The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 2

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
Number of Pages: 622


USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 2


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51


THE SOUTHERN BOUNDARY.


among themselves, Johnson had exerted himself to make peace between the leading tribes of the North and South. The Vir- ginians, as Gage wrote to Johnson some time before ( March 3. 1766), were intent on such a plan. hoping thereby to prevent the Cherokees taking revenge on the Iroquois. for some murders committed by the young men of the latter. In December. 1767, three Cherokee chiefs presented themselves at Johnson Hall, on this errand. The Iroquois were summoned. and on March 4, 1768, the friendly pact between them was made.


The movement for this boundary settlement had in the start a greater impulse at the South than at the North. It had for some time devolved upon John Stuart. as the Indian agent for the southern colonies, to deal with the Cherokees in matters touching both the whites and the savages. He had brought about a conference at Augusta, where the Creeks had ceded some territory to Georgia "in proof of the sense they have of His Majesty's goodness in forgetting past offenses."


As it happened, the irresponsible conduct of the Carolina traders was rendering it necessary to act promptly, particularly if peace was to prevail among its tribes, since the whites always suffered in such times. The rivalry of the French had much conduced in the past to make the English liberal in their gra- tuities. That open rivalry failing. the generous habit of the English had slackened, and the Choctaws had not failed to remark upon it. The French at New Orleans used this neglect to point a moral for the occasion.


The inroads of the whites upon the tribal territories had always been a source of alarm to the Indians, and Stuart had. in August, 1765, urged restraining them by a fixed line. We find. in 1766, that a deputation of Indians was in England, pleading with the government against the injustice of the colonists: and this may have had something to do with the repeated warn- ings which Stuart received in 1766 to avoid an Indian rupture. The instances of encroachment were cumulative. but the Indians took new alarm when these trespasses seemed to be made on a system, as was implied in the movement to extend the province bounds to the west. This purpose had been in part determined upon to protect the few settlers who were well within the


10


THE PROPERTY LINE.


Indian territory. The bounds of South Carolina had been already pushed upon the country of the Catawbas, and in April and May, 1766, there had been preliminary surveys towards the Cherokees ; but in December, the running of the line had been postponed till the spring, and when completed it was not carried to the North Carolina limit.


Governor Tryon had succeeded Dobbs in the executive chair of North Carolina in 1764, and it fell to him to handle this question of bounds, as it did later some more serious questions. In February, 1767, Shelburne had advised him to deal tenderly with the Indians, for tidings had reached the ministry of what he thought unaccountable risks which the people of the back country were taking in their treatment of the Indians. On the 1st of June, Tryon met the Cherokees at Tyger River, and he had what was called " a straight and good talk" with them. There were mutual phrases of concession, and each confessed that it would be much easier to live in harmony, but for the "rogues " on either side. A line planned in October, 1765, was considered, and on June 13 it was agreed upon. This line, beginning at Reedy River, ran north to Tryon Mountain, which is described as being within three or four miles of the springs of the streams flowing towards the Mississippi. Thence the line ran to Chiswell Mines, and along the Blue Ridge, east of north, sixty or seventy miles. On July 16, the decision was made publie, and all who had settled beyond were warned to withdraw by New Year's of 1768. It was further determined that no grants should be made reaching within a mile of the line.


There was still the region back of Virginia and extending to the Ohio, which it was even more necessary to bring under control. Hillsborough had instructed Stuart to force the Cher- okees, who were the main southern elaimants of this region, to an agreement. This agent met the tribe at Hardlabor, S. C., on October 14, 1768. These Indians professed to hold the territory east and north of the Cherokee [Tennessee] River - their usual route to the Mississippi - as a hunting-ground, but were content to yield all east of the Kanawha, from its mouth upwards, and on this basis the treaty was made. This deci- sion was approved by the Board of Trade and recommended to the king. This was necessary, as it threw open to the pioneers


11


THE VIRGINIANS.


the valley of the Greenbrier and other eastern affluents of the Kanawha on the west of the Atlantic divide, and was thus at variance with the royal proclamation. It was at once so far established as a " ministerial line " that Hillsborough included it in the prohibition which he had attached in April to the line farther south, when he warned all who should transgress by passing it. He had already informed Stuart that the king would never consent to new grants below the Kanawha, and might recall some already made. This meant much, for the king's "friends," under Grafton, had come into power, and it seemed they were to be his thralls, not his advisers.


This definition of bounds by the Kanawha was only less offen- sive to Virginia than the proclamation of 1763 had been, for it was still a virtual curtailment of her territorial pretensions. Washington and others interested in the Ohio Company had looked upon the proclamation as simply an ostensible show of words for satisfying the Indians without really abridging the rights of the colony. A pact of the government with the Indians, as the Hardlabor agreement had been, was somewhat more serious, and it was not long, as we shall see, before this difficulty was almost entirely removed.


There was among the colonists of the Old Dominion a marked difference of character between the tide-water people and those who had crossed the mountains, or had entered the Shenandoah Valley from the north. Burnaby, who had trav- ersed the colony a few years before, had found "a spirit of enterprise by no means the turn of Virginia ; " but he derived his opinion from his intercourse with the large landed propri- etors near the Atlantic rivers. These found nothing more exciting than their Christmas revelries, their hunts in the wil- derness, their county politics, and their annual shipments of tobacco at the river fronts of their plantations. They showed little disposition to develop the country away from their own neighborhoods. While, however, this was true of most of the gentlemen of the lower country, there were a few among them quite ready, as we shall see, to act in the faith which Bur- naby shows he imbibed, when he speaks of the Potomac as a water-way to the great divide, and "of as great consequence as any river in America."


But the development of the frontiers of Virginia was not


12


THE PROPERTY LINE.


dependent on the tide-water gentry and their inferior servitors, but rather upon the virile folk, particularly the Scotch-Irish, who had brought the valley of Virginia into subjection, and were now adding to their strength by an immigration from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and north Virginia. These, crossing the divide by Braddock's road, were pushing down the Monon- gahela, and so on to the Ohio country. They carried with them all that excitable and determined character which goes with a keen-minded adherence to original sin, total depravity, predesti- nation, and election, and saw no use in an Indian but to be a target for their bullets.


No region in North America at this time had the repute of being so inviting and fertile as this valley of the great eastern tributary of the Mississippi. In 1765, the present town of Pittsburg had been laid out at the forks of the Ohio, two hun- dred feet from the old fort which had sprung in air from a mine, at the time of Forbes's approach in 1759, and of which we have a relic of Bouquet's enlargement in a brick bastion, still or of late preserved as a dwelling in the modern town. The place was now the centre of a frontier vigor, which kept pace with the growing influence of the anti-Quaker element in the province. It was to this latter conservative and sluggish faction that the Germans mainly adhered. These were in large part a boorish people, impregnated with the slavish traits of the redemptioners ; good farmers, who cared more for their pigs than for their own comfort, uniting thrift with habits that scorned education, clannish, and never forgetful of the Rhine. They with the Quakers had made a party in the government, which, from principle and apathy, had in the late war sorely tried the patience of Franklin and those jealous of the credit of the province. There had already begun to appear a palpa- ble decline of the Quaker power before the combined energies of the Philadelphia traders and the frontier woodsmen, with not a little assistance from the enlightened activities of the better class of Germans. It was the energy of this restless faction which induced Burnaby to speak of the Pennsylvanians as " by far the most enterprising people of the continent." He contrasted them with the Virginians, who, though having every advantage of easier communication beyond the mountains, had shown much less spirit.


13


CROGHAN AND THE INDIANS.


From Pittsburg the current of the Ohio carried a depth of three feet for seventy-five miles, to a settlement of some sixty native families, known as the Mingo town. This was the only cluster of habitations at this time between the forks and the rapids at the modern Louisville. Beyond this Indian town, the water was deep enough. The variegated banks, with the windings of the current, offered, as Colonel Gordon, a recent voyager, had said, "the most healthy, pleasant, commodious, and fertile spot of earth known to European people," and a little later it was represented to Hillsborough that " no part of North America would require less encouragement for the production of naval stores and raw material for manufactures in Europe." Such praise as this was later to reach a wider public in Thomas Hutchins's Description of Virginia, etc., when published in London. This topographer had been a cap- tain in Bouquet's army, which put an end to the Pontiac war. He first surveyed the country through which Bouquet marched in 1763-64. We have a map, which is the result of his obser- vations at that time and on later visits.


The movement by the Monongahela and by the valley of Virginia had naturally opened the way into what is now Kon- tueky and Tennessee. All this had alarmed the Indians, and in April and May, 1768, about 1,100 warriors of the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawnees, beside women and children. assem- bled at the instigation of George Croghan at Fort Pitt. " With this string of wampum," said that interpreter to them. "I clean the sweat off your bodies, and remove all evil thoughts from your minds, and clean the passage to your hearts. . . . With this string I clean your ears that you may hear." Then followed apologies for the murder of certain Indians by wicked whites. Another propitiation was made. " With this belt I' clean the blood off the leaves and earth. whereon it was sprinkled, that the sweet herbs may have their usual verdure." Beaver, a Delaware chief, replied : "Take hold of the end of this belt, which we may stretch along the road between us. in order to clean it of the briars and brush. that we may all travel it in peace and safety."


There was next a little altercation between a Shawnee and an Iroquois chief. The Shawnee wished the English to pull


14


THE PROPERTY LINE.


down their forts, and thought that the boats which the English were building signified an evil purpose of going in them down the river. The Iroquois stood for the English, and advised them to hold the forts they had taken from the French. When it was proposed to send messengers to the interlopers on the Monongahela at Red Stone and warn them off, the Indians refused to lend a hand in the ejectment. The Shawnees again made bold to dispute the Iroquois pretensions to the Ohio country. So the symptoms were clear that trouble could easily be fostered in the valley, and during the previous summer some Indians had stopped the bateaux of pioneers, and the river route was in general made dangerous by the mutual hostilities of the Cherokees and the northern tribes.


In December, 1767, the Board of Trade had deemed the Kanawha River an equitable limit for the English settlements. Such a limit, restricting what Hillsborough judged the danger- ons extension of agriculture, also met the approval of that minister.


Franklin, now in London as the agent of Pennsylvania, pointed out to the government how delays were only making the colonies drift into a savage war. Shelburne was soon moved to action, and in April, 1768, Gage, who had received Shelburne's instructions to run the line, forwarded them to Johnson with a suspicion that it would be difficult to satisfy the demands of New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, in whatever line was run. Gage had already urged, in February, that the plan had been satisfactorily carried out at the south by Georgia and the Carolinas.


The task of establishing such a line imposed difficulties upon the negotiator. Johnson had only recently had diffienlty in getting the Indians to consent to the running of the line between Pennsylvania and Maryland beyond the mountains, and he felt sure that both French and Spanish were endeavoring to entice the Ohio tribes to a counter conference on the Mississippi. When Johnson had first broached the subject of a line at a conference of Iroquois in the spring of 1765, he had found some difficulty in bringing them to his conception of what such a line should be. When the Indians had made some conees- sions, he was obliged to confess he had no authority to settle the question. Accordingly, after three years of delay, during


15


FORT STANWIX TREATY.


which the ministry had been instructing him to keep a peace with the Indians, and with some untoward happenings in the interval, it was not without misgivings that Sir William, accompanied by two hundred boats of merchandise for presents, reached Fort Stanwix on September 20, 1768. Prominent


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among his advisers in attendance were Governor Franklin, Guy Johnson, and George Croghan. The Indians assembled so slowly that it was October 24 before it was deemed prudent to open the conference. By this time it was certain that nearly thirty-two hundred cavernous mouths were to be fed, and that other entertainments must be provided with equal prodigality. Johnson, indeed, soon found that there was difficulty in get- ting a sufficient allowance from the treasury at headquarters, owing to the great cost of quartering troops in Boston, now going on to meet the rebellious manifestations of that commm- nity. So the seven weeks of feasts and talks went on. Thomas Walker had come with authority from Virginia to undo the Stuart treaty and the Kanawha line, if he could. There were other delegates from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsyl- vania, together with a number of agents representing the traders who had suffered losses in the Pontiac war.


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16


THE PROPERTY LINE.


This large assembly of savages was, in fact, a considerable part of the whole number of tribes interested in the outcome of the conference. Johnson at this time estimated that the Iroquois numbered perhaps ten thousand souls, and of these two thousand could be considered warriors. Their allies could furnish probably another two thousand, made up among others of three hundred Shawnees from the Ohio country, six hundred Delawares from the Susquehanna, and two hundred Wyandots from Sandusky. These four thousand Iroquois and depend- ents, so great had been their losses, were probably not more than half as many as the Ottawa confederacy. This larger amalgamation of the savage power, including the Twightwees and Miamis, hemmed in the others on the west, and blocked the way to the Mississippi. Johnson now reckoned them at eight thousand warriors, of whom about three thousand were on the Detroit River. He makes no mention of any tribes in what is now Kentucky, and Croghan seems to confirm the belief that the territory between the Ohio and the Tennessee was destitute of savage dwellers, and this was the region now the particular object of negotiation.


It was not till November 5 that a conclusion was reached at Fort Stanwix, when, in consideration of a considerable sum of money, the Indians consented to a line, beyond which the English agreed to prohibit settling. The Iroquois chiefs signed with the colonial delegates ; but the Delawares and Shawnees, though assenting, were not allowed to sign, since they were dependent upon the Iroquois.


The territory which was thus alienated was vested, under the terms of the treaty, in the crown, and could only be occupied by royal grant. It was soon claimed that, so far as these lands were concerned, the royal proclamation was annulled.


Johnson, in directing the negotiations, had exceeded his authority, and, as the Virginians claimed, he had thwarted the purposes which Dr. Walker had been sent to advance. John- son had been directed to confirm Stuart's line by the Kanawha, and to yield to the Cherokee pretensions as respects the terri- tory west of that river. The Iroquois, however, asserted their rights in this region against the Cherokees, and Johnson thought it imprudent to arouse their resentment by declining their cession of it. Johnson satisfied his own conscience in the


17


FORT STANWIX TREATY.


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matter by recalling that the Cherokees some years before had recognized the Iroquois rights to it. He felt also that, by con- firming it to the crown, the government would not be embar- rassed in controlling its settlement as they liked. In this way what became later known as " The Property Line " practically gave Kentucky over to present occupation.


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18


THE PROPERTY LINE.


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NOTE. - The line is shown on a larger seale in a map constructed by Johnson upon Evans's Kittanning followed that river to its mouth.


The region east of the Kanawha and west of the Mononga- hela had already two days before (November 3) been deeded by the Indians to Trent, as the agent of the traders, whose prop- erty in the recent war had been despoiled to an extent, as was contended, of £86,000. Out of this transaction difficulties soon arose. The Ohio Company held the land thus conveyed to be


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19


THE " INDIANA " GRANT.


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ineluded in their own prior grants, which were known as " Indiana," and stood in the names of Samuel Wharton, Wil- liam Trent, George Morgan, and others. Virginia recognized no rights in it but her own. as coming within her charter, and she elaimed that some of her own people had already settled within the disputed territory. All disputes were finally sunk in the troubles of the Revolution.


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20


THE PROPERTY LINE.


The line, as established at Fort Stanwix, followed up the Ohio from the Cherokee River, passed the forks, and went up the Alleghany to Kittanning. It then ran west to the most westerly branch of the west fork of the Susquehanna : thenee over Burnet's Hills to Awandoe Creek, and so to the Delaware. It then ascended this river towards Owegy and Wood Creek, and stopped at a point half way between Fort Stanwix and Lake Oneida.


The line, by reason of Johnson's independent action, was not approved by the king, but the government did not venture to invalidate it. When it thus practically became the law, new conditions arose. It opened a larger area to settlement than the royal proclamation had decreed, and vesting new rights in the crown, it was held by most, except the Virginians, to place a bar, to the extent of the territory ceded by the Indians, to the westward elaims of Virginia.


This line of demarcation between the Indians and the settle- ments was now unbroken from where it started at the earlier grant near Lake Ontario to the southern end of the Appala- chians, except for an interval where the bounds back of South and North Carolina had not been made to join. This debatable ground remained for some time the scene of insecurity : the doubtful jurisdiction invited vagabonds and lawless traders, who traversed the country between the Catawbas and the Cherokees. It was of such hazardous conditions that Stuart, the Indian agent, spoke, when he commented upon the "rage for settling far back," which crowded settlers upon the boundary, and left the country seant of inhabitants on the way thither. " The Indians detest such back inhabitants," he adds, " which accounts for their reluetancy to give up any of their lands, being anxious to keep such neighbors at a distance."




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