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The European kingdom that would become France’s principal colonial rival, England, paid little attention to the North American interior in the seventeenth century. Like its French neighbor, England—after 1707, part of the Kingdom of Great Britain—had been in past centuries a province (a marginal province) of the Roman Empire, then a cluster of tribal kingdoms unified in the eleventh century CE by the Danes and Normans. It remained an unstable realm for another seven hundred years, experiencing a major rebellion or civil war once or twice each century. The seventeenth century brought to England a bloody civil war and a royal coup d’état, which (not surprisingly) distracted its royal government from goings-on in the new overseas settlements. The English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard functioned as chartered companies or family properties with substantial local autonomy; as long as they sent valuable exports back to England and served as dumping grounds for vagrants, criminals, religious malcontents, and unplaced younger sons of the aristocracy, the Crown usually left them alone. Despite this neglect, and thanks to “push” factors like a stagnant English economy that drove hundreds of thousands of people across the North Atlantic, the English American colonies’ settler population steadily grew. By 1700 it reached 250,000 colonists, sixteen times as many whites as one could find in New France, and their numbers would quadruple during the next half-century.3
Though the English colonists had little interest in the country west of the Appalachians, their influence already extended there. The Dutch colony of New Netherland and its successor colony of New York sold the Iroquois the weapons they used to disperse the Hurons, fight the Anishinaabeg, and harry the Illiniwek. New York later became an alternative trading center, if a somewhat remote one, for Lakes Indians dissatisfied with French goods or prices; hunters could canoe to Lake Erie or Lake Ontario and traverse Iroquoia, stopping along the way to pay respect and gifts to the Five Nations. Some French traders came to Albany and bought English textiles for resale to their own Indian customers. Meanwhile, the colony of South Carolina became the center of the English Indian slave trade, which ensnared thirty thousand to forty thousand people by 1715. While this trade mainly occurred in the southeast, it extended into the southern Lakes country: one of Carolina’s principal slave-trading partners, the Chickasaws, sent war parties into Illinois in search of captives, and French settlers sold Illini and Kickapoo slaves to Carolina traders.4
Albany stood distant from the Lakes Indians’ settlements, and Carolina’s Indian slave trade collapsed after the Yamasee War of 1715–
16. Shortly thereafter, though, two other British colonies began to pose a more serious challenge to French authority. Both played a part in igniting the conflict that ultimately destroyed the French empire in North America. The first was Pennsylvania, established in 1681 as a refuge for Quakers and other religious dissidents, and as a real-estate venture by founder William Penn. Pennsylvania’s Quaker-controlled government refused to create a provincial militia, instead cultivating good relations with the colony’s Delaware Indian neighbors, trading them weapons and using them to defend the colony’s borders. After it became clear that the Pennsylvanians wanted peace and that their government had legally restricted the purchase of Indian lands, Native peoples from other regions began relocating to Pennsylvania’s river valleys. The Indian settlers included a faction of the Five Nations Iroquois, known to their detractors as “Mingoes” (here we will refer to them as “Ohio Iroquois”), and some of the Shawnees.5
Pennsylvania’s white settler population also grew rapidly, rising to 160,000 by 1760. As the colony grew, the Penn family used land cession treaties, some of them fraudulent, to push their Indian neighbors and allies westward. Their main targets were the Delawares, an Algonquian-speaking nation known sometimes by the names of their divisions, the Lenapes and Munsees. Both of these Delaware groups distinguished themselves by their fluid gender boundaries: Lenape and Munsee men and women both dressed alike and both sexes could serve as sachems and religious leaders. The Iroquois derided all of the Delawares as “women,” but the targets of their scorn did not take this as an insult; to them, women were spiritually equal to men and often served as intercultural mediators. 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