USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 4
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The conclusion of Parkman is that "La Salle discovered the Ohio, and in all probability the Illinois also, but that he discovered the Mississippi has not been proved, nor in the light of the evidence we have, is it likely." Winsor, a more recent authority, says: "Mar- gry [the main champion for La Salle of the honor of discovering the Mississippi] has ceased of late years to claim that LaSalle reached the Mississippi by the Ohio, but is content to assert that he did noth- ing more than to follow the stream to some distance."
There can be no profitable denial, however, of the greatness of La Salle and the tremendous energy that carried him through a career of discovery and adventure unparalleled in the West, and sustained him in misfortunes that would have crushed an ordinary man. Save
* In the map of Monet (1685) the upper Ohio is called the Ouabache ( Wabash). the lower Ohio the Choucagna (Chicago). In 1688 the name "Ohio" or Belle Riviere appears on the map of Franquelin. LaHontan's map, a little later, shows "Lac Errie or De Conti," with some correctness, and south of it a dotted line marked, "The route that the Illinois, Oumamis, and other savages take by Iand, same as the Yroques follow to make war with savage nations as far as the Mississippi."
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THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
De Soto, and he had an army to support him, there is no hero in the early history of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys to compare with this Robert Cavelier. We next hear of him as seigneur of Fort Frontenac, on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario, the first French fort that far west, where, aided by his family in France, he might have quietly rested, ruled all the lake and grown wealthy in the fur trade. But he was determined to extend his influence and that of France, to the great rivers southwestward. In one of his visits to Europe he secured a helper of like spirit, Henri de Tonty, an Ital- ian, and in 1678 they established a fort at Niagara. Above the falls, carrying the material twelve miles, they built the Griffin, the first sail boat on Lake Erie. This pioneer of the wonderful inland navy of the great lakes, of forty-five tons burden and carrying five small cannon, was launched in 1679. In it La Salle and Tonty sailed to Mackinac and up Lake Michigan. From St. Joseph the boat was sent back for supplies, and was never again seen. Going down the Kankakee and Illinois, La Salle and Tonty built Fort Crèvecœur near Peoria, and then the indomitable captain sent Hennepin to explore the Mississippi. He returned on foot and by canoe over Lake Erie, to Fort Frontenac, to find his property seized by creditors, his supply ship from France wrecked on the coast, and a band of deserters who had destroyed Fort Crevecoeur and the post at St. Joseph seeking to waylay and kill him. While he was surmounting these difficulties, the jealous Iroquois, being informed of his traffic with the Western Indians, journeyed to that distant country, through the forests of Ohio and Indiana, and according to their story, utterly destroyed the chief town of the Illinois and drove its inhabitants across the Mississippi.
Under such circumstances, with the influence of the Jesuits against him, La Salle regained his credit, returned to Illinois, hunted the wilderness for Tonty, went down the Mississippi in 1682, returned to France, sailed at the head of a fleet to establish French dominion at the month of the great river, and though he failed and died in the wilds of Texas, succeeded in giving the impulse of enter- prise that resulted in founding the vast interior empire of New France, from the St. Lawrence and Lake Superior to the Gulf. Already, at Sault St. Marie, the sovereignty of "the most high, mighty and redoubtable monarch, Louis, fourteenth of that name, king of France and of Navarre," had been proclaimed over all lands between the seas of the north and west and the South sea.
Meanwhile the enemies of French dominion were active. Renew- ing their career of conquest, the Iroquois established their towns as far west as the Cuyahoga, routed the Canois in West Virginia; dis- persed the Shawanees who had their seat on the Skenota or Deer river (Seiota), followed them across the Ohio and drove them from the "meadow land" (Kentakce), and made war on the Cherokees.
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
Long before this, in the east, the Andastes (the tribe that bore spe- cially the title of Mengwe), had been reduced to subjection, and the most dangerous enemy of the Iroquois, the Delawares or Lenni Lenape, had been persuaded by the Iroquois and Dutch together to abjure war and take the part of arbitrators and mediators. As it was always left for the women to demand peace, this diplomatic tri- umph was called by the Iroquois "putting petticoats on the Dela- wares," and the latter were denied the title of men.
The supremacy of the Iroquois throughout the lake region, south to the Tennessee river, and west into the Manmee and Illinois coun- try, meant British trade supremacy in the Ohio valley, if not actual possession, and the severing of the French domain. The situation demanded vigorous effort on the part of the French. Negotiation was given a trial in a conference held with the Iroquois in 1684 at the Cuyahoga river, but this was unavailing, and the haughty lords of the west continued their forays against the Manmees, Illinois and Ottawas. The crisis arrived in 1686 when two New York trading parties, composed mainly of those hardy Irish and Scotch-Irish who were the pioneers of British power in the interior, ventured to navi- gate Lake Erie and trespass upon the Huron trade. They were promptly arrested and sent out of the country, and next year the mar- quis Denonville, governor of Canada, rebuilt Fort Niagara in the country claimed by the Iroquois, and, aided by a force of western Indians, ravaged the Seneca towns. Governor Dongan, of New York, remonstrated against the invasion of the Iroquois country, and inquired why the New York traders were captured in a land where they had a right to be, under the covenant chain with the Five Nations, who were lords of the domain. Why not let the British have a finger in the pie, he inquired. "If the sheep's fleece be the thing in dispute, pray let the king of England have some part of it."*
The French langhed at the Iroquois claim to the west, but soon found occasion to admit the Iroquois power. The Five Nations, under some great leader whose name has vanished, destroyed Fort Niagara, invaded Canada itself (1688-89), ravaged the whole eoun- try in the west, up to the gates of Montreal. Dongan proposed to seize the island of Mackinaw, but the ambitious project was aban- doned. The Iroquois occupied the country north of Lake Erie, and on the south pushed westwardly to the confines of the territory held in Ohio by the Maumee nation. This strong confederation of tribes, with its seats of power on the three rivers rising in northwest Ohio that were the channels of ancient transportation, the Maumee of Lake Erie, the Miami that gave a canoe route to the Ohio, and the Wabash that led to the Mississippi, vigorously resisted the extension of Iroquois conquest. There was continual war in Ohio between the
* The Ohio Valley in Colonial Days," Berthold Fernow.
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THE ANCIENT DOMAIN.
two nations, whose outpost tribes, the Senecas for the Iroquois and Twigtwees for the Maumees, bore the brunt of the conflict. In 1696 the Iroquois and Canada made a peace that lasted for sixty years, but the hostilities continued in Ohio, with such success on the part of the western red men that the haughty Iroquois were forced to ask the governor of New York to intervene .*
* Journal of Capt. William Trent, notes by Goodman.
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CHAPTER II.
THE WAR AROUND THE WORLD.
COLONIAL CHARTERS-INTRIGUES FOR INDIAN TRADE-EXPEDITION OF CELORON-CROGHAN, MONTOUR AND GIST-EVENTS AT PICK- AWILLANY-THE SKIRMISH THAT SET THE WORLD ON FIRE- BRADDOCK'S CAMPAIGN-FOUNDING OF PITTSBURG-EXPEDITION OF ROGERS-THE MORAVIANS-PONTIAC'S WAR.
T HE BRITISH colonists, though laggards in the work of ex- ploring west of the Alleghanies, were not slow in seeking the trade of the Indians in that region, or asserting their claims to sovereignty. Under the charter of 1609 Vir- ginia claimed "all lands, countries and territories" two hundred miles south from Point Comfort and as far north, "and up into the main- land throughout from sea to sea west and northwest." The crown treated this grant as annulled, and chartered Pennsylvania, Mary- land and North Carolina within its limits, but Virginia went to the verge of war in later years for a part of the Quaker dominion. Massa- chinsetts and Connectient also had charters for land from sea to sea. In 1701 the Iroquois made a sort of quit elaim of the country north- west of the Ohio to New York, and in 1726 Governor Burnet obtained a deed of trust to King George of a strip along the south shore of Lake Erie as far west as the Cuyahoga. But the French were the only explorers and possessors, except some Virginians sent out by General Wood in 1671, who claimed to have traced the Kana- wha river down to the falls.
Before 1690, as has been noted, Irish traders were in the Ohio region, but the Manmees continued to be firm supporters of France and an embassy from the earl of Bellemonte, governor of New York, was sent as prisoners to Canada. The Iroquois war toward the close of the century went against the western nation, and in 1702 a peace was made, and part of the nation agreed to trade with the British colonists, and compelled M. de Jucheran and a party of Canadians to abandon their projected settlement on the lower Wabash. At this time France and England were at war, both involved in that great
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THE WAR AROUND THE WORLD.
struggle that was incited by the succession of the Bourbons to the throne of Spain, in which the English Marlborough upheld the right of Queen Anne to the throne of England, where France would have put a Stuart, and the rival French and British colonists were urged to greater effort in their struggle for Ohio and the Northwest. In 1705 Governor Vaudreuil, of Canada, sent M. de Vincennes to persuade the Maumees to expel the British traders, and this was followed by a military expedition, under Cadillac, to force a recon- ciliation, but a few years later the Manmees sent a delegation to New York to talk of trade relations. In the midst of the European war the king of Spain, who had not yet recognized the right of the French in the Mississippi valley, ceded France all the vast interior claimed under the name of Louisiana, including Ohio, and this was confirmed by the treaty of Utrecht, 1713. By the same treaty, which termin- ated the conflict at that time between England and France, the Iro- quois were recognized as subjects of Great Britain not to be molested by the French, and England at the same time agreed to keep peace with the Indians of the West who were under French influence. The subjects of each nation were to enjoy full liberty going and coming in trade.
But in spite of the peace the Iroquois influence and the proximity of the British settlements seem to have closed eastern Ohio against French trade. The Iroquois barrier extended westward to the San- dusky at least. Beyond them lay the Maumees, divided in allegiance to France, receiving British traders on the Wabash as early as 1715. At Kekionga, the main Maumee town, at the head of the Maumee river, and near where the portage was made from that river to the Wabash, forming the shortest channel of transportation from Can- ada to Louisiana, a French mission was planted early in the century. In 1719 a post was established on the Wabash among the Weas (Ouiatenon ), and some years later Post Vincennes was founded. In 1725 the French were asking the Maumees to renew the war on the Iroquois, in the hope that that might keep out British traders. But now and then French traders were killed, while the British were fav- ored, and the repeated intrigues of the French to involve the Mau- mees in war with the Iroquois or to drive out the English, failed of effect. Further east the first aggressive step of the French in oppo- sition to the adverse possession of the Iroquois and the British, that threatened the center of their long line of dominion from Quebec to New Orleans, was to rebuild Fort Niagara. New York made a coun- ter-move in 1725 by establishing the long-contemplated trading post and fort at Oswego. The French had the advantage in position here, and the New York traders were presently complaining that the fur packs from the distant "Wyaektenocks," Maumees and other tribes, were intercepted at Niagara.
Traders from the English colonies also established themselves on
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
the Ohio, as far down as Logstown (14 miles down the river from Pittsburg), and some adventurous spirits went much farther into the western wilds. Tradition says that John Howard, of Virginia, went down the Ohio to the Mississippi in 1742, and was made a prisoner by the French. In 1744 occurred the famous treaty of Lancaster, Pa., between representatives of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Vir- ginia, and the Iroquois nation ; Conrad Weiser, the great interpreter of that day, assisting. The Indians were persuaded to make certain concessions of land, under which the Virginia settlements were pushed west of the Alleghanies, but the treaty was repudiated by the red men as obtained by unworthy means, though a ratification was obtained in the same way at Logstown in 1732.
The English speaking traders who were endangering the suprem- aey of France in the west, were, if we may wholly accept the con- temporary accounts, to a considerable extent unprincipled or lawless. Poor Mary Harris, captured at the burning of Deerfield, Mass., in 1704, and reared among the red men, with her home finally on the Walhonding, remembered that in her childhood they used to be very religious in New England, and wondered how white men could be so wicked as they were in the woods.# But whatever their failings, the traders were enterprising and tireless travelers. To the number of three hundred a year they went over the Alleghanies, their goods packed on the baeks of horses, and followed the Indian trails and buffalo tracks into the interior, or floated down the Ohio in eanoes. Some crossed the Mississippi and traded with the Osages.
George Croghan, whose name is the most conspicuous of all in this commereial invasion of the Ohio valley, had come to Pennsylvania from Ireland in 1743, and within three years was trading as far west as the Manmee country. In 1748 he had a trading house at the mouth of Beaver river, and others were soon established in the prin- cipal Ohio villages. He urged the policy adopted by Pennsylvania, of weaning the western Indians from the French by presents and trade concessions, and in 1747 he was sent out by the colonial gov- ernment to deliver presents to the various tribes, thank them for a French scalp sent in, and announce a proclamation prohibiting the trade in strong liquor.+ This prohibition, it may be said, was not effective, and the chiefs who thanked Croghan for it, suggested that as they had never tasted English rum, a little would be acceptable for experimental purposes.
During this first half of the eighteenth century there was a con- siderable resettlement of Ohio by Indian tribes. The Hurons or Wyandots, who had been driven west by the Iroquois and back from Lake Superior by the Sioux, to settle, greatly reduced in numbers,
* Gist's Journal.
t "Gist's Journal," note by W. M. Darlington.
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THE WAR AROUND THE WORLD.
about the French post of Detroit, pushed eastward to Sandusky * bay, and through central Ohio to the Beaver river, and began to assert a sovereignty over all the land between the Ohio and Lake Erie. The Ottawas (Ottaw' wahs), also exiles from upper Canada, shared the eastward migration of the Wyandots, and frequented the islands of Lake Erie and the peninsula of Sandusky. The Shawanees, after leaving their old homes on the banks of the Ohio and in Kentucky and Tennessee, had moved southward, some to the Carolina borders. In 1698 a considerable body settled on the upper Potomae, and many, returning from the south, moved into the country of the Delawares, where there had been Shawanees at the time of Penn's treaty. In 1728 some sought French protection on the Alleghany, and some, crowded ont of Pennsylvania with the Delawares, moved into south- ern and central Ohio west of the Seioto. Later, about 1755, other Shawanees came back to Ohio with a story of wanderings as far south as the salt water where there were ruins of white settlements, evi- dently middle Florida, where, according to some writers, they gave their name to the Suwannee river. Beginning in about 1740, the Delawares, by permission of the Wyandots, established towns on the upper Muskingung (Elk's Eve) river. Their most western town was on the Scioto, and their total military strength in Ohio was about five hundred warriors.
The friendship of the tribes was won by Croghan's poliey. Deelar- ing that the French traders had cheated his people, the Piankeshaw chief, ealled "Demoiselle," left his home near the French posts, and established himself at the site of an ancient town of the Twigtwees, a village ealled Pickawillany, ; on the Great Miami, north of the present town of Piqua. By reason of friendship to the Pennsylvania traders the chief earned the name of "Old Britain." His capital was a great rendezvous of traders, who built a log fort and storehouse and raised the British flag in the heart of the region elaimed by France. In 1747 the hostility roused against the French euhminated in the league of seventeen tribes, including some of the Iroquois, formed under the leadership of Nicholas, a Wyandot chief, who had estab- lished himself on Sandusky bay about 1745. Many French traders were killed in all parts of the west, and trading posts broken up. The Maumee fort was captured, but a timely warning saved Detroit
* It is said that the Wyandots bestowed the name Outsandoukie, meaning "there is pure water there." Another story is that Sandusky derives its name from Jonathan Sodowsky, also called Sandusky, who came to America in the time of Queen Anne, and was an Indian trader at that port. His son, James, built Sandusky's station in Kentucky about 1776, and Jacob, another son, went down the river to New Orleans in the same year.
+ According to Gist, the "Pickwaylinees" were a tribe of Twightwees. The name in various forms, Piqua and Pickway and Pickaway, became rather common in Ohio. The remarks in Howe's History regarding the correct form of the word, and the meaning of it, are evidently erroneous.
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
from falling into the hands of the conspirators. In the following year peace was made, the Maumee fort was rebuilt, and Nicholas abandoned his Sandusky village and retreated into the wilderness. But this Freneh victory was more than offset by the treaty of peace and commerce made by the Manmecs, Iroquois and Shawanees, at Lancaster, Pa., in 1748. In the following year the Manmees sent seventy-seven packs of skins to Oswego.
Not only were the western Indians being detached in friendship and commerce from the French, but schemes for English coloniza- tion in the Ohio valley were on foot toward the middle of the eight- eenth century. The Ohio company, formed in 1748, in which Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia council, and Augustine and Laurence, brothers of George Washington, were stockholders, was granted 200,000 acres south of the "river Alleghany, otherwise called Ohio," with a promise of 300,000 more when a fort should be built and a hundred families located. This meant encroachment upon the territory of Louisiana, which included, by the French claim, all the country drained by the Mississippi river and its tributaries.
While all these events were preparing a crisis in the relations of the French and English colonies, the mother countries were absorbed in the wars which followed the accession of Maria Theresa to the throne of Austria, and the attempted partition of her domain, begun by Frederick of Prussia and the king of Spain. When the quarrel between Frederick and Maria Theresa was quieted for a while by the treaty of Aix la Chapelle, in 1748, both France and England had time to listen to the complaints of their American colonists. France sent over as temporary governor of Canada the valiant Marquis de la Galissoniere, humpbacked but keen in intellect, and the chief repre- sentative in France of the spirit of American expansion. He was prompt, upon his arrival at Quebec, to announce the determination of France to hold the Ohio valley. The Sandusky and Manmec hostiles were subdued, and, in the summer of 1749, Celoron de Bienville (or Blainville), a captain of colonial troops and chevalier of St. Louis, was sent out to mark the elaims of New Franec and warn the Eng- lish trespassers. With fourteen officers, twenty French soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and a band of Indians, embarked in twenty-three birehbark canoes, Celoron sailed up Lake Ontario, port- aged around the falls of Niagara, coasted along Lake Erie to a portage, and, by Lake Chantanqua and its outlet, reached la Belle Riviere June 29th. On the south side, opposite the month of the Alleghany, he affixed the arms of France to a tree, and buried at its base a lead plate, which, according to its inscription, was "a token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the River Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all lands on both sides to the sources of the same, as the preceding kings of France have enjoyed or ought to have enjoyed, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by
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THE WAR AROUND THE WORLD.
treaties, notably by those of Ryswiek, Utrecht and Aix la Chapelle." They then floated down the river, or marched along its shore, "buried in the somber and dismal valley," as it was described by Father Bonnecamp, the astronomer of the expedition; posting the lilies of Franee upon the trees of the wilderness and burying their futile lead plates at the mouths of important tributaries. After passing a new town of the Wyandots, at the mouth of Beaver, where they were saluted in friendly spirit with volleys of musketry, they went through their ceremonies at the mouths of three rivers, one of which, the Muskingum, they called Yanange konan, Iroquois for "tobacco peo- ple," revealing the presence of the Wyandots. Soon afterward, they notieed the "Illinois cattle" (buffaloes) in small herds. At the mouth of the Sinhioto (Seioto) was found a village of sixty houses, of Chaouanons (Shawanees), who pierced the flag of Celoron's embassy with bullet-holes, but finally consented to an amicable eoun- cil. Here five English traders were ordered out of Ohio, as a larger party had been at the Big Beaver. A village of Maumees was found at the mouth of river Blanche (Little Miami), and on July 31st the party left the Ohio to go up the River of Rocks (Great Miami), to visit the redoubtable chief whom they ealled La Demoiselle. Though they tarried for some time at his village, "Old Britain" remained within his log fort, refused to see them, and trifled with Celoron's order to return to his former place. Burning their canoes, Celoron's party marehed northward, past the dilapidated French fort on the Maumee, and so on to Detroit. In traveling one hundred and eighty- one leagues on the Ohio river, said Father Bonneeamp, but twelve Indian villages were found, but the reports received indicated a greater population in the interior, among which the English traders were established. "Behold then," said he, "the English already within our territory, and, what is more, they are under the protee- tion of a crowd of savages whom they entice to themselves and whose number increases every day."
Celoron's expedition was followed by three very important events : the death of Conestoga, the great chief of the Iroquois nation; the sneeession of a chief who adhered to the Catholic church and was favorably disposed toward the French; and the capture in north- west Ohio and haling to Canada of some Pennsylvania traders. The Pennsylvania assembly, usually very cautious in expenditures, opened the colonial purse in this emergency. A hundred pounds were voted for the purchase of presents to the Iroquois, a hundred for the Twigtwees, and five hundred for "the natives of the Ohio" gen- erally, who were to be invited to a great eouneil in western Pennsyl- vania. About the same time, to plaeate the Delawares, the white settlements west of the Susquehanna were broken up, household goods moved, and cabins given to the torch,
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CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF OHIO.
The mission to the Indians was entrusted to George Croghan, and Andrew Montour, the "White Mingo," a picturesque character, of French Canadian and Indian descent, who was famous as an inter- preter of many Indian languages and exerted great influence for the English during the succeeding years. Ou state occasions he was a striking figure, attired in brown broadeloth coat, scarlet damaskeen waistcoat, breeches over which his shirt hung, the shoes and hat of civilization on his head and feet, and the favorite "basket-handle" pendants of the Indians dangling from his ears. These ambassadors of Pennsylvania commerce arrived at Logstown in November, 1750, and thence set out with a small party for an overland trip through Ohio, following the great trail to Pickawillany from the mouth of Beaver river.
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