USA > Indiana > Montgomery County > History of Montgomery County, together with historic notes on the Wabash Valley; gleaned from early authors, old maps and manuscripts, private and official correspondence, and other authentic sources > Part 19
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§ Treaties with the Several Indian Tribes, etc .: Government edition, 1837. The Shawnees and Delawares relinquished their title to their Spanish grant by a treaty concluded between them and the United States on the 26th of October, 1832.
{ "The army returned to this place [Fort Defiance] on the 27th, by easy marches, laying waste to the villages and corn-fields for about fifty miles on each side of the Miami [Maumee]. There remains yet a great number of villages and a great quantity of corn to be consumed or destroyed upon the Au Glaize and Miami above this place, which will be effected in a few days." Gen. Wayne to the Secretary of War: Ameri- can State Papers on Indian Affairs, vol. 1, p. 491.
T The Miami village.
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COUNTRY OF THE SHAWNEES.
bank of the latter, opposite the mouth of St. Mary, and had for a long time past been the rendezvous of a set of Indian desperadoes, who infested the settlements, and stained the Ohio and parts adjacent with the blood of defenseless inhabitants. This day we advanced nearly the same distance, and kept nearly the same course as yester- day ; we encamped within six miles of the object, and on Sunday, the 17th, entered the ruins of the Omee town, or French village, as part of it is called. Appearances confirmed accounts I had received of the consternation into which the savages and their trading allies had been thrown by the approach of the army. Many valuables of the traders were destroyed in the confusion, and vast quantities of corn and other grain and vegetables were secreted in holes dug in the earth, and other hiding places. Colonel Hardin rejoined the army."
"Besides the town of Omee, there were several other villages situ- ate upon the banks of three rivers. One of them, belonging to the Omee Indians, called Kegaiogue," was standing and contained thirty houses on the bank opposite the principal village. Two others, consisting together of about forty-five houses, lay a few miles up the St. Mary's, and were inhabited by Delawares. Thirty-six houses occupied by other savages of this tribe formed another but scattered town, on the east bank of the St. Joseph, two or three miles north from the French village. About the same distance down the Omee River, lay the Shawnee town of Chillicothe, consisting of fifty-eight houses, opposite which, on the other bank of the river, were sixteen more habitations, belonging to savages of the same nation. All these I ordered to be burnt during my stay there, together with great quantities of corn and vegetables hidden as at the principal village, in the earth and other places by the savages, who had aban- doned them. It is computed that there were no less than twenty thousand bushels of corn, in the ear, which the army either con- sumed or destroyed."+
The Shawnees also had a populous village within the present limits of Fountain county, Indiana, a few miles east of Attica. They gave their name to Shawnee Prairie and to a stream that dis- charges into the Wabash from the east, a short distance below Will- iamsport.
* Ke-ki-ong-a .- "The name in English is said to signify a blackberry patch [more probably a blackberry bush] which, in its turn, passed among the Miamis as a symbol of antiquity." Brice's History of Fort Wayne, p. 23.
Gen. Harmer's Official Letter. It will be observed that Gen. Harmer treats the French Omee or Miami village as a separate town from that of Ke-ki-ong-a. His de- scription is so minute, and his opportunities so favorable to know the facts, that there is scarcely a probability of his having been mistaken.
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HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
In 1854 the Shawnees in Kansas numbered nine hundred persons, occupying a reservation of one million six hundred thousand acres. Their lands were divided into severalty. They have banished whisky, and many of them have fine farms under cultivation. Be- ing on the border of Missouri, they suffered from the rebel raids, and particularly that of Gen. Price in 1864. In 1865 they numbered eight hundred and forty-five persons. They furnished for the Union army one hundred and twenty-five men. The Shawnees have illus- trated by their own conduct the capability of an Indian tribe to become civilized .*
THE DELAWARES called themselves Lenno Lenape, which signifies "original" or "unmixed " men. They were divided into three clans: the Turtle, the Wolf and the Turkey. When first met with by the Europeans, they occupied a district of country bounded eastwardly by the Hudson River and the Atlantic; on the west their territories extended to the ridge separating the flow of the Delaware from the other streams emptying into the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay.t
They, according to their own traditions, "many hundred years ago resided in the western part of the continent; thence by slow emigration, they at length reached the Alleghany River, so called from a nation of giants, the Allegewi, against whom the Delawares and Iroquois (the latter also emigrants from the west) carried on successful war; and still proceeding eastward, settled on the Dela- ware, Hudson, Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, making the Dela- ware the center of their possessions. +
By the other Algonquin tribes the Delawares were regarded with the utmost respect and veneration. They were called "fathers," "grandfathers," etc.
" When William Penn landed in Pennsylvania the Delawares had been subjugated and made women by the Iroquois." They were prohibited from making war, placed under the sovereignty of the Iroquois, and even lost the right of dominion to the lands which they had occupied for so many generations. Gov. Penn, in his treaty with the Delawares, purchased from them the right of possession merely, and afterward obtained the relinquishment of the sovereignty from the Iroquois.§ The Delawares accounted for their humiliating relation to the Iroquois by claiming that their assumption of the rôle of women, or mediators, was entirely voluntary on their part.
* Gale's Upper Mississippi. # Taylor's History of Ohio, p. 33. + Gallatin's Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, p. 44. § Gallatin's Synopsis, etc.
175
DELAWARES BECOME WOMEN.
They said they became "peacemakers," not through compulsion, but in compliance with the intercession of different belligerent tribes, and that this position enabled their tribe to command the respect of all the Indians east of the Mississippi. While it is true that the Delawares were very generally recognized as mediators, they never in any war or treaty exerted an influence through the possession of this title. It was an empty honor, and no additional power or ben- efit ever accrued from it. That the degrading position of the Dela- wares was not voluntary is proven in a variety of ways. " We possess none of the details of the war waged against the Lenapes, but we know that it resulted in the entire submission of the latter, and that the Iroquois, to prevent any further interruption from the Delawares, adopted a plan to humble and degrade them, as novel as it was ef- fectual. Singular as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that the Lenapes, upon the dictation of the Iroquois, agreed to lay aside the character of warriors and assume that of women."* The Iroquois, while they were not present at the treaty of Greenville, took care to inform Gen. Wayne that the Delawares were their subjects -" that they had conquered them and put petticoats upon them." At a council held July 12, 1742, at the house of the lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania, where the subject of previous grants of land was under discussion, an Iroquois orator turned to the Delawares who were present at the council, and holding a belt of waumpum, ad- dressed them thus: "Cousins, let this belt of waumpum serve to chastise you. You ought to be taken by the hair of your head and shaked severely, till you recover your senses and become sober. . . But how came you to take upon yourself to sell land at all ?" refer- ring to lands on the Delaware River, which the Delawares had sold some fifty years before. "We conquered you ; we made women of you. You know you are women, and can no more sell land than women ; nor is it fit you should have the power of selling lands, since you would abuse it." The Iroquois orator continues his chas- tisement of the Delawares, indulging in the most opprobrious lan- guage, and closed his speech by telling the Delawares to remove immediately. "We don't give you the liberty to think about it. You may return to the other side of the Delaware, where you came from ; but we don't know, considering how you had demeaned your- selves, whether you will be permitted to live there."+
The Quakers who settled Pennsylvania treated the Delawares in
* Discourse of Gen. Harrison.
+ Minutes of the Conference at Philadelphia, in Colden's History of the Five Nations.
176
HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
accordance with the rules of justice and equity. The result was that during a period of sixty years peace and the utmost harmony pre- vailed. This is the only instance in the settling of America by the English where uninterrupted friendship and good will existed be- tween the colonists and the aboriginal inhabitants. Gradually and by peaceable means the Quakers obtained possession of the greater portion of their territory, and the Delawares were in the same situa- tion as other tribes, -without lands, without means of subsistence. They were threatened with starvation. Induced by these motives, some of them, between the years 1740 and 1750, obtained from their uncles, the Wyandots, and with the assent of the Iroquois, a grant of land on the Muskingum, in Ohio. The greater part of the tribe re- mained in Pennsylvania, and becoming more and more dissatisfied with their lot, shook off the yoke of the Iroquois, joined the French and ravaged the frontiers of Pennsylvania. Peace was concluded at Easton in 1758, and ten years after the last remaining bands of the Delawares crossed the Alleghanies. Here, being removed from the influence of their dreaded masters, the Iroquois, the Delawares soon assumed their ancient independence. During the next four or five decades they were the most formidable of the western tribes. While the revolutionary war was in progress, as allies of the British, after its close, at the head of the northwestern confederacy of Indians, they fully regained their lost reputation. By their geographical position placed in the front of battle, they were, during those two wars, the most active and dangerous enemies of America .*
The territory claimed by the Delawares subsequent to their being driven westward from their former possessions, is established in a paper addressed to congress May 10, 1779, from delegates assem- bled at Princeton, New Jersey. The boundaries of their country, as declared in the address, is as follows: "From the mouth of the Alleghany River, at Fort Pitt, to the Venango, and from thence up French Creek, and by Le Bœuf, t along the old road to Presque Isle, on the east. The Ohio River, including all the islands in it, from Fort Pitt to the Ouabache, on the south; thence up the River Oua- bache to that branch, Ope-co-mee-cah,; and up the same to the head thereof; from thence to the headwaters and springs of the Great Miami, or Rocky River; thence across to the headwaters and springs · of the most northwestern branches of the Scioto River; thence to
* In the battle of Fallen Timbers there were three hundred Delawares out of seven hundred Indians who were in this engagement: Colonial History of Massachusetts, vol. 10.
t A fort on the present site of Waterford, Pa.
# This was the name given by the Delawares to White River, Indiana.
177
MAKE PEACE.
the westernmost springs of Sandusky River; thence down said river, including the islands in it and in the little lake, * to Lake Erie, on the west and northwest, and Lake Erie on the north. These boundaries contain the cessions of lands made to the Delaware nation by the Wayandots and other nations, t and the country we have seated our grandchildren, the Shawnees, upon, in our laps ; and we promise to give to the United States of America such a part of the above described country as would be convenient to them and us, that they may have room for their children's children to set down upon."}
After Wayne's victory the Delawares saw that further contests with the American colonies would be worse than useless. They submitted to the inevitable, acknowledged the supremacy of the Caucasian race, and desired to make peace with the victors. At the treaty of Greenville, in 1795, there were present three hundred and eighty-one Delawares,-a larger representation than that of any other Indian tribe. By this treaty they ceded to the United States the greater part of the lands allotted to them by the Wyandots and Iroquois. For this cession they received an annuity of $1,000.§
At the close of the treaty, Bu-kon-ge-he-las, a Delaware chief, spoke as follows:
Father: | Your children all well understand the sense of the treaty which is now concluded. We experience daily proofs of your *increasing kindness. I hope we may all have sense enough to enjoy our dawning happiness. Many of your people are yet among us. I trust they will be immediately restored. Last winter our king came forward to you with two; and when he returned with your speech to us, we immediately prepared to come forward with the remainder, which we delivered at Fort Defiance. All who know me know me to be a man and a warrior, and I now declare that I will for the future be as steady and true a friend to the United States as I have heretofore been an active enemy."
This promise of the orator was faithfully kept by his people. They evaded all the efforts of the Shawnee prophet, Tecumseh, and the British who endeavored to induce them, by threats or bribes, to violate it .**
* Sandusky Bay.
t The Hurons and Iroquois.
# Pioneer History, by S. P. Hildreth, p. 137, where the paper setting forth the claims of the Delawares is copied.
§ American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 1.
| Gen. Wayne.
T American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 1, p. 582.
** Bu-kon-ge-he-las was a warrior of great ability. He took a leading part in manœuvering the Indians at the dreadful battle known as St. Clair's defeat. He rose from a private warrior to the head of his tribe. Until after Gen. Wayne's great victory 12
178
HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
The Delawares remained faithful to the United States during the war of 1812, and, with the Shawnees, furnished some very able war- riors and scouts, who rendered valuable service to the United States during this war.
After the treaty of Greenville, the great body of Delawares re- moved to their lands on White River, Indiana, whither some of their people had already preceded them.
Their manner of obtaining possession of their lands on White River is thus related in Dawson's Life of Harrison: "The land in question had been granted to the Delawares about the year 1770, by the Piankeshaws, on condition of their settling upon it and assist- ing them in a war with the Kickapoos." These terms were complied with, and the Delawares remained in possession of the land.
The title to the tract of land lying between the Ohio and White Rivers soon became a subject of dispute between the Piankeshaws and Delawares. A chief of the latter tribe, in 1803, at Vincennes, stated to Gen. Harrison that the land belonged to his tribe, "and that he had with him a chief who had been present at the transfer made by the Piankeshaws to the Delawares, of all the country be- tween the Ohio and White Rivers more than thirty years previous." This claim was disputed by the Piankeshaws. They admitted that while they had granted the Delawares the right of occupancy, yet they had never conveyed the right of sovereignty to the tract in question.
Gov. Harrison, on the 19th and 27th of August, 1804, concluded treaties with the Delawares and Piankeshaws by which the United States acquired all that fine country between the Ohio and Wabash Rivers. Both of "these tribes laying claim to the land, it became
in 1794, he had been a devoted partisan of the British and a mortal foe to the United States. He was the most distinguished warrior in the Indian Confederacy; and as it was the British interests which had induced the Indians to commence, as well as to con- tinue, the war, Buck-on-ge-he-las relied upon British support and protection. This support had been given so far as relates to provisions, arms and ammunition; but at the end of the battle referred to, the gates of Fort Miamis, near which the action was fought, were shut, by the British within, against the wounded Indians after the battle. This opened the eyes of the Delaware warrior. He collected his braves in canoes, with the design of proceeding up the river, under a flag of truce, to Fort Wayne. On approaching the British fort he was requested to land. He did so, and addressing the British officer, said, "What have you to say to me?" The officer re- plied that the commandant wished to speak with him. "Then he may come here," was the chief's reply. "He will not do that," said the sub-officer; "and you will not be suffered to pass the fort if you do not comply." "What shall prevent me?" "These," said the officer, pointing to the cannon of the fort. "I fear not your cannon," replied the intrepid chief. "After suffering the Americans to insult and treat you with such contempt, without daring to fire upon them, you cannot expect to frighten me." Buck-on-ge-he-las then ordered his canoes to push off from the shore, and the fleet passed the fort without molestation. A note [No. 2]: Memoirs of Gen. Harrison.
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BECOME CITIZENS.
necessary that both should be satisfied, in order to prevent disputes in the future. In this, however, the governor succeeded, on terms, perhaps, more favorable than if the title had been vested in only one of these tribes; for, as both claimed the land, the value of each claim was considerably lowered in the estimation of both; and, therefore, by judicious management, the governor effected the pur- chase upon probably as low, if not lower, terms that if he had been obliged to treat with only one of them. For this tract the Pianke- shaws received $700 in goods and $200 per annum for ten years; the compensation of the Delawares was an annuity of $300 for ten years.
The Delawares continued to reside upon White River and its branches until 1819, when most of them joined the band who had emigrated to Missouri upon the tract of land granted jointly to them and the Shawnees, in 1793, by the Spanish authorities. Others of their number who remained scattered themselves among the Miamis, Pottawatomies and Kickapoos; while still others, including the Mo- ravian converts, went to Canada. At that time, 1819, the total num- ber of those residing in Indiana was computed to be eight hundred souls .*
In 1829 the majority of the nation were settled on the Kansas and Missouri rivers. They numbered about 1,000, were brave, en- terprising hunters, cultivated lands and were friendly to the whites. In 1853 they sold to the government all the lands granted them, ex- cepting a reservation in Kansas. During the late Rebellion they sent to the United States army one hundred and seventy out of their two hundred able-bodied men. Like their ancestors they proved valiant and trustworthy soldiers. Of late years they have almost entirely lost their aboriginal customs and manners. They live in houses, have schools and churches, cultivate farms, and, in fact, bid fair to become useful and prominent citizens of the great Republic.
*Their principal towns were on the branches of White River, within the present limits of Madison and Delaware counties, and the capital of the latter is named after the " Muncy" or " Mon-o-sia " band. Pipe Creek and Kill Buck Creek, branches of White River, are also named after two distinguished Delaware chiefs.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE INDIANS: THEIR IMPLEMENTS, UTENSILS, FORTIFICATIONS, MOUNDS, AND THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.
BEFORE the arrival of the Europeans the use of iron was but little known to the North American Indians. Marquette, in speaking of the Illinois, states that they were entirely ignorant of the use of iron tools, their weapons being made of stone." This was true of all the Indians who made their homes north of the Ohio, but south of that stream metal tools were occasionally met with. When Hernando De Soto, in 1539-43, was traversing the southern part of that terri- tory, now known as the United States, in his vain search for gold, some of his followers found the natives on the Savanna River using hatchets made of copper.+ It is evident that these hatchets were of native manufacture, for they were "said to have a mixture of gold."
The southern Indians "had long bows, and their arrows were made of certain canes like reeds, very heavy, and so strong that a sharp cane passeth through a target. Some they arm in the point with a sharp bone of a fish, like a chisel, and in others they fasten certain stones like points of diamonds."# These bones or "scale of the armed fish" were neatly fastened to the head of the arrows with splits of cane and fish glue.§ The northern Indians used arrows with stone points. Father Rasles thus describes them : " Arrows are the principal arms which they use in war and in the chase. They are pointed at the end with a stone, cut and sharpened in the shape of a serpent's tongue ; and, if no knife is at hand, they use them also to skin the animals they have killed." | "The bow- strings were prepared from the entrails of a stag, or of a stag's skin, which they know how to dress as well as any man in France, and with as many different colors. They head their arrows with the teeth of fishes and stone, which they work very finely and handsomely."T
* Sparks' Life of Marquette, p. 281.
+ A Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando De Soto, by a Gentleman of Elvas; published at Evora in 1557, and afterward translated and published in the second volume of the Historical Collections of Louisiana, p. 149. # Idem, p. 124. § Du Pratz' History of Louisiana: English translation, vol. 2, pp. 223, 224.
H Kip's Jesuit Missions, p. 39.
T History of the First Attempt of the French to Colonize Florida, in 1562, by Réné Laudonnière: published in Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, vol. 1, p. 170.
180
181
THEY USE STONE IMPLEMENTS.
Most of the hatchets and knives of the northern Indians were likewise made of sharpened stones, "which they fastened in a cleft piece of wood with leathern thongs."* Their tomahawks were con- structed from stone, the horn of a stag, or "from wood in the shape of a cutlass, and terminated by a large ball." The tomahawk was held in one hand and a knife in the other. As soon as they dealt a blow on the head of an enemy, they immediately cut it round with the knife, and took off the scalp with extraordinary rapidity. +
Du Pratz thus describes their method of felling trees with stone implements and with fire: "Cutting instruments are almost con- tinually wanted ; but as they had no iron, which of all metals is the most useful in human society, they were obliged, with infinite pains, to form hatchets ont of large flints, by sharpening their thin edge, and making a hole through them for receiving the handle. To cut down trees with these axes would have been almost an impracticable work; they were, therefore, obliged to light fires round the roots of them, and to cut away the charcoal as the fire eat into the tree."
Charlevoix makes a similar statement : "These people, before we provided them with hatchets and other instruments, were very much at a loss in felling their trees, and making them fit for such uses as they intended them for. They burned them near the root, and in order to split and cut them into proper lengths they made use of hatchets made of flint, which never broke, but which required a prodigious time to sharpen. In order to fix them in a shaft, they cut off the top of a young tree, making a slit in it, as if they were going to draft it, into which slit they inserted the head of the axe. The tree, growing together again in length of time, held the head of the hatchet so firm that it was impossible for it to get loose ; they then cut the tree at the length they deemed sufficient for the handle."§
When they were about to make wooden dishes, porringers or spoons, they cut the blocks of wood to the required shape with stone hatchets, hollowed them out with coals of fire, and polished them with beaver teeth.
Early settlers in the neighborhood of Thorntown, Indiana, no- ticed that the Indians made their hominy-blocks in a similar manner. Round stones were heated and placed upon the blocks which were to be excavated. The charred wood was dug out with knives, and
* Hennepin, vol. 2, p. 103.
+ Letter of Father Rasles in Kip's Jesuit Missions, p. 40.
# Volume 2, p. 223.
§ Narrative Journal, vol. 2, p. 126.
| Hennepin, vol. 2, p. 103.
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