USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 7
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The French in America doubtless encouraged this "conspiracy of Pontiac." Peace had not yet been concluded with England by for- mal treaty. While Great Britain was gathering the fruits of vic- tory in America, the war had continued in Europe, where Frederick, achieving wonderful victories and enduring erushing defeats, was in imminent danger of losing the fight. When Pitt was turned from power in 1761, the promise of the German empire of today could hardly have been read in the situation of Europe. But the oppor- tune death of Catherine turned the scale, and Russia became an ally instead of an enemy. France, siekened by losses of men and terri- tory, and exhausted in resources, proposed peace in 1762, and accepted the hard conditions imposed upon her by the treaty of Paris, February 10, 1763. Clinging to Canada and the Ohio valley, Choiseul, the French minister, warned the British that the moment Canada became English, the colonies, relieved of fear of foreign aggression, would shake off their dependence on Great Britain. But the warning was in vain. AAll Canada and the great islands of the coast, and all the interior east of the Mississippi, except the isle of Orleans, were ceded to Great Britain. France also gave up to Eng- land the land of Senegal in Africa, and in India all her gains and hopes of supremacy. Spain, having foolishly engaged in the war near its elose, in alliance with France, gave England Florida in con- sideration of the return of Havana and Manila, and thus Great Britain became the ruler of all North America east of the Mississippi. The country west of that river was ceded by France to Spain.
The valiant Maria Theresa was soon forced to make peace with Frederick, leaving Silesia in his hands, and the great struggle came
* During the series of Indian wars against the English colonies and armies, from the Acadian war in 1747 to the general league of the western tribes in 1763, he appears to have exercised the influence and power of an emperor, and hy this name he was sometimes known. He had fought with the French, at the head of his Indian allies, against the English, in the year 1747. He likewise took an active part in the memorable defeat of the Brit- ish and provincial army under General Braddock in 1755."-Taylor's His- tory of Ohio.
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to an end. It was estimated that over 850,000 soldiers of various nations had lost their lives in Germany and other hundreds of thou- sands were crippled by wounds or had died of famine and disease. To this may be added the losses of life and property in America, on the seas all round the world, and in both the Indies, to make up the total cost of the tremendous struggle that began with the war for Ohio.
Close upon the heels of the treaty of Paris came the carefully pre- meditated blow of Pontiac. The first fruit of the hostile alliance was shown in the expulsion of Post and Heckewelder from the Musk- ingum valley, and the killing of traders, but this was no part of the plan of Pontiac, who desired peace and secrecy till the moment arrived for a simultaneous attack on all the British posts. May, 1763, was the time selected, and with little variation in date, and no warning to the little garrisons in the west, the onslaught was made. The stockade at Sandusky was the first to fall, on the 16th. Ensign Paully, the commandant, admitted several Wyandots and Ottawas, on a professedly peaceful errand. While seated with them, a signal was made, Paully was seized, disarmed and bound, and shrieks and yells and the sound of musketry arose outside. When all was quiet again, Paully was led through the parade ground where the bodies of his men lay, and carried to the camp of Pontiac. Fortunately he was saved from torture and death by the fondness of an Indian widow, and in a few weeks he secured an opportunity to escape to the fort at Detroit. While the forts at St. Joseph, Maumee, Ouiatenon, Mackinac, Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango were taken and burned, and the garrisons massacred or carried into captivity, Detroit and Fort Pitt held out against the savage enemy, checking effectively the conquest planned by Pontiac. In May, for the aid of Detroit, an expedition was sent by lake under Lieutenant Cuyler, but it was attacked by the Wyandots near Point Pelee, most of the party cap- tured and the remainder forced to retreat by way of Sandusky and the south shore. The second little army of the English in Ohio went up Lake Erie in July, following the south coast. At Sandusky bay they halted, and marching inland, burned the Wyandot town and destroyed the Indian cornfields. Proceeding they joined the garri- son at Detroit under cover of the night, but even this reinforcement did not at once end the Indian siege, and a night sally met with inglorious defeat and heavy loss of life. The siege continued, under the direct command of Pontiac, until after news of the relief of Fort Pitt, and the defeat of the Indians in a two days' battle at Bushy Run by Colonel Bouquet, August 4-5, 1763. Then the war- riors became restless, word was received from the French on the Mis- sissippi that no assistance could be expected from them, and Pontiac repaired to the Maumee, leaving Detroit in peace for the winter.
This war should not be considered a wicked and causeless conspir-
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THE WAR AROUND THE WORLD.
aey for massacre and plunder. It was waged by the Indians after their uncivilized fashion, not essentially different from wars in Europe, to assert their right to the lands they occupied, which were being handed over from France to England without recognition of the Indian interests. It may be said that in the campaign of 1763, though the red men failed at Pittsburg and Detroit, they achieved a remarkable victory in obtaining recognition from the throne of England. The famous "King's Proclamation," of October 7, 1763, should be considered as a sequel of this remarkable campaign, in which nine British forts were reduced, as many as a hundred traders put to death and their goods confiseated, and thousands of settlers killed or driven from their homes in western Pennsylvania and Vir- ginia.
CHAPTER III.
THE BRITISH INDIAN RESERVE.
THE KING'S PROCLAMATION-BRADSTREET'S SANDUSKY EXPEDI- TION-BOUQUET'S MARCHI TO THE MUSKINGUM-THE SUR- RENDER OF CAPTIVES -- THE SCOTCH-IRISH - COLONIZATION SCHEMES - MORAVIAN MISSIONS - CONOLLY AT PITTSBURG - CRESAP AND LOGAN-DUNMORE'S WAR-BATTLE OF POINT PLEASANT-LOGAN'S SPEECH-THE FORT GOWER RESOLUTIONS.
T HE "King's Proclamation," or order in eonneil, divided the newly aeqnired territory in North America into three provinees and an Indian reservation. The pretentious claims of the Atlantie colonies from sea to sea were not ree- ognized, and the provinees were practically limited westward by the Apalachian mountain ranges. Canada was rechristened the prov- inee of Quebee; East and West Florida included the peninsula and strip of gulf coast south of the St. Mary's and the 31st parallel west to the Mississippi; the established colonial governments were restricted in their westward seope to the sonrees of the rivers that fall into the Atlantie, and all beyond those sonrees, in the interior, between Florida and the great lakes, and the Mississippi and the Alleghanies, was reserved for the Indians. Within this reservation the provincial governors were forbidden to make grants of land ; all subjects were strictly forbidden to make any purchases or establish settlements without special lieense, and persons within the country reserved for the Indians were required to remove themselves forth- with.
This proclamation seemed to be a deelaration, by the highest anthority, that not only Ohio and all the country northwest of the Ohio river to the sonree of the Mississippi, but Kentucky, Tennessee, and that part of the territory claimed by Georgia now comprised in the states of Mississippi and Alabama, passed from the direct con- trol of the erown of France to the dircet control of the erown of Eng- land, without regard to the ancient provincial charters. If Virginia
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THE BRITISH INDIAN RESERVE.
or any other colony participated in the war against the French for the purpose of extending the provincial bounds to the full extent of the claims, they were deprived of the fruit of victory. Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, had promised 200,000 acres of land beyond the mountains to the soldiers who went out with Washington, and if he were to fulfill the pledge now he must be authorized by a special grant of the king, who had assumed complete dominion in those parts. The disposition of individuals, both in Georgia and Virginia, was to extend the frontier settlements westward in disregard of the royal edict. The conservative men of the colonies construed the proclamation as a temporary expedient to avoid Indian hostilities. But this was their wish, rather than the fact. The plain purpose of the British government was to restrict the Atlantic colonies to the coast, as Lord Hillsborough said, "in due subordination to and dependence upon the mother country," while the west should be devoted to Indian occupation and fur trading.
As for the region of the present State of Ohio, as well as that coun- try of the upper Ohio and its tributaries which topographically belongs to it, though now included in Pennsylvania, it was made the king's domain, without any intervening and subordinate government in America until it should be created a new province, or annexed to an existing one. "It was subject only to military commanders or Indian agents acting under the immediate orders of the king in coun- cil, or of the Board of Trade, which at that period administered the king's domain in America." Ohio remained in this condition for ten years, without any government located in America, save the author- ity of Sir William Johnson, and at the expiration of that time, when it seemed necessary to give it and the Northwest a provincial gov- ernment, it was assigned, not to Virginia, or any other Atlantic col- ony that claimed rights in it, but to the province of Quebec.
Perhaps, if the Indians had promptly made peace on the basis of this proclamation, the settlement of the Ohio valley would have been longer delayed, but whatever the disposition of the wiser chiefs may have been, ravages on the border were resumed in the spring of 1764, necessitating the invasion of Ohio by a sufficient force to compel peace. An army was collected in two wings, one, under Col. John Bradstreet, made up of colonials (those from Connecticut led by Israel Putnam), to advance in boats along the south shore of Lake Erie ; while the left wing, under Col. Henry Bouquet, was to march into the interior of Ohio from Fort Pitt.
Bradstreet reached Niagara in July, and found representatives of twenty tribes gathered to seek for peace, the Senecas leading in the conciliatory step of bringing in and delivering their prisoners. Before the troops arrived at Presque Isle, ambassadors appeared, purporting to speak for the Wyandots, Shawanees and Delawares.
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With these Bradstreet made a treaty with various stipulations, inelud- ing the delivery at Sandusky of all prisoners and permission to rebuild the western forts and oceupy the land within cannon shot of each. But the authority of these Indian negotiations is doubtful. They were not able, if sineere, to stop the hostilities toward the east, and though Bradstreet notified Bouquet that his advance would be unnecessary, the latter officer found it desirable, for the safety of the frontier, to push on toward Ohio.
Bradstreet continued his march through Ohio, without hostilities, and at Detroit, where he arrived August 26th, a treaty of peace was made with the Michigan tribes. Maekinae was regarrisoned, but an envoy to the Maumee region, where Pontiac was eneamped with the Ottawa and Maumee warriors, made a narrow eseape with his life. Bradstreet did not move against that eentre of hostility, and did not act with decision upon the failure of the Indians to carry out the pledge to bring their eaptives to Sandusky. Returning to Sandusky in September, he received orders from General Gage, eensuring him for the indulgent terms granted at Presque Isle and urging an attack upon the Indians of the Scioto valley. His proper course, for an effective campaign, was to attack the Maumee villages, but it was then too late, and after a month at Sandusky bay, he wrote to Bou- quet, "he found it impossible to stay longer in these parts, absolute necessity requiring him to turn off the other way." On the return trip the flotilla suffered from storms on the lakes.
Bouquet's army, ineluding five hundred regulars, a thousand Penn- sylvanians and a corps of volunteers from Virginia, did not advance from Fort Pitt until October 3d. Previously he had adopted the plan afterward followed in Indian wars, of seizing envoys who eame in with peace talks and holding them as hostages. In this way he seenred the safe eondnet for a messenger through Ohio to Bradstreet at Detroit. Marching out on the great trail erossing the mouth of Beaver, the army entered Ohio without resistance, and on October 13th came in sight of the ruins of the Tusearawas town, near which an encampment was made. The chiefs of the Delawares and Shawa- nees immediately gave notice of their desire to treat for peace, and on the 17th Bouquet went into eonneil, under an arbor erected for that purpose, with chiefs of the Seneeas, Delawares and Shawanees. A small party of warriors attended the chiefs, and the better part of Bouquet's army was drawn up in an imposing fashion, elose at hand. Bouquet's policy was not eoneiliation and hasty forgiveness. He sternly rebuked the Indians, and not until the 20th would he say that he was willing to make peace. "I am now to tell you," he said, "that we will no longer be imposed upon by your promises. This army shall not leave your country until you have fully complied with every con- dition now to be agreed upon." Twelve days were given the Indians
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THE BRITISH INDIAN RESERVE.
to turn over at Wakatomica," a Shawanee town on the Muskingum, all the prisoners in their possession, English, French, women, chil- dren and negroes, with clothing, provisions and horses to carry theni to Fort Pitt. Bouquet then moved his army to the Coshocton forks, a central position among the Indian settlements, established a forti- fied camp, and erected houses for the reception of the captives. By the early part of November over two hundred of these unfortunates had been brought in from the depths of the primeval forest, the greater part women and children. Accompanying Bouquet as volun- teers were a considerable number of men seeking their wives or chil- dren. Some were bitterly disappointed ; others, finding their loved ones, gave vent to their emotions in scenes that made this one of the most memorable ineidents in the history of the continent. If one could imagine a reunion of the Acadians, torn from their homes a few years before, and scattered along the Atlantic and gulf coast by the English, a similar picture might be presented to the mind. Strange to say, some of the captives, perhaps those that had been long in that situation, were reluctant to leave the red people, who were compelled to bind and carry them to the camp, and there were Indians who wept over their prisoners at parting, brought them gifts during their stay in camp, and followed on the way to Fort Pitt, daily supplying them with food from the forest. It is told that one young Mingo brave, desperately in love with a girl prisoner, trailed after the army until his life was in danger on the Virginia frontier. Some prisoners, women particularly, found means to escape from their rescuers and return to life in the forest. Such circumstances as these perplex one when tempted by some story of savage cruelty to join in wholesale denunciations of the red men. The Shawanees were the last to give up prisoners, and even then withheld a large number, on the plea that the great men to whom they belonged were absent. Six hostages were taken to insure future performance on their part, and on November 18th army and captives started back to Fort Pitt. For his success Bouquet was promoted to brigadier-gen- eral. The worthy Swiss might possibly have won greater honors at the expense of the United Colonies a few years later, but, being assigned to command at Pensacola, he took the fever there and died in 1765.
As a result of the invasions of Ohio in 1764, delegates from many tribes met Sir William Johnson in April, 1765, at German Flats, in ยท the interior of New York. They agreed to grant land to the traders in compensation for their losses, and a definite boundary line was
* Mica (meeka) a termination of the names of a few Shawanee towns in Ohio, is from the same Indian word as "micco," the Creek and Seminole title for chieftains, and the prefixes of Missi-sippi and Michi-gan, and has the primitive meaning of "great."
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discussed, but not decided upon, the Indians recommending the line of the Alleghany and Susquehanna rivers. George Croghan had visited London, with the adventure by the way of a shipwreck on the coast of France, and had submitted the necessity of such a boundary to the lords of trade and plantations. But for three years the matter hung in uncertainty.
Returning to America, Croghan went down the Ohio in May, 1765, on a mission to the Ottawas and Maumees, who had as yet taken no part in the peace negotiations. Save the Mingo town below the present site of Steubenville no Indian village was found on the Ohio river from Fort Pitt to the mouth of the Wabash. Buffalo were frequently observed, and game of all sorts was abundant. The valley remained a wilderness, after centuries of Indian occupation. To the white man it was preposterous that all this lovely land should be left in the hands of few thousand savages, all of whom, with their families, could find abundant room and amass wealth by agriculture in a single county. Arrived at the Wabash, Croghan sent notices of his arrival to the English and French posts on the Illinois and Mis- sissippi, but his mission was suddenly ent short, June 8th, hy an attack of Kickapoo Indians. Five of Croghan's party were killed, and he and most of his other attendant whites, Delawares and Shawa- nees were wounded. In this condition Croghan was taken up the Wabash, and to the Maumee town, where he found Pontiac in refuge and disposed to make peace. The great warrior would no longer stand in the path of the English; "but they must not imagine that in taking possession of the French forts they gain any right to the country, for the French had never bought the land and lived upon it by sufferance only."
From the Maumee villages, attended by Pontiac, Croghan went down the river of the same name, through the country occupied by the Ottawas, and proceeding to Detroit, held another council, at which Pontiac spoke most pacifically on behalf of the tribes under his influence, and concluded a dignified address by a petition for pow- der and lead for the hunters and the opening of the barrel, "that your children may drink and be merry." The career of Pontiac was soon rum. A few years later he appeared at the French post of St. Louis, and near there was assassinated, at the instigation, it is said, of a British trader.
After the negotiations of Johnson and Croghan, there was a great revival of colonization schemes for the Ohio valley, despite the king's proclamation. A new Ohio company was projected in 1766, with Sir William Johnson and Benjamin Franklin as its promoters, ask- ing land south of the Ohio river, including the panhandle. Thomas Walpole, a London banker, became its nominal head. Another ambi- tions scheme contemplated the acquirement of the territory between the Ohio and Mississippi bounded on the north by a line from the
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THE BRITISH INDIAN RESERVE.
mouth of the river Wisconsin to the mouth of the Maumee." Frank- lin worked for his project at London, while in America the influence of George Washington is said to have been exerted against such enter- prises, in the interest of the soldiers of the French and Indian war who had been promised bounties in western land. The frontier peo- ple, meanwhile, were "squatting" where they saw fit, mainly in west- ern Virginia and Pennsylvania, exciting the hostility of the Indians, and compelling General Gage to warn the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia of their duty to prevent such lawless aggressions. But it was useless to oppose the tide of movement of the hardy and inde- pendent pioneers of the West.
"These backwoods mountaineers who dwelt near the great water- shed that separates the Atlantic streams from the springs of the Wautauga, the Kanawha and the Monongahela, were all cast in the same mould, and resembled each other much more than any of them did their immediate neighbors of the plains. The backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania had little in common with the peaceful population of Quakers and Germans who lived between the Delaware and the Sus- quehanna ; and their kinsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky mountains were separated by an equally wide gulf from the aristo- cratie planter communities that flourished in the tide-water regions of Virginia and the Carolinas. The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth and parentage, and of mixed race; but the dominant strain in their blood was that of the Presbyterian-Irish, the Scotch-Irish as they were often called. These Irish representatives of the Covenanters were in the west almost what the Puritans were in the northeast, and more than the Cavaliers in the south. Mingled with the descendants of many other races, they nevertheless formed the kernel of the distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of our people in their march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settleis, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific. . They were Protestants of the Protestants ; detested and despised the Catholics, whom their ancestors had conquered ; and regarded the Episcopalians, by whom they themselves had been oppressed, with a more sullen, but scarcely less intense, hatred. They were a trueulent and obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike renown of their forefathers. They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston. Pushing through the long settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the foot of the mountains, and became the outposts of
* King's "Ohio."
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civilization. From Pennsylvania they drifted south along the foot-
hills till they met their brethren from Charleston. The two facts of most importance to remember in dealing with our pio- neer history are first, that the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas were peopled by an entirely different stoek from that which had long existed in the tide-water regions of those colonies ; and see- ondly, that the immigrants of this stoek were mostly from the north, from their great breeding-ground and nursery in western Pennsylvania." So Theodore Roosevelt# describes the dom- inant pioneers of the Ohio valley, noting also the large admixture of descendants of early English colonists, of Pennsylvania Germans, ; Carolina Germans, and the less numerous Huguenots, Hollanders and Swedes.
As a vivid picture of the character of these pioneers, then strug- gling toward the Ohio borders, another passage from the same anthor should be read :
"Thuis the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings they had hewed out of the everlasting forest ; a grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very heart's core. Their lives were harsh and narrow; they gained their bread by their blood and sweat, in the nnending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature. They suffered terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, revengeful, suspicions, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute and fearless, loyal to their friends and devoted to their country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to eonquer the wilderness and hold it against all comers."
To fix a line which these people should not pass became the concern of the British government. The southern superintendent of Indian affairs, treating with the Cherokees, settled upon a boundary which ran south from the month of the Kanawha. Sir William Johnson, in January, 1768, was instructed, in effect, to make a treaty extending this line from the Kanawha to Oswego. In May following Croghan conferred with the Ohio Indians at Pittsburg, allaving the soreness of the Shawanees regarding eneroachments, and in October Sir Will- ian Johnson, with representatives from various colonies, met a large
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