USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 3
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The dispute between the Iroquois and the Cherokees would, it was feared, seriously involve the interests of such as received grants in what are now the States of Kentucky and Tennessee. It was not long before Gage was warning Johnson of " an agi- tation among the Indians." That the Iroquois should have been paid for territory which the Cherokees claimed was galling to the pride of the latter.
The Cherokee [Tennessee] River bends near Cumberland
21
MOVEMENTS FOR OCCUPATION.
Gap, separated by a divide from the springs of the Kanawha. The area in controversy, including the valley of the Cumber- land, lay between these rivers and the Ohio. The purposes of the home government and those of the pioneers regarding this territory were equally at variance, the one sustaining, in opinion at least, the treaty of Stuart, and the other that of Johnson. Gage was fully aware of the risks of occupying the region south of the Ohio. To do so, in his judgment, could hardly fail to bring on a war with the southern Indians. The ministry, in view of the opposition which had been developed to the royal proclamation, was not unwise in winking at what it dared not undo.
This opening of a fertile country to occupation induced the steady movements westward to and beyond Cumberland Gap which took place in the next few years. Dr. Thomas Walker, whose name is so often associated with these early movements, and who had been more or less familiar with Powell's Valley and the neighboring region for twenty years, soon secured a grant hereabouts. Throwing it open to the pioneers, a rush of settlers to occupy it followed. In the spring of 1769, there was a race of rival parties seeking to reach the spot first and secure the land. Victory came to Joseph Martin and his com- panions, and they were earliest squatted in the rich valley, shadowed with black walnuts and wild cherries, which lies between Cumberland and Powell mountains. The modern Martin's Station, where they pitched their tents, was on the hunter's trail to Kentucky, and twenty miles from Cumberland Gap. The situation, however, was precarious, for there were roving bands of southern Indians, who were incensed that the pledge given in the Stuart treaty had not been observed. While Martin and some of his people were exploring farther west, hostile savages swooped down on those in camp, and the settlement was broken up. There is no lack of suspicion that in this and other marauding, the vicious trader was supplying the barbarian with his gun and powder.
So it was that the proclamation of 1763 was practically de- fied, and the ministry had not dared to interpose its authority.
·
CHAPTER III.
LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
1763-1768.
IT is curious to find the French traveler, Pages, in 1767, speaking of the Mississippi as bounding on New England ! The reservation of the trans-Alleghany country to the Indians' usc, by the proclamation of 1763, had not eradicated from the conceptions of the French the old sea-to-sea claims of the English charters. They had too long confronted this English pretension to do more than recognize the curtailment of their claims by making that river the western boundary of those colonies, as required by the recent treaty.
In the colonies themselves, the claim was certainly dormant. Massachusetts, for her rights, was abiding her time. Connecti- cut was even now, on the strength of such a title, claiming a portion of Pennsylvania, and for the next few years, in the struggle between the two provinces, the New England colony was to be in the main successful in sustaining her Susquehanna Company, though it was at the cost of life and property. Both colonies, in the effort to defend what they thought their own, had devastated homes and wasted crops, and each was alter- nately the aggressor.
Virginia was still vigilantly looking after her western inter- ests, and she did it to some purpose ten years later, when her George Rogers Clark did much to save the Northwest to the young Republic. Franklin, in 1754, would have swept all such pretensions away by his barrier colonies. During the years that had intervened, he had not forgotten his purpose, as we shall see.
The peace of 1763 had had its effect upon the Indian trade of the far West. The English seaboard merchants had become conscious how much this traffie had slipped away from their
23
ST. LOUIS AND THE FRENCH.
western agents. Such diminution had been the subject of repeated representations. George Croghan was explaining it to General Gage in New York and to Dr. Franklin in London. Carleton complained that French and Spanish traders were gathering furs within twenty leagues of Detroit. Gage com- mented upon it to Conway, and hinted at the clandestine ways which were used by the Indians and French. Sir William Johnson also found artifice in the French methods, but it would seem to have been nothing more than that the traders got ten- pence a pound more for skins in New Orleans than in any British market.
The unwelcome outcome of the business was the preeminence which the new settlement at St. Louis, under French enter- prise, was likely to acquire. Hutchins speaks of the site of the new town as " the most healthy and pleasurable situation of any known in this part of the country," and hither (he adds), "by conciliating the affections of the natives," the French traders have drawn the traffic of the Missouri, Mississippi, Wisconsin, and Illinois rivers away from the English posts. St. Louis had become in a few years a town of about one lun- dred and twenty stone-built houses. The occupants of these dwellings, including a hundred and fifty negroes, numbered about eight hundred. Not far off was Ste. Geneviève, a place of more than four hundred inhabitants. These two settlements constituted the only French villages on the western bank of the Mississippi. Neighboring, but on the eastern bank, and so within the English jurisdiction, were some three hundred more French, with a serving body of nearly as many blacks. These were the communities which were seeking to turn the Indian products into channels which would carry them down the Mis- sissippi on their way to the sea. The French Canadians, who were now looking to the English to protect their western trade, complained that unless the English were more enter- prising and built new posts, the Indian trade toward the Mis- sissippi would all slip away. Neither did the English, who were now coming into Canada in order to reap a harvest in the fur trade, view the conditions with more complacency. Carleton. who had ruled in Quebec since September, 1766, opened a correspondence with Johnson in order to seek a remedy, but Gage saw it was simply a game of sharp practice at which both
24 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
sides were privileged to play. When it was reported to him that the French and Spanish were endeavoring to lure the savages to their interest, he replied that " we have no reason to reproach them, as we aim at the same thing," and he spoke the truth. He was quite as complacent when one warned him of the Indians' efforts to embroil the English with the French. " They might well like to do it," he said, " for our quarrels are the Indian harvests."
The trade of that part of this distant country lying west of the Lake of the Woods had been drawn in large part to the English factors at Hudson's Bay. From Lake Superior the traders were already pushing to Rainy Lake, and by 1770 they had established posts on Lake Winnipeg and beyond, as well as farther south on the upper branches of the Mississippi.
Trading west of Detroit had been prohibited except by license, and under such a privilege Alexander Henry had en- joyed the freedom of Lake Superior. But police control in such conditions was impossible, and it was not unlikely that the trader without a license turned his tracks down the Great Valley, rather than risk detection on the St. Lawrence. The English commander at Fort Chartres was always complaining that the traders on the opposite sides of the Mississippi acted in collusion. There were ninety carrying places between the Lake of the Woods and Montreal. It was not strange that the ' trading canoes were oftener seen gliding on the almost uninter- rupted current of the Mississippi, where they were easily thrown into companionship with the French packmen, as far north as the Falls of St. Anthony and higher up. Such intercourse boded no good to the English.
Unfortunately, Major Rogers, their commandant at Mack- inac, was hardly a man to be trusted. He had become badly in debt to the traders, and had schemes of detaching that post . from Canadian control and using it to secure welcome and advancement from the French. This movement demoralized the Indians, and Gage soon found it necessary to instruet Johnson to use his interpreters to ensnare the traitor, and in December, 1767, he was arrested for treason.
The effect of Rogers's disaffection upon the Indians was to be dreaded, as convincing them of the weakness of the English rule and the ultimate return of the French domination. There
25
THE AMERICAN BOTTOM.
were too apparent grounds for believing in the hold which the French still had upon the Indians. Johnson assured Gage that the savages were as fond as ever of the French. " Whatever they ardently wish for, it is natural for them to expeet even after several disappointments," said that observer. It seemed to the French themselves that the savages greatly desired a reinstatement of the French power.
To unsettle this savage regard for their rivals and to rehabili- tate this Indian trade, so that the seaboard could profit by it, was now a vital question with the English. The obvious move- ment was to make the Illinois country subservient to such a pur- pose, just as the French in the earlier days had always made it. The author of a tract on The Expediency of securing our American Colonies by settling the Country adjoining the River Mississippi had, as early as 1763, pointed out how the forks of the Mississippi, as its junction with the Ohio was termed, cover- ing a region stretching to the Illinois, was " the most necessary place of any in America, - the key of all the inland parts." Gage, on April 3, 1767, wrote to Shelburne that it was desir- able to have an English fort at this point in order to control the dependent country ; and just before Captain Harry Gordon, Chief Engineer of North America, had pointed out the situation of Fort Massac as admirable for that purpose. Beck, in his Gazetteer (1823), points out that the first settlements at Cahokia and Kaskaskia were made in the most fertile land in Illinois. They were upon a piece of alluvial land, later known as the American Bottom, whose existing aboriginal mounds showed that it had long before supported an affluent population. This region, lying between a range of bluffs and the river, extended north from Kaskaskia for a hundred miles, and contained an area of about five hundred and twenty square miles. It was mostly a treeless prairie, but there was a fringe of heavy timber along the river. Its very fertility rendered it miasmatic, but steady cultivation had improved its salubriousness. As an agricultural region, Hutchins called it " of a superior soil to any other part of North America " that he had seen. Carver tells us that this was the general reputation which the country bore.
During the years immediately following the peace, and par- ticularly before the cession of the trans-Mississippi country to
26 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
Spain was known, there had been some confusion among the population, owing to a general exodus of the French across the Mississippi. The village neighboring to Fort Chartres had become almost depopulated in this way, and the flight of its inhabitants was not altogether untimely, in view of the speedy encroachments which the current of the river was making on the soil. The English a little later (1772) found it necessary to abandon Fort Chartres, " the most commodious and best built fort in North America," as Pittman called it, because the river had undermined its walls in places. To understand how the very qualities which rendered this bottom-land so rich made it also unstable, we find this fort, when it was rebuilt in 1756, two miles inland ; at the time we are now considering, sixteen years later, it was partly washed away, while to-day the ruined magazine and the ragged walls are again more than a mile from the river. In 1772, a new defense, called Fort Gage, was built on the bluff opposite Kaskaskia, and thither the Eng- lish garrison was transferred. There was need of it, if England was to give the region the protection it needed.
The Cherokees and Chickasaws, not long before, had invaded the country and committed depredations in the neighborhood of Kaskaskia. The native defenders, the tribes of the Illinois, had at this period lost their vigor. Early in 1768, or at least in time for Gage to have heard of it in New York in the sum- mer of that year, - and this evidence seems better than what indueed Parkman to put it a year later, - Pontiae had been treacherously killed in Cahokia. " The French at Illinois and Post Vincent," says Gage (July 15, 1768), " complain of our setting the Cherokees and Chickasaws to molest them, and that the death of Pontiae, committed by a Peorie of the Illinois, and believed to have been excited by the English to that action, had drawn many of the Ottawas and other northern Indians towards their country to revenge his death." Johnson, from reports which reached him, feared, as a consequence, another outbreak like the Pontiac war. But the Illinois were the only sufferers, and their misfortunes lay them open to the revenge of the Pottawattamies, the Winnebagoes, and the Kickapoos, and there was a direful scene of suffering at Starved Roek. To such " a poor, debauched, and dastardly " condition had these people come, who in La Salle's time had erossed from the west-
27
THE ILLINOIS TRIBES.
StLouis
Fát Cahokia
Mill
to PLE
A Spring
Merimeg
4-442
APLAN of the several Villages in the
ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
Belle Fountain,
with Part of the
River Mifsifsippi&c,
River
Pourds
Tho Hutchins.
Indian Village
HFort Chia
Arist. Mill
Indian
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Kaskaskias
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12345
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Scale of Miles.
The Show A
KASKASKIA AND CAHOKIA AND THE AMERICAN BOTTOM.
ern bank of the Mississippi and confronted the Iroquois, that Hutchins describes them as too indolent to obtain skins enough to barter for clothing.
Pittman's account of them is much to the same effect. Ile counts their male adults at three hundred and fifty, whom it
.
askash Cahokia
by
La Prairie de Roche
Farkaskias River
28 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
is a mockery to call warriors. If they slunk before the braver tribes towards the Wisconsin, they had, in the Miami confeder- acy, other warlike neighbors to repress them on the side of the Wabash. The white population of all this country, including that at Vincennes, was perhaps not far from two thousand, consisting almost wholly of French, who from ties with the Indians, or from habits of content, had not sought to escape the English rule, though they objected to serve as British militia. Perhaps English observers exaggerated their social degradation, but Lieutenant Fraser, who had just been among them, called them debauched and every way disgraced by drunken habits.
Such was the country, in climate, soil, and denizen, white and red, which was now attracting attention. Sir William Johnson was writing of its capabilities to the Board of Trade, and di- The reasons which he
recting thither the notice of Conway. urged for making it the seat of a British colony were that an English population would prevent the practice promoted by the four hundred French families already there, of sending furs down to New Orleans. The commander at Fort Chartres had been unsuccessful in prohibiting this, and the Spanish traders went with impunity up the Illinois and Wabash rivers. Gen- eral Gage asked Don Ulloa at New Orleans to prevent this, and a little later ordered armed boats to patrol the river to inter- cept the outlaws. Johnson's plan included the maintaining of English posts on the east bank of the Mississippi, the acquir- ing lands of the Indians and settling soldiers upon them, and the creation of a land company, which would agree to settle an occupant on every hundred acres.
Meanwhile, General Phineas Lyman, in behalf of some offi- cers of the late war, was writing to Shelburne, and developing schemes by which he would establish colonies all along the Mississippi from western Florida to the Falls of St. Anthony.
The active mind of Haldimand worked over, as we shall see, the problem in his quarters at Pensacola, and he sent a plan to Gage, now in New York, who forwarded it to the home govern- ment. This plan outlined a military colony at the Natchez, and advocated the making of small grants of land to the Louisi- ana French along the river, in order to induce them to settle upon them and so escape a servitude to the Spanish, which had now become their palpable fate.
,
29
NEW ORLEANS.
To understand the attitude of Haldimand's mind and the con- ditions which prevailed in the lower parts of the Mississippi, it is necessary to revert to the influenees which the secret treaty of 1763 were exerting in that region.
New Orleans at this time contained, within a stockade having a cireuit of about two and a half miles, not far from four thou- sand souls. This population for the most part was living in some seven or eight hundred dwellings, standing as a rule in gardens of their own. These houses, built of timber, with brick filling, were of a single floor, elevated about eight feet from the soil so as to furnish storage below. The wet ground, in fact, did not admit of digging cellars. The occupants of the out- skirts were mostly Germans and Aeadians, seattered along the river on both sides, nearly to the Iberville. Including these, the entire population of the town and its dependencies may have reached near ten thousand souls. In seasons of high water they were all living in some danger of inundation, for the rush- ing river at such times was only kept to its channel by an unsubstantial levee, which extended for about fifty miles up and down its banks.
Several travelers have left us their observations of New Orleans at a period just subsequent to the Peace of Paris.
Captain de Pages, of the French navy, whom we have already mentioned, speaks of seeing Tonicas and Choctaws in the town, bringing fish, fruit, and game to barter for brandy and trinkets. The more active merchants, however, were rarely in the town except to replenish their supplies, and were usually up the river in search of peltry. They oftener than otherwise wintered on the St. Francis River, which entered the Mississippi on the western side, ninety miles below the Ohio. From this place they sent their furs and salted meats to New Orleans for a market. In the season of travel, they moved up the river in little flotillas of bateaux, which were generally of about forty tons burden, and were manned by eighteen or twenty hands. It took about three months to row, pole, and warp such crafts from New Orleans to the Illinois country, and the bargemen were often obliged at night to guard their camps from the attacks of the Chiekasaws and other maranders. Arrived at the upper waters of the Mississippi, the paekmen scattered along the various trails. They were found on the higher reaches
30 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
of the Missouri, and were known to be in the habit of ascend- ing that river three and four hundred leagues, gathering that trade of which the English were now so covetous. They went among the Sionx in the region west of Lake Superior. They even turned east towards Canada, and are thought to have instigated the savages of the Great Lakes to hostile demonstra- tions against the English. We find more or less contemporary testimony on these points in such observers as Lieutenant John Thomas, of the Royal Artillery, and Philip Pittman, who had passed from the Illinois region down the valley to Pensacola. But in March, 1764, a Colonel Robertson, who had just arrived at New York from New Orleans, assured Gage that the French in Louisiana were certainly not instigating the upper tribes against Detroit.
Pensacola was now become the centre of English interests on the Gulf shore, and had attained a prominence that it never had possessed under the Spanish rule. It had been promptly occu- pied by the English in 1763. The post then consisted of a high stockade, inclosing some miserable houses, and there were a few equally dismal habitations without the defenses. Such was the place where Bouquet, now a brigadier, had been put in com- mand in August, 1765, as a fit field for his recognized abilities, and where the southern fever was in a few days to cut short a ' brilliant career. Whoever the commander, Pensacola was des- tined to be the centre from which the English were to control, as best they could, the. conflicting interests of the neighbor- ing tribes, and gain what advantage was possible from their treaty rights of navigation along the Mississippi. The prin- cipal savage peoples within the radius of this influence were the Choetaws, the Creeks, and the Chickasaws, and they presented some perplexing problems. The Choetaws were for a time dis- tracted by the rival solicitations of the French and English and warring with the Chiekasaws; but this conflict the English after a while checked, only to turn the Choctaws against the Creeks, now angry with the English traders, and discontented with the absence of gifts, which the French had taught them to expect of Europeans. In their restless condition they were marauding along the English borders, but they promptly dis- owned their young warriors if they were apprehended, - per-
Chicasan's R.
CHERA
gee R.
rakces or
KEES
River Hogohegecor Callamay
el
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Cher
Talassee
...........
Gr. Telliquot:
Sapone
artending Westward to the Mifo-
ifpi and Northward to the Six
Kittowa
Natlond was Surrendered by Treaty
Seecover
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of Great Britain
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The Extent of the
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The above map, showing the relative positions of the Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws, is a section from one in The American Gastheer, vol. i., London, 1702.
Saxegotha Ter
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The Little
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The Corgitry of the Cherakees
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Thechipout of Symphe
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L
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3
32 LOUISIANA, FLORIDA, AND THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY.
haps more promptly than the English disowned the " crackers," as the lawless whites of the borders were called. The English would have been glad to play off some of the lesser tribes against both Choctaws and Creeks, but the Alibamons were flying north to escape the toils. The English even thought of luring the Natchez, because of their hatred of the French, to cross the Mississippi and stand as a barrier against their savage neighbors ; but the scheme was hardly practicable. The Creeks growing troublesome, Governor Johnston, who had succeeded Bouquet, had determined, in October, 1766, to attack them, while Gage was advising that Johnston should draw in for safety his distant garrisons. When Johnston's purpose was known to the home government, it dreaded a general uprising of the tribes, and recalled him for his rashness. Haldimand was now ordered to take his place, and enforce a more peaceful policy. So one of the first matters to which the new governor, on his arrival early in 1767, directed his attention was how to divert from the lower Mississippi the trade of the Illinois country.
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