USA > Ohio > The Old Northwest : a chronicle of the Ohio Valley and beyond > Part 2
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however, only the vaguest notion of the extent, appearance, and resources of their new possession. Even the officials who drew the treaty were as ig- norant of the country as of middle Africa. Prior to the outbreak of the war no widely known Eng- lish writer had tried to describe it; and the absorb- ing French books of Lahontan, Hennepin, and Charlevoix had reached but a small circle. The prolonged conflict in America naturally stimulated interest in the new country. The place-names of the upper Ohio became household words, and en- terprising publishers put out not only translations of the French writers but compilations by English- men designed, in true journalistic fashion, to meet the demands of the hour for information.
These publications displayed amazing miscon- ceptions of the lands described. They neither es- timated aright the number and strength of the French settlements nor dispelled the idea that the western country was of little value. Even the most brilliant Englishman of the day, Dr. Samuel John- son, an ardent defender of the treaty of 1763, wrote that the large tracts of America added by the war to the British dominions were "only the barren parts of the continent, the refuse of the earlier ad- venturers, which the French, who came last, had
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taken only as better than nothing." As late indeed as 1789, William Knox, long Under-Secretary for the Colonies, declared that Americans could not settle the western territory "for ages, " and that the region must be given up to barbarism like the plains of Asia, with a population as unstable as the Scy- thians and Tartars. But the shortsightedness of these distant critics can be forgiven when one re- calls that Franklin himself, while conjuring up a splendid vision of the western valleys teeming with a thriving population, supposed that the dream would not be realized for "some centuries." None of these observers dreamt that the territories trans- ferred in 1763 would have within seventy-five years a population almost equal to that of Great Britain.
The ink with which the Treaty of Paris was signed was hardly dry before the King and his ministers were confronted with the task of provid- ing government for the new possessions and of solv- ing problems of land tenure and trade. Still more imperative were measures to conciliate the Indians; for already Pontiac's rebellion had been in progress four months, and the entire back country was aflame. It must be confessed that a continental wilderness swarming with murderous savages was
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an inheritance whose aspect was by no means alto- gether pleasing to the English mind.
The easiest solution of the difficulty was to let things take their course. Let seaboard popula- tions spread at will over the new lands; let them carry on trade in their own way, and make what- ever arrangements with the native tribes they de- sire. Colonies such as Virginia and New York, which had extensive western claims, would have been glad to see this plan adopted. Strong objec- tions, however, were raised. Colonies which had no western claims feared the effects of the advan- tages which their more fortunate neighbors would enjoy. Men who had invested heavily in lands lying west of the mountains felt that their returns would be diminished and delayed if the back coun- try were thrown open to settlers. Some people thought that the Indians had a moral right to pro- tection against wholesale white invasion of their hunting-grounds, and many considered it expedi- ent, at all events, to offer such protection.
After all, however, it was the King and his min- isters who had it in their power to settle the ques- tion; and from their point of view it was desirable to keep the western territories as much as possi- ble apart from the older colonies, and to regulate,
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with farsighted policy, their settlement and trade. Eventually, it was believed, the territories would be cut into new colonies; and experience with the seaboard dependencies was already such as to sug- gest the desirability of having the future settle- ments more completely under government control from the beginning.
After due consideration, King George and his ministers made known their policy on October 7, 1763, in a comprehensive proclamation. The first subject dealt with was government. Four new provinces - "Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada"I - were set up in the ceded terri- tories, and their populations were guaranteed all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants of the older colonies. The Mississippi Valley, how- ever, was included in no one of these provinces; and, curiously, there was no provision whatever for the government of the French settlements lying
I The Proclamation of 1763 drew the boundaries of "four distinct and separate governments." Grenada was to include the island of that name, together with the Grenadines, Dominico, St. Vincent, and Tobago. The Floridas lay south of the bounds of Georgia and east of the Mississippi River. The Apalachicola River was to be the dividing line between East and West Florida. Quebec included the modern province of that name and that part of Ontario lying north of a line drawn from Lake Nipissing to the point where the forty-fifth parallel intersects the St. Lawrence River.
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with farsighted policy, their settlement and trade. Eventually, it was believed, the territories would be cut into new colonies; and experience with the seaboard dependencies was already such as to sug- gest the desirability of having the future settle- ments more completely under government control from the beginning.
After due consideration, King George and his ministers made known their policy on October 7, 1763, in a comprehensive proclamation. The first subject dealt with was government. Four new provinces - "Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada"I - were set up in the ceded terri- tories, and their populations were guaranteed all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants of the older colonies. The Mississippi Valley, how- ever, was included in no one of these provinces; and, curiously, there was no provision whatever for the government of the French settlements lying
I The Proclamation of 1763 drew the boundaries of "four distinct and separate governments." Grenada was to include the island of that name, together with the Grenadines, Dominico, St. Vincent, and Tobago. The Floridas lay south of the bounds of Georgia and east of the Mississippi River. The Apalachicola River was to be the dividing line between East and West Florida. Quebec included the modern province of that name and that part of Ontario lying north of a line drawn from Lake Nipissing to the point where the forty-fifth parallel intersects the St. Lawrence River.
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within it. The number and size of these settle- ments were underestimated, and apparently it was supposed that all the habitants and soldiers would avail themselves of their privilege of withdrawing from the ceded territories.
The disposition made of the great rectangular area bounded by the Alleghanies, the Mississippi, the Lakes, and the Gulf, was fairly startling. With fine disregard of the chartered claims of the sea- board colonies and of the rights of pioneers already settled on frontier farms, the whole was erected into an Indian reserve. No "loving subject" might purchase land or settle in the territory without special license; present residents should "forthwith remove themselves"; trade should be carried on only by permit and under close surveillance; offi- cers were to be stationed among the tribes to pre- serve friendly relations and to apprehend fugitives from colonial justice.
The objects of this drastic scheme were never clearly stated. Franklin believed that the main purpose was to conciliate the Indians. Washing- ton agreed with him. Later historians have gener- ally thought that what the English Government had chiefly in mind was to limit the bounds of the seaboard colonies, with a view to preserving im-
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perial control over colonial affairs. Very likely both of these motives weighed heavily in the de- cision. At all events, Lord Hillsborough, who pre- sided over the meetings of the Lords of Trade when the proclamation was discussed, subsequently wrote that the "capital object" of the Govern- ment's policy was to confine the colonies so that they should be kept in easy reach of British trade and of the authority necessary to keep them in due subordination to the mother country, and he added that the extension of the fur trade depended "en- tirely upon the Indians being undisturbed in the possession of their hunting-grounds. "I
It does not follow that the King and his advisers intended that the territory should be kept forever intact as a forest preserve. They seem to have contemplated that, from time to time, cessions would be secured from the Indians and tracts would be opened for settlement. But every move was to be made in accordance with plans formu- lated or authorized in England. The restrictive policy won by no means universal assent in the mother country. The Whigs generally opposed it,
But as Lord Hillsborough had just taken office and adopted bodily a policy formulated by his predecessor, he is none too good an authority. See Alvord's Mississippi Valley in British Politics, vol. I, pp. 203-1.
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and Burke thundered against it as "an attempt to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men."
In America there was a disposition to take the proclamation lightly as being a mere sop to the Indians. But wherever it was regarded seriously, it was hotly resented. After passing through an arduous war, the colonists were ready to enter upon a new expansive era. The western territories were theirs by charter, by settlement, and by conquest. The Indian population, they believed, belonged to the unprogressive and unproductive peoples of the earth. Every acre of fertile soil in America called to the thrifty agriculturist; every westward flow- ing river invited to trade and settlement - as well, therefore, seek to keep back the ocean with a broom as to stop by mere decree the tide of homeseekers. Some of the colonies made honest attempts to com- pel the removal of settlers from the reserved lands beyond their borders, and Pennsylvania went so far as to decree the death penalty for all who should refuse to remove. But the law was never enforced.
The news of the cession of the eastern bank of the Mississippi to the English brought consternation to
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the two or three thousand French people living in the settlements of the Kaskaskia, Illinois, and Wa- bash regions. The transfer of the western bank to Spain did not become known promptly, and for months the habitants supposed that by taking up their abode on the opposite side of the stream they would continue under their own flag. Many of them crossed the Mississippi to find new abodes even after it was announced that the land had passed to Spain.
From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the Wabash, and the Illinois had re- mained, in French hands, mere sprawling villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have con- tained in its most flourishing days two thousand people, many of them voyageurs, coureurs-de-bois, converted Indians, and transients of one sort or another. In 1765 there were not above seventy permanent families. Few of the towns, indeed, attained a population of more than two or three hundred. All French colonial enterprise had been based on the assumption that settlers would be few. The trader preferred it so, because settle- ments meant restrictions upon his traffic. The Jesuit was of the same mind, because such settle- ments broke up his mission field. The Government
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at Paris forbade the emigration of the one class of people that cared to emigrate, the Huguenots.
Though some of the settlements had picturesque sites and others drew distinction from their for- tifications, in general they presented a drab ap- pearance. There were usually two or three long, narrow streets, with no paving, and often knee- deep with mud. The houses were built on either side, at intervals sufficient to give space for yards and garden plots, each homestead being enclosed with a crude picket fence. Wood and thatch were the commonest building materials, although stone was sometimes used; and the houses were regularly one story high, with large vine-covered verandas. Land was abundant and cheap. Every enterpris- ing settler had a plot for himself, and as a rule one large field, or more, was held for use in com- mon. In these, the operations of ploughing, sow- ing, and reaping were carefully regulated by pub- lic ordinance. Occasionally a village drew some distinction from the proximity of a large, well- managed estate, such as that of the opulent M. Beauvais of Kaskaskia, in whose mill and brewery more than eighty slaves were employed.
Agriculture was carried on somewhat exten- sively, and it is recorded that, in the year 1746
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alone, when there was a shortage of foodstuffs at New Orleans, the Illinois settlers were able to send thither "upward of eight hundred thousand weight of flour." Hunting and trading, however, con- tinued to be the principal occupations; and the sugar, indigo, cotton, and other luxuries which the people were able to import directly from Europe were paid for mainly with consignments of furs, hides, tallow, and beeswax. Money was practi- cally unknown in the settlements, so that domes- tic trade likewise took the form of simple barter. Periods of industry and prosperity alternated with periods of depression, and the easy-going habitants - "farmers, hunters, traders by turn, with a strong admixture of unprogressive Indian blood" - tended always to relapse into utter indolence.
Some of these French towns, however, were seats of culture; and none was wholly barren of diver- sions. Kaskaskia had a Jesuit college and likewise a monastery. Cahokia had a school for Indian youth. Fort Chartres, we are gravely told, was "the center of life and fashion in the West." If everyday existence was humdrum, the villagers had always the opportunity for voluble conversa- tion "each from his own balcony"; and there were scores of Church festivals, not to mention birth-
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days, visits of travelers or neighbors, and home- comings of hunters and traders, which invited to festivity. Balls and dances and other merry- makings at which the whole village assembled sup- plied the wants of a people proverbially fond of amusement. Indeed, French civilization in the Mississippi and Illinois country was by no means without charm.
Kaskaskia, in the wonderfully fertile "American Bottom," maintained its existence, in spite of the cession to the English, as did also Vincennes far- ther east on the Wabash. Fort Chartres, a stout fortification whose walls were more than two feet thick, remained the seat of the principal garrison, and some traces of French occupancy survived on the Illinois. Cahokia was deserted, save for the splendid mission-farm of St. Sulpice, with its thirty slaves, its herd of cattle, and its mill, which the fathers before returning to France sold to a thrifty Frenchman not averse to becoming an Eng- lish subject. A few posts were abandoned alto- gether. Some of the departing inhabitants went back to France; some followed the French com- mandant, Neyon de Villiers, down the river to New Orleans; many gathered up their possessions, even to the frames and clapboards of their houses, and
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took refuge in the new towns which sprang up on the western bank. One of these new settlements was Ste. Geneviève, strategically located near the lead mines from which the entire region had long drawn its supplies of shot. Another, which was destined to greater importance, was St. Louis, established as a trading post on the richly wooded bluffs opposite Cahokia by Pierre Laclède in 1764.
Associated with Laclède in his fur-trading opera- tions at the new post was a lithe young man named Pierre Chouteau. In 1846 - eighty-two years af- terwards - Francis Parkman sat on the spacious veranda of Pierre Chouteau's country house near the city of St. Louis and heard from the lips of the venerable merchant stories of Pontiac, Saint-Ange, Croghan, and all the western worthies, red and white, of two full generations. "Not all the magic of a dream," the historian remarks, "nor the en- chantments of an Arabian tale, could outmatch the waking realities which were to rise upon the vision of Pierre Chouteau. Where, in his youth, he had climbed the woody bluff, and looked abroad on prairies dotted with bison, he saw, with the dim eye of his old age, the land darkened for many a furlong with the clustered roofs of the western metropolis. For the silence of the wilderness, he
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heard the clang and turmoil of human labor, the din of congregated thousands; and where the great river rolls down through the forest, in lonely gran- deur, he saw the waters lashed into foam beneath the prows of panting steamboats, flocking to the broad levee."
Pontiac's war long kept the English from taking actual possession of the western country. Mean- while Saint-Ange, commanding the remnant of the French garrison at Fort Chartres, resisted as best he could the demands of the redskins for assistance against their common enemy and hoped daily for the appearance of an English force to relieve him of his difficult position. In the spring of 1764 an English officer, Major Loftus, with a body of troops lately employed in planting English au- thority in "East Florida" and "West Florida," set out from New Orleans to take possession of the up-river settlements. A few miles above the mouth of the Red, however, the boats were fired on, without warning, from both banks of the stream, and many of the men were killed or wounded. The expedition retreated down the river with all possible speed. This display of faintheartedness won the keen ridicule of the French, and the Governor, D'Abadie, with mock
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magnanimity, offered an escort of French soldiery to protect the party on its way back to Pensacola! Within a few months a second attempt was pro- jected, but news of the bad temper of the Indians caused the leader, Captain Pittman, to turn back after reaching New Orleans.
Baffled in this direction, the new commander- in-chief, General Gage, resolved to accomplish the desired end by an expedition from Fort Pitt. Pontiac, however, was known to be still plotting vengeance at that time, and it seemed advisable to break the way for the proposed expedition by a special mission to placate the Indians. For this delicate task Sir William Johnson selected a trader of long experience and of good standing among the western tribes, George Croghan. Notwithstand- ing many mishaps, the plan was carried out. With two boats and a considerable party of soldiers and friendly Delawares, Croghan left Fort Pitt in May, 1765. As he descended the Ohio he carefully plotted the river's windings and wrote out an inter- esting description of the fauna and flora observed. All went well until he reached the mouth of the Wabash. There the party was set upon by a band of Kickapoos, who killed half a dozen of his men. Fluent apologies were at once offered. They had
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made the attack, they explained, only because the French had reported that the Indians with Cro- ghan's band were Cherokees, the Kickapoos' most deadly enemies. Now that their mistake was apparent, the artful emissaries declared, their re- gret was indeed deep.
All of this was sheer pretense, and Croghan and his surviving followers were kept under close guard and were carried along with the Kickapoo band up the Wabash to Vincennes, where the trader en- countered old Indian friends who soundly rebuked the captors for their inhospitality. Croghan knew the Indian nature too well to attempt to thwart the plans of his "hosts." Accordingly he went on with the band to the upper Wabash post Ouiatanon, where he received deputation after deputation from the neighboring tribes, smoked pipes of peace, made speeches, and shook hands with greasy war- riors by the score. Here came a messenger from Saint-Ange asking him to proceed to Fort Chartres. Here, also, Pontiac met him, and, after being as- sured that the English had no intention of enslav- ing the natives, declared that he would no longer stand in the conquerors' path. Though in unex- pected manner, Croghan's mission was accom- plished, and, with many evidences of favor from
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the natives, he went on to Detroit and thence to Niagara, where he reported to Johnson that the situation in the West was ripe for the establishment of English sovereignty.
There was no reason for further delay, and Cap- tain Thomas Sterling was dispatched with a hun- dred Highland veterans to take over the settle- ments. Descending the Ohio from Fort Pitt, the expedition reached Fort Chartres just as the frosty air began to presage the coming of winter. On October 10, 1765, - more than two and a half years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, - Saint-Ange made the long-desired transfer of au- thority. General Gage's high-sounding proclama- tion was read, the British flag was run up, and Sterling's red-coated soldiery established itself in the citadel. In due time small detachments were sent to Vincennes and other posts; and the triumph of the British power over Frenchman and Indian was complete. Saint-Ange retired with his little garrison to St. Louis, where, until the arrival of a Spanish lieutenant-governor in 1770, he acted by common consent as chief magistrate.
The creoles who passed under the English flag suffered little from the change. Their property and trading interests were not molested, and the
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English commandants made no effort to displace the old laws and usages. Documents were written and records were kept in French as well as English. The village priest and the notary retained their accustomed places of paternal authority. The old idyllic life went on. Population increased but little; barter, hunting, and trapping still furnished the means of a simple subsistence; and with music, dancing, and holiday festivities the light-hearted populace managed to crowd more pleasure into a year than the average English frontiersman got in a lifetime.
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