to the massive cession of lands to Pennsylvania. In doing so, they supported Pennsylvania’s claims to land south of the Ohio contested by Virginia, and the Wyoming Valley, finally, was bought for the Penns. No commissioners from Connecticut were present to protest the sale and argue their claims. Johnson, Croghan, and the Iroquois had strategized to exclude John Henry Lydius, a well-known land speculator and smuggler, and the Indians rejected his claims as invalid. But they made a private agreement and signed a deed granting the “suffering traders” land around the Forks of the Ohio in compensation for their losses in the war: “in order to shew that we love justice, we expect the Traders who suffered by some of our dependants in the wars five years ago, may have a grant for the Lands we now give them down Ohio, as a satisfaction for their losses.” The traders received almost 2.5 million acres, about one-quarter of the current state of West Virginia. In addition, said the Iroquois, “as our friend Mr Croghan long ago got a Deed for Lands from us, which may now be taken into Mr Penns Lands, should it so happen, we request that it may be considered and get as much from the King somewhere else, as he fairly bought it.” In addition to his share in the suffering traders’ grant, Croghan thus received reaffirmation of the earlier grant of two hundred thousand acres on the Ohio that “conveniently” fell within the new cession. He had also bought up deeds to 127,000 acres of land in the weeks leading up to the treaty. The Iroquois granted Sir William two hundred thousand acres in New York. Having “given enough to shew our Love for the King and make his people easy,” they expected the Crown to permit no old claims or new encroachments.109

Sir William thanked them for their words and the council adjourned. Heavy rain prevented a meeting the next day, but Johnson kept busy presenting gifts of clothing to chiefs and preparing papers. He made a final effort to persuade the Mohawks to extend the boundary beyond Wood Creek but the Mohawks stuck to their guns. After another day spent preparing speeches and drawing up the deed of cession, the parties reconvened on Friday, November 4, to conclude the treaty.110 After conducting a condolence ceremony for the death of an Oneida chief, Johnson assured the Indians that their speech to the king would be forwarded along with the rest of the proceedings and that the boundary was intended to last; however, “should it be found necessary by His Majesty or yourselves to make any future additions or alterations he will treat with you by those who have management of your affairs.” Finally, on that last day, Johnson turned to the Shawnees and Delawares. Having brought the Senecas back into the British orbit after years of rocky relations, he now treated their erstwhile allies with disdain and effectively discredited them as participants in the treaty. He told them he knew they had been talking with England’s enemies and warned them not to listen to mischief makers; the British had conquered Canada and driven the French out of their country and would always have it in their power to defeat any future French efforts. He instructed the Shawnees and Delawares to remember their agreements with the English, observe the peace with the Cherokees, “& pay due regard to the Boundary Line now made.” If they made no disturbances on the frontiers and kept “the Roads & Waters open and free,” they would “enjoy the benefits of Peace & Commerce, the esteem of the King of Great Britain & the friendship of all his subjects.” He handed them a wampum belt and told them to “remember & often repeat my words.” Johnson wanted the Ohio nations united under the leadership of the Six Nations, not scattered and following their own paths. Because the government was transferring management of the Indian trade to the individual colonies, he called on the governor of New Jersey and the various commissioners “to enact the most effectual Laws for the due observance of this Line & the preventing all future intrusions.” All that remained then, said Johnson, was for the Indians to execute a deed of cession to the king and for him to deliver to the Indians the presents and money he had promised.111

The next morning, when the Indians filed into the fort, the presents and money were laid out on the parade ground for all to see. Wharton said it was “the greatest Quantity of Indian Goods, and Dollars, I ever saw on such an occasion” and that the presents were arranged so that they “circumscribed” Johnson, Governor Franklin, and the commissioners on three sides. The Indians’ spokesman repeated what Johnson had said the day before and thanked him for his words and advice. The deeds to the king, the proprietors of Pennsylvania, and the traders were then laid on the table and signed. Six chiefs, one for each of the Six Nations, affixed their signatures to the final deed: Abraham for the Mohawks, Conoghquieson for the Oneidas, Sequarusera for the Tuscaroras, Bunt for the Onondagas, Tegaia for the Cayugas, and Gaustrax for the Senecas. No Shawnees or Delawares were included, and there was not any statement indicating that they had agreed to the largest cession of Indian land in colonial America. The chiefs of each nation then “received the Cash which was piled on a Table for that purpose” and spent the rest of the day dividing the goods among their people. Governor Franklin and the other commissioners wasted no time and headed for home that afternoon. Johnson and the Indians left the next day, Sunday.112

The treaty extended the boundary line almost four hundred miles farther west than Johnson’s instructions from London stipulated, embracing most of Kentucky and West Virginia (see figure 2.3). Asserting their right to the Tennessee River and their authority to act for “the Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingoes of Ohio and other Dependent Tribes,” the Iroquois delegates had signed away thousands of square miles of other peoples’ lands. The grant of lands as reparations to Philadelphia merchants—the Indiana grant—lay north and east of the Kanawha, the authorized boundary. South and west of the Kanawha lay “the whole Cumberland-Tennessee-Kentucky region so productive of future difficulties.”113 As the historian Timothy Shannon says, “The handprints of private land speculators, including Johnson’s own, were all over these cessions.” In return for £10,000 in cash and trade goods, and a measure of protection for their own lands, the Iroquois sold Shawnee hunting grounds “to agents whose official credentials barely disguised their private interests.”114 Yet at Stanwix, Crown purposes, private speculations, and Iroquois interests were not at odds; they were just not quite in line. The total cost came to £13,156, 14 shillings, and one penny: £10,460 7s. 3d in cash; £2,328. 5s. 0d. in gifts, and £758. 4s. 5d. in provisions, with additional expenses for travel, messengers, making wampum belts at the treaty, and so on.115 The Ohio Indians were allotted just £27 worth of trade goods.

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FIGURE 2.3 Guy Johnson’s map of the boundary line established at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. (A Map of the Frontiers of the Northern Colonies with the Boundary Line established between them and the Indians at the Treaty held by Sir Will Johnson at Ft Stanwix in Novr. 1768. DRCHNY, 8, opp. 136; Courtesy Dartmouth College)

In the name of George III, Johnson bought from the Iroquois “a vast expense of the American West which the Crown had specifically ordered him not to buy.”116 In Johnson’s mind, imperial and personal interests were easily conflated: he and the Crown both got what they wanted at Fort Stanwix. An Indian war was averted, the traders were compensated, the boundary line was run, and both the empire and its chief agent came away with lots of land. It appeared that the authority of the Crown and its superintendent over the regulation of the boundary was reaffirmed. When he got home from the treaty, Johnson wrote to Governor Penn that “after a Great Struggle & more difficulty that can be conceived by those who were not Eye Witnesses I have at length in the Settlement of the boundary Line procured for you a very advantageous cession.”117 Richard Peters promised on his return to Philadelphia to give the governor a full account of Johnson’s “attention to his interest & the prudence & zeal with which you transacted that part of the business in which he was concerned.”118 Samuel Wharton was delighted with the treaty. “I can assure you,” he wrote Benjamin Franklin, “To the Honour of Sir William and Mr. Croghan that no Treaty was ever Conducted with more Judgement and Candour and none I am convinced, ever finished with more solid satisfaction on the part of the Natives, than this did ….There is now the fairest prospect, that these Colonies have ever had since the Year 1749, to perpetuate the Blessings of an Indian peace to their Posterity and of rendering our Commerce with the Natives much more beneficial to the Mother Country, than it Ever has been.” The Indians had given up their rights to a huge amount of territory for a “very small Sum,” and the king’s ministers should confirm the treaty, and its compensation to the traders, without delay. Once the cession was confirmed, continued Wharton with an eye to the future, settlers could occupy the Ohio and the interior parts of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York and no longer be threatened by Indian attacks: “In case of a Rupture, the War can be readily and at a little expence carried into the Indian Villages and They thereby be compelled to seek a retreat, To the Westward of the great Lakes.”119

The Iroquois got what they wanted as well. In the words of William Fenton who spent his life studying Iroquois history and culture, from an Iroquois perspective, “the Fort Stanwix treaty was the greatest giveaway in history.” They were in no position to defend what they claimed, their power was declining as that of the English increased, and their influence among the Ohio nations was in decline.120 But at Fort Stanwix, for a moment, the Iroquois reaffirmed their dominance over the western nations and regained their standing with the British. They diverted the swelling tide of British settlement away from Iroquoia onto lands that they claimed but which other people inhabited, and for a hefty sum they gave up a tenuous claim to an area they could no longer control, if indeed they ever had. The Iroquois traded land for time and it was someone else’s land.

Johnson and the Iroquois both saw in the treaty an opportunity to bolster their authority—Johnson as the Crown’s man-on-the-spot dealing with Indians and negotiating the expansion of the empire, and the Iroquois as the key players in Britain’s relations with a wider Indian world. The treaty also gave Johnson and others an opportunity to advance their individual interests. The interests of the Crown’s agent, colonial speculators, and eastern Iroquois headmen converged in an agreement to hand over the country south of the Ohio—and the Ohio Indians paid the price.121 But Johnson and the Iroquois would also pay a heavy price for their immediate gains. The treaty did not maintain Sir William’s influence; it did not maintain Iroquois influence, and it did not bring peace. In fact, the British-Iroquois deal at Fort Stanwix produced disastrous consequences for British-Iroquois dominance in North America.

The Struggles for the Stanwix Cession

The treaty was immediately controversial. General Thomas Gage, the British commander in North America, feared that pushing the boundary to the Tennessee River would cause trouble with the southern Indians: “for whatever Pretensions the Six Nations May have to the Territorys claimed by them on that Side, if our Provinces should ever pretend a Right to those Lands in Consequence of this Cession of the Six Nations, it seems most probable that a Quarrell will ensue with the Southern Nations, who by no Means admit of these Claims of the Six Nations.”122 Johnson assured him that the Tennessee River boundary would “have no Ill Effect, what I have done is only vesting the Claim of the Northeren [sic] Indians (which would always hang over that Country) in the Crown,” and the Cherokees had not objected. Had he not moved the boundary west, the Virginians would have pushed into the area anyway.123 Gage remained skeptical: the Cherokees might not have openly denied the Six Nations’ claim to those lands but they did not openly acknowledge it either. “And if by Virtue of the Claim of the Six Nations Made over to Us, we should in Consequence possess those Lands, the Cherokees would look upon such a step with a Jealous and evil Eye, and that would sooner or later occasion Hostilities between us.” Gage had little faith in boundaries anyway: They were only effective if they were strictly enforced and the frontier people were “too Numerous, too Lawless and Licentious ever to be restrained.”124 Johnson agreed that the frontier inhabitants would inevitably push west but felt that it was better that they dispossess the Cherokees than the northern tribes “who are more capable of Shewing their Resentment & more inclined to do so.”125

At the Treaty of Hard Labor in October 1768, John Stuart and the Cherokees confirmed a new boundary approved by the Board of Trade.126 Starting at Fort Chiswell, the terminal point of a boundary negotiated between Governor William Tryon of North Carolina and the Cherokees the year before, the treaty continued the boundary to the Ohio at the mouth of the Kanawha River. The treaty completed the Virginia section of the boundary although no Virginian representatives attended. In November, Stuart negotiated a boundary treaty with the Creeks at Augusta in Georgia.127 But the unauthorized Stanwix cession of lands beyond the Kanawha threw the southern boundary issue into confusion. Virginians petitioned for an extension of the southern boundary to bring it into line with the Stanwix boundary, and the governor of Virginia, Lord Botetort, promptly dispatched Andrew Lewis and Thomas Walker to Stuart to negotiate a new boundary with the Cherokees.128 At the Treaty of Lochaber in October 1770 one thousand Cherokees agreed to shift the boundary farther west, so that it ran from the mouth of the Kanawha to the Holston River. “We never had such Talks formerly but now all our Talks are about Lands,” the Cherokee chief Attakullakulla reflected ruefully. Surveyors running the line in the summer of 1771 deviated from the agreement, and the next year John Donelson secured a new deal from Attakullakulla that moved the boundary west to the Kentucky River. The new line still did not meet up with the Stanwix line or give Virginians all they wanted but it did secure for Virginia an additional ten million acres in what is today eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.129 Now the southern treaties confused the boundary issue in the North. Surely Botetort had no authority to grant lands beyond the Appalachians in defiance of the Proclamation of 1763, William Franklin wrote his father. “It also seems improbable to me, that the Crown should, thro’ Lord Botetort, give the Virginians Leave to purchase of the southern Indians the very Land which the Crown had before purchased of the Six Nations.”130

The Treaty at Fort Stanwix marked the end of an era in Virginian-Iroquois relations. For almost a century, Virginian colonists had relied on alliance with the Iroquois for security against the French and to build their own power. As the colony grew, boundary lines with the Iroquois were negotiated in 1684, 1722, and at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744. Fort Stanwix was the last time colonial Virginians and Six Nations chiefs met in council. After 1768, Virginians regarded the Iroquois as “simply another Indian group that impeded the speedy settlement of western lands.”131

Lord Hillsborough was furious that Johnson had ignored his instructions in order to extend the boundary west, thereby undermining the agreements Stuart had reached with the southern tribes.132 The Board of Trade looked into the matter and reprimanded Johnson for ignoring his orders and allowing “the claims and interests of private persons to mix themselves in this Negotiation.”133 Johnson acknowledged in correspondence with William Franklin that his friendship with the suffering traders might have caused him “to espouse their cause,” but he had only done what the government had already approved and he had “acted on the most equitable as well as disinterested principles.”134

In any case, the Iroquois grant to the traders was worthless without confirmation by the imperial government. Having achieved their goals in America, Samuel Wharton and William Trent sailed for England early in 1769 to head off rivals with competing claims and “have the final Stroke given to the Grant.” They carried letters of introduction to well-placed people, and they relied on Benjamin Franklin for guidance and advice. Wharton spent years in London, cultivating friends in high places and promoting his schemes. “He has acquired better connections here, than any American that I know of, ever did,” wrote one business associate. In Peter Marshall’s assessment, he was “energetic, persuasive and above all unscrupulous.” The original group of Philadelphia merchants expanded to include British politicians and speculators, and the claim for reparations for losses in the Indian trade became absorbed into a much larger project that reached the highest levels of government. The suffering traders joined forces with the Ohio Company and formed a new consortium known as the Grand Ohio Company or the Walpole Associates (Benjamin Franklin involved the British politicians Thomas and Richard Walpole). The company first petitioned the Privy Council for a grant of 2,400,000 acres to be carved out of the lands ceded to the Crown at Fort Stanwix. The Privy Council referred the petition to the Board of Trade; after a five-month delay the board approved it in December 1769. By that time, the company was scheming to develop a new western colony in the ceded lands south of Ohio, and it petitioned for a grant of twenty million acres within the Stanwix cession that would have swallowed up the Indiana grant. They initially called the proposed colony “Pittsylvania” in honor of William Pitt but, hoping to win royal support, changed the name to Vandalia, in honor of Queen Charlotte, who was reputed to be descended from Vandals. Hillsborough attempted to obstruct the project but Wharton and Franklin won over influential people. The Lords of the Treasury approved the twenty-million-acre grant in 1770; the Privy Council approved the Vandalia proposal in 1772, and Hillsborough fell from power to be replaced by the Earl of Dartmouth. But Vandalia never became a reality. Opposition from rival interest groups—Virginian speculators with eyes on the same lands also had connections in London—continued to delay progress and the Quebec Act of 1774 placed supervision of western territory in the hands of the governor-general of Canada, leaving the speculators involved in the Grand Ohio Company and the Vandalia project empty-handed. Relations between Wharton and the Franklins strained and then broke. When Benjamin Franklin left England in 1775 “eleven years of lobbying for various land-speculating ventures had netted him absolutely nothing.” Then the Revolution changed everything and Wharton’s and Croghan’s schemes “were among the first casualties of the war.”135

Croghan had hoped that the Treaty at Fort Stanwix would secure his fortune and his future, and he leveraged loans on the basis of land granted to him and the suffering traders. But his plans soon ran into trouble. Laid up by a severe attack of gout and a dislocated foot in the summer of 1769, he traveled by wagon to Johnson Hall when he heard that the government was unlikely to confirm the private transactions Johnson had written into the treaty.136 The following February he was confined to his bed; an acquaintance described him as “a Poor Soul” who did “nothing but pray and talk about the Sufferings of the Inner Man,” and occasionally sighed in regret “about the Tricks of his Youth.”137 In the spring, fearing an Indian war was imminent, Croghan hurried to Fort Pitt to try and sell off the merchandise and buildings he owned there, presumably to someone less aware of the impending catastrophe. He then set up a private land office in Pittsburgh, selling land titles to anyone who would buy them, liquidating his claims as quickly as possible to try and pay off his debts.138

One of the individuals interested in making a purchase was George Washington. Washington had told a friend, the fellow land speculator and agent William Crawford, in 1767 that he regarded the proclamation line of 1763 as no more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians & [one that] must fall of course in a few years especially when those Indians are consenting to our Occupying the Lands.” Anyone who missed “the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them)” would never get another chance. Through Crawford, Washington consulted Croghan about purchasing fifteen thousand acres. He also considered buying Croghan’s interest in the Walpole Company but finally decided it was too shaky. Washington did acquire, by grants, some of the lands claimed by Croghan, and he later had to resort to litigation to reinforce his rights to the land.139 The government’s procrastination and ultimate rejection of the Vandalia scheme sent Croghan deeper into debt.

The Mason-Dixon line had separated Pennsylvania from Maryland and Virginia but the western end of the line remained undetermined. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix also left Pennsylvania’s western boundary undetermined and Pennsylvania and Virginia contested a large area. In which colony, for example, did Fort Pitt fall? Pennsylvania took the position that the Stanwix treaty put the ceded lands at its disposal and immediately began surveying and settling lands in the area. Virginia insisted that the ceded territory lay within its borders. The Virginia governor Lord Dunmore’s chief agent in the region was Dr. John Connolly, who occupied Fort Pitt after British regulars abandoned it in 1772, and he renamed it Fort Dunmore. Connolly was George Croghan’s nephew.

According to the historian Dorothy Jones, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix “closed the book on one era of treaty-making in early America and opened it on another.” Before Stanwix, treaties dealt with issues of trade, war and peace, alliances and relationships, and criminal jurisdiction, and they sometimes, but not always, transferred Indian lands into colonial hands. After Stanwix, treaties as conferences of accommodation disintegrated; more and more often, they became instruments for transferring land and as methods to separate Indians and Europeans.140 As Timothy Shannon puts it, the “simple equation of land for loot” established at Fort Stanwix “provided the template” by which the United States conducted its diplomacy with Indian nations in years to come, demanding land cessions in exchange for annuities of cash or goods that the Indians needed to sustain themselves as they were confined to small, unproductive reservations.141

The Fort Stanwix treaty also accelerated a movement toward private land acquisition. The boundary that was meant to bring peace and order to the frontier in fact created conditions for conflict and confusion in which “the step from treaties as a public instrument of cession to treaties as a private instrument of cession was a very short step, and one easily taken.”142 Shifting intertribal power and politics, shifting British imperial policy, and unrelenting white expansion created chaos in the early 1770s. British actions in the wake of the treaty made things worse and contributed to the collapse of their empire in the Ohio Valley. When the government ordered Fort Pitt and Fort Chartres abandoned in 1771 as a measure of economy, it removed the British army as “a restraining power” in the region. At the same time, by failing to provide for limited land development beyond the proclamation line and by stalling indefinitely in giving approval to various proprietary schemes, “the ministry guaranteed that impatient, unscrupulous, or opportunistic adventurers would take the lead in western development and compound the confusions and conflicts that were already developing over western lands.”143

The Stanwix cession unleashed an invasion of Indian country. In Virginia, veterans of the French and Indian War, with Washington at the forefront, asked the Executive Council for the land bounties they had been promised. Influential Virginians lobbied the Privy Council for rights to Kentucky and other lands that Virginia claimed by charter but which the suffering traders claimed were theirs. Samuel Wharton wrote a lengthy tract arguing that the territory west of the Alleghanies “never belonged to Virginia.” (He also argued that Indians had “an indefensible right freely to sell, and grant to any person whatsoever”—in other words the land grants to private individuals at Fort Stanwix were valid. As the law professor Blake Watson notes, those who defended the property rights of Indians were often those who were most eager to buy their lands.)144 The Penns opened their portion to settlement in April 1769 and received 2,790 applications for three-hundred-acre lots on the first day. Croghan reckoned between four and five thousand families crossed the mountains in 1769, and all spring and summer the next year the roads were “lined with wagons moving to the Ohio.” Alexander McKee, an agent in the Shawnee towns, reported that the flood of white settlers and surveyors in the country around Fort Pitt and down the Ohio “has set all their Warriors in a rage.”145 The Delaware chief Killbuck told the governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia that since the Stanwix treaty “great Numbers more of your People have come Over the Great Mountains and settled throughout this Country.” They were “very fond of our Rich Land,” constantly quarreling among themselves about land, and had had some violent quarrels with the Indians. Unless the governors found a way to control their people, the Indians would not be able to restrain their young men; “the black Clouds begin to gather fast in this Country,” Killbuck warned. The western Indians frequently heard of English meetings with the Six Nations and Cherokees “which gives us cause to think you are forming some bad designs against us Indians who Live between the Ohio and the Lakes.”146

Even the Iroquois did not get the respite or benefit they hoped the treaty would bring them. Crops failed in 1769 and many Iroquois had to use the money they received at Fort Stanwix to buy provisions from colonial settlers to make it through the winter and spring.147 In July 1770, at a conference both Abraham and Conoghquieson attended, Johnson confirmed the treaty and the Iroquois reaffirmed their right to cede the western lands. But, Abraham reprimanded Johnson, “at the treaty of Fort Stanwix you then told us, as you had done before, that we should pass our time in peace, and travel in security, that Trade should flourish & goods abound; that they should be sold us cheap, & that care should be taken to prevent any persons from imposing on us.” Things had not worked out that way. “It is now worse than it was before.”148 Two years later, the Mohawks reminded Johnson that they had made the “great cession of Territory” to the king in expectation that their villages east of the line would be protected but now their lands were again under pressure from the people of Albany.149 The Iroquois position would soon deteriorate further.

The harder the British and the Iroquois tried to maintain their influence and authority in the West, the faster it declined. Iroquois adherence to the British as a way of preserving their power among the western nations actually reduced it, as those nations became increasingly resentful of the British-Iroquois alliance. In selling their neighbors’ lands and protecting their own, the Iroquois forfeited their leadership role among the western tribes; in failing to protect the western tribes’ lands, the British forfeited their role as fathers. The Ohio nations denounced the treaty as a deal concocted between the British and the Iroquois to steal their lands. The Six Nations had given up their hunting grounds to the English without asking for their consent, they said, and “had Shamefully taken all the Money and Goods to themselves and not Shared any part thereof with them.” They called the Six Nations “slaves of the white people.” Young warriors said it was better to die like men than be kicked about like dogs.150

Shawnee resentment of the Iroquois predated 1768 and ran deeper than the Fort Stanwix cession—they had voiced defiance of the Six Nations at Fort Pitt the spring before—but the treaty brought things to a head. The Shawnees became increasingly vocal and began to build a coalition of Indian nations that was independent of both the Iroquois and the British and opposed to the Stanwix cession. The Shawnee chief Red Hawk said the Six Nations had no more “right to sell the Country than we have.” The Shawnees had acknowledged the Iroquois as their elder brothers and listened to them while their advice was good, he said, but “their power extends no further with us.” Shawnee emissaries carrying wampum belts traveled north to the Great Lakes and south to Creek country and delegates from southern and western tribes gathered at “a very large Council House” that the Shawnees built on the banks of the Scioto River.151 “The scheme of the Shawnese to form a confederacy of all the Western and Southern nations is a notable piece of policy,” General Gage warned John Stuart, “for nothing less would enable them to withstand the Six Nations and their allies against whom they have been much exasperated on account of the boundary treaty held at Fort Stanwix.”152 As Shawnee emissaries reached out to Cherokees, Stuart informed his deputies that the Shawnees “are at the head of the Western confederacy which is formed upon the principle of maintaining their property in the lands obtained from the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix and prevent their being settled by white people.”153 Hillsborough became increasingly convinced of “the fatal Policy” of deviating from the proclamation line and feared the outbreak of a general Indian war.154

The Shawnees also protested against the Cherokees selling lands in Kentucky that they regarded as their hunting grounds. The boundary lines that were agreed upon by the Iroquois and the Cherokees converged on the Ohio River. In the words of the late historian Wilbur Jacobs, the lines “silhouetted a huge geographical arrowhead directed to the heartland of America.”155 Whites entered the arrowhead confident that their invasion was legal; Shawnees who had never relinquished the land treated them as trespassers. Daniel Boone was one of the first intruders. In 1769 with half a dozen men, he crossed from North Carolina through the Cumberland Gap and spent the summer hunting in the game-filled forests of northern Kentucky. The Shawnees caught them, confiscated their furs and guns, and sent them home. Boone sneaked back into Kentucky the next spring, and in 1773, he sold his farm in North Carolina and led five families and forty single men through Cumberland Gap. A war party of Cherokees and Shawnees ambushed them and killed six people, including Boone’s eldest son, James. Boone’s party retreated but regrouped and returned two years later.156

Kentucky became a battleground where two worlds and worldviews collided. Backcountry settlers hunted, supplementing their crops and livestock, and adopted Indian hunting techniques, but they did not adopt Indian hunting values. They felt no kinship with animals; they ignored rituals that Indians believed were necessary to harvest plant and animal life and keep the world in balance, and they slaughtered game wastefully. Indians fought to preserve their hunting territories; invading settlers fought to transform them into fields and pastures. They felled trees with fire and axes, fenced and plowed fields, brought in pigs and cattle, and tried to hold the land they seized as private property. They changed the landscape and many of its meanings. Colonists called the Indians savages; Shawnees called the invaders who disrupted the balance of their world “crazy people [who] want to shove us off our land entirely.”157

And the crazy people kept coming. Pioneers from Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland followed in Boone’s footsteps. “You told us that we should have no more Disturbance or trouble about our Lands after the Boundary line was run. But trouble still continues with us,” the Cherokee chief Oconostota complained. “We think the Virginia People don’t hear your talks nor mind, nor do they seem to care for King George’s talks over the great Water.”158 The country around Pittsburgh was “in great Confusion,” said Croghan, “on account of the Governour & Council of Virginia granting patents to Col. Washington for 200,000 acres of Land on Ohio & the Great Kanahwa,” and the Indians were alarmed to see surveyors and colonists heading downriver “to Settle a Country wh[ich] they were Informed by the Kings Messages was not to be settled.” If reports of sixty thousand people settled between Pittsburgh and the mouth of the Ohio by the end of 1773 were true, wrote Croghan, “the policy of ye People in England delaying ye Grant of ye New Colony in order to prevent Emigration answers not their purpose.”159 As Johnson explained to the Earl of Dartmouth, “These settlers generally set out with a general Prejudice against all Indians and the young Indian Warriors or Hunters are too often inclined to retaliate.”160 Shawnees who found “the Woods covered with White People” and surveyors marking the land said they “had many disagreeable Dreams” about it that winter.161 “Being Sure the White People intended to take all our Country from us, and that very soon,” the Shawnees urged other tribes to be ready to “defend it to the last Drop of blood.”162

The British employed divide-and-conquer tactics to dismantle the coalition the Shawnees were building: “we must either agree to permit these people to Cut each other’s Throats or risk their discharging their fury on Our Traders & defenceless Frontiers,” Johnson wrote to Hillsborough. Johnson worked on the Iroquois, Stuart on the Cherokees, and Croghan among the western tribes, to keep them out of the impending conflict. Shawnee delegates who tried to rally the tribes met rebuffs. In one instance the Iroquois threw the Shawnees’ wampum belt back at them.163

Croghan kept borrowing money to buy Indian land and kept hoping for word from London that the government had approved his purchases. But the world in which he had lived and operated for years was coming to an end as fast as that of the Shawnees. In 1772, Croghan buried his old friend Andrew Montour, who had been murdered by a Seneca. In the historian Patrick Griffin’s words, Croghan and the Indians who attended Montour’s funeral near Fort Pitt “were remembering more than a man. They were paying homage to a moment now passed on the frontier and to a process of cultural accommodation that underscored the viability of the imperial plan.” That plan was dead, authority west of the line was collapsing, and Croghan’s influence was evaporating. He resigned his post as deputy, “hoping to make as much money as he could before his world dissolved.”164

In the final weeks of his life Sir William Johnson also saw the treaty he had maneuvered and the world he had created coming apart.165 The land ceded at Fort Stanwix, he assured Lord Dartmouth in late June, “was secured by the plainest & best natural boundaries, and the Indians freely agreed to make it more ample that our people should have no pretext of narrow limits, and the remainder might be rendered the more secure to themselves & their posterity.” But now squatters were pushing beyond the boundaries. He expected soon to hear they had even crossed the Ohio “wherever the lands invite them; for the body of these people are under no restraint, they perceive that they are in places of security, and pay as little regard to Government, as they do title for their possessions.” Atrocities like the murder of the Mingo chief Logan’s family by frontier thugs (an event made infamous when Thomas Jefferson included Logan’s alleged lament in his Notes on the State of Virginia) threatened to spark fresh wars. And there was little hope of establishing order in the West until better order was restored in the East.166

As Johnson was writing, parties of Iroquois gathered at Johnson Hall to discuss “the critical state of Indian Affairs.” Conoghquieson opened the meeting on Saturday, July 9, 1774. Serihowane, a Seneca, got down to the business at hand:

Brother, we are sorry to observe to you that your People are as ungovernable, or rather more so, than ours. You must remember that it was most solemnly, and publicly settled, and agreed to at the General Congress held at Fort Stanwix in 1768 … that the Line then pointed out and fixed between the Whites and Indians should forever after be looked upon as a barrier between us, and that the White People were not to go beyond it. It seems, Brother, that your People entirely disregard, and despise the settlement agreed upon by their Superiors and us; for we find that they, notwithstanding that settlement, are come in vast numbers to the Ohio, and gave our people to understand that they wou’d settle wherever they pleas’d. If this is the case we must look upon every engagement you made with us as void and of no effect.

The conference adjourned for the rest of the weekend. On Monday Johnson responded that the Crown would take steps to keep colonists off Indian lands but the Iroquois must do their part and keep the Shawnees in check. Then, fatigued from his exertions, he ordered pipes, tobacco, and some liquor for the Indians, and he retired to give them time to consider. Two hours later Sir William Johnson was dead.167

Conoghquieson conducted the condolence ceremony at Johnson’s funeral. He handed Guy Johnson a black and white wampum belt, exhorting him to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and take over the conduct of their affairs. Abraham repeated that if the British could not prevent their settlers from breaching the Stanwix line, it “must end in troubles.”168 The chiefs returned to Johnson Hall in September to hold a formal condolence ceremony and invest Guy Johnson as superintendent with a new name. Several chiefs who had been with Sir William at the Fort Stanwix treaty but not at the council where he died—Bunt, Diaquanda, and Sayenqueraghta—conveyed their sympathies and assured Guy Johnson of their support.169 In December, the Iroquois again reminded Guy Johnson that they had given up so much land at Fort Stanwix in expectation that the king would hold the line and they hoped that would not be forgotten, “for we remember it still, and you have it all in writing.”170

The Treaty of Fort Stanwix bulged the 1763 proclamation line to the west; it did not demolish or revoke it. Although the line did little to restrain colonial settlers, land speculators in Virginia and elsewhere still chomped at the bit, frustrated in their investments unless they could obtain clear title. The British government denied Virginia’s bid for Kentucky, and Indian resistance to the cession made things worse. As a result, writes Woody Holton, “the total yield of the Virginia land rush set off by the Fort Stanwix treaty was a pile of rejected land petitions and worthless surveys.” Lack of clear title infuriated Virginia gentry like George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson who had received preliminary grants to millions of acres. They would have to find other ways to acquire the Indians’ lands.171

In the spring of 1774 Virginia went to war against the Shawnees.172 There was, said Croghan in August, “too great a Spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians.” He requested thirty thousand white wampum beads and twenty thousand black beads in order to help preserve the friendship of the Delawares and Six Nations and prevent a general Indian war.173 Isolated by British diplomatic strategy, the Shawnees fought virtually alone. While James Murray, Governor Dunmore, led one army down the Ohio from Fort Pitt, Andrew Lewis, who had represented the claims of Virginian officers at Fort Stanwix, led another down the Kanawha River. Chief Cornstalk and the Shawnees attacked Lewis at Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha joins the Ohio. Charles Lewis, the general’s brother, died in the daylong firefight that ensued but the Shawnees were outnumbered and outgunned and forced from the field.174 Cornstalk made peace with Dunmore, and the Shawnees conceded their lands south of the Ohio. Dr. Thomas Walker, who represented Virginia at the treaties at Fort Stanwix and Lochaber, was present at this treaty as well.

As Dorothy Jones noted, Dunmore’s War might “better be called the War of the Stanwix Cession.” The Shawnees protested first against the land ceded north and east of the Kanawha and they fought against Virginia to try and keep white settlers out of that region. After they were defeated and compelled to accept that cession, they and their western allies fought to keep whites out of the unauthorized part of the Fort Stanwix cession, the lands south and west of the Kanawha in Kentucky and Tennessee that became the famous “dark and troubled ground” of frontier history.175 The fighting over the Stanwix cession merged into the fighting of the American Revolution.

When the Revolution broke out, many Indians in the Ohio country hoped to stay out of the conflict. But they understood that it was a war over their land as well as a war for American independence and their best option was to side with the British, who had offered at least token protection for Indian lands, rather than with the Americans who were hell-bent on taking them. Shawnee chiefs told the Virginians in July 1775 “we are often inclined to believe there is no resting place for us and that your Intentions were [sic] to deprive us entirely of our whole Country.”176

More than six hundred Indians showed up at Fort Pitt in the fall of 1776 to meet with the American commissioners for Indian affairs, one of whom, once again, was Thomas Walker. George Morgan, now an Indian agent for the United States, was on hand. The Americans assured the Indians their lands would not be touched as long as they held fast the chain of friendship. Both sides pledged themselves to peace, although a Seneca chief named Round Face reminded the commissioners, “You know the Boundary lately established at Fort Stanwix—You then told us if any of your people should presume to set their Feet over the Line, they should be cut off.” The commissioners assured the Indians that “no white people will be suffered to pass the Line settled at Fort Stanwix, for although that agreement was made with the King yet as we are satisfied with it, we shall take care that it is complied with.” Nevertheless, Cornstalk had Morgan write down his speech and send it to the Congress in Philadelphia. American land thefts struck at the core of Shawnee life, and “all our lands are covered by the white people,” he said. Referring to the lands south and west of the Kanawha—the lands Johnson was not authorized to buy—he declared: “We never sold you our Lands which you now possess on the Ohio between the Great Kenhawa and the Cherokee River, and which you are settling without ever asking our leave, or obtaining our consent ….That was our hunting Country and you have taken it from us. This is what sits heavy upon our Hearts and on the Hearts of all Nations, and it is impossible for us to think as we ought to whilst we are thus oppressed.”177

The next year Cornstalk visited the American garrison at Fort Randolph on the Kanawha River, at the site where he had fought the Virginians exactly three years earlier. He was taken hostage, held in the fort, and later murdered by American militia.178 Meanwhile, the Delaware chief White Eyes publicly threw off the subordinate status the Iroquois had assigned his people and negotiated a defensive alliance with the United States at Fort Pitt in September 1778.179 But American militia murdered White Eyes. By 1779 most Shawnees and Delawares joined the British alliance. Shawnee war parties and Kentucky militia raided back and forth across the Ohio River, burning villages and taking scalps in a vicious conflict along the boundary set at Fort Stanwix.

Cherokees also fought to preserve the disputed lands. No matter how much land Cherokees gave up, the colonists kept coming; Cherokees said they could “see the smoke of the Virginians from their doors.” In March 1775, at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in Tennessee, Judge Richard Henderson and a group of North Carolina land speculators known as the Transylvania Land Company induced Attakullakulla, the principal headman Oconostota, and the Raven of Chota to sell twenty-seven thousand square miles of land between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers—most of modern Kentucky—in exchange for a cabin full of trade goods. The chiefs later claimed that Henderson had deceived them as to what they were signing. A young chief named Dragging Canoe reputedly stormed from the treaty council in disgust, vowing to make the ceded lands “dark and bloody.” He told the British “that he had no hand in making these Bargains but blamed some of their Old Men who he said were too old to hunt and who by their poverty had been induced to sell their land but that for his part he had a great many young fellows that would support him and that they were determined to have their land.”180

In April 1776 a Shawnee chief and a delegation of fourteen northern Indians traveled to Cherokee country. In the council house at the town of Chota the Shawnee produced a nine-foot wampum belt, painted red as a sign of war. He recited the grievances of the Shawnees and other nations, particularly their cruel treatment at the hands of the Virginians. The Indians once held the whole country; now they barely had enough ground to stand on. “Better to die like men than to dwindle away by inches,” he declared. The older Cherokee chiefs, who had seen war and tasted defeat, sat silent, but Dragging Canoe led the warriors in accepting the war belt. Cherokee war parties attacked the colonists who encroached on their lands but armies from Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas immediately retaliated, burned Cherokee villages and crops, and then dictated peace terms that took more Cherokee land. Rather than surrender, Dragging Canoe led his warriors deep into present-day Tennessee and continued the fight from the Chickamauga River and Lookout Mountain. Chickamauga Cherokees made common cause with militant Shawnees.181

The Revolution ended many careers, alliances, and hopes that had rested on the Fort Stanwix treaty. Delegates from the Six Nations and the Continental Congress met at Albany in the summer of 1775 to remind each other of their peaceful intentions. Abraham and Conoghquieson were both there.182 The Fort Stanwix treaty had left the Oneidas on the border of the new boundary and they faced hard choices when the Revolution broke out. The British had endeavored to regulate white encroachment on their lands, but they had failed to stop it and the Oneidas knew that if they displayed British sympathies their American neighbors would be sure to seize their lands and the Carrying Place they had negotiated so hard to keep at Fort Stanwix. Conoghquieson blamed the missionary Samuel Kirkland for meddling in Oneida affairs and dividing the tribe (which he did) but most Oneidas supported the Americans.183 But the Revolution swept away the Fort Stanwix treaty provisions that protected Mohawk and Oneida land; in their place, it brought frontier violence and racial conflict.

Joseph Brant sided with the Crown and the Mohawks were driven from their homeland. Guy Johnson and his followers fled to Canada. American troops occupied and trashed Johnson Hall, the center of the world that Sir William had constructed and dominated with the help of his Iroquois friends and allies. John Butler, who had interpreted at Fort Stanwix, also fled to Canada with his sons Thomas and Walter, although his wife and other children were imprisoned by the rebels and he did not see them again until an exchange was arranged in 1780. Dispatched to Niagara to manage the Indian department there, Butler orchestrated raids on the American frontier and organized a corps of rangers to serve with the Indians, fighting alongside Joseph Brant and the aging Seneca war chief Sayenqueraghta. His property in New York was confiscated and he tried to recoup his losses through various means—monopolizing trade at Niagara during the war, speculating in Indian lands and other shady ventures in Upper Canada after the war—which got him investigated by the British colonial government but brought little success. He continued to serve as deputy superintendent of Indian affairs and, despite growing infirmities, attended the Sandusky conference between the Indians and Americans in 1793, his last public act. At Butler’s funeral in 1796 Brant described him as “the last that remained of those that acted with that great man the late Sir William Johnson, whose steps he followed and our Loss is the greater, as there are none remaining who understand our manners and customs as well as he did.”184

Sayenqueraghta remained firm in his allegiance to the British. The rebels, he declared, “wish for nothing more, than to extirpate us from the Earth, that they may possess our Lands, the desire of attaining which we are convinced is the Cause of the present War between the King and his disobedient Children.” He led Seneca war parties harassing Fort Stanwix, now in American hands, and fought with Butler in the bloody Battle of Oriskany in the woods near the fort in 1777. Seneca villages bore the brunt of the American invasion of Iroquoia in 1779, when General John Sullivan’s army burned forty towns, destroyed an estimated 160,000 bushels of corn, and systematically wasted fields and orchards. Left without food and shelter as one of the harshest winters on record gripped upstate New York, many Senecas accompanied Sayenqueraghta to the British garrison at Fort Niagara, where he continued to exercise a prominent role in the refugee community that grew up there and in British-Iroquois relations. In 1780 he moved with his family and followers to Buffalo Creek in New York, where he died six years later.185

The Mohawk chief Abraham pursued a precarious and perilous neutrality and stayed behind when most of his people went to Canada. In the winter of 1779–80 he and another Mohawk named Crine, together with two Oneida leaders, Good Peter and Skenandon, set out through the snow to Niagara, carrying letters and hoping to arrange an exchange of prisoners. They met with a cold reception. The British and their Iroquois allies at Niagara regarded them as traitors. Sayenqueraghta, who had negotiated alongside Abraham at Fort Stanwix, drank to the health of the other Indians, “omitting the four Rebels as a Mark of his Contempt.” Guy Johnson threw the emissaries into the fort’s dungeon, where they languished in cramped confinement for several months. By the time Johnson agreed to release them, Abraham was dead.186

Richard Peters did not have time to profit from the Revolution; he died six days after the Declaration of Independence was signed.187 The Revolution ended the Penn family’s control of Pennsylvania. John Penn was the last colonial governor of Pennsylvania. He pursued a careful policy of neutrality and managed to hold on to his private lands but the Pennsylvania Assembly divested the proprietorship of twenty-four million acres.

Unlike many of his associates, Croghan sided with the Patriots and became chairman of the Pittsburgh Committee of Correspondence. But he kept in contact with Loyalists as well as Patriots as he struggled to make his speculations pay off. He was a natural candidate for Indian agent at Pittsburgh, but the post went first to Richard Butler and then to George Morgan, who had little time for Croghan. Accused of being a Loyalist, Croghan had to move from Pittsburgh to Lancaster. There, still struggling with debts and with most of his remaining lands heavily mortgaged, he lived his old age in poverty. He died on the last day of August 1782. After his death more lands were sold to settle debts. Croghan Hall, his home for much of his life near the growing city of Pittsburgh, was lost through mortgage foreclosure. A man who had spent most of his life speculating in Indian lands died essentially landless.188

Andrew Lewis was appointed brigadier general in the Continental Army and he attended the United States treaty with the Delawares at Fort Pitt in 1778. He resigned his commission owing to ill health and died in 1781. Thomas Walker fared rather better. In 1775 he bought more than a million acres from George Croghan,189 and by the time he died in 1794 he was one of the richest men in Albemarle County, Virginia.

Samuel Wharton was in London when the Revolution broke out, still working to secure the Crown’s approval for the land grant. When some of his letters to rebels were made public, he was forced to flee to France. Returning to America in 1780 he took an oath of allegiance to the American cause. In 1782 and 1783 he was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he seems to have worked quietly but unsuccessfully to secure recognition for his western landholdings. After the Revolution, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware ceded their western land claims to the federal government; Virginia ceded its claims to lands north of the Ohio but retained its claims south of the river. Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 governing the territory north of the Ohio, and Virginia refused to confirm private purchases. Wharton’s claims came to nothing.

Unlike his father, William Franklin remained loyal to the Crown. He continued to serve as governor of New Jersey until 1776 when he was arrested and imprisoned on the orders of the Provincial Congress of New Jersey. He was released in a prisoner exchange in 1778 and continued to be active in the Loyalist community. He joined other Loyalists leaving for England in 1782. He met his father once more, during Benjamin’s trip to England in 1785, but in his will Franklin senior left him only some land in Nova Scotia, explaining, “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for my leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”190 William died in London in 1813.

By the terms of the Peace of Paris in 1783 Britain recognized American independence and handed over to the new United States all lands south of the Great Lakes, east of the Mississippi, and north of Florida. The Indians who inhabited this territory were neither included nor consulted and were left to make their own terms with the victorious Americans. Britain’s Indian allies were outraged. They were “thunderstruck” when they heard that British diplomats had sold them out to the Americans: “the peacemakers and our Enemies have talked away our Lands at a Rum Drinking,” declared a Cherokee chief named Little Turkey. They were not defeated subjects of King George; they were independent nations still fighting to defend their territorial boundaries as set by colonial treaties to which at least some of them had agreed. “These people,” Governor Frederick Haldimand of Canada wrote to Lord North in November 1783, “have as enlightened Ideas of the nature & Obligations of Treaties as the most Civilized Nations have, and know that no Infringement of the treaty in 1768 … Can be binding upon them without their Express Concurrence and Consent.” Indians saw the treaty as an act of betrayal “that Christians only were Capable of doing.” The British responded lamely that they had only ceded the right of preemption to Indian lands.191 For Indians the fighting did not end in 1783; it merged into a longer war to halt American expansion at the Ohio River—the boundary established at Fort Stanwix.