An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (14 page)

In carrying out these orders, the marauding rangers demonstrated what they could accomplish with unmitigated violence and a total lack of scruples and respect for noncombatants. They destroyed the Miamis' two largest towns and took forty-one women and children captive, then sent warnings to the other towns that the same would be their lot unless they surrendered unconditionally: “Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.” Yet the Indians of the Ohio Country continued to fight, well aware of the likely consequences. The Seneca leader Cornplanter called the colonizers the “town destroyers.” He described how, during the destruction and suffering that troops wreaked on the western Iroquois, Seneca “women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.”
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Despite the primary use of settler militias, President Washington insisted that the new government had to develop a professional army that would enhance US prestige in the eyes of European countries. He also thought that the cost of using mercenaries, at four times that of regular troops, was too high. But whenever regular troops were sent into the Ohio Country, the Indigenous resisters drove them out. Reluctantly, Washington resigned himself to the necessity of using what were essentially vicious killers to terrorize the region, thereby annexing land that could be sold to settlers. The sale of confiscated land was the primary revenue source for the new government.

In late 1791, the War Department notified Ohio squatters to call out their rangers for an offensive. Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne was charged with restructuring the units of the army under his command to function as irregular forces. Washington and other officials were aware that Wayne was unreliable and an alcoholic, but it appeared that such characteristics might be useful for the dirty war ahead. Between 1792 and 1794, Wayne put together a combined force of regulars with a large contingent of experienced rangers. He enthusiastically embraced such counterinsurgent tactics as
destroying food supplies and murdering civilians.

Among the fifteen hundred mounted rangers in the first mission was the talented William Wells with his group of rangers. When he was thirteen, Wells had been captured by the Miamis and then had lived with them for nine years, marrying Little Turtle's daughter. Under his father-in-law's command, Wells had fought the invading settlers and the US Army. In 1792, Wells was chosen to represent the Miami Nation in a negotiation with the United States, but on arrival for talks he encountered a brother from the family he had been separated from for a decade. He was persuaded to return to Kentucky and served as a ranger for the US Army.
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Wayne's troops and rangers managed to enter the Ohio Country and establish a base they called Fort Defiance (in northwestern Ohio), in what had been the heart of the Indigenous alliance led by Little Turtle.
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Wayne then made an ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of your blood.” The Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, and the US forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. On August 20, 1794, at Fallen Timbers, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered. Even after this US victory, the rangers continued for three days laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. After creating a fifty-mile swath of devastation, the invading forces returned to Fort Defiance. The defeat at Fallen Timbers was a severe blow to the Indigenous nations of the Ohio Country, but they would reorganize their resistance during the following decade.

The US conquest of southern Ohio was formalized in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, a victory based on vicious irregular warfare. The nations of the region no longer had the British and the French and the settlers to play against one another, but rather were now faced with the determined imperialist thrust of an independent republic that had to coddle settlers if they were to recruit any into their service.
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Over the following decade, more settlers poured over the Appalachians, squatting on Indigenous lands, and even building towns, anticipating that the US military, land speculators, and civilian institutions would follow.

In the Ohio Country, the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa began building a concerted Indigenous resistance in the early nineteenth century. From their organizing center, Prophet's Town, founded in 1807, Tenskwatawa and his fellow organizers traveled throughout Shawnee towns calling for a return to their cultural roots, which had been eroded by the assimilation of Anglo-American practices and trade goods, especially alcohol.
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Abuse of alcohol (and drugs) is epidemic like diseases in communities subjected to colonization or other forms of domination, particularly in crowded and miserable refugee situations. This is the case in all parts of the world, not only among Native peoples of North America. Alcohol was an item in the tool kit of colonialists who made it readily and cheaply available. Christian missionaries often took advantage of these dysfunctional conditions to convert, offering not only food and housing but also discipline to avoid alcohol. But this was itself a form of colonial submission.

Significantly, Tecumseh did not limit his vision to the Ohio Country but also envisaged organizing all the peoples west to the Mississippi, north into the Great Lakes region, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. He visited other Indigenous nations, calling for unity in defiance of the squatters' presence on their lands. He presented a program that would end all sales of Indigenous land to settlers. Only then would settlers' migrations in search of cheap land cease and the establishment of the United States in the West be prevented. An alliance of all Indigenous nations could then manage Indigenous lands as a federation. His program, strategy, and philosophy mark the beginning of pan-Indigenous movements in Anglo-colonized North America that established a model for future resistance. Joseph Brant and Pontiac had originated the strategy in the 1780s, but Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa forged a pan-Indigenous framework made all the more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation.
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The evolving Indigenous alliance posed a serious barrier to continued Anglo-American squatting and land speculation and acquisitions in the trans-Appalachian region. With previous Indigenous resistance movements, such as those led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, during peace negotiations in the wake of ruinous US wars of annihilation, leaders of factions had become “agency chiefs” who agreed to land sales without the consent of those they purported to represent. The colonized communities had fallen into economic dependency on trade goods and federal annuities, incurring debts that led to the forfeiture of what land remained in their hands. The emerging younger generation was contemptuous of such chiefs, whom they perceived as selling out their people. Anglo-American settlers and speculators exerted increased pressure and issued new threats of annihilation, provoking anger and calls for retaliation but also a renewed spirit of resistance.

By 1810, new Indigenous alliances challenged squatter settlers in the Indiana and Illinois Territories at a time when war between the United States and Great Britain was looming. Fearing that the British would unite with the Indigenous alliances to prevent the US imperialist goal to dominate the continent, these settlers drafted a petition to President James Madison, demanding that the government act preemptively: “The safety of the persons and property of this frontier can never be effectually secured, but by the breaking up of the combination formed by the Shawnee Prophet on the Wabash.”
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In 1809, Indiana's territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, badgered and bribed a few destitute Delaware, Miami, and Potawatomi individuals to sign the Treaty of Fort Wayne, according to which these nations would hand over their land in what is now southern Indiana for an annual annuity. Tecumseh promptly condemned the treaty and those who signed it without the approval of the peoples they represented. Harrison met with Tecumseh at Vincennes in 1810, along with other delegates of the allied Shawnee, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Peoria, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Winnebago Nations. The Shawnee leader informed Harrison that he was leaving for the South to bring the Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws
into the alliance.

Harrison, now convinced that Tecumseh's brother Tenskwatawa, the Prophet, was the source of the renewed Indigenous militancy, reasoned that destroying Prophet's Town would crush the resistance. It would present a clear choice to the many Indigenous people who supported the militant leaders: cede more land to the United States and take the money and trade goods, or suffer further annihilation. He decided to strike in Tecumseh's absence. Having served as General Wayne's aide-de-camp in the Fallen Timbers attacks, Harrison knew how to keep his regular army forces from being ambushed. He assembled Indiana and Kentucky rangers—seasoned Indian killers—and some US Army regulars. At the site of what is today Terre Haute, Indiana, the soldiers constructed Fort Harrison on Shawnee land—a symbol of their intention to remain permanently. The people in Prophet's Town were aware of the military advance, but Tecumseh had warned them not to be drawn into a fight, because the alliance was not yet ready for war. Tenskwatawa sent scouts to observe the enemy's movements. The US forces arrived on the edge of Prophet's Town at dawn on November 6, 1811. Seeing no alternative to overriding his brother's instructions, Tenskwatawa led an assault before dawn the following morning. Only after some two hundred of the Indigenous residents had fallen did the troops overpower them, burning the town, destroying the granary, and looting, even digging up graves and mutilating the corpses. This was the famous “battle” of Tippecanoe that made Harrison a frontier hero to the settlers and later helped elect him president.
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The US Army's destruction of the capital of the alliance outraged Indigenous peoples all over the Old Northwest, prompting fighters of the Kickapoos, Winnebagos, Potawatamis, and even Creeks from the South to converge on a British garrison at Fort Malden in Canada to obtain supplies with which to fight. Contrary to the false US assumption that Tecumseh was a mere tool of the British, he had been unwilling to enter into a British alliance because Europeans had proved so unreliable in the past. But now he spoke for unified and coordinated Indigenous-led war on the United States that the British could support if they wished but not control. President Madison, speaking to Congress in seeking a declaration of war against
Great Britain, argued: “In reviewing the conduct of Great Britain toward the United States our attention is necessarily drawn to the warfare just renewed by the savages on one of our extensive frontiers—a warfare which is known to spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly shocking to humanity.”
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During the summer of 1812, the Indigenous alliance struck US installations and squatter settlements with little help from the British. The US forts at present-day Detroit and Dearborn fell. Among the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn, Kentucky ranger William Wells was killed and his body mutilated as that of a despised turncoat. In the fall, Indigenous forces attacked Anglo-American squatter settlements all over Illinois and Indiana Territories. The US rangers attempting to track and kill the Indigenous fighters found destroyed and abandoned Anglo-American settlements, with thousands of settlers driven from their homes. In response, Harrison turned the militias loose on Indigenous fields and villages with no restrictions on their behavior. The head of the Kentucky militia mustered two thousand armed and mounted volunteers to destroy Indigenous towns near today's Peoria, Illinois, but without success. A reversal came in the fall of 1813, when Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames and the Indigenous army was destroyed. Throughout the eighteen-month war, militias and rangers attacked Indigenous civilians and agricultural resources, leaving behind starving refugees.
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In the unconquered Indigenous region of the Old Southwest, parallel resistance took place during the two decades following US independence, with similar tragic results, thanks to extirpative settler warfare. Tennessee (formerly claimed, but not settled, by the British colony of North Carolina) was carved out of the larger Cherokee Nation and became a state in 1796. Its eastern part, particularly the area around today's Knoxville, was a war zone. The mostly Scots-Irish squatters, attempting to secure and expand their settlements, were at war with the resistant Cherokees called “Chickamaugas.” The settlers hated both the Indigenous people whom they were attempting
to displace as well as the newly formed federal government. In 1784, a group of North Carolina settlers, led by settler-ranger John Sevier, had seceded from western Carolina and established the independent country of Franklin with Sevier as president. Neither North Carolina nor the federal government had exerted any control over the settlements in the eastern Tennessee Valley region. In the summer of 1788, Sevier ordered an unprovoked, preemptive attack on the Chickamauga towns, killing thirty villagers and forcing the survivors to flee south. Sevier's actions formed a template for settler-federal relations, with the settlers implementing the federal government's final solution, while the federal government feigned an appearance of limiting settler invasions of Indigenous lands.
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Facing the fierce resistance of Indigenous nations in the Ohio Country and the fighting between the Muskogee Nation and the state of Georgia, Washington's administration sought to contain Indigenous resistance in the South. Yet now the settlers were provoking the Cherokees in what would soon be the state of Tennessee. Secretary of War Knox claimed to believe that the thickness of settlers' development, converting Indigenous hunting grounds into farms, would slowly overwhelm the Indigenous nations and drive them out. He advised the squatters' leaders to continue building, which would attract more illegal settlers. This disingenuous view ignored the fact that the Indigenous farmers were well aware of the intentions of the settlers to destroy them and seize their territories.