trading partners. Some tribes, notably the majority of the Iroquois Confederacy (which comprised the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora but in this case was minus the Seneca), joined the British. The war—brutal and total—lasted from 1754 until 1763, when France gave up most of its New World possessions at the Treaty of Paris, though it left its citizens and traders in their former holdings.
When, under the leadership of General Jeffrey Amherst, the British took possession of the French territories around the Great Lakes, they made a number of mistakes. They understaffed the forts and shortchanged their new Indian trading partners. Most of these errors resulted from Amherst’s low opinion of Natives. He thought them disorganized, weak, and worthless. Whereas the French treated the Indians as allies and urged, through diplomacy and trade, the creation of mutually beneficial alliances, the British treated Indians as a defeated people. They did away with the symbolic and quasi-religious gifting ceremonies the French had observed, during which village chiefs were presented with blankets, guns, and trade goods. Amherst’s general approach was desultory and his attitude derisive; he cut rations and instructed traders not to sell gunpowder to the Indians. Few French colonists made inroads into Indian territories, but the British came in waves. And finally, the great tribes of the East had enough.
An alliance was forged between three different tribal regions: the Great Lakes tribes, consisting of the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Huron, and Potawatomi; the tribes from Illinois country to the west, made up of Miamis, Kickapoos, Mascoutens, Weas, and Piankashaws; and the tribes from the Ohio country, including Mingos, Shawnee, Wyandots, and Delaware. These came together largely under the leadership of the Ottawa chief Pontiac and Kiywasuta, a Seneca leader. The Seneca, having long supported the British, were disaffected. They threw in their lot, and their many warriors, with the tribes allied against the British. When fighting started at Fort Detroit in the spring of 1763 and lasted until late 1764, the Indians used every strategy they had. They sneaked in concealed weapons, pretending to want to have a council. The leader of Fort Miami was lured out of the fort by his Indian mistress and killed by Miami warriors lying in wait. The most daring method of capture was used when the Ojibwe and Sac staged a lacrosse game outside the gates of Fort Mitchilimackinac. They threw the ball in past the open gates and chased after it (nothing was “out of bounds” in early lacrosse). Once inside the fort the lacrosse players grabbed weapons smuggled in earlier by their women and opened fire, killing fifteen of the fort’s thirty-five soldiers; five soldiers were tortured to death later.
During the conflict many hundreds of British soldiers and civilians were burned, tortured, and scalped. One was ritually cannibalized. The British, for their part, weren’t very nice either. During the siege of Fort Pitt General Amherst wrote to Colonel Bouquet, who commanded a force sent to relieve him, “Could it not be contrived to send the small pox among the disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” Colonel Bouquet agreed heartily: “I will try to inoculate the bastards with some blankets that may fall into their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself.” This was Amherst’s response: “You will do well to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” Even in Pennsylvania, far from the fighting, fear and tempers ran high. Around Paxton, Pennsylvania, rumors circulated that a war party had been seen in Conestoga. A local militia, later known as Paxton’s Boys, grabbed weapons and attacked a peaceful village of Christian Susquehannock farmers, killing six of them. The rest fled to Philadelphia with fifty Paxton Boys right behind them, but they were protected by the British and a local militia, led by Benjamin Franklin.
When it was all over, 500 British troops were dead and 2,000 British colonists had been captured or killed. The number of Indian dead is unknown and hard to estimate—smallpox claimed many, including many who weren’t involved in the conflict at all. The war ended in a stalemate. The Indian alliance wasn’t able to drive out the British, and the British weren’t able to subdue the Indians. Such an outcome had long-lasting effects. British policy toward Natives was hastily reconfigured in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. In it, the British restructured their trade and social relations to mimic those of the French and drew a boundary between British and Indian lands that ran from the Appalachians to the Mississippi River and from Florida to Maine. The land to the west of the Appalachians was considered “Indian land” and British colonists were warned to leave it alone. Conciliation and compromise rather than all-out war became the method of dealing with Indian tribes. And Indians were understood to have individual and collective rights to their lands. Indian tribes also understood that pan-Indian alliances were the best way to deal with colonial outsiders. This was a major shift in policy and in thinking on both sides.
Then the Revolutionary War broke out. Indian tribes on the eastern seaboard and in the Ohio River valley were actively courted by the British and the colonists. Some tribes picked sides; others played both sides. By 1778 the Continental Army was in deep trouble and looking for help from every quarter—from the French and Germans, naturally, but also from the Indian tribes: the Tuscarora, Shawnee, Delaware, Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Wyandot, and Munsies. Some of these tribes sided with the British. Some, like the Delaware, threw in their lot with the Americans. None of the tribes fared well in the end.
As Pontiac’s War of 1763–1764 proved, the Indians at the western edge of the colonies were a force to be reckoned with. As of 1778, the United States could not afford to fight the Indians of the eastern Great Lakes as it fought the British to the east. It desperately needed the Indians’ neutrality, if not their help. The offer from the revolutionaries (and evidence that, though the outcome was not clear, they already thought of themselves and their Indian neighbors as nations) to the Delaware came in the form of a treaty. The Treaty of Fort Pitt, signed on September 17, 1778, was to set the tone for future formal treaties between Indian nations and the U.S. government. In it, the United States recognized that the Delaware were a sovereign nation, not beholden to any rule other than their own; the treaty guaranteed their rights to administer their own affairs and to protect their territories, and recognized the “usefructory” rights of the Delaware, that is, the right to hunt, fish, gather, log, build, and otherwise dispose of the resources within the limits of their territory mentioned in the treaty. The Continental Congress also promised to build a fort for the tribe, most likely to protect the Delaware against retaliation by the Wyandot—enemies of the Delaware who sided with the British. In return, the Delaware promised to allow Continental troops to pass through Delaware land, and to provide warriors to fight alongside the colonists. The United States was so keen to enlist the support of the Delaware that it made an unprecedented and never-repeated gesture: as a term of the treaty it offered the Delaware the opportunity to become the fourteenth state of the union. “It is further agreed on,” reads the treaty, “between the contracting parties should it for the future be found conducive for the mutual interest of both parties to invite any other tribes who have been friends to the interest of the United States, to join the present confederation, and to form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress.” Sadly, it never happened. The promise was not made in good faith and the negotiations were not conducted with any faith at all. “There never was a conference with the Indians so improperly or villainously conducted,” wrote Colonel Morgan, one participant in the proceedings. The Delaware were invited to an early version of an “open bar” and in the general inebriation the translators (in the pay of the Continental Congress) deliberately deceived the Indian delegates. The Delaware were betrayed almost immediately. White Eyes, one of the Delaware chiefs who signed the treaty and who was one of the staunchest supporters of the United States, was murdered by his allies within a month; his death was covered up and officially attributed to smallpox. So much for the first formal, written treaty between the United States and an Indian tribe.
Treaties were based on two suppositions that reflect a history of thought rather than fact: that tribes were nations (in the European sense of “nation”) and that negotiation was preferable to all-out war. Treaties were not made between nations and lesser states, or between colonies and nations—they were made between sovereign nations. At the time—and later, during what has been called the “treaty period” between 1783 and 1889 (though the
