For the Lenapes and Munsees, “woman” served as a metaphor for diplomat.6
The Penn family chose to view the Delawares’ predilection for diplomacy and gender egalitarianism as signs of weakness. In 1737, the Penns and their allies drove the nation entirely out of the valley that bore its name. Pennsylvania officials presented Delaware leaders with an old (and fake) deed of cession to tribal land on the Delaware River, with one of the cession’s boundaries extending as far as a man could walk “in a day and a half.” The Penn family then hired runners to cover fifty-five miles of ground on the days allotted to mark the boundary. When the Delawares protested the so-called Walking Purchase, the Penns brought in the Iroquois, with whom they had been cultivating an alliance for several decades, to bully their smaller Indian neighbors into leaving. At a 1742 conference, Onondaga chief Canasatego declared that “we [the Iroquois] conquered you; we made women of you; you know you are women, and can no more sell land than women,” and ordered the Delawares to “remove immediately.” Canasatego’s tone and threats made it clear that he used “women” as a label for subjugation, and the Iroquois continued to use gendered language to shame and belittle the Delawares into the 1750s. For its victims, the Walking Purchase became a bitter experience and a cautionary tale to Lakes Indians with whom they subsequently resided. Pierre-Joseph Céloron reminded the Allegheny Delawares of their mistreatment when he visited them in 1749, and four decades later a Wyandot chief recounted the colonists’ perfidy to an American governor.7
The Delawares driven from their homes after the Walking Purchase sought a new homeland in the upper Ohio valley, joining there Shawnees and Ohio Iroquois who had begun moving to the region in the 1720s. The migrants established farming settlements centered on communal longhouses, where they held religious ceremonies like the Delawares’ annual gamwing rite—twelve days of singing, vision dances, and thanksgiving to the Creator. They extended their winter hunting trips to the southern shore of Lake Erie, a region notable for its “abundance of game,” including bison. There men shot beaver, deer, waterfowl, and other animals, which provided their families with meat and with peltry exchangeable for European goods.8
The Indian communities in western Pennsylvania established ties to those living on the southern Great Lakes. The Odawas, Potawatomis, and Wyandots residing near Detroit and Sandusky regularly traded with the Delawares, whom the Odawas called Wapanachki (Easterners), and with the Shawnees. Men and women from all of these nations used the southern shorelands of Lake Erie as a common range. Hunting and fishing in shared country, the Anishinaabeg and Wyandots shared campfires and stories with the newcomers and developed a common identity with them. They saw themselves not as French or British allies, or as members of wholly distinct nations, but as an autonomous regional alliance—as Ohio Indians. Their confederacy eventually became one of the nuclei of larger pan-Indian movements in the region.9
Reinforcing the Ohio Indians’ autonomy was their willingness to trade and negotiate with both of the European empires that claimed the region. Fur traders from British Pennsylvania followed the Ohio valley migrants west to their new homeland. By the early 1740s, one of the most prominent, George Croghan, had pushed into modern Ohio, building a trading post for the Delawares and Ohio Iroquois on the Cuyahoga River. Concurrently, the Pennsylvania provincial government developed diplomatic ties with the southern Lakes Indians. In 1747–48, Pennsylvania commissioners invited Ohio Iroquois and Miami deputies to Philadelphia and Lancaster and there signed with them treaties designed to detach them from the French alliance. More ominously, they also interviewed the Miamis on the principal river routes and French forts in their homeland, demonstrating Pennsylvanians’ interest in expanding even further westward.10
France had always maintained a tenuous sovereignty over the Lakes Indians. French officials needed their Native American allies more than the Indians needed them, and the Lakes Indians saw the French kings and governors not as their rulers but as their fictive “fathers,” men who gave gifts and resolved disputes but had no command authority. France also found it difficult to govern the Lakes Indians because none of the Lakes nations comprised a politically consolidated whole. Individual towns had headmen and war parties had captains, but the region’s chiefs played ceremonial and diplomatic roles and could govern their kinsmen only through persuasion. Political factions formed easily in the region’s Native American communities, and often those factions opposed an exclusive relationship with the French or favored an alliance with Britain.11
One such faction emerged within the Miamis, an Indian nation descended from the Fort Ancient culture and loosely affiliated with the Illiniwek. Residing chiefly in the Wabash and Maumee River valleys, to which they had migrated from Illinois in the mid-seventeenth century, the Miamis had in 1718 around eight thousand people, gathered into a half-dozen towns with extensive fields and access to rich beaver and bison-hunting grounds. Their population and productivity as hunters gave the Miamis leverage over their French trading partners, whom they obliged to build convenient trading posts at Fort Miami (present-day Fort Wayne) and Ouiatenon. During King George’s War (1744–48), however, the British navy blockaded New France, and French goods became scarce in the Lakes country. So too did the generosity of French traders, whom many Lakes Indians suspected of cheating or exploiting them. By 1747 a faction of Miamis under Memeskia, or La Demoiselle (as the French called him), had begun diplomatic communication with the English, and the following year this group moved their homes to Pickawillany (modern Piqua, Ohio), where George Croghan had constructed a trading post.12
Another disaffected group came from the Huron-Wyandots, who had settled near Detroit earlier in the century. Some of the Hurons had come to dislike French traders’ goods and attitudes. Others had come to distrust the neighboring Odawas, whom the Wyandots, as farmers and Christians, considered a primitive, pagan people. In 1738 a faction of disaffected Wyandots moved to Sandusky Bay, fifty miles from Detroit. During King George’s War their principal chief, Orontony, put out diplomatic feelers to Pennsylvania, and in 1747 he helped organize an anti-French “revolt” in the lower Lakes region. Among other incidents, Wyandot warriors slew five traders at Sandusky, while Miamis plundered another eight French traders at Fort Miami. The following year, Orontony and his kinsmen burned their settlement and relocated to the Muskingum River, where they continued to trade with the British.13
French officials found the Pennsylvanians’ presence in the Ohio country and the growing disaffection among the southern Lakes Indians deeply troubling, as it threatened to create a salient of British influence between Canada and Louisiana. Some feared that Britain had even more ambitious goals, that it would use the Ohio valley as a base to seize Louisiana, then advance from that province to conquer Spanish America, thereby giving Great Britain mastery of the hemisphere. Such fears impelled French officials to an energetic and violent response, similar to Governor Bienville’s response to the Chickasaws’ challenge in the 1730s.14
First, the governor of New France in 1749 sent a party of soldiers under Pierre-Joseph Céloron to descend the Ohio River, post or bury metal plates proclaiming the renewal of French rule over the region, and inform the Ohio valley Indians that their lands came under Louis XV’s authority. Céloron visited several communities of Iroquois, Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis, warned them not to trade with Britain, and told them that British colonists only wanted their lands. Most of his hosts responded with politeness and flattery, raising French flags, greeting the emissaries with “pipes of peace,” and assuring Céloron and the governor of New France of their friendship. However, some Ohio Indians fled at the French party’s approach, and others allegedly planned to attack Céloron and his companions. Still others argued, as bluntly as protocol permitted, that French traders could not supply them and that they needed English goods and blacksmiths to survive. One Delaware spokesman told Céloron that without British aid, “we shall . . . be exposed to the danger of dying of hunger and misery on the Beautiful River. Have pity on us, my father, you cannot at present minister to our wants.” When the French emissaries returned to Quebec, their report only confirmed what their superiors already feared.15
A more violent assertion of French authority soon followed.
