CHAPTER TWO

The Half King’s Dilemma

In adopting an essentially high-handed approach to the Pennsylvania Indians, the Iroquois made a classic miscalculation. Although virtually all empires grow by the forcible extension of dominion over others, the most successful empires have maintained long-term control by encouraging subordinated groups to participate voluntarily in the larger imperial community. Typically this kind of cooperative relationship rests on a pair of complementary realizations. In the first place, client communities must be willing to believe that the advantages of membership in the empire—a greater degree of security, for instance, or the economic benefits of trading within an imperial market—outweigh the costs of subordination and the dangers of resistance. In the second, the empire’s leaders must be able to recognize that it is neither possible nor desirable to use force constantly to maintain control. Ultimately the co-optation of local leaders and the consent of their communities are crucial to enduring imperial mastery. This was particularly true for the Six Nations. Iroquois warriors could strike with horrifying violence and intimidate other groups more or less at will, but lacked the capacity to undertake anything like a military occupation, or even to understand that concept as a meaningful one. The error that the leaders of the Six Nations made in dealing with the Delawares, Shawnees, and other Indians of Pennsylvania lay in assuming that they would accept subordination without resistance or complaint.

That they would not do. Instead, they moved west.

NATIVE PEOPLES AND EUROPEAN EMPIRES, C. 1750-1763

It would have suited the purposes of the League ideally if the Delawares had merely relocated from the upper Delaware Valley (on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania) to the Susquehanna Valley in the center of the province, where most of the Shawnee villages were already situated. The headwaters of the Susquehanna lay in the heart of Iroquoia, and the route that Six Nations warriors took on raiding expeditions against the Cherokees and Catawbas followed the valley. To have client groups living there would give raiders passing through on the warriors’ path places to rest and reprovision themselves, coming and going; and since any retaliatory raids would follow the same path north, the Delawares, Shawnees, and others living in the valley would form a defensive shield for Iroquoia.

Many Delawares did in fact move to the Susquehanna, and some decided to remain there permanently in villages around Shamokin, the principal settlement at the confluence of the river’s west and north branches. Yet for most of the Delawares, and for the Shawnees of the valley as well, the Susquehanna was only a way station on a path whose ultimate destination lay far to the west, beyond the Alleghenies, at the Forks of the Ohio—the site on which Pittsburgh stands today. There, they believed, they would be beyond the reach of the land-hungry Pennsylvanians; beyond, indeed, the effective control of the Iroquois chiefs who had betrayed them in order to gain profit and power. In the Ohio country they might become independent once more, and reap the same kinds of benefits the Six Nations did from dealing as a neutral power with both the French and British empires.

Independence was a compelling vision, and for a time it seemed to be a realizable one. When the Delawares and Shawnees moved to the Ohio country, they were relocating to an area that had been depopulated of human beings for nearly a century, and which as a result had become the home to the greatest populations of game animals—especially deer, beaver, and bear—in North America. Because the traders who had long lived among them decided to follow them west, the migrants could translate this abundance of game into a higher standard of living by hunting commercially for pelts and skins. Continued access to weapons, ammunition, and trade goods of all sorts encouraged them to imagine that they could once more live on their own terms.

By the mid-1740s, at least twenty-five hundred Indians lived in valleys of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio, and their associated tributaries. The majority were Delawares and Shawnees, but large numbers of western Senecas, called Mingos, lived there as well. As members of the Seneca nation, the Mingos were of course Iroquois. Yet like the Delawares and Shawnees they too hoped to escape domination by the League. Descended mainly from nations the Iroquois had absorbed in the Beaver Wars—Eries, Neutrals, Monongahelas, and others—the Mingos moved west in order to reestablish themselves on ancestral lands. All three groups shared a strong impulse toward traditionalism. Whereas the Delawares and Shawnees who remained behind on the Susquehanna responded to the pressures of an encroaching white society by converting to Christianity, those who moved to the Ohio country embraced nativist beliefs as a key to recapturing cultural and religious autonomy.

At first the chiefs of the Six Nations viewed the departure of so many of the Pennsylvania Indians with equanimity, for they underestimated how deeply the migrants desired independence. The Iroquois benefited from having client peoples living on the Ohio because it strengthened their claim to ownership of the region—a claim ultimately based on having conquered it in the Beaver Wars. Suzerainty over the Ohio country was, in every sense, crucial to the Iroquois policy of neutrality. The French had long made it clear that they would recognize the Iroquois claim to the Ohio country provided the Six Nations kept the English out. For the French to build the forts necessary to occupy the valley would cost far more than they could hope to recover by trade. At the same time, the Ohio furnished the principal river connection between the western slope of the Appalachians and the Mississippi Valley, flowing directly into the heart of French settlement in the mid-Mississippi Valley, the pays des Illinois. If the numerous, prolific, aggressive English settlers colonized the Ohio Valley, they would, of course, be in a position to cut the great inland arc of French influence and alliances in two. The most immediate threat, however, was that English traders would invade the Ohio country. Britain’s cheap, high-quality trade goods would become a magnet drawing away the native peoples who now traded with the French at Detroit and other posts. This in turn would weaken, and perhaps destroy, the system of alliances on which French power rested in the interior of the continent.

Traders from Pennsylvania, as we have seen, accompanied the Delawares and Shawnees to the Ohio country. This alone would have concerned the French, but it was the aggressive way that the Pennsylvanians expanded their operations when a new war broke out that awakened the French to an alarming set of circumstances. As in the previous Anglo-French conflicts, the outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1744 caused a counterpart conflict to erupt between New France and the northeastern British colonies. But King George’s War, as the Anglo-Americans called it, differed from the previous wars in that this time the Anglo-Americans actually succeeded in striking a military blow that imperiled New France.

Map of Kittanning, 1756. Delaware emigrants seeking freedom from colonial and Iroquois domination established the town of Kittanning in the 1720s along the banks of the Allegheny River north of present-day Pittsburgh. By 1756, when this map of the settlement was drawn, more than five hundred residents lived in several clusters of dwellings stretching for more than a thousand yards along the rich river bottomland. (Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society)

That blow fell in the spring of 1745 at the fortress of Louisbourg on Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), when a British naval squadron blockaded the port, and an improvised expeditionary force from the New England colonies unexpectedly landed and laid siege to the town. The French government had begun building Louisbourg’s fortifications in 1720 in order to create a naval base powerful enough to protect the North Atlantic cod fisheries and to defend the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. By 1745 the town and harbor were (it was thought) so well fortified as to merit the nickname “Gibraltar of the North.” A siege of six weeks in May and June proved that Louisbourg’s impregnability had been greatly exaggerated. With the fortress in hand the Anglo-Americans took command of the Saint Lawrence, effectively sealing Canada off from resupply.

New France survived until the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the war in 1748 because certain Albany fur merchants chose profit over patriotism, expanding their routine smuggling trade with Montreal into an emergency supply line. Canada’s economy survived, but trade goods soon became prohibitively expensive at Detroit and the other interior forts where trade and diplomatic gift-giving ordinarily kept the Franco-Indian alliance system healthy. The famine in trade goods and the suspension of diplomatic gift-giving created a huge incentive for traders from Pennsylvania to expand their operations into the Ohio Valley and far to the west along the shore of Lake Erie. Among these the most important figure was a colorful, supremely confident Irish opportunist named George Croghan. Even before the war he had opened a trading post on the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie (on the site of modern Cleveland). Now he took advantage of the trade-good famine in the interior by establishing a post at Logstown, about fifteen miles downstream from the Forks of the Ohio, and at Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie, just fifty miles from Fort Detroit.

By war’s end Croghan was the greatest Pennsylvania trader in the West, and poised to expand his operations far down the Ohio Valley to a new post at Pickawillany on the Great Miami River. Pickawillany grew into a great emporium, an immense magnet for Indian groups that had formerly traded at Detroit. Meanwhile the Ohio Indians had begun to show more overt signs of independence than ever before, by seeking to establish direct diplomatic ties with Pennsylvania’s government. At a treaty conference at Logstown in 1748, Pennsylvania’s commissioner (abetted by the omnipresent Croghan) seemed willing to bypass the authority of the League and negotiate directly with the Ohio chiefs.

Aware that the French would intervene if the English presence on the Ohio continued to grow, the Iroquois now took action, appointing a re-gent to superintend the Mingos and other Ohio Indians. This chief, Tanaghrisson, was a Catawba by birth and a Seneca by adoption, and his status among the Ohio peoples was a matter of considerable ambiguity. The League Council at Onondaga authorized Tanaghrisson to speak on behalf of the Ohio Indians; that is, it made him solely responsible for conducting diplomacy on their behalf, thus rebuking them for their recent presumptions of independence at the Logstown conference. At the same time, however, any agreements Tanaghrisson might make were only conditional ones, which had to be ratified by Onondaga; hence his derisive nickname, “the Half King.”

Unfortunately for the Half King (and for the hopes of the Iroquois Council that he might be able to defend its interests), his ability to influence the Ohio Indians depended on building a following among the chiefs who led them, especially the emergent Delaware leaders Tamaqua, Shingas, and Pisquetomen. That in turn meant that he needed a European ally to provide him with trade goods, as diplomatic gifts, to distribute among them, which they could in turn redistribute among their own followers. Croghan and his fellow Pennsylvania traders were already on the scene, and a new set of traders from Virginia had recently made its appearance as well, bearing ample gifts in the hope of forging connections of their own. Tanaghrisson had no choice but to turn to them for the necessary trade goods. In so doing, however, he also convinced the French, watching warily from Detroit, that the Iroquois had indeed lost the ability to keep the Ohio Valley free of English traders and English influence.

For the French this unbalanced state of affairs was intolerable. But what to do?