USA > Ohio > History of Ohio; the rise and progress of an American state, Volume One > Part 14
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In a council held in the year 1744 at Lancaster, Pa., at which were present the representatives of the prov- inces of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, with the delegates from the Six Nations, the Virginia com- missioners told the sachems if they laid right claim to any land on the border of Virginia, the colonists would make satisfaction to the tribes. The Iroquois spokesmen, Chiefs Canassatego, Gachadow, and Tacha- noontia, speaking "with strong voice and proper action," replied that they admitted the colonies had a right "to some parts of Virginia;" but as to what lies beyond the mountains, "we conquered the nations residing there, and that land, if the Virginians ever get a good right to it, it must be by us."
In this notable gathering, Conrad Weiser, the agent for Pennsylvania, and for many years one of the fore-
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most diplomats in the prolonged negotiations between the colonists and the tribesmen, as well as an influential intercessory between the various tribes, acted as inter- preter and mediator. The proceedings of the council lasted many days, and were noted for many interest- ing speeches which are reported in the published minutes of the Pennsylvania Provincial Council. The Iroquois relinquished "all lands that are or shall be by his Majesty's appointment in the colony of Vir- ginia," meaning from the Virginian frontier to the Ohio. But the Virginia colony, through the terms of its charter, claimed, as will be seen, nearly all of Ohio and most of the country west to the Mississippi. It is of record that before business was transacted in this meeting, the English commissioners gave a spread of "wine, punch, pipes and tobacco," to the sachems who "fed lustily and drank heartily, and were very greasy before they finished dinner." Indeed an almost inseparable function to the "business" part of these gatherings of the colonists and the tribesmen was the convivial hospitality, in the shape of "heap fire water, " tendered the aborigine guests by the pale face pioneers. Nor in these customs of entertainment were the Cana- dian colonists a whit behind.
But at this council the Iroquois warriors by no means lost their wits, through the unrestrained imbib- ing of fire water. The proceedings of the gathering lasted twelve days, and were noted for the many remarkable speeches made by the chiefs, which speeches are reported in Colden's History of the Five Nations and also in the proceedings of the Pennsylvania Pro- vincial Council. The principal orator for the Indian
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delegates was Canassatego. This eloquent chief of the Onondagas was a steadfast friend of the English, and in one of his addresses to the colonial representa- tives, he advocated a Union among their colonies, in the following language, as interpreted by Weiser; "We have one Thing further to say, and that is, We heartily recommend Union and a good Agreement between you and our Brethren. Never disagree, but preserve a strict Friendship for one another, and thereby you, as well as we, will become the stronger. Our wise Forefathers established Union and Amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great Weight and Authority with our neighboring Nations. We are a powerful Confederacy; and, by your observing the same Methods our wise Forefathers have taken, you will acquire fresh Strength and Power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another." This, we believe, is the first recorded public suggestion of a confederacy, made to the colonies, and it came from an Indian ten years before the same idea was proposed by Benjamin Franklin at Albany.
Thus the English colonists were insidiously casting their lines to entrap the proprietory rights of the Indians, whatever those rights might be, and were shrewdly laying their plans to circumvent the encroach- ments of the French. The land of promise was the country over the Alleghanies and beyond the Ohio. The English were moving forward on their frontiers. as they began in New England, with the planting of villages that were to be permanent communities o: peaceful and prosperous homes with outlying and inter-
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vening farms. Meanwhile the French were strengthen- ing their boundary lines, already marked by the missionary and trading stations and military posts. By the time the Iroquois had made their dubious "trust deed" at the Albany conference, the Canadian pioneers had completed the chain of stockade defenses, planned by La Salle, and which extended from Quebec to New Orleans. These fortresses, crude to our view but sufficient for their time, were forts Frontenac at the exit of Lake Ontario; Niagara on the river uniting the latter lake and Erie; Detroit, founded by La Motte Cadillac; Ste. Marie, at the Sault Rapids; Mackinac on the waterway between lakes Huron and Michigan; Miami at the mouth of the St. Joseph; St. Louis at Starved Rock on the Illinois; and at intervals adown the Mississippi, were forts Chartres, Assumption, La Salle, Prudhomme, Rosalie, and New Orleans. Besides these military posts, were many intervening, and far-remote, settlements, which had been estab- lished or erected by 1725. The St. Lawrence and Mississippi basins and their uniting chain of great akes had been explored and if not colonized, at least Fortified. The French had possession and occupancy; hey regarded the Alleghany and Appalachian ranges is the natural, and also political, western barriers of the English.
The English colonists thought otherwise and were patiently biding their time; the charter grants of the British Crown carried their territorial rights from "sea o sea" and they abated no pretensions as to the west- rard course of their star of empire and only halted at he mountain slopes till the propitious moment might
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come, when they could scale the rugged heights and descend as conquerors into the rich valleys and plains of the Northwest. Meanwhile they were cajoling the Indians and bartering for the titles of the savages to the Ohio country, that they might more securely rivet their claims when possession should be demanded. Already many adventurous woodsmen from the Vir- ginia, Maryland and particularly Pennsylvania and New York colonies had climbed the mountain steeps and trailed their way through the forests or paddled the streams of Ohio and the Northwest even to the shores of Superior and the banks of the Mississippi. Gordon in his History of Pennsylvania states that as early as the year 1740, traders from the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies "went among the Indians on the Ohio and tributary streams, to deal for peltries." They were the English wood-rangers, exploring the interior, noting the value and "lay" of the land that they coveted and felt in time would be theirs, while trading whiskey and trinkets with the tribes for furs. These English trail-trampers were called by the eastern colonists "bushlopers" and "swampiers." They were hardy, persistent, rough in manner, but curried favor with their red skinned customers by selling their goods at less prices than were asked by the French peltry purchasers.
Ohio was the least explored and almost the last to be invaded by either of the rival white races. There were no Jesuit missions in Ohio of a permanent OI independent nature. The only one deserving notice was that at Sandusky. The Jesuit Relations record that Father Armand de la Richardie was deputed ir
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1728 to establish a permanent mission at Detroit. The Recollet order was already in evidence there and to avoid conflict with it, Richardie located his mission across the river, opposite Fort Pontchartrain, at Pointe de Montreal, now Sandwich, Ontario. Here he built a church, a mission-house and on Bois Blanc Island established a supporting farm. In 1744 Pierre Potier came to the mission as assistant to Richardie, who left the post ten years later, Potier then becoming the mission-master. John Gilmary Shea, than whom there is no higher authority on the subject, in his "History of the Catholic Missions," among the Indian tribes, states that in 1751, Richardie "led a party of the Hurons from Detroit to Sandusky, and these under the name of Wyandots, soon took an active part in the affairs of the West; they were conspicuous in the last French War, and at its close in Pontiac's con- spiracy, though long withheld by the influence of Father Potier." Shea continues: "During these times of troubles the missionaries were driven from Sandusky; and though a regular succession was kept up at the mission of the Assumption near Detroit, still the suppression of the Jesuits prepared for its close and Father Pierre Potier, the last Jesuit missionary to the western Hurons, died in July 1781." And Shea adds, "After that the Indians depended entirely on the priests at the French posts, and the Wyandots were thus cut off from all spiritual instructions, but they did not lose their faith." We fail to find in the Jesuit Relations any mention of the Sandusky Mission, which seems to have been therefore merely a dependent post under the wing of the Detroit Mission. For
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his authority Shea refers to the "Register at Sand- wich;" that is the record kept there by Richardie and Potier. That the Jesuit Missions were not independ- ently represented among the Ohio Indians may be in part explained by the fact that conditions were not conducive to permanent Indian stations in Ohio. The Ohio Indians were too migratory. During the period of the missionary pilgrimages and shrine build- ing in the lake region and far west, the Ohio country was shaken and torn by the Iroquois conflicts with the local tribes, and this warlike condition kept the Ohio tribes in a shifting and agitated attitude. The French explorers had not invaded the interior; nor were the solitudes or Indian trails much disturbed by the coureurs de bois; though some of these forest tramps and outlaw traders frequented the regions of the Maumee, the Sandusky and the Cuyahoga, carrying brandy and small stocks of trinkets to exchange with the natives for their more valuable furs.
Ohio was almost terra incognita, to the European, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, though not entirely so. The two Sulpitian priests, Dollier and Galineé in their journey up the lakes, after leaving La Salle at Otinawatawa, in 1669, spent the winter at Point Pelee and there erecting the customary cross and the Arms of France took formal possession for their king of all lands bordering on Lake Erie. At the same time La Salle on the Ohio River was appro- priating that valley as the property of the Bourbons. As early as 1680-86 the French established a trading post near the mouth of the Maumee River, probably the first permanent evidence of French occupancy of
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Ohio. But the English claimants were close behind, for, as early as 1686, colonial governor Dongan of New York, on the strength of the English-Iroquois treaties, began to issue licenses to his colonists for trading, hunting and discovery to the southwest. That the English early had designs on Ohio is also proven by the proposal (1721) of Governor Spotswood of Virginia, five years after his romantic raid into the Shenandoah Valley, to the Board of Trade in London, that the British authorities make a treaty with the Miamis on the Maumee, permitting the English to trade with the Ohio Indians and to build a small fort on Lake Erie, upon which as yet the French had no formidable post. But this plan was not carried out. Both the rival European nations-France and England -therefore, had their watchful eyes on Ohio. It offered the virgin soil and the primeval forest-"all parts of the state," as one has written of this primitive time, "were peculiarly rich in game. The river, the lake and the inland combined to form a country which the red man and the white alike admired and coveted as a garden of delight. No wonder that the savage died rather than yield it; no wonder that enterprising spirits in the old settlements were eager to enjoy a land so attractively pictured by all who came back from it." The time had come for action! Ohio must be secured.
The valley of the Maumee was the first objective section in the struggle of the French and English for a foothold in Ohio. This because the Maumee with its portage connection with the Wabash, was the gate- way of one of the easiest and earliest travelled water-
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ways from Lake Erie to the lower Ohio, and thence on to the Mississippi. Miami Indians and other tribes centered in this locality and their favor and alliance was sedulously sought by both the English and the French.
The first clash growing out of the rival efforts of the two white races to get a foothold in Ohio, occurs about the bay at the mouth of the Sandusky River, then called Sandoski, Sandoské, Sandosket, Otsandoske, and other variations. At this point a Huron chief, whose Indian name was Orontony, baptismal name Nicolas, had settled with a numerous band of his Wyandot followers. He and his adherents had removed there from the neighborhood of Detroit, where his people had come in conflict with the French, whom the Indians had in some way seriously offended. Nicolas is described as "a wily fellow, full of savage cunning, whose enmity, when once aroused, was greatly to be feared." He had become the deadly foe of the French and sought their destruction. In 1739 Sieur Desnoyelles notified Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, that "the Hurons had all gathered at Sandoské, although they had been told that they had nothing to fear," nevertheless, he adds, "they were armed like men who go to fight-bullets in their mouth and in their guns-and one Nicolas was their chief." It was feared they "may hatch something wrong." The Hurons committed many depredations against the Frenchmen and to strengthen his efforts against the enemy by securing the aid of the English, Nicolas in 1745 permitted the Pennsylvania colonists to erect a trading post and blockhouse, known as
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Fort Sandoski, at the principal Huron town on the northwest point of Sandusky Bay, a station on the portage from the Sandusky River to the mouth of the Portage River, at Lake Erie, not far from the site of the present town of Port Clinton. This was the first "fort" erected by white men in Ohio, the Miami trading post, (1680-6) on the lower Maumee, being regarded as having no military significance. The French had built a Fort Miami, at the juncture of the Rivers St. Mary and St. Joseph, the headwaters of the Maumee, present site of Fort Wayne, but this was not in Ohio; another Fort Miami, we noted, was built by La Salle at the mouth of St. Joseph River in Illinois.
Chief Nicolas won the friendship of the English, by permitting them to remain at Fort Sandusky and carry on traffic with his and other tribesmen. This movement of Nicolas, naturally aroused the offensive hostility of De Longueuil, commandant at Detroit. He wrote the Canadian governor, "Nicolas' band are as insolent as ever, the chief never ceasing his work to get allies-Nicolas will draw the English to him and facilitate their establishment all along Lake Erie." The crafty chief encouraged by his alliances, now set ifoot a bold conspiracy. He rallied to his cause "the .roquois of the West," the Hurons, Ottawas, Miamis, Chippewas, Sioux, Shawnees, Pottawattomies, and pands of many other tribes. The object of this great Bague was no less than the extermination of the French rom Detroit and lake posts. Many western tribes, hough not those in Illinois, entered into the plan with zeal and alacrity." The blow was to be struck
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at many points and without mercy. Chosen braves of the Hurons were to sleep in the fort and cabins at Detroit, as they had often done, and each at the appointed moment was to do his deadly work in the house of his lodgment. The Pottawattomies were to detroy the Bois Blanc Island mission; the Miamis were to annihilate the French traders in their country; the Wyandots to destroy the village on the Maumee; the Foxes were assigned the settlement at Green Bay; and thus nearly all the French trading posts of the Northwest were marked for destruction by the neigh- boring savages. In breadth and boldness of plan the plot of Nicolas equalled the conspiracy of King Phillip to combine the New England tribes in order to wipe out the coast settlements of the Puritans. But Nicolas' well-laid project, so deadly and wide-sweeping in its purpose, went awry. Members of the conspiring tribes, prematurely committed deeds of violence that aroused the suspicion of the intended victims. French traders were massacred and tomahawked in the Detroit and Sandusky regions. The bloody scheme was matured and about to be sprung when the conspiracy was betrayed by a Huron squaw, who gave the information to a Jesuit missionary. Messengers were immediately dispatched to the forts and trading posts, putting the occupants on their guard and causing them to take measures for protection and for retaliatory punishmen of the Indians. The conspiracy succeeded only il small measure. Some of the posts were attacker before being warned, property was destroyed and few captives were the victims of the death-dealin tribesmen. The Detroit fort was reënforced by th
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arrival from Montreal of a hundred and fifty soldiers. The baffled Nicolas was compelled to succumb to the power that was ready to crush him. Proceeding to Detroit, accompanied by Orotoni, and Anioton, as- sociate Huron chiefs, Nicolas secured immunity for himself and the Sandusky Wyandots upon the promise of abandoning his alliance with the English and of maintaining the peace in the future. But the Indian vengeance and treachery smoldered in the breast of the defeated chief. In the winter of 1747-8, the un- subdued chieftain defiantly received at his Sandusky villages two separate parties of traders from Phila- delphia and allowed his Indian subjects to traffic with them; at the same time he was the willing recipient of wampum belts and other tokens of friendship from his English guests. This bold defiance of the faithless conspirator again aroused the Canadian powers, and La Jonquiere, the new French governor, ordered De Longueuil to use all means possible to suppress the traitorous leader. These instructions were conveyed to Nicolas by a French officer from Detroit. All the English in the Indian towns in the Sandusky region were ordered to immediately depart the country. Nicolas realizing that he could no longer avoid the doom certainly awaiting him at the hands of the in- censed French, abandoned all further plans, tore down his towns including the stockade of Fort Sandusky, bade farewell to the scenes of his defeat, and at the head of a band of one hundred and nineteen warriors with their families, sought a new home on the Ohio, not far from the White River in the Indiana country. Another band of these "rebel Hurons," numbering
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seventy, found their way east and settled on the Beaver River in Pennsylvania. The conspirators from the other tribes promptly gave up and became humble supplicants for pardon and peace. This pardon it was the policy of the De Longueuil to grant, but the French ever after exercised a more guarded conduct towards the western tribes. In place of their previous liberty and almost unlimited privileges, the Indians were subjected to constant surveillance and a rigid treatment. Thus ended in 1748 the conspiracy of Nicolas, the main features of which were incidents in northwestern Ohio. The Miamis were in hearty ac- cord with the rebelling Wyandots and entered actively into the plot and "performed the part assigned them by the capture and destruction of Fort Miami at the confluence of St. Joseph and St. Mary's Rivers." The Miami fort was promptly rebuilt after the suppression of the Nicolas conspiracy.
As we learn from the article on "Old Fort Sandoski," by Miss Lucy Elliot Keeler, in the publications (1909) of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, although Nicolas' career at Fort Sandusky was speedily ended, "the English traders did not give up the foot- hold they had gained," at that point.
In 1749 La Jonquiere, governor of Canada, learned to his great indignation that several English traders had again reached the Sandusky and were "exerting a bad influence upon the Indians of that quarter.' These indomitable English traders-it is confidently believed-rebuilt the Sandusky stockade, though we find no authentic record of its re-erection by them The historic accounts do record, however, that "For
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Sandoski" was "usurped by the French in 1751;" indeed this is the annotation concerning the fort on Mitchell's map. It must therefore have been previous- ly rebuilt by the English. This "usurpation" was effected by Bienville de Celoron, who, after his voyage (1749) through Ohio, which we shall soon relate, was made French commandant at Detroit and he "im- mediately followed," says Miss Keeler, "the formal claim of France to the territory between Lake Erie and the Ohio by founding a fort and trading-post on the [Sandoski] bay." It would seem therefore that Celoron had no need of building a fort; he simply appropriated the one rebuilt (1749) by the English. The exact site of this old "Fort Sandoski," often spoken of as the "first fort built by white men in Ohio, " long a subject of earnest research, was definitely settled ·by Colonel Webb C. Hayes and Mr. Charles W. Burrows, by the discovery (1906), through the indefatigable research by the gentlemen mentioned, in the archives of Laval University, Quebec, of the original journals of Chevalier Chaussegros de Lery, a distinguished engineer of the French army, who was ordered to accompany an expedition from Presque Isle (Erie) to Detroit and Mackinac in the summer of 1754. De Lery's expedition consisted of twenty- seven canoes, each carrying ten men "with packages of provisions." De Lery's journal of this expedition, enriched with numerous maps, diagrams and descrip- tions of the route followed, gives definite statement of the site of the ruins of old Fort Sandusky, which he calls "Otsandoské." His journal for Sunday, August 1, (1754), reads: "I discovered a great sheet of water
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which I took for lac Otsandoské. I did not know where the portage was [across the peninsula to Lake Erie]. I imagined that some vestiges still remained of the fort the French built in 1751 and which was after- wards evacuated. To find it I followed the shore on the north side of the said lake which runs east and west. After proceeding about 3 leagues, I found a clearing where I landed at noon and discovered the ruins of the old fort. I at once had the packages in my canoe carried across the portage. The portage is fifty- seven arpents in length." Fifty-seven "arpents" is about two miles and brought De Lery to the north side of the peninsula near the present site of Port Clinton, whence he embarked for Detroit.
The old fort "Otsandoské" was abandoned by the French when Fort Junundat was built by them in the year 1754,-same year as De Lery's expedition -on the east or right side of the mouth of the San- dusky Bay or River, "near the mouth of Pickerel Creek," known to the French as Riviere du Poisson doree." It was from this Fort Junundat that many of the later Indian trails on the east side of the Sandusky River started.
At this date (1754) the French made every effort to drive the English traders from the Ohio country, but it was a hopeless task. The latter were straggling in across the Ohio from the south and east and em- barking from their canoes along the shores of Lake Erie. They were especially active in their operations between the lower Sandusky and the mouth of the Cuyahoga at which latter place the "shrewd barterer and wily agent," George Croghan, had a trading
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house and did an extensive business with the tribes along the lake front. The appetite of the rival races for land and trade in the Ohio country grew upon what it fed. The very year (1748) of the Nicolas insurrection, Gallissioniere, Governor of Canada, ad- vocated the emigration from France of ten thousand peasants who should be settled in the Ohio valley to preëmpt the country and check the invasion from the English Colonies. But before so extensive a coloni- zation scheme could be effected, events happened that rendered the attempt impossible of accomplish- ment.
CHAPTER IX. THE OHIO LAND COMPANY
O NE of the first embassadors of the English to the Ohio Indians was Conrad Weiser, a native of Germany, who as a mere lad came with his parents to America; his father leading a party of Palatines to the new country and finally settling with his family in Berks County (then Lancaster), Pennsylvania. The Weiser home was in an Indian country and young Conrad came in close contact with the Mohawks, living many years in their midst and being adopted into their tribe, and receiving the Indian name Tharachiawagon. He became master of the Mohawk and other tribal dialects, and gained complete knowledge of the customs, habits, conditions and political contentions of many of the tribes with which the colonies had to deal. He was appointed an official interpreter by the Pennsylvania council and for thirty years was employed in that capacity, participating during that period in almost every im- portant Indian negotiation. His integrity and his loyalty to the colonial interests were equalled by his tact and ability.
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