USA > Ohio > Greene County > History of Greene County, together with historic notes on the northwest and the state of Ohio > Part 7
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The governor declined sending troops to protect the Iroquois against their enemies, but informed them: "You must be sensible that the Dowaganhaes, Twichtwicks, etc., and other remote Indians, are vastly more numerous than you Five Nations, and that, by their continued warring upon you, they will, in a few years, totally destroy you. I should, therefore, think it prudence and good policy in you to try all possible means to fix a trade and correspondence with all those nations, by which means you would reconcile them to yourselves, and with my assistance, I am in hopes that, in a short time, they might be united with us in the covenant chain, and then you might at all times, without hazard, go hunting into their country, which, I understand, is much the best for beaver. I wish you would try to bring some of them to speak to me, and perhaps I might prevail upon them to come and live amongst you. I should think myself obliged to reward you for such a piece of service as I tender your good advantage, and will always use my best endeavor to preserve you from all your enemies.
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The conference continued several days, during which the Iroquois stated their grievances in numerons speeches, to which the governor graciously replied, using vague terms and making no promises, after the manner of the extract from his speech above quoted, but placed great stress on the value of the fur trade to the English, and enjoining his brothers, the Iroquois, to bring all their peltries to Albany; to maintain their old alliance with the English, offensive and defensive, and have no intercourse whatever, of a friendly nature, with the rascally French of Canada.
The Iroquois declined to follow the advice of the governor, deeming it of little credit to their courage to sue for peace. In the meantime the governor sent emissaries out among the Miamis, with an invitation to open a trade with the English. The messengers were captured by the commandant at Detroit, and sent, as prisoners, to Canada. However, the Miamis, in July, 1702, sent, through the sachems of the Five Nations, a message to the governor at Albany, advising him that many of the Miamis, with another nation, had removed to, and were then living at, Tjughsaghrondie, near by the fort which the French had built the previous summer ; that they had been informed that one of their chiefs, who had visited Albany two years before, had been kindly treated, and that they had now come forward to inquire into the trade of Albany, and see if goods could not be purchased there cheaper than elsewhere, and that they had intended to go to Canada with their beaver and peltries, but that they ventured to Albany to inquire if goods could not be secured on better terms. The governor replied that he was extremely pleased to speak with the Miamis about the establishment of a lasting friend- ship and trade, and in token of his sincere intentions presented his guests with guns, powder, hats, strouds, tobacco and pipes, and sent to their brethren at Detroit, waumpum, pipes, shells, nose and ear jewels, looking-glasses, fans, children's toys, and such other light articles as his guests could conveniently carry ; and, finally, assured them that the Miamis might come freely to Albany, where they would be treated kindly, and receive, in exchange for their peltries, everything as cheap as any other Indians in covenant of friendship with the English.
During the same year (1702) the Miamis and Senecas settled their quarrels, exchanged prisoners, and established a peace between them- selves.
The French were not disposed to allow a portion of the fur trade to be diverted to Albany. Peaceable means were first used to dis-
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URGED TO UNITE AT ONE PLACE.
suade the Miamis from trading with the English; failing in this, forcible means were resorted to. Captain Antoine De La Mothe Cadillac marched against the Miamis and reduced them to terms.
The Miamis were not unanimous in the choice of their friends. Some adhered to the French, while others were strongly inclined to trade with the English, of whom they could obtain a better quality of goods at cheaper rates, while at the same time they were allowed a greater price for their furs. Cadillac had hardly effected a coercive peace with the Miamis before the latter were again at Albany. "I have," writes Lord Cournbury to the Board of Trade, in a letter dated August 20, 1708, " been there five years endeavoring to get these nations (referring to the Miamis and another nation) to trade with our people, but the French have always dissuaded them from coming until this year, when, goods being very scarce, they came to Albany, where our people have supplied them with goods much cheaper than ever the French did, and they promise to return in the spring with a much greater number of their nations, which would be a very great advantage to this province. I did, in a letter of the 25th day of June last, inform your Lordships that three French soldiers, having deserted from the French at a place they call Le Destroit, came to Albany. Another deserter came from the same place, whom I examined myself, and I inclose a copy of his exam- ination, by which your Lordships will perceive how easily the French may be beaten out of Canada. The better I am acquainted with this country, and the more I inquire into matters, so much the more I am confirmed in my opinion of the facility of effecting that conquest, and by the method I then proposed."
Turning to French documents, we find that Sieur de Callier desired the Miamis to withdraw from their several widely separated villages and settle in a body upon the St. Joseph. At a great council of the westward tribes, held in Montreal in 1694, the French Intendant, in a speech to the Miamis, declares that "he will not believe that the Miamis wish to obey him until they make altogether one and the same fire, either at the River St. Joseph or at some other place adjoining it. He tells them that he has got near the Iroquois, and has soldiers at Katarakoui, in the fort that had been abandoned ; that the Miamis must get near the enemy, in order to imitate him (the Intendant), and be able to strike the Iroquois the more readily. My children," continued the Intendant, "tell me that the Miamis are numerous, and able of themselves to destroy the Iroquois. Like them, all are afraid. What ! do you wish to abandon your country
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to your enemy ? . . Have you forgotten that I waged war against him principally on your account, alone? Your dead are no longer visible in his country ; their bodies are covered by those of the French who have perished to avenge them. I furnished you the means to avenge them likewise. It depends only on me to receive the Iroquois as a friend, which I will not do on account of you, who would be destroyed were I to make peace without including you in its terms."
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"I have heard," writes Governor Vaudreuil, in a letter dated the 28th of October, 1719, to the Council of Marine at Paris, " that the Miamis had resolved to remain where they were, and not go to the St. Joseph River, and that this resolution of theirs was dangerous, on ac- count of the facility they would have of communicating with the English, who were incessantly distributing belts secretly among the nations, to attract them to themselves, and that Sieur Dubinson had been designed to command the post of Ouaytanons, where he should use his influence among the Miamis to induce them to go to the River St. Joseph, and in case they were not willing, that he should re- main with them, to counteract the effect of those belts, which had already caused eight or ten Miami canoes to go that year to trade at Albany, and which might finally induce all of the Miami nation to follow the example." Finally, some twenty-five years later, as we learn from the letter of M. de Beauharnois, that this French officer, having learned that the English had established trading magazines on the Ohio, issued his orders to the commandants among the Weas and Mi- amis, to drive the British off by force of arms and plunder their stores.
Other extracts might be drawn from the voluminous reports of the military and civil officers of the French and British colonial govern- ments respectively, to the same purport as those already quoted; but enough has been given to illustrate the unfortunate position of the Miamis. For a period of half a century they were placed between the cutting edges of English and French purposes, during which there was no time when they were not threatened with danger of, or engaged in, actual war either with the French or the English, or with some of their several Indian allies. By this continual abrasion, the peace and happiness which should have been theirs was wholly lost, and their numbers constactly reduced. They had no relief from the strife, in which only injury could result to themselves, let the issue have been what it might between the English and the French, until the power of the latter was finally destroyed in 1763; and even then, after the French had given up the country, the Miamis were compelled to de-
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DECLINE OF THE MIAMIS.
fend their own title to it against the arrogant claims of the English. In the effort of the combined westward tribes to wrest their country from the English, subsequent to the close of the colonial war, the Mi- amis took a conspicuous part. This will be noticed in a subsequent chapter. After the conclusion of the revolutionary war, the several Miami villages from the Vermilion River to Fort Wayne suffered severely from the attacks of the federal government under General Harmer, and the military expeditions recruited in Kentucky, and com- manded by Colonels Scott and Wilkinson. Besides these disasters, whole villages were nearly depopulated by the ravages of small-pox. The uncontrollable thirst for whisky, acquired through a long course of years, by contact with unscrupulous traders, reduced their numbers still more, while it degraded them to the last degree. This was their condition in 1814, when General Harrison said of them : " The Miamis will not be in our way. They are a poor, miserable, drunken set, diminishing every year. Becoming too lazy to hunt, they feel the ad- vantage of their annuities. The fear of the other Indians has alone prevented them from selling their whole claim to the United States ; and as soon as there is peace, or when the British can no longer in- trigue, they will sell." The same authority, in his historical address at Cincinnati in 1838, on the aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio, says : "At any time before the treaty of Greenville in 1795 the Miamis alone could have furnished more than three thousand warriors. Con- stant war with our frontier had deprived them of many of their braves, but the ravages of small-pox was the principal cause of the great de- crease in their numbers. They composed, however, a body of the finest light troops in the world. And had they been under an efficient system of discipline, or possessed enterprise equal to their valor, the settlement of the country would have been attended with much greater difficulty than was encountered in accomplishing it, and their final sub- jugation would have been delayed for some years."
Yet their decline, from causes assigned, was so rapid, that when the Baptist missionary, Isaac McCoy, was among them from 1817 until 1822, and drawing conclusions from personal contact, declared that the Miamis were not a warlike people. There is, perhaps, in the history of the North American Indians, no instance parallel to the utter de- moralization of the Miamis, nor an example of a tribe which stood so high and had fallen so low through the practice of all the vices which degrade human beings. Mr. McCoy, within the period named, traveled up and down the Wabash, from Terre Haute to Fort Wayne; and at the villages near Montezuma, on Eel River, at the Missis-
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sinewa and Fort Wayne, there were continuous rounds of drunken debauchery whenever whisky could be obtained, of which men, women and children all partook, and life was often sacrificed in personal broils or by exposure of the debauchees to the inclemency of the weather.
By treaties, entered into at various times, from 1795 to 1845, in- clusive, the Miamis ceded their lands in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, and removed west of the Mississippi, going in villages or by detach- ments, from time to time. At a single cession in 1838 they sold the government 177,000 acres of land in Indiana, which was only a frag- ment of their former possessions, still retaining a large tract. Thus they alienated their heritage, and gradually disappeared from the val- leys of the Maumee and Wabash. A few remained on their reserva- tions and adapted themselves to the ways of the white people, and their descendants may be occasionally met with about Peru, Wabash and Fort Wayne. The money received from sales of their lands proved to them a calamity, rather than a blessing, as it introduced the most demoralizing habits. It is estimated that within a period of eighteen years subsequent to the close of the war of 1812 more than five hundred of them perished in drunken broils and fights.
The last of the Miamis to go westward were the Mississinewa band. This remnant comprising in all three hundred and fifty persons, under charge of Christmas Dagney, left their old home in the fall of 1846, and reached Cincinnati on canal boats in October of that year. Here they were placed upon a steamboat and taken down the Ohio, up the Mississippi and Missouri, and landed late in the season at Westport, near Kansas City. Ragged men and nearly naked women and chil- dren, forming a motley group, were huddled upon the shore, alone, with no friends to relieve their wants, and exposed to the bitter December winds that blew from the chilly plains of Kansas. In 1670 the Jesuit Father Dablon introduces the Miamis to our notice at the village of Maskoutench, where we see the chief surrounded by his officers of state in all the routine of barbaric display, and the natives of other tribes paying his subjects the greatest deference. The Miamis, advancing eastward, in the rear of the line of their valorous warriors, pushed their villages into Michigan, Indiana, and as far as the river still bearing their name in Ohio. Coming in collision with the French, English and Americans, reduced by constant wars, and deci- mated, more than all, with vices contracted by intercourse with the whites, whose virtues they failed to emulate, they make a westward turn, and having, in the progress of time, described the round of a
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REMOVAL WESTWARD.
most singular journey, we at last behold the miserable and friendless remnant on the same side of the Mississippi from whence their war- like progenitors had come nearly two centuries before.
From Westport the Mississinewas were conducted to a place near the present village of Lowisburg, Kansas, in the county named (Miami) after the tribe. Here they suffered greatly. Nearly one third of their number died the first year. They were homesick and discon- solate to the last degree. "Strong men would actually weep, as their thoughts recurred to their dear old homes in Indiana, whither many of them would make journeys, barefooted, begging their way, and sub- mitting to the imprecations hurled from the door of the white man upon them as they asked for a crust of bread. They wanted to die to forget their miseries." "I have seen," says Mrs. Mary Baptiste to the author, " mothers and fathers give their little children away to others of the tribe for adoption, and after singing their funeral songs, and joining in the solemn dance of death, go calmly away from the assemblage, to be seen no more alive. The Miamis could not be recon- ciled to the prairie winds of Kansas ; they longed for the woods and groves that gave a partial shade to the flashing waters of the Wa-pe- sha. .
The Wea and Piankeshaw bands preceded the Mississinewas to the westward. They had become reduced, to a wretched community of about two hundred and fifty souls, and they suffered severely during the civil war, in Kansas. The Miamis, Weas, Piankeshaws, and the remaining fragments of the Kaskaskias, containing under that name what yet remained of the several subdivisions ot the old Illini confed- eracy were gathered together by Baptiste Peoria, and consolidated under the title of The Confederated Iribes. This little confedera- tion disposed of their reservation in Miami county, Kansas, and adjacent vicinity, and retired to a tract of reduced dimensions within the Indian Territory. Since their last change of location in 1867 they have made but little progress in their efforts toward a higher civiliza- tion. The numbers of what remains of the once numerous Illinois and Miami confederacies are reduced to less than two hundred persons. The Miamis, like the unfortunate man who has carried his dissipations beyond the limit from which there can be no healthy reaction, seem not to have recovered from the vices contracted before leaving the states, and with some notable exceptions, they are a listless, idle people, little worthy of the spirit that inspired the breasts of their ancestors.
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CHAPTER VII.
THE SHAWNEES AND DELAWARES.
THE SHAWNEES were a branch of the Algonquin family, and in manners and customs bore a strong resemblance to the Delawares. They were the Bedouins of the wilderness, and their wanderings form a notable instance in the history of the nomadic races of North America. Before the arrival of the Europeans the Shawnees lived on the shores of the great lakes eastward of Cleveland. At that time the principal Iroquois villages were on the northern side of the lakes, above Montreal, and this tribe was under a species of subjec- tion to the Adirondacks, the original tribe from whence the several Algonquin tribes are alleged to have sprung, and made "the planting of corn their business." .
" The Adirondacks, however. values themselves as delighting in a more manly employment, and despised the Iroquois in following a business which they thought only fit for women. But it once hap- pened that game failed the Adirondacks, which made them desire some of the young men of the Iroquois to assist them in hunting. These young men soon became much more expert in hunting, and able to endure fatigues, than the Adirondacks expected or desired ; in short, they became jealous of them, and one night murdered all the young men they had with them." The chiefs of the Iroquois complained. but the Adirondacks treated their remonstrances with contempt, without being apprehensive of the resentment of the Iroquois, "for they looked upon them as women."
The Iroquois determined on revenge, and the Adirondacks, hear- ing of it, declared war. The Iroquois made but feeble resistance, and were forced to leave their country and fly to the south shores of the lakes, where they ever afterward lived. "Their chiefs, in order to. raise their people's spirits, turned them against the Satanas, a less war- like nation, who then lived on the shores of the lakes." The Iro- quois soon subdued the Satanas, and drove them from their country.
In 1632 the Shawnees were on the south side of the Delaware.
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THEIR REMOVAL FROM FLORIDA.
From this time the Iroquois pursued them, each year driving. them farther southward. Forty years later they were on the Tennessee, and Father Marquette, in speaking of them, calls them Chaouanons, which was the Illinois word for southerners, or people from the south, so termed because they lived to the south of the Illinois cantons. The Iroquois still waged war upon the Shawness, driving them to the ex- tremities mentioned in the extracts quoted from Father Marquette's journal. To escape further molestation from the Iroquois, the Shaw- nees continued a more southern course, and some of their bands pen- etrated the extreme southern states. The Suwanee River, in Florida, derived its name from the fact that the Shawnees once lived upon its banks. Black Iloof, the renowned chief of this tribe, was born in Florida, and informed Gen. Harrison, with whom for many years he was upon terms of intimacy, that he had often bathed in the. sea.
" It is well known that they were at a place which still bears their name on the Ohio, a few miles below the mouth of the Wabash, some time before the commencement of the revolutionary war, where they remained before their removal to the Scioto, where they were found in the year 1774 by Gov. Dunmore. Their removal from Florida was a necessity, and their progress from thence a flight rather than a delib- erate march. This is evident from their appearance when they pre- sented themselves upon the Ohio and claimed protection of the Miamis. They are represented by the chiefs of the Miamis and Dela- wares as supplicants for protection, not against the Iroquois, but against the Creeks and Seminoles, or some other southern tribe, who had driven them from Florida, and they are said to have been literally sans provant et sans culottes [hungry and naked].
After their dispersion by the Iroquois, remnants of the tribe were found in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, but after the return of the main body from the south, they became once more united, the Pennsylvania band leaving that colony about the same time that the Delawares did. During the forty years following that period, the whole tribe was in a state of perpetual war with America, either as British colonies or as independent states. By the treaty of Greenville, they lost nearly all the territory they had been permitted to occupy north of the Ohio.
In 1819 they were divided into four tribes-the Pequa, the Mequachake,the Chillicothe, and the Kiskapocoke. The latter tribe was the one to which Tecumseh belonged. They were always hostile to the United States, and joined every coalition against the government. In 1806 they separated from the rest of the tribe, and took up their
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residence at Greenville. Soon afterward they removed to their former place of residence on Tippecanoe Creek, Indiana.
At the close of Gen. Wayne's campaign, a large body of the Shaw- nees settled near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, upon a tract of land granted to them and the Delawares in 1793, by Baron de Carondelet, governor of the Spanish provinces west of the Mississippi.
From their towns in eastern Ohio, the Shawnees spread north and westward to the headquarters of the Big and Little Miamis, the St. Mary's, and the Au Glaize, and for quite a distance down the Maumee. They had extensively cultivated fields upon these streams, which, with their villages, were destroyed by Gen. Wayne on his return from the victorious engagement with the confederated tribes on the field of "fallen timbers." Gen. Harmer, in his letter to the Secretary of War, communicating the details of his campaign on the Maumee, in October, 1790, gives a fine description of the country, and the loca- tion of the Shawnee, Delaware and Miami villages, in the neighbor- hood of Fort Wayne, as they appeared at that early day. We quote : "The savages and traders (who were, perhaps, the worst savages of the two) had evacuated their towns,and burnt the principal village called the Omee, together with all the traders' houses. This village lay on a pleasant point, formed by the junction of the rivers Omee and St. Joseph. It was situate on the east 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 defenceless inhabitants. This day we advanced nearly the same distance, and kept nearly the same course as yesterday ; 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 sav- ages and their trading allies had been thrown by the approach of the army. Many valuables of the traders were destroyed in the confus- ion, 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. ated 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, con- sisting together of about forty-five houses, lay a few miles up the St. Mary's, and were inhabited by Delawares. Thirty-six houses occu-
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