THE
LOCATION OF THE SIX NATIONS
The original homeland of the Iroquois was in
upstate New York between the Adirondack Mountains and Niagara Falls. Through
conquest and migration, they gained control of most of the northeastern United
States and eastern Canada. At its maximum in 1680, their empire extended west
from the north shore of Chesapeake Bay through Kentucky to the junction of the
Ohio and Mississippi Rivers; then north following the Illinois River to the
south end of Lake Michigan; east across all of lower Michigan, southern
Ontario and adjacent parts of southwestern Quebec; and finally south through
northern New England west of the Connecticut River.
During the hundred years preceding the American
Revolution, wars with French-allied Algonquin and British colonial settlement
forced them back within their original boundaries once again. Their decision
to side with the British during the Revolutionary War was a disaster for the
Iroquois. The American invasion of their homeland in 1779 drove many of the
Iroquois into southern Ontario where they have remained. With large Iroquois
communities already located along the upper St. Lawrence in Quebec at the
time, roughly half of the Iroquois population has since lived in Canada. This
includes most of the Mohawk along with representative groups from the other
tribes. Although most Iroquois reserves are in southern Ontario and Quebec. In the United States, much of the Iroquois
homeland was surrendered to New York land speculators in a series of treaties
following the Revolutionary War. Despite this, most Seneca, Tuscarora, and
Onondaga avoided removal during the 1830s and have remained in New York.
POPULATION
Considering their impact on history, it is
amazing how few Iroquois there were in 1600 - probably less than 20,000 for
all five tribes. Their inland location protected them somewhat from the
initial European epidemics, but these had reached them by 1650 and, combined
with warfare, cut their population to about half of its original number.
However, unlike other native populations which continued to drop, the
Iroquois, through the massive adoption of conquered Iroquian-speaking enemies
(at least 7,000 Huron, and similar numbers of other tribes.
Absorption of this many outsiders was not without major problems - not the
least of which was the Iroquois became a minority within their own
confederacy.
With the incorporation of 1,500 Tuscarora in 1722 as a sixth
member of the League, the Iroquois numbered only 12,000 in 1768. By the end of
the Revolutionary War, they were less than 8,000. From that point there has
been a slow recovery followed by a recent surge as renewed native pride has
prompted many to reclaim their heritage. The 1940 census listed only 17,000
Iroquois in both New York and Canada, but current figures approach 70,000 at
about 20 settlements and 8 reservations in New York, Wisconsin, Oklahoma,
Ontario, and Quebec.
The Mohawk are the largest group of Iroquois
with more than 35,000 members. The Seneca were once the largest tribe of
the Iroquois League - the number of their warriors equal to the other four
tribes combined. Their current enrollment stands at 9,100, 1,100 of whom are
in Ontario at Grand River.
PEOPLES
OF THE SIX NATIONS
Iroquois is an easily recognized name, but like
the names of many tribes, it was given them by their enemies. The Algonquin
called them the Iroqu (Irinakhoiw) "rattlesnakes." After the French
added the Gallic suffix "-ois" to this insult, the name became
Iroquois. The Iroquois call themselves Haudenosaunee meaning "people of
the long house." The Six Nations are as follows:
Cayuga: Gweugwehono. Translated variously as
"people of Oiogouen; where the boats were taken out; people at the
landing; or people of the mucky land." Also referred to as "those
of the great pipe."
Mohawk: Kahniankehaka
(Ganiengehaka) "people of the
flint." Spoken of within the League as the "keepers of the eastern
door."
Oneida: Onayotekaono (Onyotaaka) "people of the
standing stone"
Onandaga: Onundagaono "people of the hills; place on
the hill; people on the mountain." The "keepers of the fire"
and "wampum keepers."
Seneca: Nundawaono "great hill people." The
"keepers of the western door."
Tuscarora: "shirt wearing people." Not an
original member of the Iroquois League, the Tuscarora joined as a non-voting
member in 1722 after they had been forced to leave North Carolina in 1714
after a war with the English colonists.
CULTURE
Simply put, the Iroquois were the most
important native group in North American history. Culturally, however, there
was little to distinguish them from their Iroquian-speaking neighbours. All had
matrilineal social structures - the women owned all property and determined
kinship. The individual Iroquois tribes were divided into three clans, turtle,
bear, and wolf - each headed by the clan mother. The Seneca were like the
Huron tribes and had eight (the five additional being the crane, snipe, hawk,
beaver, and deer). After marriage, a man moved into his wife's longhouse, and
their children became members of her clan. Iroquois villages were generally
fortified and large. The distinctive, communal longhouses of the different
clans could be over 200 feet in length and were built about a framework covered
with elm bark, the Iroquois' material of choice for all manner of things.
Villages were permanent in the sense they were moved only for defensive
purposes or when the soil became exhausted (about every twenty years). The travois
was one method of transport of goods and belongings, using dogs and later
horses.
Agriculture provided most of the Iroquois diet.
Corn, beans, and squash were known as "deohako" or "life
supporters." Their importance to the Iroquois was clearly demonstrated by
the six annual agricultural festivals held with prayers of gratitude for their
harvests. The women owned and tended the fields under the supervision of the
clan mother. Men usually left the village in the fall for the annual hunt and
returned about midwinter. Spring was fishing season. Other than clearing
fields and building villages, the primary occupation of the men was warfare.
Warriors wore their hair in a distinctive scalplock (Mohawk),
although other styles became common later. While the men carefully removed all
facial and body hair, women wore theirs long. Tattoos were common for both
sexes. Torture and ritual cannibalism were some of the ugly traits of the
Iroquois, but these were shared with several other tribes east of the
Mississippi. The False Face society was an Iroquois healing group which
utilized grotesque wooden masks to frighten the evil sprits believed to cause
illness.
The game of
lacrosse was given to
the People by the Creator to play for
his amusement. Just as a parent will gain much amusement at the sight of
watching his child playing joyfully with a new gift, so it was intended that
the Creator be similarly amused by viewing his "children" playing
lacrosse in a manner which was so defiant of fatigue. This is the belief, and
when the four Great Messengers came, the Creator reiterated to the People that his game
should be played.
It was the Iroquois political system, however,
that made them unique, and because of it, they dominated the first 200-years
of colonial history in both Canada and the United States. Strangely enough,
there were never that many of them, and the enemies they defeated in war were
often twice their size. Although much has been made of their Dutch firearms,
the Iroquois prevailed because of their unity, sense of purpose, and superior
political organization. Since the Iroquois League was formed prior to any
contact, it owed nothing to European influence. Proper credit is seldom given,
but the reverse was actually true. The Iroquois used a combination
of military prowess and skilled diplomacy to conquer an empire. Until their
internal unity finally failed them during the American Revolution, the
Iroquois dealt with European powers as an equal. Rather than learning political
sophistication from Europeans, Europeans learned from the Iroquois, and the
League, with its elaborate system of checks, balances, and supreme law,
almost certainly influenced the American Articles of Confederation and
Constitution.
THE
LARGEST IROQUOIS NATION: Seneca
The Senecas call themselves Nodowa'ga:', or the
"People of the Great Hill." The "Great Hill" refers to Bare
Hill, which is situated in Middlesex Township, Yates County, New York, and is
the place of origin of the Seneca Nation. Although Seneca lands once extended
far to the west, all of the present Yates County falls within the old territory
of the Senecas, which extended from the western shores of Seneca Lake to the
Niagara River, and beyond.
The name "Seneca," is derived from the Mohegan
(Algonkin) word A'sinnika, which means "People of the Standing Stone."
The Seneca call themselves
Onondowahgah, which means the People of the Great Hill. The Onondowahgah are one of
the original Five Nations to accept the Peacemaker's message and joined
together with the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, and Cayuga to form the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which is also know as the Iroquois Confederacy.
Haudenosaunee translates to mean (People of the Longhouse), which refers to
the type of homes built by the Haudenosaunee.
When the Peacemaker came to
the warring Five Nations, he carried with him the message of
Kaianeraserakowa (the Great Law of Peace). The Peacemaker came to the
Haudenosaunee with his message of Skennen (Peace), Kariwiio (The Good Word),
and Kasatensera (Strength), which contains the principles of peace,
equality, respect, love, and justice. The Peacemaker envisioned the uniting
of these Nations in peace as one extended Longhouse with each Nation having
their own hearth fire. In other words, each Nation would have a shared
sovereignty in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the responsibility to
protect the Peace, the Natural World, and the Future Generations to come,
while retaining the sovereignty over their own Nations. The joining together
of the Five Nations is perhaps the oldest example of nations uniting under a
single form of government and spirituality. Interestingly, the Haudenosaunee
draw no distinction between what is political and what is spiritual, for our
spiritual leaders are also the political leaders.
The Seneca are known as the
Elder Brothers, which has significance when the Grand Council of Chiefs,
composed of all fifty chiefs of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, meet to
discuss matters of importance to the entire Confederacy. The Seneca are also
known as the Keepers of the Western Door. One can identify the Nation
that the wearer is from by the number of eagle feathers and the position
that these feathers are worn on the gustoweh.
Onondowahgah men wear one
eagle feather on their gustowehs, like the Cayuga. However, there is a major
difference in the way the feather is worn. The Seneca wear their eagle
feather in an upright position, whereas, the Cayuga wear, in their gustoweh,
their eagle feather in an downward tilted position. If the man were a chief
of the Onondowahgah Nation, he would wear attached to his feathered hat deer
antlers that symbolize his authority as one of the eight chiefs of the
Seneca Nation. One of the many jobs of the eight Clan Mothers, who are the
female leaders, is to raise (to bring forth) a new chief from her clan, when
one passes on or is removed. The Clan Mothers have the authority to dehorn
(impeach), which is done by the removal of the deer antlers off the gustoweh
of a chief who is not doing his duty to the people properly.
The Onondowahgah have eight
clans. The eight clans are Turtle, Bear, Wolf, Beaver, Deer, Snipe, Hawk,
and Huron. The Haudenosaunee are matrilineal, which means that the clans are
passed down from one's mother. In other words, if your Mother is of the Bear
clan, then you are of the Bear. If your father is of the Wolf clan, but your
mother has no clan then you would have no clan, even though your father has
a clan, because clans are passed on from mother to sons and daughters. Some
mistakenly think that when a man marries a women he becomes her clan, this
is untrue. If you are born with a clan, that clan remains yours through out
your life.
HISTORY
Archeological evidence indicates the Iroquois
had lived in upstate New York for a long time before the Europeans arrived.
Longhouse construction dates to at least 1100 A.D. The maize agriculture was
introduced in the 14th century prompting a population surge and other changes.
By 1350 villages had become larger and fortified due to increased warfare, and
ritual cannibalism began around 1400. The Onondaga were the first of the
Iroquois tribes that can be positively identified in New York and seems to
have begun after the merger of two villages sometime between 1450 and 1475.
The origin of the other four tribes is not as certain. According to Iroquois
tradition, they were once a single tribe in the St. Lawrence Valley subject to
Algonquin-speaking Adirondack who had taught them agriculture. To escape
Algonquin domination, the Iroquois say they left the St. Lawrence and moved
south to New York where they split into opposing tribes.
The exact date of this migration is uncertain.
When Jacques Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence in 1535, there were
Iroquoian-speaking peoples living in at least eleven villages between
Stadacona (Quebec) and Hochelaga (Montreal). Hochelaga was a large fortified
village with large corn fields and a population over 3,000. It was still there
during Cartier's second visit (1541-42), but when the French returned to the
area in 1603, Hochelaga and the other Iroquois villages on the St. Lawrence
had disappeared. In their place were Montagnais and Algonkin.
Equally confused is the exact date of the
founding of the Iroquois League. Some estimates put this as far back as 900
A.D., but the general consensus is sometime around 1570. There is no question,
however, that all of the Iroquoian confederacies (Neutrals, Susquehannock,
Huron, and Iroquois) were established prior to European contact. Nor is there
any dispute over why this occurred. Although still threatened by the
Adirondack after moving to upstate New York, the greatest danger for the
Iroquois was themselves. Relationships between the tribes had deteriorated
into constant war, blood feuds, and revenge killings. In danger of
self-destruction, the Iroquois were saved by the sudden appearance of a Huron
holyman known as the "Peacemaker." Deganawida (Two River Currents
Flowing Together) received a vision from the Creator of peace and cooperation
among all Iroquois. Apparently he was hindered by either a language or speech
difficulty, but Deganawida eventually won the support of Hiawatha (Ayawentha -
He Makes Rivers), an Onondaga who had become a Mohawk war chief.
With considerable effort, they were able to
convince the other Iroquois tribes to end their fighting and join together in
a league. Legend tells that Deganawida blotted out the sun to convince the
reluctant. A solar eclipse visible in upstate New York occurred in 1451
suggesting another possible date for these events. The formation of the League
ended the warfare between its members bringing the Iroquois a period of
unprecedented peace and prosperity. It also brought political unity and
military power, and unfortunately, Deganawida's "Great Peace"
extended only to the Iroquois themselves. For outsiders it was a military
alliance and the "Great War" against any people with whom the
Iroquois had a dispute, and during the first 130 years of the League's
existence, there were very few tribes who managed to avoid a dispute with the
Iroquois.
After establishing a settlement at Quebec, the
French reached west to the vicinity of Montreal in 1609. What they found there
was a war zone where it was possible to travel along the St. Lawrence for days
without seeing another human being. The Algonkin and Montagnais were so
harassed by Mohawk war parties that they usually remained well-clear of the
river. The French only wanted to trade for fur. Their
potential trading partners, however, wanted help fighting the Mohawk which
trapped the French into winning their loyalty by jumping into someone else's
war. It must have seemed a trivial at the time, but it proved a fateful
decision. In July, 1609 Samuel de Champlain accompanied a Huron, Montagnais,
and Algonkin war party which moved south along the shores of Lake Champlain.
When they encountered Mohawk warriors, a battle followed during which French
guns broke the massed Mohawk formation killing several war chiefs. The
following year, Champlain joined another attack against a Mohawk fort on the
Richelieu River. Although the Mohawk soon discarded mass formations, wooden
body armor, and countered French firearms by falling to the ground just before
they discharged, they were driven from the St. Lawrence after 1610. The
Algonkin and Montagnais took control of the area and its fur trade for the
next twenty years. Meanwhile, the French pushed west to the Huron villages
and, in a similar error in 1615, participated in an attack on the Onondaga.
During the years following, the French paid
dearly for their intervention. Iroquois hostility prevented them from using
Lake Ontario and forced a detour through the Ottawa River Valley to reach the
western Great Lakes. For the moment, however, the Iroquois needed guns and
steel weapons to protect themselves, but these were available only through a
fur trade controlled by their enemies. In 1610 Dutch traders arrived in the
Hudson Valley of New York, and the Iroquois had solved a part of their
problem. Still pressed from the north by the Huron, Algonkin, and Montagnais,
the Mohawk in 1615 were also fighting their traditional Susquehannock rivals
to the south. Suspecting the French were behind this, the Dutch helped the
Mohawk against the Susquehannock. This attached the Mohawk to the Dutch, but
there were problems. Located on the Hudson, the Mahican blocked Mohawk access
to Dutch traders unless tribute was paid to cross their territory.
This unhappy arrangement did not sit well with
the Mohawk and periodically erupted into war. Since this affected their fur
trade, the Dutch arranged a truce in 1613. Four years later, renewed fighting
between the Mohawk and Mahican forced the closure of Fort Nassau near Albany
until another peace was made in 1618. Meanwhile, the Dutch demand for fur had
created competition for previously-shared hunting territory, and Mohawk
encroachment had led to fighting and subjugation of some the northern groups
of Munsee Delaware during 1615. How long the Dutch could have "kept the
lid on" this situation is questionable. The Mohawk were acting as
middlemen for other Iroquois and had even greater ambitions. In 1624 the Dutch
built a new post at Fort Orange which was actually closer to the Mohawk.
Unfortunately, they also tried to take some of the St. Lawrence fur trade from
the French by using Mahican middlemen to open trade with the Algonkin.
Trade with their enemies was too much for the
Mohawk, and in 1624 they attacked the Mahican in a war the Dutch could not
stop. Fighting continued for the next four years with the Mahican calling in
their Pocumtuc and Sokoki (Western Abenaki)
allies. The Dutch at first tended to favor the Mahican. Dutch soldiers from
Fort Orange joined a Mahican war party in 1626. A Mohawk ambush resulted in
several dead Dutchmen, but rather than retaliate, the Dutch decided to remain
neutral. By 1628 the Mohawk had defeated the Mahican and driven them east of
the Hudson River. Under the terms of peace, the Mahican were forced to pay
tribute in wampum, or at least share their profits from wampum trade with the
Delaware on Long Island. The Dutch accepted the Mohawk victory and made them
their principal ally and trading partner. The Iroquois homeland occupied a
very strategic position - sitting between the Dutch in the Hudson Valley and
furs of the Great Lakes. Already able to force the French to stay well north,
the Iroquois were ready to try to dominate the French trade on the St.
Lawrence.
The result was the Beaver Wars - 70 years of
violent intertribal warfare for control of the European fur trade. Largely
forgotten today, the Beaver Wars were one of the critical events in North
America history. With the Mahican defeated and subject, the Mohawk in 1629
continued the war against the Mahican's Sokoki and Pennacook allies. This may
have continued for some time if not for the actions of third European power,
Great Britain, which had begun colonizing New England in 1620. During a war in
Europe between Britain and France, English privateers under Sir David Kirke
captured Quebec in 1629. Without French support, the Algonkin and Montagnais
were vulnerable, and after concluding a truce with the Sokoki, the Mohawk took
advantage by destroying the Algonkin-Montagnais village at Trois Rivieres. By
late 1630 the Algonkin and Montagnais desperately needed help against the
Mohawk. For three long years none came until the Treaty of St. Germaine en
Laye restored Quebec to France in 1632.
By the time the French returned to the St.
Lawrence that year, the Iroquois (with uninterrupted trade with the Dutch) had
reversed their earlier losses and were dangerously close to gaining control of
the upper St. Lawrence and southern Ontario. The Iroquois had exhausted most
of the beaver in their homeland (they never had that many to begin with). If
they were to continue trade for the European goods on which they become
dependent, they desperately needed to find new hunting territory. As large
Iroquois war parties ranged freely through southern Ontario and the Ottawa
Valley, the French tried to restore the balance of power in the region by
selling firearms to their trading partners for "hunting." For
obvious reasons, the Europeans at first had avoided trading firearms to the
natives, although they were pretty free with steel knives and hatchets. With
growing competition in the fur trade, however, their reluctance rapidly gave
way.
Initially, the French took the precaution of
restricting guns to Christian converts and limiting the amount of ammunition
to preclude any use against themselves. Even a limited supply was sufficient
at the time to allow the Huron, Algonkin, and Montagnais to counter the
Iroquois, while the French rebuilt their fur trade. The firearms and steel
weapons, however, soon found their way into the hands of the tribes for which
the Huron acted as a middleman, and as the number of beaver dwindled in the
eastern Great Lakes, Neutral, Tionontati, and Ottawa warriors used them to
seize territory from Algonquin and Siouan tribes in lower Michigan and the
Ohio Valley. The Beaver Wars spread westward during the 1630s and 40s. The
Iroquois were Dutch allies. Because of this and past hostility, the French
continued to avoid them. Despite a limited trade agreement concluded with the
Mohawk in 1627, they concentrated their efforts on trade with the Huron who
had strong trading ties to the western Great Lakes.
Stymied by Huron military power, the Iroquois
wanted their permission to hunt in the prime beaver territory to the north and
west of their homeland so they could maintain their trade with the Dutch. At
the very least, the Iroquois needed the Huron to cooperate and trade some of
their furs with them - something the two rival confederations had done for
many years before arrival of the French and Dutch. Resorting to diplomacy, the
League sent its requests to the Huron council. The Huron, however, sensed
their growing advantage and refused. After the Huron killed an Iroquois
hunting party in disputed territory, all-out war erupted. Although the Huron
and their allies outnumbered them more than two to one, Iroquois war parties
moved into southern Ontario trying to cut the Huron link through the Ottawa
Valley to French traders at Quebec. Some French settlements along the St.
Lawrence were also attacked in 1633, but these were never the main target. For
the most part, the Iroquois shrewdly tried to keep the French neutral, while
they eliminated their native allies.
A peace arranged with Algonkin in 1634 failed
almost immediately when the Algonkin renewed efforts to open trade with the
Dutch in the Hudson Valley. Two separate Iroquois offensives during 1636 and
1637 drove the Algonkin deep into the upper Ottawa Valley and forced the
Montagnais to retreat east towards Quebec. Smallpox from New England in 1634
slowed the Mohawk offensive, but the Seneca inflicted a major defeat on the
Huron the following year. Between 1637 and 1641, the Huron paid a horrendous
price for European contact and fur trade when a series of epidemics swept
through their villages. When these ended, the Huron had lost many experienced
leaders and almost half their population which seriously weakened their
ability to defend themselves against the Iroquois. When the French had begun
to provide firearms to the Huron and Algonkin, the Dutch had kept pace in
supplying them to the Iroquois. The resulting arms race had remained on a
relatively low level until the Swedes established a colony on the lower
Delaware River in 1638.
To compensate for their late start in the fur
trade, the Swedes placed few restrictions on the amount of firearms they sold
to the Susquehannock. Suddenly confronted by a well-armed enemy to the south
in Pennsylvania, the Iroquois turned to the Dutch for more and better
firearms. Already angry the Swedes had settled on territory claimed by
themselves and taken over their trade, the Dutch provided additional guns and
ammunition and in the process gave the Iroquois a definite arms advantage over
the Huron. The first victim of this new armament was not the Huron, but the
small Iroquian-speaking Wenro
tribe of western New York. Abandoned by their Erie and Neutral allies, they
were overrun by the Iroquois in 1639. Resistance continued until 1643, but the
surviving Wenro were finally forced to seek refuge with the Huron and
Neutrals. The major change came in 1640, when the other newcomers to the fur
trade, New England traders from Boston, tried to break the Dutch trade
monopoly with the Mohawk by selling them firearms.
Although this sale would have violated British
law, the Dutch started selling the Iroquois all the guns and powder they
wanted. The level of violence in the Beaver Wars escalated dramatically, with
the Iroquois, now even better armed than the French, holding a clear advantage
in firepower. Despite this the Huron won two major victories against the
Iroquois in 1640 and 1641. but within a year, the Mohawk and Oneida had driven
the last groups of Algonkin and Montagnais from the upper St. Lawrence. The
French responded by building forts, but these proved inadequate to protect
even their own settlements which were coming under attack. The founding of
Montreal at the mouth of the Ottawa River in 1642 shortened the distance the
Huron had to travel to trade, but the French were vulnerable to attack in this
new location. The Iroquois easily compensated during 1642 and 1643 by moving
large war parties into the Ottawa Valley to attack the French and Huron trying
to move furs to Montreal.
As if the French did not have enough trouble, a
long-standing hostility between the Montagnais and Sokoki (Western Abenaki)
had erupted into war in 1642 when the Montagnais attempted to keep the Sokoki
from trading directly with the French at Quebec. Since the Mohawk were already
at war with the Montagnais, the Sokoki put aside past differences and formed
an alliance with the Mohawk. This also brought the Mahican (Mohawk allies
since 1628) into the fighting, and in 1645 a combined Mohawk, Sokoki, and
Mahican war party raided the main Montagnais village near Sillery, Quebec. The
Dutch in 1640 had also begun providing large quantities of firearms to the
Mahican. By 1642 both the Mohawk and Mahican were using these weapons to
demand tribute from the Munsee and Wappinger Delaware on the lower Hudson. To
escape this harassment, the Wiechquaeskeck (Wappinger) moved south during the
winter of 1642-43 to Manhattan Island and the Tappan and Hackensack villages
at Pavonia (Jersey City) for what they thought was the protection of the Dutch
settlements.
The Dutch, however, became alarmed and in
February, 1643 made a surprise attack on the Wiechquaeskeck village killing
more than 100 of them. The Pavonia Massacre ignited the Wappinger War
(Governor Kieft's War) (1643-45). The fighting spread to include Munsee in New
Jersey and Unami (Delaware) and Metoac of western Long Island, and the Dutch
were forced to call upon the Mahican and Mohawk for help. After signing a
formal treaty of alliance with the Dutch that year, the Mohawk and Mahican set
to work. By the time a peace was finally signed at Fort Orange in the summer
of 1645, more than 1,600 Wappinger, Munsee, and Metoac had been killed, and
the Mohawk and Mahican had gained control of the wampum trade of western Long
Island. Munsee resentment continued to smolder during the final 20 years of
Dutch rule, but the Mohawk stood ready to crush an uprising. Violence finally
came when five Munsee tribes combined to fight the new Dutch settlements in
the Esopus Valley. The Mohawk attacked the Munsee villages killing hundreds,
and when the Esopus War (1660-64) ended, the Munsee had been conquered and
made subject to the Iroquois.
For the French, 1644 was an especially grim
year. The Atontrataronnon (Algonkin) were driven from the Ottawa River and
forced to seek refuge with the Huron, and three large Huron canoe flotillas
transporting fur to Montreal were captured by the Iroquois. The fur trade on
the St. Lawrence had come to almost a complete halt, so the French were ready
to listen when the Iroquois proposed a truce. The peace treaty signed in 1645
allowed the French to resume the fur trade, and the Mohawk, who had suffered
heavy losses from war and epidemic, got the release of their warriors being
held prisoner by the French. However, the treaty failed to solve the main
cause of the war. The Iroquois expected peace would bring a resumption of
their earlier trade with the Huron. Instead, the Huron ignored Iroquois
overtures for trade and sent 60 canoe-loads of fur to Montreal in 1645
followed by 80 loads in 1646. After two years of increasingly-strained
diplomacy failed to change this, all hell broke loose.
While their diplomats took great care to
reassure the French and keep them neutral, the Iroquois destroyed the
Arendaronon Huron villages in 1647 and cut the trade route to Montreal. Very
few furs got through that year. In 1648 a massive 250-man Huron canoe flotilla
fought its way past the Iroquois blockade on the Ottawa River and reached
Quebec, but during their absence, the Iroquois destroyed the Huron
mission-village of St. Joseph torturing and killing its Jesuit missionary.
This scattered the Attigneenongnahac Huron. Sensing a complete Iroquois
victory, the Dutch provided 400 high-quality flintlocks and unlimited
ammunition on credit. The final blow came during two days in March, 1649. In
coordinated attacks, 2,000 Mohawk and Seneca warriors stuck the Huron
mission-villages of St. Ignace and St. Louis. Hundreds of Huron were killed or
captured, while two more French Jesuits were tortured to death. Huron
resistance abruptly collapsed, and the survivors scattered and fled to be
destroyed or captured.
The Iroquois, however, were not about to just
let the Huron go. After 20 years of war and epidemic, they had paid a high
price for victory. Down to less than 1,000 warriors, the League had decided on
massive adoptions to refill their ranks. The "Great Pursuit" began
the following December when the Iroquois went after the Attignawantan Huron
who had taken refuge with the Tionontati. The main Tionontati village was
overrun, and less than 1,000 Tionontati and Huron managed to escape to a
temporary refuge on Mackinac Island near Sault Ste. Marie (Upper Michigan).
The Iroquois followed, and by 1651 the Huron and Tionontati refugees (who
together would become the Wyandot) were forced to relocate farther west to
Green Bay, Wisconsin. The following spring the Nipissing suffered the same
fate (survivors fled north to the Ojibwe), and the last groups of Algonkin
abandoned the upper Ottawa Valley and disappeared into safety of the northern
forests with the Cree for the next twenty years.
Meanwhile, the Tahonaenrat Huron had moved
southwest among the villages of the Neutrals. Throughout the many wars between
Iroquois and Huron, the Neutrals had refused to take sides. Huron and Iroquois
war parties passed through their homeland to attack each other, but the
Neutrals remained neutral - hence their name. Perhaps alarmed by the sudden
Iroquois victory over the Huron, they made no effort to prevent the
Tahonaenrat from continuing to make war on the Iroquois. After not-so
diplomatic requests for the Neutrals to surrender their "guests"
were ignored, the Iroquois attacked them in 1650. For the first year of the
war, the Neutrals had the support of the Susquehannock who had been Huron
allies before 1648. However, this ended in 1651 when the Mohawk and Oneida
attacked the Susquehanna. The main Neutral fort of Kinuka fell to the Seneca
that year, and the other Neutrals either surrendered or were overrun.
The Tahonaenrat surrendered enmass and were
incorporated into the Seneca, but large groups of Neutrals and Huron fled
south to the Erie. Their reception was less than cordial, but they were
allowed to stay in a status of semi-slavery. The "Great Pursuit"
continued, and the Iroquois demanded the Erie turn the refugees over to them.
Relations between the Iroquois and Erie apparently had never been friendly,
and reinforced with hundreds of new warriors, the Erie flatly refused. The
matter simmered for two years with growing violence. In 1653 an Erie raid into
the Iroquois homeland killed a Seneca sachem. A last minute conference was
held to avoid war, but in the course of a heated argument, an Erie warrior
murdered an Onondaga, and Iroquois retaliated by killing all 30 of the Erie
representatives. After this, peace was impossible, and the western Iroquois
prepared for war. However, having great respect for the Erie as warriors, they
first took the precaution of arranging a peace with the French.
When the Huron were overrun in 1649, the French
fur trade empire collapsed. The Jesuits had been killed, their native trading
partners and allies destroyed or scattered, and the flow of fur stopped. The
French still encouraged the natives to come to Montreal for trade, but very
few tried with the Iroquois controlling the Ottawa River. The offer of peace
did not include the Mohawk and Oneida, but the French grabbed at a chance to
end hostilities with the other three Iroquois tribes. With the French pacified
and the Mohawk and Oneida keeping the only possible ally, the Susquehannock,
from giving any aid, the Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga were free to deal with
the Erie. Their initial caution proved justified. Without firearms, the Erie
held out for three years until resistance ended in 1656. The survivors were
incorporated into the Iroquois.
At this point, no power in North America could
have stood against the Iroquois League, even the Europeans. However, rather
than choosing to confront the Europeans, the Iroquois decided to deal with
them as equals and use their firearms and trade goods to their own advantage.
To this end, it should be noted the Iroquois never tried to eliminate one
European power for the benefit of another. Instead, they attempted to maintain
a working relationship with each one, even the French. Rather than being a
Dutch ally, the Iroquois were in business for themselves to dominate the fur
trade with the Europeans and set about creating an empire for this purpose.
Details of how they did this have been mostly lost, since no European was
present to record what happened. Oral traditions provide only partial answers,
but archeological evidence indicates the western Great Lakes and Ohio Valley
were rather heavily populated before contact. The first French explorers in
the area during the 1660s and 70s, however, found few residents and many
refugees.
The Mohawk's alliance with the Sokoki against
the Montagnais ended with fighting over hunting territory east of Lake
Champlain. The sudden collapse of the Huron in 1649 had alarmed everyone, and
the French at Quebec tried to assemble whatever allies they could against the
Iroquois. The Mohawk struck outlying French settlements and kept attacking the
small group of Christian Huron living just outside the gates of Quebec. In
1650 the French sent a Montagnais sachem and Jesuit missionary into northern
New England to encourage an alliance between the Sokoki, Pennacook, Pocumtuc,
and Mahican against the Iroquois. The New England colonies were also asked to
participate, but the British were not interested. The French got the alliance
they were seeking and began providing firearms to its members. Despite
occasional raids against the Sokoki in Vermont, the alliance was not tested
initially. The Mohawk after 1651 had all they could handle in their war in
Pennsylvania with the Susquehannock.
The Susquehannock had always been formidable
warriors. In 1651 they had been well-armed by Swedish traders from the lower
Delaware River. After four years of fighting with heavy losses to both sides,
the Mohawk and Oneida only succeeded in capturing part of the upper part of
Susquehanna River. The war was a stalemate, until the Dutch took the Swedish
colonies in 1655. Suddenly deprived of their source of weapons, the
Susquehannock asked for peace. The Mohawk readily agreed. Peace with the
Susquehannock freed the Mohawk and Oneida to turn on their enemies in western
New England, and the alliance received its first test. New fighting between
the Mohawk and Mahican concerned the Dutch, and at their insistence, the
Mahican left the alliance in 1658 and made peace with the Mohawk. However, the
Mohawk soon discovered the Mahican were arranging trade between the Dutch and
the Montagnais and Sokoki. Diplomacy failed to stop this, and in 1662 the
Mohawk attacked the Mahican. Two years of war forced the Mahican to abandon
most of the Hudson Valley, including their capital at Shodac near Albany.
Supplied by both French and British, the
Sokoki, Pennacook, Pocumtuc, and Montagnais continued fighting the Mohawk and were holding their
own. Iroquois and Algonquin war parties moved back-and-forth across western
New England attacking each other's villages. By 1660 the war had spread to
include the Abenaki in Maine who were allies of the Montagnais. After an
attack against a Mohawk village failed in 1663, the Pocumtuc found they were
running out of warriors and asked the Dutch to arrange a truce. Nothing came
of this, and in December a large Mohawk and Seneca war party struck the main
Pocumtuc village at Fort Hill (Deerfield, Massachusetts). The assault was
repulsed with the loss of almost 300 warriors, but the battered Pocumtuc
abandoned Fort Hill in the spring and sued for peace. The Mohawk agreed, but
someone (not the Pocumtuc) murdered the Iroquois ambassadors enroute to the
peace conference. The Mohawk renewed their attacks forcing the Pocumtuc from
the middle Connecticut River.
In the midst of this, the British seized New
York in 1664. The Dutch recaptured it in 1673, but it was returned to the
British by the Treaty of Westminster the following year. The important role of
the Dutch in North America ended at this point. The British concluded their
own treaty of friendship with the Mohawk in 1664 and, most importantly, left
the Dutch traders at Albany in charge of the trade essential to the Iroquois
war machine. British traders at Boston saw greater opportunity trading with
the powerful Iroquois than New England Algonquin and moved west to Albany.
Their departure left the Sokoki, Abenaki, and Pennacook without support other
than the French. No longer concerned about getting into a war with the
British, the Mohawk took advantage and began to drive the Sokoki and Pennacook
from the upper Connecticut River, one raid even reaching the vicinity of
Boston in 1665.
The French had noted the British capture of New
York and their subsequent treaty with the Mohawk. Worried the British would
gain control of the fur trade and tired of being threatened by the Iroquois,
the French Crown took formal possession of New France and in June, 1665 sent
the 1,200-man Carigan-Saliéres regiment to Canada. The French soldiers had
much to learn, and their first offensive against the Iroquois got lost in the
woods. However, during the winter of 1665-66, they invaded the Iroquois
homeland with devastating effect and burned the Mohawk villages of
Tionnontoguen and Kanagaro. By the following spring the Mohawk were asking the
English for help. The governor of New York (also concerned about French)
agreed to an alliance but only on condition the Mohawk first make peace with
Mahican and Sokoki. The Mahican were ready, but the Sokoki refused. That
summer, the Mohawk struck the Pennacook, while the Sokoki and Kennebec
attacked Mohawk villages.
The French army resumed their attacks in the
fall but ran into a Mohawk ambush. The attacks still had their effect, and the
Iroquois agreed to a general peace with the French in 1667. This freed the
western Iroquois to concentrate on the still-dangerous Susquehannock while the
Mohawk went after western New England. During 1668 the Mohawk drove the
Pennacook across New Hampshire to the protection of the Abenaki in Maine. The
following year an alliance of New England Algonquin (including Sokoki and
Mahican) retaliated, but the attack on a Mohawk village was ambushed on their
return home. With the exception of Missisquoi on the north end of Lake
Champlain, by the time peace was arranged in 1670, most Sokoki were living
under French protection along the St. Lawrence. The peace the Mahican agreed
to in 1672 with the Iroquois was actually surrender. Afterwards, the Iroquois
handled all Mahican relations with Europeans. In 1677 the Mahican became the
first member of the Covenant Chain.
The alliance of the British and Iroquois served
to protect both from the French. It also gave the Iroquois the support of the
British in extending its authority over other tribes by gathering them into
the Covenant Chain which greatly increased the League's power and influence.
There were several advantages for the British: it kept the Covenant Chain
tribes from falling under French influence; negotiations with Native Americans
were simplified since the British only had to deal with the Iroquois; and it
also allowed the British to call upon the League a "policeman" in
case of trouble. When the Wampanoag tried to use the Mahican village at
Schaghticoke as a refuge during the King Philip's War (1675-76), the governor
of New York called on the Mohawk to force them back to Massachusetts. The
Mohawk later helped New England force Philip's Sokoki and Pennacook allies to
retreat into northern Maine and Canada. Unfortunately, this also drove these
peoples into an alliance with the French.
After destroying the Erie in 1656, the western
Iroquois had turned on the Algonquin in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes and
driven them west of Lake Michigan. The peace the French had signed with the
western Iroquois in 1653, had not given the French access to the western Great
Lakes and left them besieged in Montreal and Quebec by the Mohawk and Oneida.
What little fur reached them came from the Ottawa who, after the destruction
of the Huron, had assumed the middleman's role in trade with the French. This
eventually annoyed the Iroquois, and they attacked the Ottawa living on the
islands of Lake Huron forcing them west to Wisconsin and upper Michigan. The
only French to visit the western Great Lakes during this period were Radisson
and Groseilliers who reached the west end of Lake Superior in 1658 (only to be
arrested when they returned to Quebec for trading without a license). The
French peace with the Iroquois came to an end in 1658 with the murder of a
Jesuit ambassador, and it was not until 1665 that Nicolas Perot and Father
Claude-Jean Allouez (6 French and 400 Huron, Ottawa, and Ojibwe) fought their
way up the Ottawa River and made their way to Green Bay.
What they found was appalling. More than 30,000
refugees (Fox, Sauk, Ottawa, Mascouten, Miami, Kickapoo, Ojibwe, and
Potawatomi) had overwhelmed both the resident Winnebago and Menominee and the
resources of the area. Too far north for growing corn, the area was
over-hunted, and the starving refugees were fighting among themselves over the
little that was left. War had also started with the Dakota (Sioux) to the west
as Algonquin hunters encroached on their territory. The refugees were also
subject to periodic attacks by the Iroquois whose "Great Pursuit"
had followed the Wyandot to Wisconsin. In 1653 the Seneca had attacked a
Wyandot and Potawatomi fort near Green Bay, but the Iroquois were forced to
withdraw after they ran out of food. The Wyandot
retreated inland to the Mississippi and finally to the south shore of
Superior. However, the Iroquois continued to strike without warning. A Fox
village had been destroyed in 1657, although in 1662 the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and
Nipissing surprised and annihilated a large Mohawk and Oneida war party at
Iroquois Point (east end of Lake Superior).
The peace signed between the French and
Iroquois in 1667 was significant. It not only included all five members of the
Iroquois League but extended to French allies and trading partners in the
western Great Lakes. The relentless Iroquois pursuit of the Wyandot ended, and
the French were able to rebuild their fur trade. French traders and Jesuit
missionaries immediately went west and began to bring some order to the chaos
in Wisconsin. The French were also able to explore the Ohio Valley for the
first time in 1669 which provided the basis for their later claim to the area.
The Iroquois, of course, already claimed it by right of conquest. Marquette
and Joliet reached the Mississippi in 1673, and LaSalle claimed Louisiana for
France in 1682. More importantly, as fur began to reach the markets at
Montreal and Quebec once again, the French became the mediator in intertribal
disputes - the first step towards organized Algonquin resistance to the
Iroquois.
While the French used the peace to rebuild, the
British became increasingly concerned with French military power and
expansion. When they began to increase their own military strength, the stage
was set for the 100-year struggle between Britain and France for control of
North America. For the Iroquois, the events of 1664-67 changed the manner in
which the League functioned. By 1677 the Iroquois had signed their first
treaties as the "Five Nations," and members afterwards rarely
negotiated separate treaties or conducted their own wars. Relations with
European powers grew more complex, and the League found it necessary to first
resolve its internal differences in order to present a united front to
outsiders. The peace signed with the French in 1667 also had advantages for
the Iroquois. They settled in the old Huron homeland of southern Ontario -
uninhabited since 1650. While men had fought each other, the beaver were at
peace, and the area had recovered to once again become a prime fur area.
It also freed the western Iroquois for a war
with the one Iroquian-speaking neighbor who had remained independent of the
League. The Susquehannock's long war against the Mohawk and Oneida had barely
ended in 1655, when a new conflict began with the Seneca, Cayuga, and
Onondaga. The western Iroquois found them just as stubborn as had the Mohawk.
Outnumbered three-to-one, the Susquehannock enlisted support from their
tributary Algonquin and Siouan tribes (Shawnee, Delaware, Nanticoke, Conoy,
Saponi, and Tutelo), and although they had lost the Swedes in 1655, alliances
with Maryland colonists in 1661 and 1666 provided the necessary weapons. The
Mohawk had their own wars in the tribes in New England and continued to honor
their peace with the Susquehannock. The Mohawk, however, helped the Dutch
during the Esopus War and, in crushing the Munsee Delaware, deprived the
Susquehannock of one of their allies in 1664.
The Susquehannock concentrated in a single
impregnable fort for defense, so the Iroquois went after their allies and
attacked the Delaware living along the Delaware River during the 1660s. The
Shawnee also came under attack and were scattered. The pursuit of these
Susquehannock allies south into South Carolina and Tennessee soon had Iroquois
war parties fighting with Cherokee and Catawba. In the end the Susquehannock
were just too few. The greatest blow, however, was not military defeat but
epidemic when smallpox struck their single, crowded village with devastating
effect in 1661. When the western Iroquois were free to prosecute the war with
their full strength in 1668, the Susquehannock had only 300 warriors. Still,
they continued to fight for another seven years, and it was not until 1675
that the Iroquois were finally able to force their surrender.
The first phase of the Beaver Wars ended with
the Iroquois conquest of the Susquehannock. During the next ten years, the
Iroquois finished off the last of their Nanticoke and Conoy allies and
incorporated them into the Covenant Chain. Maryland made peace with the League
in 1682, but raids (which had begun in 1671) against the Saponi and Tutelo in
Virginia and the Catawba in South Carolina continued. Iroquois power reached
its peak in 1680. By this time they had won a vast empire, and their warriors
had fought battles in every state east of the Mississippi. They never crossed
this river, but the Iroquois already knew trails leading to South Dakota's
Black Hills. After their war with the Susquehannock, the Iroquois turned their
attention west again, but were unhappy with what they saw. With peace in the
region after 1667, the French fur trade was going well, and the Algonquin had,
for the most part, stopped fighting each other.
It had not been a perfect peace - the Seneca
had attacked Mackinac in 1671 and the Dakota were fighting the Ojibwe and Fox
along the shores of Superior, but it was a major improvement over the chaos
the French had discovered in 1665. In 1680 Robert LaSalle had opened Fort Crèvecoeur
on the upper Illinois River to trade with the tribes of the Illinois
Confederation, and thousands of Algonquin had gathered in the vicinity. This
many potential enemies bothered the Iroquois, but of greater concern were
Illinois hunters moving into Ohio, Indiana and lower Michigan (claimed by the
Iroquois) and taking every beaver they could. Since this included the young
beaver, there was no breeding stock to replace the ones killed. Iroquois
protests resulted the murder of a Seneca sachem by the Illinois at an Ottawa
village beginning the second phase of the Beaver Wars in 1680.
Back in western New York, the Seneca formed an
enormous war party and started west to teach the Illinois a lesson they would
never forget. Enroute they added warriors from the Miami (Illinois enemies)
and set out for the Illinois villages near Fort Crèvecoeur. Warned of their
approach, the French evacuated their trading post and left for Wisconsin. Most
of the Illinois also moved to safety west of the Mississippi, but the Tamora,
Espeminkia, and Maroa chose to remain - a fatal mistake. After the Seneca had
finished their deadly work, the French returned to find the valley littered
with bodies and burned villages. Thousands of Illinois had been massacred.
Only a few Tamora and Maroa survived, and the Espeminkia disappeared
completely. The Seneca returned in 1681, but Henri Tonti built Fort St. Louis
on the upper Illinois during 1682, and the new stronghold brought the Illinois
back from west of the Mississippi. Meanwhile, the Miami had allowed Shawnee
(Iroquois enemies) to settle in their midst. Threatened by the Iroquois over
this, they switched sides and allowed the French to arrange a peace with
Illinois allowing the Miami to move closer to the French fort.
By 1684 the native population near Fort St.
Louis had grown to more than 20,000. The Iroquois returned in force that year,
but the Algonquin stood and fought. The Iroquois siege failed to capture the
fort, and they were forced to retreat - the turning point of the Beaver Wars.
Elated by this victory, the French began to organize a formal alliance against
the Iroquois. The first offensive failed so miserably, that Joseph La Barre,
the French governor of Canada, panicked and signed a treaty with the Iroquois
ceding most of Illinois. La Barre was replaced by Jacques-Rene Denonville who
renounced the treaty, built new forts, strengthened old ones, and provided
guns to the Great Lakes Algonquin. The strengthened alliance (Ojibwe, Ottawa,
Wyandot, Potawatomi, Missisauga, Fox, Sauk, Miami, Winnebago, Menominee,
Kickapoo, Illinois, and Mascouten) took the offensive in 1687. Following
important alliance victories in massive battles fought between canoe fleets on
Lake St. Clair and Erie, the Iroquois were clearly on the defensive by the
1690s and falling back across the Great Lakes towards New York. By 1696 the
Iroquois had been forced to abandon most of their southern Ontario villages to
the Missisauga (Ojibwe) and, except for eastern Ohio and northern
Pennsylvania, had retreated to their homeland.
The last part of the Beaver Wars coincided with
King William's War (1688-97) between Britain and France. This meant warfare
was not confined just to the Great Lakes, and in 1687 the French had struck
the Seneca and Onondaga villages in the Iroquois homeland. More than 1,200
Iroquois warriors retaliated in August, 1689 with a massive raid against
Lachine just outside Montreal which killed more than two hundred French
settlers. The following year the French and their allies attacked
Schenectady. The Mohawk attacked the Sokoki at St. Francois (the main French
ally in the east) in 1690 and 1692, but three separate campaigns launched from
Quebec by Louis Frontenac 1693-96 carried the war to the Iroquois villages.
Under intense pressure from both the east and west, smallpox broke out among
the Iroquois in 1690. The Iroquois made overtures for a separate peace to the
French in 1694, but these were ignored because the offer did not include
French allies.
The Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the war
between Britain and France in 1697, placed the League under British protection
(not something the Iroquois had requested). The French worried their
continuing war with the Iroquois might bring another confrontation with the
British and began to consider the Iroquois peace offers with greater interest.
However, their first attempts to urge a settlement on their allies created
suspicion that they would abandon their allies and make a separate peace.
There was good reason for the Algonquin to feel this way since the Iroquois
had already attempted to break the alliance with offers of peace and trade to
the Ottawa and Wyandot. The main problem was the return of prisoners taken and
adopted by the Iroquois. Sensing the League was about to collapse, the
Algonquin wanted total victory, and the fighting continued until 1701.
The peace signed with the Iroquois that year
included both the French and their allies. The French agreed to mediate any
disputes which might arise between the League and Algonquin, while the
Iroquois promised to remain neutral in any future war between Britain and
France. That future war would start that very year - Queen Anne's War
(1701-13). In their hurry to insure Iroquois neutrality before the outbreak of
hostilities, the French neglected to extinguish Iroquois claims to the Ohio
Valley in favor of their own, and the British would soon claim this area since
the Iroquois were supposedly under their protection. For the most part, the
Iroquois had been a British ally during the King William's War, but only to
the extent they were engaged in a separate war with the French. Fighting
during the Queen Anne's War was mostly in New England and Canadian Maritimes,
and keeping its word, the League remained neutral and waited to see who won.
Not everything was peaceful, however. The
powerful Missisauga expanded south along the shores of Lake Huron into
southern Ontario and seized territory from the Iroquois. Concerned with other
matters, the French ignored the League's protests about this, and by 1713 the
Iroquois were considering an invasion of Canada. Fortunately, the Queen Anne's
War ended with the Treaty of Utrecht that year, and the French finally got
around to mediating a settlement. This dispute, however, was one of the least
of their problems. France had emerged from the King William's War as the
winner in North America. It then proceeded to discard the fruits of its
victory. A glut of beaver fur in Europe had caused a drastic drop in price,
and the French monarchy suddenly "got religion." For years, the
Jesuits had been protesting the destruction which the fur trade was causing
among Native Americas, but no one listened until a drop in price made fur
unprofitable.
A royal proclamation was issued curtailing fur
trade in the western Great Lakes. Realizing the disaster this was for the
Algonquin alliance, Frontenac, the governor of Canada, delayed implementation
to such extent he was removed. His successor obediently closed forts and
trading posts, and the French surrendered their main source of power and
influence - trade goods and presents. Their hard-won alliance in the Great
Lakes quickly began to unravel. The Iroquois may have been down in 1701, but
certainly not out, and they immediately sensed the French dilemma. Still
controlling access to British and Dutch traders at Albany, they proceeded,
after military force had failed them, to attack the French with trade. Even
before the peace was signed in 1701, the Iroquois had used trade with the
British as a weapon to break the unity of the alliance. When the French
finally put the proclamation into effect, Iroquois traders went to work.
The French responded in 1701 to this challenge
from the "neutral" Iroquois with a new post at Detroit, Fort
Pontchartrain. Just about every tribe in the French alliance immediately moved
nearby, and the resulting frictions placed further strains on the alliance.
The French lost control, and the tense situation exploded in 1712 when the Fox
attacked Fort Pontchartrain. The Fox Wars (1712-16 and 1728-37) marked a
period of intertribal warfare between members of the French alliance. Living
under the "Great Peace," the Iroquois must have enjoyed the
spectacle of their enemies fighting among themselves. They continued to make
inroads into the French trade empire with British trade goods which were not
only of higher quality than the French, but lower in price. The Ottawa began
to trade with the Iroquois and British in 1717, and other French allies
followed. By the time the French rescinded the royal degree, it was too late.
The Iroquois allowed the British in 1727 to build Fort Oswego in their
homeland to shorten the travel distance for the Great Lakes tribes. By 1728,
80% of the beaver on the Albany market was coming from French allies.
The British accepted Iroquois neutrality after
1701 but still found them useful as a buffer between themselves and French
Canada. With the French alliance in disarray, the Iroquois soon realized they
represented the balance of power between the British and French in North
American. By taking advantage of this fact until the final French defeat in
1763, they managed to maintain their power and independence. A remarkable
achievement, and the diplomatic skills they demonstrated were at least the
equal of any European statesman. While they weakened the French with economic
warfare, the Iroquois used British fear of French influence among Native
Americans in the British colonies to gain support for the Covenant Chain. The
British government actually pushed these tribes into joining, and membership
eventually included (at different times): Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Conestoga
(Susquehannock), Nanticoke, Saponi, Tutelo, Munsee, Mahican, Conoy
(Piscataway), Cherokee,
Creek, Choctaw, Catawba,
and Chickasaw.
The League's actual power to speak for some
tribes was far from absolute. No amount of threat and intimidation could force
the Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, Catawba, or Choctaw to submit to the League's
authority, and Iroquois attempts to enforce their will often led to warfare.
Perhaps the Covenant Chain's worst feature was the Iroquois often placed their
own (or British) interests ahead of tribes they were supposed to represent. An
exception was the Iroquois threat of intervention on behalf of the Tuscarora
during the Tuscarora War (1712-13) with the Carolina colonists. The Iroquois
stopped short of a war but remained defiant. In 1714 they allowed the
Iroquian-speaking
Tuscarora to join them in western New York, and for years afterwards Iroquois
war parties went south to punish the Catawba for helping the British against
the Tuscarora. By 1722 the Tuscarora had become the sixth, but non-voting,
member of the Iroquois League. Four years later, the Iroquois began to
secretly organize a massive uprising by all tribes east of the Mississippi
against the French and British. The response from other tribes, however, was
mostly negative, and the idea was dropped.
The political unity of the Iroquois was the
source of their power, but it was by no means perfect. Divisions appeared over
religion after French Jesuit missionaries began to make regular visits to
Iroquois villages during the 1640s. This proved to be very dangerous work for
the "blackrobes". Suspicion of French in general and smallpox in
particular frequently caused the Iroquois to protect themselves from what they
perceived as witchcraft, with fatal results for the priest. However, the
Jesuits kept coming and began to make converts. The mission of St. Marie was
established at the Mohawk village of Teatontaloga in 1642 but was destroyed
three years later during an epidemic. Father Jogues was warned to stay away,
but he attempted to rebuild the mission and was murdered in 1643. Despite
this, missionary work resumed among the Mohawk, but it was the League's
incorporation of large numbers of Christian Huron, Tionontati, and Neutrals
during the 1650s which really opened the door for the Jesuits.
Through the efforts of Father Le Moine, Notre
Dame de Ganentaa, the first mission among the Onondaga was opened in 1654. Two
years later Father René Ménard built Etienne for the Cayuga, and separate
missions were also established for the Seneca and Oneida in 1656. As the
number of converts rose, there was increasing conflict between traditional and
Christian Iroquois. Meanwhile, the French had signed a peace with the western
Iroquois but still avoided trade with them, preferring to get their furs from
the Ottawa. As tensions increased, the French tried using Jesuits as
go-betweens in dealings with the League. This made the Jesuits appear partisan
to the Iroquois, and following the murder in 1658 of a Jesuit serving as a
French ambassador, peace between the French and Iroquois ended. Most of the
missions were abandoned temporarily. With renewed hostilities, the Iroquois
began to question the loyalty of Christian tribesmen pressuring them to
renounce their new religion and return to traditional Iroquois ways. Many did,
but others were forced from the Iroquois villages. Eventually, many left
entirely and settled near the French in the St. Lawrence Valley.
The first of these settlements was at La
Prairie near Montreal. In 1667 the Jesuits convinced some Christian Oneida to
spend the winter. More Oneida and several Mohawk families came later, and
other Christian Iroquois followed. This new Iroquois settlement grew very
rapidly, but the soil at La Prairie proved unsuitable for corn. In 1673 they
moved a short distance to Sault St. Louis (Lachine) calling the new village
Caughnawaga. The Caughnawaga population was mixed (at one point it included
Huron from Notre Dame de Foy), but the vast majority were Mohawk. By 1680 more
Mohawk warriors were living near the French at Caughnawaga than in the Mohawk
homeland. Although many had been forced to leave their homeland over religion,
the Caughnawaga Mohawk still observed the "Great Law of Peace" and
remained neutral in wars between the French and the Iroquois League. This
changed with the massive Iroquois raid against the French at Lachine in 1689,
after which the Caughnawaga entered the war as French allies.
During the remainder of the war, Caughnawaga
warriors participated in the French retaliatory raids against Albany and
Schenectady and even guided French expeditions against the Iroquois homeland.
However, the "Great Peace" was still observed, and Iroquois and
Caughnawaga warriors took care to avoid confrontations where they would have
to kill each other. The Caughnawaga paid a high price for their support of the
French in the King William's War, and by 1696 they had lost half of their
warriors. The French war with the Iroquois League dragged on until 1701, but
the Caughnawaga were instrumental in arranging the terms of the peace treaty
signed that year. While the Iroquois League agreed to remain neutral in future
wars between Britain and France, no such restrictions were placed on the
Caughnawaga. By the outbreak of the Queen Anne's War, the Caughnawaga had
allied with the Abenaki, and as French allies, their joint war parties raided
New England. The worst blows were in Massachusetts. Deerfield was destroyed in
February, 1704 (59 killed and 109 captured), and Groton burned in 1710.
The Iroquois have often described as a British
ally during the four major conflicts between Britain and France. In truth,
after 1701, more Iroquois were fighting for the French than British. The
League (except the Mohawk) was neutral in these conflicts, while the
Caughnawaga were a major French ally. The original Caughnawaga grew so rapidly
part of the population moved across the St. Lawrence in 1676 to start a second
village at Kanesatake. By 1720 the Lake of the Two Mountains mission was built
for the Iroquois of the Mountain who would become the modern Mohawk community
of Oka. Caughnawaga was moved slightly in 1716 to its present location after
soil at the old site became exhausted. Other sites were added as the number of
pro-French Iroquois along the St. Lawrence continued to grow: Sault Recollet
in 1721; Oswegatchie and the La Presentation mission (Ogdensburg, New York) in
1748 for the Onondaga, Oneida, and Cayuga; and St. Regis in 1756 to relieve
overcrowded conditions among the Mohawk at Caughnawaga.
Besides the defection of most of the Christian
Iroquois to the French along the St. Lawrence, the League was further weakened
when another portion of its population began moving to the Ohio Valley. The
massive adoptions of the 1650s had actually made the original Iroquois a
minority within the League, but they had retained political power since
representatives to the League's council were chosen from certain
"royal" families, all of which were part of the original Iroquois.
For the most part, this excluded adoptees from positions of authority, and
this second-class status caused dissatisfaction. Rather than outright revolt,
many chose to separate themselves from the League. Groups of Iroquois hunters,
mainly Seneca and Cayuga, but to a large degree descendents of adopted Huron
Susquehannock, Neutrals, and Erie, began to move to Ohio and western
Pennsylvania during the 1720s and establish permanent villages outside the
Iroquois homeland. By the 1730s their numbers had become significant, and the
British traders had started calling them by a corrupted form of their Delaware
name - Mingo.
The Iroquois League made little objection to
the Mingo migration so long as they continued to acknowledge its authority.
Actually, it was to the League's advantage to have tribesmen living there to
keep the French and their Algonquin allies from claiming the Ohio Country. The
Iroquois did not object when part of the Wyandot left Detroit and settled
along the Sandusky River in northwest Ohio. Instead, the Iroquois saw an
opportunity to lure an important member of the Great Lakes alliance from the
French and into the Covenant Chain. Within a few years, Wyandot ambassadors
routinely spoke in the League's councils (a major change from the days of the
"Great Pursuit") and were considered by other tribes in the area as
the de facto Iroquois viceroy of Ohio. By 1740 there were almost a thousand
Mingo living in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. Although considered
part of the Iroquois, they had begun to think and act like a separate tribe.
From its peak of 25,000 in 1660, Iroquois
population had gone into a steady decline from war and epidemic to about
14,000 by 1740. The 1,500 Tuscarora added in 1722 did not compensate for the
defection of 1,000 Mingo to Ohio and 2,000 Caughnawaga to Canada. Both the
British and French were aware of this decline, but on paper the Iroquois were
still formidable because of the Covenant Chain. As mentioned, the League often
abused its responsibility to represent member tribes, and there never was a
clearer example than its support of the British in the infamous Walking
Purchase in 1737. Pennsylvania "discovered" an old treaty supposedly
signed by the Delaware which gave it the right to claim a large part of the
remaining Delaware homeland. Through fraud and trickery, the colonists
enlarged the claim to include almost all of the land the Delaware had left. As
members of the Covenant Chain, the Delaware turned to the League for help.
What they got instead was intimidation and
insult. Furious the Delaware had dared to sell land without their permission,
the Iroquois took the bribes offered by Pennsylvania and supported the
British. The Delaware continued to protest, but at a 1742 meeting with the
Pennsylvania governor, the Iroquois representative Canasatego silenced the
Delaware sachem Nutimus as he rose to complain about the Walking Purchase,
called the Delaware women, and ordered him to leave. This left the Delaware
and some Shawnee landless. The Iroquois ordered them to the upper Susquehanna
in north-central Pennsylvania where the League was running its own
"Indian reservation" for Covenant Chain tribes displaced by British
settlement. The Iroquois were generous to provide land for these tribes but
self-serving to the extent it gave them additional warriors in case of war
with the French. In any case, the Susquehanna was crowded and deadly from
malaria which had been introduced to the area after 1700.
The Shawnee hunting parties were the first to
leave for western Pennsylvania and Ohio. When the Mingo living there made no
objection and even shared their villages, the Shawnee became permanent
residents and invited the Delaware to join them. Between 1742 and 1749, many
Delaware left the Susquehanna and moved west to form mixed villages with the
Shawnee and Mingo. Once again, the League did not oppose this migration
because the presence of Covenant Chain tribes in western Pennsylvania only
strengthened their claim versus the French and their allies. The Wyandot soon
extended an invitation for the Shawnee and Delaware to settle in Ohio, and the
Mingo, as part of the Iroquois, were already living there. The
"republics," or mixed Mingo-Delaware-Shawnee (Ohio tribes) villages
which formed, were outside the French alliance, but what the Iroquois and
British did not realize at first was that they were also outside their own
control. By 1750 the "republics" had a population of 10,000 with
2,000 warriors and had become a power to be reckoned with.
Trade competition in Ohio had been building
with the British gaining on the French by virtue of superior goods and lower
prices. Three powers claimed the area: the Iroquois by right of conquest
during the 1650s and 60s; the French by right of discovery in the 1670s; and
the British since the Iroquois were placed under their protection by the
Treaty of Ryswick in 1696. The key to control of the area, however, were the
Ohio tribes who lived there. The French realized this and began efforts to
gain their allegiance. For the most part, the Ohio tribes did not wish to
become subject to anyone - French, British, or Iroquois. The French had some
success using the Métis Pierre Chartier to lure some of the Shawnee to their
cause as well as the Cuyahoga Mingo. This was enough, however, to alarm the
British who urged the Iroquois to command the Delaware and Shawnee to return
to the Susquehanna. When the League council finally agree to this, it was
stunned to discover its orders were ignored, and the Delaware, Shawnee, and
Mingo stayed right where they were and refused to leave.
With the outbreak of the King George's War
(1744-48) between Britain and France, only the Mohawk, due to the influence of
the British trader, William Johnson, supported the British. The League itself
chose to remain neutral which was fortunate for the British, since at the
time, the Iroquois were angry with them and could easily gone over to the
French. Both Pennsylvania and Virginia had chosen to interpret the Treaty of
Lancaster (1744) as an Iroquois cession of Ohio to themselves, when all the
League had intended was to give permission for the British to build a trading
post at the forks of the Ohio River (Pittsburgh). Pennsylvania and Virginia
ignored the League's protests and both claimed the entire region.
Pennsylvania's claim was more modest and extended only to eastern Ohio, but
Virginia's included the entire Ohio Valley west to the Illinois River
including Kentucky and lower Michigan.
As with the Queen Anne's War, most of the
fighting during the King George's War was confined to New England and the
Canadian Maritimes. The Caughnawaga were not only loyal to the French but
allies of the Sokoki and Abenaki. When Dummer's War (1722-26) had broken out
between the eastern Abenaki and New England, it was followed shortly by a
separate, but related, conflict in western New England - Grey Lock's War
(1723-27). Beyond supplying weapons and refuge in Canada, the French never
became directly involved, but the Caughnawaga joined the Sokoki in their raids
against western New England. The British asked the Iroquois to intervene, but
the League was no longer willing to be a British "policeman," mainly
because of a reluctance to become involved in fighting with the Caughnawaga -
a violation of the "Great Peace." They did, however, ask the Abenaki
to stop and offered to mediate.
Twenty years later, the Caughnawaga - who
claimed western Vermont as part of their homeland - had 250 warriors and stood
by the French during the King George's War. In 1744 they formed war parties
with the Sokoki and Abenaki to raid the British settlements in southern
Vermont and New Hampshire. Much of the New England frontier had to be
abandoned during the next four years. In August, 1746 Fort Massachusetts on
Hoosac River was captured, and almost all of the settlement on the east of the
Hudson River in New York also had to be abandoned as a result. The Mohawk
fought for the British, but after one of their raids struck just south of
Montreal, the Caughnawaga and other Canadian Iroquois formally declared war on
the British colonies in 1747. The war finally ended with the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle
in 1748.
There was little fighting in the Ohio Valley
and Great Lakes during the war and was limited to pro-French Shawnee and Mingo
attacks on British traders. Otherwise, the French allies (Ottawa, Menominee,
Winnebago, Illinois, Saulteur and Mississauga Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Wyandot)
sent their warriors east to Montreal to defend Canada against the British.
Despite the lack of combat, the war was a disaster for the French in the west
after the British began a naval blockade of Canada in 1745. This completely
cut the supply of French trade goods, and without these, the French alliance
fell apart by 1747. French traders without goods were killed, and British were
quick to take advantage of the situation. By war's end, British traders had
entered Ohio and were trading directly with French allies like the Wyandot and
Miami.
All of which boded well for the Iroquois and
British to keep the French out of Ohio and western Pennsylvania. A major
concern was the refusal of the Shawnee and Delaware to obey the League's order
to return to the Susquehanna. Something needed to be done about this. At the
Treaty of Lancaster with the Iroquois, Shawnee and Delaware (and indirectly -
Mingo) in 1748, Pennsylvania urged the Iroquois to restore the Ohio tribes to
the Covenant Chain as a barrier against the French. The Iroquois created a
system of half-kings - special Iroquois emissaries (usually Mingo), one for
the Shawnee and one for the Delaware - to represent the Ohio tribes in the
Iroquois council. This regain the allegiance of the Delaware and Shawnee to
the League. When the French sent Pierre-Joseph Céloron in 1749 to expel
British traders and mark the Ohio boundary with lead plates, his reception was
openly hostile. Two years later, Chabert de Joncaire traveled through Ohio
demanding the expulsion of British traders, and the Mingo wanted to know by
what authority the French were claiming Iroquois land.
Of course, the French were not the only
Europeans claiming Iroquois land in the Ohio Valley. After the 1744 Treaty of
Lancaster, Virginia had chartered the Ohio Company in 1747 to begin settlement
around Pittsburgh. Investors included most of the important families of
Virginia, including Lawrence Washington, the older half-brother of George.
Pennsylvania had similar plans, and to the Iroquois it appeared the British
and French were two thieves fighting over their land. It also did not help
matters that the British had reduced annual presents to the Iroquois after the
King George's War. The French, however, felt they were losing Ohio and decided
on drastic action. In June, 1752 the Métis Charles Langlade led a war party
of 250 Ottawa and Ojibwe from Mackinac in an attack which destroyed the Miami
village and British trading post of Pickawillany (Piqua, Ohio). The French
allies ended trade with the British, and after apologies, rejoined the French
alliance. Immediately afterwards, the French began building a line of new
forts across western Pennsylvania designed to block British access to Ohio.
The Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware had no wish to
fall under French control and turned to the Iroquois to stop this. Deciding
the French were an immediate threat, the Iroquois cast their lot with the
British and signed the Logstown Treaty in 1752 confirming their earlier
cession of Ohio at Lancaster in 1744. They also gave permission for the
British to build a blockhouse at Pittsburgh. This was not even completed
before French soldiers forced its surrender and burned it. In December, 1753
Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia sent 21-year-old militia major George
Washington to Fort Le Boeuf to order the French to abandon their forts and
leave Ohio. The French commander received Washington with perfect courtesy but
refused the demand. He also warned him not to come back.
The following May Washington was sent west
again with a detachment of 130 militia guided by Mingo warriors under
Half-King (Tanacharisson) and Monacatoocha (Scarrooyady). His mission was to
force the surrender of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, but he never
got there. Enroute they got into a fight with 50 French soldiers commanded by
Joseph Villier de Jumonville. Jumonville was killed in the brief engagement,
and with the French in pursuit, Washington beat a hasty retreat. Disregarding
the Mingo advice to keep going until he reached Virginia, Washington stopped
and built Fort Necessity. After an argument, the Mingo decided Washington was
a fool and left him. The French quickly surrounded the tiny fort and forced
its surrender, but Washington was released after unknowingly signing a
confession of murdering a French ambassador on a mission of peace. The
incident started the French and Indian War (1755-63).
That same month, a conference was held at
Albany between representatives of the British colonies and Iroquois League to
prepare for a war with the French. Needing British help to defend Ohio from
the French, the Iroquois had ceded it to Pennsylvania with the exception of
the Wyoming and Susquehanna Valleys which they were determined to keep for the
tribes of the Covenant Chain. Unfortunately, an Albany trader managed to get
some minor Iroquois representatives drunk, and when they sobered up, they
discovered they had signed an agreement with Connecticut (which by its charter
also claimed northern Pennsylvania) land companies opening the Susquehanna and
Wyoming Valleys to settlement. Rather than achieving unity for war against the
French, the conference ended with the Iroquois furious at the British for the
fraudulent treaty, Pennsylvania protesting Connecticut's attempt to claim its
territory, and the Delaware still living on the upper Susquehanna threatening
to kill any white who tried to settle in the Wyoming Valley.
Despite their long history as a French ally,
the Caughnawaga attended the Albany Conference as part of the Iroquois
delegation and agreed, on behalf of the Abenaki and Sokoki to remain neutral
in the coming war. Unfortunately, they were unable to keep this promise for
either themselves or their allies. The French had also been busy organizing
their allies and the result was an alliance known as the Seven Nations of
Canada (Seven Fires of Caughnawaga) composed of the Iroquois mission villages
on the St. Lawrence (Caughnawaga, Kanesatake, Oswegatchie, and St. Regis); the
Abenaki at St. Francois and Bécancour; and the Huron at Lorette. Although the
Caughnawaga clearly dominated this coalition, they were over-ruled by the
pro-French majority after the outbreak of war. The Caughnawaga were not as
active as in previous conflicts, but the Christian Onondaga from Oswegatchie
attacked German Flats (Herkimer, New York) in 1758.
When news of the Iroquois cession of Ohio at
the Albany Conference reached the Ohio tribes that fall, they decided the
British were also enemies and the Iroquois could no longer be trusted. Only a
few Mingo remained loyal to British. Despite the fact many Caughnawaga had
moved in with the Mingo during the early 1750s, there was no sudden switch of
allegiance to the French. The Mingo remained hostile to the French who had
difficulty in 1755 supplying their forts or finding allies in the area willing
to defend them from the British army being assembled under General Edward
Braddock. The policy of the Mingo, Shawnee, and Delaware in Ohio was one of
belligerent neutrality towards both sides. As Braddock's 2,200-man army began
its march towards Fort Duquesne, the French were forced to bring in 600 native
allies from Canada and the Great Lakes. This, however, proved more than
adequate. Braddock disdained using savages as scouts, and in July just south
of Fort Duquesne (present-day Pittsburgh), he blundered into an ambush in
which almost half his command was killed, including himself.
News of the defeat was met with stunned
disbelief in the British colonies followed by anger. The Shawnee and Delaware
picked an incredibly bad time to send a delegation to Philadelphia to protest
the Iroquois sale of Ohio. Pennsylvania seized and hanged them, and the
Shawnee and Delaware retaliated with raids on frontier settlements in
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. The Delaware still under Iroquois
control on the upper Susquehanna did not participate at first but, by
December, 1755 had joined the war in defiance of the Iroquois council. The
Susquehanna Delaware made peace in August, 1756, but the Delaware, Shawnee and
Munsee continued fighting and by the end of the year more than 2,500 colonists
had been killed. Another peace conference was held with the eastern Delaware
at Easton, Pennsylvania in October, 1758. The Treaty of Easton paid for
Delaware lands taken by New Jersey, and Pennsylvania unilaterally renounced
all claim to land west of the Appalachians that had been ceded by the Iroquois
at the Albany in 1754. The news soon reached Ohio, and when General John
Forbes captured Fort Duquesne in November, the Delaware and Shawnee offered no
resistance.
In the hysteria following Braddock's defeat in
1755, a Seneca war party enroute to attack Catawba in the Carolina had been
treacherously killed by Virginia militia. Coupled with anger over the
fraudulent land cessions exacted at the Albany, many of the Seneca, Cayuga,
and Onondaga joined the French, and for the first time in almost two
centuries, Iroquois found themselves on opposite sides of a war. Only the
Mohawk of Hendrick (Soiengarahta) and the Oneida stayed loyal to the British.
This was mainly due to William Johnson, an Irishman who had immigrated to New
York in 1734 and established himself as a planter and fur trader in the Mohawk
Valley. After taking a Mohawk wife (Molly Brant), Johnson became known to the
Iroquois for honesty. He not only learned their language but mastered the
ritual courtesies of their councils. The Mohawk called him Waraghiyaghey,
meaning "Big Business."
The Mohawk were no less angry by the drunken
cession of the Wyoming Valley than other Iroquois, but because they trusted
Johnson, they answered his call in 1755 to help New York and New England
militia take the French fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Leading 200 of
his Mohawk warriors, Hendrick was killed in this battle. The Caughnawaga were
also there with the French, but when they saw Mohawk fighting for the English,
they suddenly retired and sat out the fight. Despite the loss of their sachem,
the Mohawk did likewise leaving the French and British to fight each other.
There was be no violation of the Great Law of Peace that day. The Mohawk also
accompanied Johnson in the capture of Fort Niagara in July, 1759. Quebec fell
that September, and Montreal surrendered the following year. After these
British victories, the war in North American was over.
British soldiers occupied the remaining French
forts in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes, but rather than leave after
defeating the French, they stayed as an occupying army. Fort Duquesne was
rebuilt as Fort Pitt and garrisoned with 200 men. William Johnson was
appointed the British Indian agent in the north and wanted to continue the
French system of dealing with Native Americans through trade and annual
presents. Unfortunately, the British commander in North America, Lord Jeffrey
Amherst, despised Indians - friend or foe. Ignoring Johnson, Amherst ended
annual gifts to treaty chiefs in 1760, increased prices on trade goods, and
restricted the supply - especially firearms, powder and rum. By 1761 the
Seneca were passing a war belt calling for an uprising against the British,
but only the Delaware and Shawnee responded. Johnson discovered the plot from
the Wyandot during a meeting at Detroit with tribes of the old French
alliance. Other belts were circulated by Caughnawaga and Illinois, but it took
the religious movement of Neolin, the Delaware Prophet, to provide the unity
for a general revolt.
Neolin taught rejection of the white man's
trade goods (especially whiskey) and a return to traditional native ways.
Pontiac, chief of one the most important tribes of the old French alliance,
the Ottawa at Detroit, seized on this and began to secretly organize an
uprising. When it hit in 1763, the Pontiac Rebellion caught the British
entirely by surprise, and six of nine forts west of the Appalachians were
captured during May. However, the failure to take the other three ultimately
caused the revolt to fail. The Iroquois were still healing their recent
divisions and tried to remain neutral, but the Seneca joined the uprising and
besieged Fort Niagara. A British column trying to reach the fort was ambushed
followed by a massacre of prisoners and wounded, but Niagara held. The Mingo
and Wyandot captured Fort Venango in northwest Pennsylvania, but the siege of
Fort Pitt by Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo dragged on, and the British defended
it by introducing a smallpox epidemic with gifts of infected blankets and
handkerchiefs to their besiegers.
While continuing the siege, the Delaware,
Shawnee, and Mingo also attacked the Pennsylvania frontier killing 600
colonists. Pontiac had reserved for himself the responsibility of taking Fort
Detroit but failed to achieve surprise when an informer warned the garrison.
As the forts continued to hold and the British recovered from their initial
surprise, the rebellion began to unravel. After a three-day battle at Bushy
Run, Colonel Henry Bouquet broke the siege of Fort Pitt. Allies began to
desert, and Pontiac was forced to end his siege of Detroit and retreat west to
Indiana where he still had a considerable following among the Kickapoo and
Illinois. While reorganizing, he asked the French at Fort de Chartes on the
Mississippi for help, but the commandant refused and urged him to stop. In
November Amherst was replaced by Thomas Gage who listened to William Johnson.
Gage restored trade goods to previous levels and lowered prices.
Badly shaken, the British issued the
Proclamation of 1763 halting all new settlement west of the Appalachian
Mountains. The Seneca ended their siege of Fort Niagara and were forced to
sign a humiliating surrender. Pontiac signed a peace in 1765 but was disgraced
as a result. He never returned to Detroit and moved to northern Illinois in
1766. Three years later he was murdered by a Peoria (Illinois) during a visit
to Cahokia. William Johnson emerged from the Pontiac Uprising in control of
British Indian policy in North America. His influence was so great among the
Iroquois councils that the Mohawk were literally his private army, and at his
urging in 1763, they had destroyed the Delaware village of Kanhanghton as
punishment for their support of Pontiac. After the war, almost all of the
Delaware in the Susquehanna Valley left and moved west to Ohio.
Whites replaced them, and settlers from
Connecticut finally took advantage of the drunken treaty signed by the
Iroquois at Albany in 1754 and began to occupy the Wyoming Valley -
conflicting claims of Connecticut and Pennsylvania resulted in pitched battles
between rival frontier militias in 1768. With the whites fighting among
themselves for the land, it was no place for Indians, and the remaining tribes
of the Covenant Chain (Nanticoke, Saponi, Tutelo, Munsee, Delaware, and some
Iroquois) left the Wyoming Valley to crowd into the rapidly shrinking Iroquois
homeland in New York. With the French gone and the British controlling Canada,
Caughnawaga lands were also being overrun by settlement in 1763. After their
village at St. Francois had been destroyed by Rogers Rangers in 1759 during
the French and Indian War, the Sokoki had found refuge with the Caughnawaga at
St. Regis.
By 1763 white settlement had taken the Sokoki's
lands, as well as those of the Caughnawaga, along the shores of Lake
Champlain. With St. Francois already overcrowded, there was no place for these
people to go. The Caughnawaga had good reason to consider joining the Pontiac
rebellion in 1763 but stayed out and in the end advocated peace. They may have
done better if they had fought. William Johnson supported some Caughnawaga
claims to the upper Champlain Valley but ruled the Proclamation of 1763 did
not apply to lands claimed by the Sokoki in Vermont and New Hampshire. The
Proclamation was doomed from the moment it was issued, and the resentment it
created among the colonists was one of the main reasons for the American
Revolution. Frontiersmen seeking new land simply ignored it and moved into
native lands, and the British, trying to avoid a revolution, were powerless to
stop the encroachment. Under pressure from the Americans to open more land for
settlement, the British decided in 1768 to rescind the Proclamation and
negotiate a new treaty with the Iroquois for Ohio.
Although other tribes were invited to send
representatives, Johnson adhered to custom and negotiated only with the
Iroquois. With the French no longer a threat, the League had lost much of its
previous advantage and, with white settlement encroaching upon its own
homeland, was anxious to sign an agreement to protect themselves. Johnson
(himself a land speculator) had no trouble in getting them to part with their
claim to Ohio in exchange for a defined boundary of their lands. The Treaty of
Fort Stanwix in 1768 ceded much of western Pennsylvania and the entire
Ohio Valley. This self-serving agreement was between two parties who could no
longer control the people they represented - the British for the Americans and
the Iroquois for the Ohio tribes - and condemned both to a fifty-years of war
which claimed more than 30,000 lives.
The Iroquois attempt to protect their homeland
brought them nothing but grief. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix Treaty not only
destroyed their credibility as a representative of the Ohio tribes, but many
Iroquois lost faith in the League's decisions. Shawnee protests to the
Iroquois council went unanswered except for a threat of annihilation if they
opposed the agreement. The Shawnee turned to others for support and, in what
proved the opening move towards the western alliance, made overtures to the:
Illinois, Kickapoo, Wea, Piankashaw, Miami, Potawatomi, Wyandot, Ottawa,
Delaware, Mascouten, Ojibwe, Cherokee and Chickasaw. Meetings were held at the
Shawnee villages on the Sciota River in Ohio in 1770 and 1771, but Johnson was
able to prevent the formation of an actual alliance by threats of war with the
Iroquois. Frontiersmen flooded across the mountains into the new lands. By
1774 there were 50,000 whites west of the Appalachians and more coming. The
British closed many of their forts in the area and withdrew their garrisons as
an "economy measure."
Most of the first settlements were along the
Ohio River between Pittsburgh and Wheeling. Isolated by Johnson, the Shawnee,
Delaware, and Mingo in the area stood alone against the Long Knives (Virginia
and Pennsylvania frontiersmen) and got along as best they could with them, but
the tension was building. Problems began after treaties signed with the
Cherokee opened the way for more settlement in Kentucky. Virginia sent survey
teams into the area in 1773, and there were clashes with the Shawnee. Virginia
militia took over abandoned Fort Pitt early in 1774 to use as a base in case
of war. There was more fighting that the spring, and believing a war had
already started, Michael Cresap and a group of vigilantes attacked a Shawnee
trading party near Wheeling in April killing a chief.
The following month, another group of
frontiersmen massacred a band of Mingo at Yellow Creek (Stuebenville, Ohio).
Among the victims were the wife, brother, and sister of Logan, a Mingo war
chief. The Shawnee chief Cornstalk wanted to avoid a war and visited Fort Pitt
to ask the Virginians to "cover the dead," but Logan went to the
Shawnee-Mingo village of Wakatomica and recruited a war party. While Cornstalk
was at Fort Pitt talking peace, Logan took a gruesome revenge by killing 13
settlers near the mouth of the Muskingum River. Lord Dunmore's (Cresap's) War
(1774) began in June. Logan assured colonial officials in July the killing was
over, but by then whites had gathered into forts waiting for help to arrive.
Spurning both Iroquois and Delaware offers to mediate, Lord Dunmore, governor
of Virginia, brought a large army of militia west to the Ohio.
With the Iroquois and most of the Delaware
remaining neutral, the Shawnee and their Mingo allies sent a war belt to the
Detroit tribes who refused it. William Johnson kept the Miami and other
possible allies at bay with threats of Iroquois intervention if they helped
the Shawnee. Dunmore's militia destroyed Wakatomica and five other villages,
and in October was gathering at Point Pleasant (West Virginia) on the Ohio
River for a second invasion. The Shawnee and Mingo launched a sudden attack.
The battle lasted most of the day with heavy casualties on both sides, but the
Shawnee were finally forced to withdraw. A month later, they signed a treaty
relinquishing all their claims south of the Ohio River which opened Kentucky
for settlement.
The American Revolution (1775-83) began the
following year with fighting at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts just as
the first Kentucky settlements were established at Harrodstown and
Boonesborough. The Quebec Act of 1774 had made the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes
part of Canada and brought Virginia and Pennsylvania to the point of
revolution. With the outbreak of war, the British ceased being a bystander and
began urging the Shawnee and Mingo to attack the Americans. Some tribes chose
neutrality, but by arguing the Americans intended to take their land, the
British succeeded with the Detroit tribes, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe. They also
got an alliance between the Shawnee and Cherokee (Chickamauga) war factions.
In July, 1776 the Chickamauga attacked two forts in the Carolinas provoking
American retaliation against all Cherokee. Meanwhile, Chickamauga and Shawnee
war parties roamed through Kentucky attacking Americans.
In the midst of an impassioned speech to incite
the Mohawk against the Americans in 1774, William Johnson suffered a stroke
and died a few days later. His duties as the British Indian commissioner
passed to his son-in-law, Guy Johnson, while his wealth and 100,000 acre
estate went to his son John - both were loyalists. Neither had as much
influence over the Mohawk as Sir William, but they had the help of his protégé,
the Mohawk sachem Joseph Brant (Thayendanega), brother of Sir William's Mohawk
wife, Molly. With the outbreak of war, both the British and Americans tried to
win the support of the Iroquois. The League listened respectfully to both
arguments, but although they recognized the new United States in 1776, their
decision was to remain neutral. They even ordered the Shawnee to stop
attacking Americans in Kentucky. Nothing stopped, but by this time the League
had gotten used to its orders being ignored. If the League had been able to
remain neutral, it probably would have survived the war. However, this was not
to be. The "Great Peace" ended in 1777, and the Iroquois League was
destroyed two years later. The Caughnawaga and the other members of the Seven
Nations of Canada also intended to remain neutral in the beginning but were
drawn into the war during which its members fought on both sides.
William Johnson had treated Joseph Brant like
his own son and sent him to an English school on Connecticut. Rising to
leadership among the Mohawk afterwards, Brant was convinced the Iroquois would
lose their land if the Americans won and strongly opposed the council's
decision to remain neutral. After accepting a captain's commission in the
British army, he visited England in 1775 and returned in time to participate
in the Battle of Lang Island in 1776. Angered by the American arrest of Sir
John Johnson (William's son) for loyalist activities, Brant defied the
Iroquois council and led his warriors north to stop the American attempt to
capture Canada during the winter of 1776-77. Opposing Brant on the council
were the Oneida and Tuscarora who, because of the missionary Samuel Kirkland,
favored the Americans. The crisis came with a British effort in 1777 to cut
New England off from the other colonies by seizing the Hudson Valley.
The plan called for three British armies to
meet at Albany. General William Howe was to come north from New York City,
while General John Burgoyne marched south from Montreal and Colonel Barry St.
Leger moved east through the Mohawk Valley. St. Leger's role in the campaign
which provoked a crisis on the League council since he would need their
permission to move through the Iroquois homeland. Unfortunately, a recent
epidemic had deprived the council of several important sachems. Still opposed
by the Oneida and their sachem Skenandoah, Brant was able to win over the
Seneca and Cayuga. Unable to resolve the differences between the members, the
Onondaga extinguished the council fire and joined the majority going to the
British. The Iroquois League had come to an end, with each tribe free to go
its own way. The "Great Peace" which had prevailed among the
Iroquois for centuries ended shortly afterwards at Oriskany.
Joined by Iroquois and other native allies, St.
Leger moved down the Mohawk valley towards Fort Stanwix (Fort Schuyler to the
Americans). On August 6th, 1777 American and British forces met at the Battle
of Oriskany. Oneida warriors with the Americans and Mohawk and Seneca warriors
with the British fought and killed each other. St. Leger's defeat at Oriskany
and his failure to take Fort Stanwix forced him to abandon his part in the
offensive and return to Canada. In October the Oneida served as scouts in the
American victory over Burgoyne at Saratoga - the turning point of the
Revolutionary War. They rendered further service that winter by bringing food
to Washington's starving army at Valley Forge and in May, 1778 participated in
the Battle of Barren Hill under the command of Lafayette. Despite the setbacks
at Saratoga and Oriskany, the British and Iroquois launched a series of raids
against the frontier that put the Americans on the defensive in New York and
Pennsylvania during the summer and fall of 1778.
In July Brant's Mohawk attacked the Cherry
Valley on the upper Susquehanna in New York. He followed this with a raid on
the settlement at Minisink Island on the Delaware River between Pennsylvania
and New Jersey which left several farms in flames. The real damage, however,
was done during his retreat when only 30 of the 150 militia pursuing escaped
an ambush. At the same time, McDonald's tories and native warriors hit
settlements in Northampton County and the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania.
In September Brant struck again - this time at German Flats in the Mohawk
Valley. Forewarned, the Americans rushed to Forts Dayton and Herkimer where
they sat helplessly inside while smoke rose from their burning homes. Two
weeks later the Americans destroyed Brant's villages at Unadilla and Oquaga on
the Susquehanna. Brant joined forces with Tory Rangers commanded by Walter
Butler and attacked the Cherry Valley for a second time in November. Known as
the Cherry Valley Massacre, the attack took the Americans by surprise. Homes
were burned, 30 settlers killed, and 71 prisoners taken. An assault on the
American fort killed 16 soldiers, but the British and Mohawk withdrew the
following day when reinforcements arrived.
Brant became known as "Monster
Brant," but his reputation was undeserved. Most of the killing at Cherry
Valley was done by Walter Butler's men who Brant later admitted were far more
"savage" than any of his Mohawk. The tendency towards brutality
seemed to run in the Butler family. It was Walter's father, John Butler, who
orchestrated what was by far the worst massacre in the Wyoming Valley that
July. Brant and his Mohawk were not present at Wyoming, and Butler's men
returned to Fort Niagara with 267 scalps. This much death and destruction on
the frontier could not be tolerated, and during the summer of 1779, George
Washington sent three converging armies to destroy the Iroquois homeland: from
the south General John Sullivan proceeded up the Susquehanna with 4,000
troops; General James Clinton moved west through the Mohawk Valley; and
Colonel Daniel Brodhead pushed up the Allegheny River from Fort Pitt.
Guided by Oneida scouts, the Americans brushed
aside Brant's 500 warriors and John Butler's 200 tories at the second Battle
of Oriskany and in September captured the League's capital at the Onondaga
village of Kanadaseagea. Destroying everything, the Americans burned over 40
towns earning George Washington his Iroquois name of Caunotaucarius "town
destroyer." The Iroquois never recovered from this disaster. Their homes
and crops destroyed, the survivors spent a cold and hungry winter as refugees
in the vicinity of the British fort at Niagara. Brant, however, enlisted a
large war party that winter to punish the Oneida and attacked their villages.
Hundreds were killed in this Iroquois civil war, and the Oneida fled to the
Americans at Schenectady. They spent the rest of the war in brutal poverty and
misery but continued to serve as American scouts.
Brant was able to block an attempt by the
Seneca Red Jacket to make peace with the Americans, and the Iroquois continued
to attack the frontier in support of the British. Both Guy and John Johnson
led raids into the Mohawk Valley during summer and fall of 1780. The Butlers
were also active until Walter was killed by an Oneida warrior near Johnson
Hall in October, 1781. The Americans so hated him they refused to bury his
body and left it to rot. Brant fought in the Ohio Valley during 1781 and in
August ambushed a group of Pennsylvania militia near the mouth of the Miami
River (Cincinnati, Ohio). He also tried to ambush George Rogers Clark on the
Ohio River, but Clark avoided this and reached safety at Fort Nelson
(Louisville, Kentucky). Returning east, Brant's final foray into the Mohawk
Valley was stopped at Johnstown during 1783, the last year of the war.
The war in the Ohio Valley was almost a
separate conflict from the one east of the Appalachians and continued, despite
the Treaty of Paris in 1783, with few interruptions until 1795. Shortly after
the start of the war, the British began supplying arms and paying bounties for
American scalps. The Chickamauga (Cherokee) and Shawnee launched the first
attacks, but indiscriminate retaliation by Americans drew the other tribes
into the fighting. By the time the Iroquois entered the war in the east in
1777, the Mingo had joined the Shawnee and would remain a part of the alliance
fighting the Americans until 1794. Many of the raids against Kentucky during
this period originated from Pluggy's Town, a Mingo village located near
present-day Delaware, Ohio. In September, 1777 Fort Henry (Wheeling) was
attacked by 400 Shawnee, Mingo and Wyandot. Half of the 42-man garrison was
killed, and the war party burned the nearby settlement before withdrawing.
After the Americans built Fort Laurens in eastern Ohio in 1778, Mingo and
Wyandot warriors surrounded it and kept it under siege until abandoned as
indefensible in August, 1779. A Mingo war party also burned Hannastown,
Pennsylvania in 1782. Raids and counter-raids continued until 1783 with the
Mingo and other British allies moving their villages into northwest Ohio to
distance them from the Americans along the Ohio River.
At the end of the war, Joseph Brant crossed
into Canada with almost 2,000 followers - mostly Mohawk and Cayuga but
including parts of all six members of Iroquois League as well as a few
Delaware, Munsee, Saponi, Nanticoke, and Tutelo. A second group of Iroquois
settled at Tyendenaga on the north shore of Lake Ontario just west of
Kingston, Ontario. Brant settled along the Grand River in southern Ontario on
675,000 acres given by Governor Frederick Haldimand of Canada as compensation
for the lands the Iroquois had lost in New York. Unfortunately, Haldimand's
term of office ended before he could provide legal title. Brant went to
England in 1785 to correct this, but the problem has persisted ever since.
Totally destitute after the war, Brant ultimately had to sell 300,000 acres to
feed his people (only 45,000 acres remain). From a pre-war population of
8,000, fewer than 5,000 Iroquois survived the war, 2,000 of whom had moved to
Canada.
On the Six Nations Reserve at Grand River,
Brant rekindled the League's council fire which had been extinguished in 1777.
At the same time back in New York, a second council fire was started at
Buffalo Creek leading to a question of which represented the original
confederacy with its claim to the Ohio Valley. George Rogers Clark's capture
of the Illinois country in 1778 had extended the boundary of the new United
States to the Mississippi, and the Americans had no doubts about which one
counted. They informed the Iroquois in New York that they were now a
"conquered people" and forced them to sign another treaty at Fort
Stanwix in 1784 ceding much of their homeland and confirming the earlier
cession of Ohio made to the British in 1768. Brant's Mohawk and the Canadian
Iroquois were conspicuous by their absence at the signing of this treaty, and
the Iroquois League had split into two parts. The Canadian and American
branches gradually grew farther apart, until by 1803 the Canadian Iroquois
were no longer included in meetings of the American portion of the League.
After the Treaty of Paris, the British asked
the Ohio tribes to stop their attacks on Americans. In truth, neither they nor
the American frontiersmen considered the question of Ohio had been decided. As
early as 1782, the British agent at Detroit, Simon De Peyster, had urged the
tribes to form an alliance to keep the Americans out of Ohio. To this end, he
brought Joseph Brant west in 1783 as a representative of the Six Nations
(Canadian) to attend a meeting of the Ohio tribes at Sandusky. The British did
not attend themselves, but Brant's influence was important in the formation of
the western alliance. Its first council fire was at the Shawnee village of
Waketomica. After Waketomica was burned by the Americans in 1786, it moved to
Brownstown, a Wyandot village south of Detroit.
Refusing to comply with the Paris treaty until
the Americans compensated British loyalists for their losses in the war, the
British continued to occupy their remaining forts on American territory. Of
course, there was no way the Americans could pay these, or their other debts
from the Revolution, until they sold the land in Ohio. The British were aware
of the American dilemma and let it be known to the alliance tribes they would
support them in any conflict with the Americans. When the Ohio tribes learned
of the second Treaty of Fort Stanwix signed by the New York Iroquois in 1784,
American intentions became quite clear. They also lost faith in that part of
the Iroquois League's ability to represent their interests, while the
influence of Brant and the Six Nations in Canada grew.
Unsure of how much authority the New York
Iroquois still had in Ohio, the Americans wanted to confirm the League's
cession with the resident tribes. The problem was the Americans thought of the
western alliance as a British plot -which it was - and would only negotiate
with individual tribes. The Fort McIntosh and Fort Finney treaties signed with
the Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Shawnee were useless because they
did not reflect the consensus of the alliance or, in some cases, the tribes
who signed. The American position was also at odds with its frontier citizens.
Most of the alliance warriors wanted the Ohio River, not the Muskingum as the
boundary of settlement, while the frontiersmen were not going to be satisfied
until they had taken the entire Ohio Valley.
Sensing trouble, the New York Iroquois called
for a meeting with the Ohio tribes at Buffalo Creek in the spring of 1786. No
one came, although alliance representatives attended the League's meeting in
July to ask for help against the Americans. Congress, meanwhile, sold the land
rights to a New Jersey syndicate and the Ohio Company to pay war debts.
Americans flooded into Ohio and took native land as squatters making treaty
boundaries worthless. 12,000 whites were north of the Ohio in 1785, and short
of civil war, the government could not stop them. In response to this
encroachment, Shawnee and Mingo raids resumed against Kentucky. After an
inspirational speech by Brant at the meeting of western alliance in November,
1786, a consensus formed demanding the Ohio as a boundary. However, the
alliance council also agreed to a truce until the spring to allow its demands
to reach the American Congress. For some reason, the message did not make it
to Philadelphia until July, and by that time, the fighting had resumed.
A final attempt to resolve the dispute by
treaty was made in December, 1787 when the American governor of the Northwest
Territory, Arthur St. Clair, called for a meeting at Fort Harmar. The tribes
of the western alliance were divided on how to respond. In the meeting of the
council, Brant demanded the repudiation of all treaties ceding any part of
Ohio, but the Wyandot wanted to negotiate and gained support from the
Delaware, Detroit Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi. Brant left the meeting in
disgust and went back to Ontario deferring his role to the Shawnee and Miami.
The conference finally took place in January, 1789, and the Treaty of Fort
Harmar set the Muskingum River as the boundary of the frontier. This satisfied
no one, and the raids continued. After the Americans retaliated against the
Kickapoo, Wea, and Piankashaw villages on the lower Wabash during the summer
of 1789, the Miami and Shawnee war factions dominated the alliance.
At this point the Americans decided to settle
the dispute by force. The alliance again asked the New York Iroquois for help.
When this was refused, the League lost whatever influence it still had with
the Ohio tribes. Little Turtle's War (1790-94) began with two horrendous
American defeats: Harmar (October, 1790); and St. Clair (November, 1791). The
Americans could not quit, because they could not afford to lose. President
Washington sent "Mad Anthony" Wayne to take command in Ohio. Wayne
began training his Legion, a large force of trained regulars to back the
undisciplined militia which had contributed to the earlier defeats. At the
same time, the Americans were making peace overtures to the alliance in 1792
through the Iroquois. Flush with their recent victories, the alliance was in
no mood to listen. At the conference, they threw the American proposal in the
fire and called the Iroquois representatives "coward red men." The
role of the Iroquois League in the Ohio Valley had definitely ended, and they
were fortunate to leave the meeting with their lives.
However, Brant and the Six Nations from Canada
continued to have influence within the alliance, but after watching Wayne's
careful preparations to destroy them, the Ohio tribes began to have doubts
whether they could win. After Wayne began his advance into northern Ohio in
the fall of 1793, the alliance council asked Brant to negotiate a peace with
the Americans. The British had reached the same conclusion and were ready to
resolve their differences with the United States. Unfortunately, this was done
in secret, and as far as Brant knew, the British would still support the
alliance if it chose to fight. He urged war, and the majority of the alliance
reluctantly agreed. In August, 1794 Wayne's Legion and the alliance faced each
other at Fallen Timbers. Driven from the field, the retreating warriors were
refused refuge at the nearby British fort. In November the Jay Treaty was
signed between Great Britain and the United States, and the British withdrew
their garrisons from American territory. Abandoned, the alliance signed the
Fort Greenville Treaty the following August ceding most of Ohio.
The ownership of Ohio was finally decided after
40-years of war. The 1784 Fort Stanwix Treaty which surrendered Ohio for a
second time did not protect the Iroquois homeland. Over the next 60 years, it
was surrendered to a "feeding frenzy" of land speculators whose
names included most of the rich and politically powerful founding families of
New York. Among the first victims were the Oneida who had served the Americans
so faithfully during the Revolution and suffered as a result. Washington had
promised the Oneida they would be "forever remembered" for their
contributions and sacrifices and assured them their sovereignty and land
rights would be respected. Nice words, but the Oneida were living in poverty
after the war, and the United States did not compensate them for their losses
until 1795. Meanwhile, the Oneida by 1785 had taken in the Christian
Stockbridge and Brotherton Indians from New England. Desperate for money to
feed themselves, the Oneida signed a treaty with New York governor George
Clinton ceding most of their original 6 million acres in exchange for a
smaller reservation.
For similar reasons, New York was able to make
similar agreements with the Onondaga in 1788, and Cayuga the year following,
buying their land and confining them to reservations. The rate at which
Iroquois land was disappearing into the hands of land speculators was one
reason Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act in 1790 forbidding the sale of
native lands to anyone but the federal government. To stabilize the situation,
the United States signed the Canandaigua (Pickering) Treaty in 1794 to
establish definite boundaries for Iroquois. The earlier New York treaties were
acknowledged, but this failed to stop the land loss. There was enough New York
political power that federal law and treaties were either ignored or
permission to disregard them was routine. Three years after Canandaigua, the
Seneca surrendered a large tract at Big Tree. More was sold in 1802 and 1823.
By 1807 the Cayuga had sold the last of their New York lands. Many went west
to Ohio to live with the Mingo, now known as the Seneca of the Sandusky. The
others scattered to the Iroquois in New York or crossed the border into
Canada.
Only two Mohawk signed the Fort Stanwix Treaty
in 1784. The others were with Joseph Brant in Canada. Still at war with the
Americans, at least in the Ohio, the Mohawk homeland was overrun by settlement
after 1783. It seemed obvious the Mohawk were never going to get back their
lands in New York. Already forced to sell part of the Grand River Reserve in
Ontario to feed his people, Brant finally agreed to cede the Mohawk lands in
New York in a treaty signed at Albany in 1797. The Onondaga sold much of their
reservation to New York in 1822. About the same time, the Oneida had
disagreements over Quaker missions versus traditional religion. In 1822 they
sold their land and half agreed to relocate to Wisconsin. The Christian
Stockbridge and Brotherton went with them. Problems with the government
purchase of land from the Menominee delayed the move, but by 1838 more than
600 Oneida were living near Green Bay. The Tuscarora also agreed to removal,
but most chose to stay in New York or move to Canada.
The final blow came with the Indian Removal Act
of 1830. Pressure built to remove the remaining Iroquois from New York. The
result was the Treaty of Buffalo Creek (Treaty with the New York Indians)
signed in 1838 where the Iroquois agreed to move to southeastern Kansas. In
truth, much of this agreement never went into effect. Influential Quakers
blocked its implementation, and by 1846 only 210 New York Seneca had moved to
Kansas. In 1873 the Iroquois lands in Kansas were declared forfeited and the
rights of 32 Iroquois living there were repurchased by the government. Seneca
and Onondaga who fought the Americans in the Revolution stayed in New York,
but the Oneida had a more difficult time. After the treaty, 250 New York
Oneida purchased land near London, Ontario in 1839. By 1845 their numbers had
grown to more than 400. The other 200 remained near Oneida, New York or moved
in with the Onondaga. Despite federal laws, the Seneca continued to lose land
to whites due to incompetence and corruption of tribal leadership. Reaction to
this ended their traditional system of hereditary chiefs, and they separated
from the rest of Iroquois League in 1848.
The Mingo in Ohio fought as part of the western
alliance until after Fallen Timbers, and in 1795 they had made peace with the
Americans at Fort Greenville. In 1805 the Wyandot signed the Treaty of Fort
Industry ceding the eastern part of northern Ohio which forced the remaining
Mingo villages there to relocate to northwest Ohio. The Mingo were joined in
1807 by a large group of Cayuga from New York. The continuing loss of native
lands in the Ohio Valley to Americans gave rise to the movement of Tecumseh
and his brother, Tenskwatawa, the Prophet. Some Mingo joined this and fought
for the British during the War of 1812 (1812-15). Most Mingo, as well as the
Iroquois League in New York, remained neutral. Late in the war, the Seneca
declared war on the British after they had occupied Grand Island in the
Niagara River which was claimed by the Seneca. As a result a British attack
burned the Tuscarora settlement near Niagara Falls, New York.
After the war the Mingo who followed Tecumseh
into Canada signed the Treaty of Indian Springs (1815) allowing them to return
to the United States. Two years later, the Ohio tribes surrendered their last
Ohio lands at Treaty of Fort Meigs (Maumee Rapids) in exchange for
reservations. There were two groups of Mingo at the time - the mixed
Shawnee-Seneca band received a reserve at Lewistown, Ohio, while the Seneca of
the Sandusky took a 30,000 acre reserve on the Sandusky River north of
Wyandot.
Treaties signed at St. Marys the following year actually added to these
holdings. The 100-year Mingo residence in Ohio came to an end in 1830 with the
passage of the Indian Removal Act. In February 1831 the Seneca of the Sandusky
signed a treaty agreeing to removal to the northeast part of the Indian
Territory adjacent to the Western Cherokee.
In July Shawnee-Seneca band at Lewistown also
agreed to move to the same area. In 1857 they allowed 200 Kansas Wyandot to
settle at the Neosho Agency. Unfortunately, these Wyandot were pro-Union, and
in June, 1862 Confederate soldiers invaded the Seneca Reserve forcing the
Wyandot, as well as many of the Seneca, to leave. The Seneca spent the Civil
War in refugee camps on the Marais des Cygnes River in eastern Kansas. Giving
in after the war to demands by Kansas for the removal of all Indians from
inside its borders, the government in 1867 negotiated a treaty with the
eastern tribes which had been removed to Kansas during the 1830s. Most moved
to Oklahoma, including the 200 Seneca who had arrived from New York in 1846.
The treaty separated the mixed Shawnee-Seneca band, and the different groups
Seneca of Sandusky merged to form the modern Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma.
The Caughnawaga signed only one treaty with the
United States. This was at New York City in 1796 on behalf of the Seven
Nations of Canada relinquishing their claims to land in New York with the
exception of 36 square miles on the New York-Quebec border which was preserved
as the St. Regis Reservation. St. Regis was also excluded from the removal
provisions of the 1838 treaty and exists today as the only Mohawk
reservation in the United States. The Caughnawaga and other Canadian Iroquois
were active during the 1800s as trappers in the western fur trade with both
the Hudson Bay and Northwest companies. Mohawk from near Montreal were
regularly employed as voyageurs and laborers for the long canoe routes from
Montreal to the Mackenzie Delta and Pacific Coast. The fierce competition
between these two companies ended when they merged in 1821.
Besides trapping, the Iroquois had frequent
contact with western tribes and frequently intermarried with them. In 1840 a
Caughnawaga Iroquois, Ignace Lamoose, was responsible for Jesuit missionaries
being sent to the Flathead and Kalispel in Montana. Several Iroquois employees
of the Hudson Bay Company settled in the Willamette Valley of Oregon during
the 1840s. Beginning about 1800, the Northwest Company convinced Iroquois
families from the St. Lawrence River to move west and settle in Alberta. The
Canadian government established a reserve for the Iroquois band of Chief
Michel Calihoo near Villeneuve in 1877. Parts were sold to whites in 1903 and
1906. After the band surrendered its aboriginal status in 1952, the reserve
was broken up into individually owned plots.
The ten-year period between Fort Stanwix and
Canandaigua (1784-1795) was probably the lowest point for the Iroquois people.
From there, however, they began a slow recovery which has continued to the
present. In 1799 the Seneca Handsome Lake (Ganiodayo) had a spiritual vision
which not only changed his life but the Iroquois history. Afterwards, he
preached the "Kaiwicyoch" (Good Message) and founded the Longhouse
religion - a blend of the traditional Iroquois values and Christianity. The
religious values he espoused were so universal and commendable that Handsome
Lake even received a letter of appreciation from President Thomas Jefferson.
Because there was also an element of accommodation in his message, many
Americans interpreted the Longhouse religion as the Iroquois coming around to
their way of thinking. However, this was definitely not the case, since
Handsome Lake strongly opposed Christian missionaries among his people. The
Longhouse Religion carries a strong message of tolerance, but it is first and
foremost a traditional native religion.
As such it has been responsible for the
Iroquois being able to retain much of the their culture and tradition despite
adversity and defeat. There is still division as to whether the council fire
belongs with the Six Nations in Canada or the Onondaga in New York (New York
finally returned the wampum belts of the Confederacy to the Onondaga in 1989).
Many Iroquois, however, still consider themselves a distinct nation from
either Canada or the United States. Canada imposed an election system on the
Six Nations in 1924, but many Iroquois tribes have retained their traditional
system of hereditary leadership. The Iroquois opposed American citizenship
when it was finally extended by the Congress in 1924 to all Native Americans
in the United States. They also fought the Wheeler-Howard Indian
Reorganization Act (1934) which would have required federal approval of their
tribal governments.
Reference: Six
Nations Website: www.sixnations.org