USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 24
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This plan of a rectangular survey was first suggested in the report of a committee, of which Jefferson was chairman, on May 7, 1784, and it was in accordance with his distrust of rivers and ridges as suitable lines of demarcation. It has been suggested that the hint of such a survey came from Dutch
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THE INDIAN TITLE.
practice in a country too flat for natural divides. What Ilutch- ins now undertook to do constituted the first systematic survey west of the mountains, and was known as the Seven Ranges. To start it, a " geographer's line," so called, was run due west for forty-two miles from a point where the bounds of Penn- sylvania crossed the Ohio to a meridian that struck the Ohio a few miles above Marietta, and formed the western bounds of nineteen towns in the most western of the ranges. A post was set at each mile, and every six miles a spot was indicated as a township corner, through which a meridian line was run to the Ohio and to the line of the Reserve (41º), cut by other east and west lines at regular distances of six miles. In this way the lines were marked, at first, without any very nice regard to the magnetic variation, though Rufus King had tried in Con- gress to insure a record of it. Another difficulty was soon pointed out by Pickering and others, which was that there was no rec- ognition of the converging of the meridian going north. "A difference of six hundred yards in ten miles must surely pro- duce material errors," said Pickering. This was remedied at a later period (May 10, 1800, Act of Congress) by running other base lines occasionally, with new six-mile subdivisions.
While the work was going on, it was necessary sometimes to protect the surveyors from inroads of the savages. Tupper had been engaged with Hutchins, and it was his report on the country to Putnam that helped start the later Ohio Company. Hutchins did not live to complete the work, and when he died in 1788, at Pittsburg, the charge of the survey was assumed by the treasury. Hutchins's work has given him fame, as by it he introduced that universal square plotting of the public lands which makes the map of our Western States and Territories so unattractive to an eye accustomed to the diversity of geo- graphical boundaries.
The quieting of the Indian title has been mentioned as the other necessary preliminary to the successful settlement of these western lands. The red man had first recognized in 1784. in the treaty of Fort Stanwix, the authority of the new Republic; and this meant, in an enforced dealing with the Indians, a more extensive governmental relation than had been main- tained with them in the past. The confederation had of late
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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
years spent annually less than $2,500 in the Indian problem, the greater cost devolving upon individual States. In 1784, the cost, to the extent of $4,500, fell upon the United States.
It was held in later years by Chief Justice Marshall that a European nation making discovery of a territory had the sole right of extinguishing the Indian title within that territory, and that individual bargains with Indians for land were of no binding effeet. This principle had been established by Con- gress in 1781.
The earlier treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, had, according to the claim of the Indians, considered the Ohio as the bound- ary between them and the whites ; and recognizing this, it now devolved upon Congress to take steps to enlarge the territory open to settlement. In March, 1784, that body deemed it desirable that the Indian title should be quieted on the hither side of the meridian of the falls of the Ohio. To do this, it was necessary to bring the tribes to treaty stipulations, and some- what unadvisedly it was determined to enter into pacts, tribe by tribe, rather than to deal with them in a mass. There were two obstacles in sight. One was the difficulty of finding the money necessary for the presents required in a successful agree- ment with the savages. The other was the obstinacy with which the Indians, in some part at least, and under British instigation, were opposed to abandoning the Ohio limits.
It was politie to begin at the immediate frontiers. Richard Butler, with whom Washington had been consulting about the Ohio portages, was in October, 1784, joined in a commission with Oliver Woleott and Arthur Lee, to whom representatives of Pennsylvania should be added, to meet the New York In- dians at Fort Stanwix, in order to extinguish their title to lands lying north and west of the Ohio, and within the limits of Pennsylvania and New York. A treaty was made, and by it the Iroquois, who had been pressing west along the southern shores of Lake Erie, were in fact shut out from any further advance in that direction. The pretensions of the Six Nations to make sale of this territory angered the western tribes, who claimed it as within their own patrimony. This rendered it necessary to placate those discontents.
Fort McIntosh had fallen into disrepair sinee 1783, and was now refitted; and here, on January 21, 1785, the American
-
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INDIAN RESERVATION.
commissioners, Isaac Lane, George Rogers Clark, and Samuel H. Parsons, met representatives of the Wyandots, Delawares. Chippewas, and Ottawas. It was now agreed for a satisfactory consideration that a region in the northwest of the present State of Ohio should remain inviolably in the Indian posses- sion, except that the whites should be allowed tracts, six miles square, about any military post which was within the territory. The region thus reserved stretched on Lake Erie from Caya-
FORT McINTOSH.
[After a plate in The Columbian Magazine, January, 1790. See the same sketch revamped in Pennsylvania Archives, second series, vol. xiv.]
hoga to the Maumee. Its easterly line ran by the Cayahoga and the Tuscarawas to near Fort Lawrence. The southern line extended thence to the portage connecting the Miami and the Maumee, and by the latter stream the line extended to the lake. Gerry, on February 25, 1785, writing from New York, informed Jefferson that Arthur Lee had just returned from the Indian country, and had reported that the new treaty had secured thirty million acres for coming settlements. There were all the while opposing views as to the desirability of acquiring the Indian title beyond the Miami, and so to the Mississippi.
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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
Pickering was among those who opposed any such movement as opening the lands to " lawless emigrants," who were rather incited than restrained by any prohibitory enactments. On the other hand, there were those who contended that such purchases were necessary to give the color of right to "lawless emigra- tion," and so prevent an Indian war.
There was another pressing difficulty, and that was the invasion of these lands, north of the Ohio, by irresponsible land-grabbers. In January, 1785, Governor Henry had warned all intruders of the dangers they incurred. Congress was deter- mined to prevent the occupation of the acquired lands till they had been surveyed. On January 24, 1785, General Harmar, now in command on the Ohio, had been instructed to drive out all squatters, and he did not hesitate to brand them as " banditti, whose actions were a disgrace to human nature." In March, he sent Ensign Armstrong along the north bank of the Ohio as far as a point opposite Wheeling, to dispossess the intruders, and this officer reported that he had heard of many hundred more, as far west as the Miami. The work was fol- lowed up by a proclamation from Harmar on April 2, 1785 ; and by vigilant action that general succeeded in preventing a combination of the adventurers, for the purpose of resisting under some organized form of government. By May 1, Har- mar reported that the cabins of such squatters had been burned.
The immigration by the Ohio, which had now been going on for some years, was estimated at the close of 1785 to have carried something like fifty thousand souls west of Pittsburg, and there was enough community of interest among them, English, Scotch, Irish, and German, to warrant in the summer of 1786 the setting up of the first newspaper west of the Alleghanies, the Pittsburg Gazette. The stream of emigrants, aggregating year by year from five to twenty thousand, and sometimes in a twelvemonth making a procession of a thousand boats, had been stranded mainly on the Kentucky side of the river, but the lateral valleys on the north bank had received no inconsiderable numbers, as Armstrong was now reporting.
While these measures were in progress, it had occurred to the philanthropic Countess of Huntingdon (February, 1785) to send a company of English colonists to settle on lands adjacent
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SURVEYS AND SETTLEMENTS.
to the Indians, in order to influence the savage character through Christian neighbors, and so bring them to civilized ways. There was no doubt that a spirit in the white man, different from that prevailing among the wild adventurers of the west, was needed on the frontiers ; but there was a fear that colonists direct from English homes would feel more sympathy with the English of the retained posts than with the neighboring bush- rangers, and that accordingly the philanthropic experiment was too dangerous for trial. So nothing came of it.
All these movements did not escape the notice of Simon Girty and other emissaries of the British at Detroit. Very likely it was by the instigation of such men that a disaffected remnant of the Shawnees, Mingoes, and Delawares, and a few Cherokees, got together in council on May 18, 1785, and gave warning through one Jolin Crawford, a Virginian whom they held, that resistance would be made to encroachments north of the Ohio, if such were persisted in. Ten days later (May 29), we find McKee informing Sir John Johnson of the growing discontent of the tribes, and the pressure which those along the Wabash were exerting on the easterly Indians to combine in order to enforce their rights.
In August, an Indian council at Niagara, and the move- ments of the autumn months, showed that it was difficult to insure quiet, especially as there were rumors of an American attack on Detroit. Such had been the uncertain condition when, on June 15, 1785, Congress, to give higher authority to Harmar's action, proclaimed that the surveys of the new lands must be completed before settlement could be allowed. It was felt by Hamilton and others that the proclamation was likely to be futile, and that the territory must inevitably become the theatre of a savage war, and in April, militia had been called out for three years' service on the frontiers. There were fore- boding symptoms in the active agencies which Simon Girty and Joseph Brant were exerting along the frontier. As an Iroquois chieftain, Brant had felt deeply the manner in which his tribesmen had been driven from their old homes and forced to find hunting-grounds on Canadian soil, and had turned a deaf ear to Monroe's entreaty to join the American rather than the British interests. Nothing had more perplexed Haldimand than making suitable provision for these old allies of the British.
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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
Despite their antipathy to the Americans, Brant and his conn- trymen were not a little incensed, moreover, in seeing what measures the British Parliament had taken to provide for the losses of the loyalists, while the losses of his own people had been left without corresponding relief. He was threatening during the summer (1785) to proceed to England and lodge his complaint with the ministry, while Haldimand tried to assuage his resentment.
In the autumn (1785), the commissioners, of whom General Robert Howe was now one, began to prepare for a further treaty to carry out the wishes of Congress expressed the preceding June. Monroe accompanied them " for private considerations," as it was said. Captain Doughty, stationed at Fort McIntosh, was persuaded that a more generous treatment of the Indians would be better, and recommended to the secretary of war a greater outlay in gifts. Jay, as a looker-on at the centre of government, was far from content with what the Indian depart- ment was doing, and by no means sure that there were not sinister agencies at work. "Our Indian affairs do not prosper," he wrote, January 9, 1786; " I fear Britain bids higher than we do. Our surveys have been checked, and peace with the savages seems somewhat precarious."
Doughty detailed a company of infantry to escort the com- missioners as they proceeded west. Arrived at the mouth of the Miami, a field was cleared, stockades and blockhouses were built, and the post was named Fort Finney. The Indians had been notified that this was the spot for a conference. On November 13, 1785, General Samuel H. Parsons joined his fellow members, and the commission was ready for its task.
The Shawnees on the Scioto, who had kept aloof from the meeting in January, 1785, now came in, and a treaty was con- cluded on much the same terms as at Fort McIntosh. They agreed to confine themselves in the territory between the Great Miami and the Wabash. This was on January 31, 1786, and the Indians left five hostages to insure the release of white prisoners, which were held among the tribes. Another effect of the treaty was that it afforded for a while protection to the government surveyors on the western lands.'
These several treaties had at last secured from the Indians
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COUNCIL AT NIAGARA.
participating a recognition of the title of this great northwestern country which the United States had received from Great Brit- ain. This recognition, however, had not been obtained without exciting the jealousy of some portion of the conceding tribes, particularly of such as had sought an asylum under British authority in Canada, and were in December sitting in council at Detroit. Brant, despite Haldimand's endeavors to prevent him, had proceeded to England, and we find him there on January 4, 1786, presenting his claims, and, in behalf of the whole Indian race, appealing to Sydney for countenance and aid in the savages' efforts to keep the Americans south of the Ohio. John Adams says that he saw the chieftain at the queen's drawing-room. "The ministerial runners," adds this observer, "give out that Brant is come to demand compensation for the Indian hunting-grounds ceded by the English, and to get something for himself as half-pay as colonel." Brant was deeply chagrined to find that there had really been a cession of the Indian territory to the Americans, and made the best he could of Sydney's promise to pay £15,000 for the certified losses of the Indians. Brant's disappointment was apparent to the ministry, but they counted on his pacifying his tribe, and advised his abstaining from revengeful hostilities against the Americans.
While the government in London was struggling with the importunities of this chieftain, the American commissioners had been only partially successful, as we have scen, at the mouth of the Miami, inasmuch as the Cherokees and Mingoes were raiding along the Ohio, rather than to join the conference at Fort Finney, while the tribes near Sandusky were hokling aloof. Major Doughty, in March, 1786, sent one Philip Liebert to the lake shore to gain, if he could, these suspected bodies. It is doubtful if the savages who had seemed complacent at Fort Finney were aeting in the best faith, for by April they knew in Detroit that their signing of the treaty was only to gain time and prevent the harrying of their villages by the whites.
By midsummer (1786), Sir John Johnson and Brant, who had now returned from England, had called upon the Niagara a council of the Six Nations and the western tribes. From Brant's bearing, Campbell of the twenty-ninth regiment, which
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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
was at Niagara, reported that the Mohawk chieftain was in ill humor, and cared only for his own interests. Girty, McKee, and their Indians soon joined the council, and on July 25, 1786, the Indians had gathered there in good numbers. Brant now did his best to unite them in a campaign against the Americans. His speeches had not their usual effect, and he next tried per- sonal solicitation among their villages, but he was no more suc- cessful here ; and in September he was telling the British lead- ers in Detroit that he could do nothing more. Indeed, there was already a movement among the Indians to start westward, and find homes beyond the Mississippi, but it did not go far.
As the summer of 1786 wore on, it was by no means sure that the danger was over. There was a disposition in Virginia to bring matters to an issue. Rufus King records how the gov- ernor and Assembly of that State were "clamoring for a war against the Indians," but Congress without a quorum stood still. King further comments on " the lawless and probably unjust conduct of the inhabitants of Kentucky towards the In- dians bordering on the western side of the Ohio." The secre- tary of war was powerless. When, in June, 1786, he needed a thousand dollars to transport powder to the western troops, the treasury board were not able to supply the funds, and the troops deserted because they were not paid.
The Indian bureau of the confederation had set up two de- partments, one north, the other south of the Ohio. The instruc- tions of their respective agents on the spot were to regulate the relations of the settlers to the Indians, and to protect the savages in their territorial rights. To aid in this, Congress, which in March had declined to aid Knox in reorganizing the militia, voted (October 19, 1786) to raise a body of thirteen hundred and forty troops, so as to increase the western force to a legionary corps of two thousand men, but the condition that they should be raised in New England soon aroused suspi- cion that, under the color of protecting the western settlers, it was the real purpose of Congress to overawe the participants in Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts. On November 29, Gerry wrote to King of the Massachusetts legislature that " the coun- try members laugh and say the Indian war is only a political one to obtain a standing army." On the Canadian side there was something of the same indirection. The British government
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CLARK AT VINCENNES.
were not ready to espouse the cause which Brant had not been able to set afoot in the west, but they were not averse, as Dorchester's instructions to Sir John Johnson show (November, 1786), to furnishing supplies to the Indians, and in October there were two hundred savage warriors waiting at Niagara for powder.
So things were uncertain at every point just beyond the mountains ; but farther west, on the Wabash, there were other complications arising from the discontent of the old French set- tlers at Vincennes. There were in this place, and near the Illi- mois, perhaps a thousand French, and they numbered four to one American. In the confusion following the war, with their alle- giance deprived of an object, they had petitioned the American Congress to set up a government among them, to be in some sort stable, and there was at the same time some talk of bring- ing additional French thither to increase that population in the Ohio valley. This being denied, the situation had become grave. Vincennes was a town of some three hundred houses, but the sixty American families who made a portion of the population lived apart from their French neighbors. The out- lying American squatters had withdrawn from the dangers at- tending their exposure to the savage marauders, and had sought shelter among their compatriots in the town. The Indians, on their part, were harbored among the resident French. So the partisans on both sides lived in much insecurity, facing and fear- ing each other.
It was an opportunity for the Kentuckians, who, seeking thie leadership of George Rogers Clark, now but the wreck of his former self, organized at Harrodsburg on August 2, 1786, and advanced to relieve the Americans by scattering the Indians. In this they sought to do what the general government seemed indisposed to attempt. Gathering towards the middle of Sep- tember, at the falls of the Ohio, on the 17th, some twelve hun- dred in number, horse and foot, they started out. Harmar, when he heard of it, had no confidence in their success, so bad was their organization, and such difficulty had Clark experi- enced in holding the men to his standard. The apprehension was well founded, for he accomplished little, and fell back upon Vincennes. Here, in an attempt to support a garrison, he seized stores from the Spanish merchants, and it was for a
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THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
while supposed that he intended to attack the Spanish across the Mississippi.
The weeks through the autumn of 1786 were disturbed ones. Kentuckians still pursued the Shawnees and ravaged their towns. The Indians were everywhere uneasy, and all through Georgia and Virginia the inhabitants were in arms. It was the old story of eneroachments and counter raids. A hundred thousand dollars in specie, said Rufus King, had been paid in ten years to satisfy the savages, in the hope of paeifying them, but the sacrifice was futile.
Late in October, Lord Dorchester reached Quebec to assume the supreme command. He had come with special instructions to prevent, if possible, the Indians bringing on a war with the Americans. On November 27, we find him informing Sir John Johnson that this was the king's desire, and in December he writes to the commandant at Detroit to " confine the war in as narrow bounds as possible," if it should inevitably come. Brant was at this time at the straits, and had summoned there a gen- eral assembly of the tribes from the Hudson to the Mississippi. It was his purpose to formulate the last Indian appeal to be sent to the American Congress. A paper was drawn up with such skill as Brant possessed, embodying a protest against the con- gressional policy of treating with separate tribes, instead of cov- enanting with the entire body of the Indians. It insisted upon the invalidity of the Indian cessions of land as individual tribes had made them. It stood stubbornly for the Ohio as the In- dian boundary, and deprecated the sending of surveyors aeross that river. There was too much reason to believe, as most Americans then thought, not only that British sympathy sup- ported the hostility of the Indians, but also their demand for an Ohio frontier.
Brant certainly felt that in making this stand, it was neces- sary to have the countenance of the English ; but it was a question how far they would sustain him in actual war. It turned out that Sydney, in April, 1787, instructed Dorchester to avoid assisting the Indians openly, but to see that they had what ammunition they needed. This disguised aid was appar- ently become the British policy, while the troops with which they manned their posts were insufficient for an active de- fense. The forts themselves were in a " ruinous" condition, and
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MONARCHICAL VIEWS.
Dorchester had only two thousand men to hold them along a line eleven hundred miles in length. The governor depended, however, upon the assistance of the loyalists and Canadians, if the forts were attacked. Sydney had instructed him to retake the posts, if they were lost. Nevertheless, it was the manifest poliey of the British cabinet not to come to extremities, if it could be avoided.
The English ministry were quite prepared for the information which Dorchester now began to transmit, and the public press was only too ready to augment the stories of a gradual disin- tegration in the new Republic. The governing class was eager to believe such tales. Lord Lansdowne so felt, and Jay tried to disabuse his mind. "We are happy," said the American, " in the enjoyment of much more interior tranquillity than the English newspapers allow, or their writers seem to wish us." Unfortunately, the question of debts and loyalists had shown them the insubordination of the States, and they were in doubt if it was possible for any representative of the confederation which could be sent to their court to be sure of his position. Sheffield predicted that, sooner or later, the western country would revolt and seek the rest of the world through the Missis- sippi. All these things incited in England the hope that intes- tine disorders and a half-hearted interest in the proposed new constitution would urge public feeling to seek social and political stability in a return to monarchy, and it was faneied that Ham- ilton was latently the leader of a growing monarchieal party, against which the newly organized government was only a tem- porary barrier. Hamilton had indeed privately vouched for his confidence in the British Constitution ; but his publie action was opposed. Speaking of the Federal Constitution, he said, " Not more than three or four manifested theoretical opinions favora- ble in the abstract to a constitution like that of Great Britain ; but every one agreed that such a constitution would be out of the question." So there lingered, not without cause, a feeling among the English that publie sentiment would some time find a reason propitious for an offer of one of the king's sons as a sovereign of an allied kingdom, and there were broad intimations made that a prince of the house of Hanover would serve them better than a French Bourbon. The chance was not untalked of in the States. "I am told," said Washington to Jay, August
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