Contested Territories: Native Americans and Non-Natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700-1850 - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1611860458 ISBN 13: 9781611860450

Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A remarkable multifaceted history, Contested Territories examines a region that played an essential role in America's post-revolutionary expansion—the Lower Great Lakes region, once known as the Northwest Territory. As French, English, and finally American settlers moved westward and intersected with Native American communities, the ethnogeography of the region changed drastically, necessitating interactions that were not always peaceful. Using ethnohistorical methodologies, the seven essays presented here explore rapidly changing cultural dynamics in the region and reconstruct in engaging detail the political organization, economy, diplomacy, subsistence methods, religion, and kinship practices in play. With a focus on resistance, changing worldviews, and early forms of self-determination among Native Americans, Contested Territories demonstrates the continuous interplay between actor and agency during an important era in American history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Beatty-Medina is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toledo.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CONTESTED TERRITORIES

Native Americans and Non-Natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700–1850

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2012 Michigan State University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-045-0

Contents

Foreword by Greg O'Brien...............................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments........................................................................................................................................................................................xiIntroduction by Melissa Rinehart and Charles Beatty-Medina.............................................................................................................................................xiiiA Year at Niagara: Negotiating Coexistence in the Eastern Great Lakes, 1763–1764 Daniel Ingram..................................................................................................1"Foolish Young Men" and the Contested Ohio Country, 1783–1795 Sarah E. Miller...................................................................................................................35Native American–French Interactions in Eighteenth-Century Southwest Michigan: The View from Fort St. Joseph Michael S. Nassaney, William M. Cremin, and LisaMarie Malischke.....................55Old Friends in New Territories: Delawares and Quakers in the Old Northwest Territory Dawn Marsh.......................................................................................................81Delawares in Eastern Ohio after the Treaty of Greenville: The Goshen Mission in Context Amy C. Schutt.................................................................................................111Miami Resistance and Resilience during the Removal Era Melissa Rinehart...............................................................................................................................137The Politics of Indian Removal on the Wyandot Reserve, 1817–1843 James Buss.....................................................................................................................167Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................................................195Contributors...........................................................................................................................................................................................215Index..................................................................................................................................................................................................217

Chapter One

A Year at Niagara: Negotiating Coexistence in the Eastern Great Lakes, 1763–1764

DANIEL INGRAM

In early September 1763, the British garrison of Fort Niagara felt lucky. They had been spared the fates of Fort Michilimackinac and many smaller western forts that had been overtaken or destroyed in the Indian rebellion that would soon be named after the Odawa leader Pontiac. Niagara lay within the nominal country of the Senecas, and some of them had become disaffected with the British regime. Many of the westernmost Senecas living in the Genesee river area, often called Chenussios by their contemporaries, had joined in the rebellion and may have played a role in fomenting the uprising in the first place. They had long been friendlier to the old French regime in Canada than most of their English-allied Iroquois kin, and they saw the uprising as a way to assert their influence in regional affairs. However, except for a few small skirmishes, mainly in Pennsylvania, the rebellious Chenussios had not yet subjected the Niagara region to the kind of violence that had roiled through the Great Lakes region earlier that summer. This was vital to British plans for quelling the uprising because Niagara was the main supply point for all the western posts, and any chance of relieving besieged Fort Detroit and stopping the rebellion would begin there. In the meantime, British representatives continued to parley for peace with western Indian groups. To that end, the sloop Michigan had sailed into Lake Erie on August 26, carrying provisions for Detroit's besieged garrison, and an Iroquois delegation to meet with Pontiac. The small delegation included Daniel Oughnour, a Mohawk friend of Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department, and their mission was a routine peace negotiation. But, soon after the ship entered Lake Erie, it was cast ashore. The effort to reclaim its wreckage from the lakefront prompted a series of events that brought the full force of the Indian uprising to the Niagara region.

Niagara's role in the Indian uprising of 1763 has been less prominent in studies of the rebellion than more familiar events at Detroit, Michilimackinac, and Pittsburgh. Pontiac and his allies in the Great Lakes region, the Ohio Valley, and Illinois have garnered more attention than the western Seneca group, despite the Chenussios' roles as early instigators and supporters of the rebellion, and their success in overthrowing Pennsylvania forts Venango, Le Boeuf, and Presque isle in 1763. The Seneca attack at Devil's Hole on the Niagara portage is usually noted as an important British defeat, but second to the battles of Bushy Run near Fort Pitt, or Bloody Run near Detroit. Johnson's 1764 Niagara peace conference is often depicted as a smashing diplomatic success because it resulted in the supposedly desperate Senecas ceding control of the Niagara corridor to the British. From the British military's point of view, and with the benefit of hindsight, these interpretations seem well founded.

However, studying these events from the Senecas' perspective complicates the picture. The Anglocentric vantage emphasizes Iroquoian social and military decline and economic dependency during the eighteenth century. The Senecas would have understood the events of the 1760s differently. For six decades, Senecas and their Iroquoian kin had worked to establish favorable economic and political relations with both the British and French governments in North America without taking part in European military conflicts. By the 1760s, the Six Nations Iroquois had become vital consumers in the Atlantic fur trade. They desired fair trade, political neutrality in European affairs, and, like nearly all Eastern Woodland peoples of the eighteenth century, restriction of white settlement in their country. But the Iroquois Confederacy was not a monolith; the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations that made up the confederacy, and indeed each town within those nations, exercised significant autonomy in managing their own affairs. The Chenussios held long-established relations with French traders at Niagara, and viewed French defeat in the Seven Years' War and the new British military hegemony in the Great Lakes with trepidation. Restrictions on trade, rising prices of English goods, and the threat of English civilian settlement near Niagara gave the Chenussios common cause with Odawas, Shawnees, Ojibwas, and other groups in open rebellion against the British Great Lakes military regime of the early 1760s. There is little evidence of desperation or decline in this initiative; indeed, the Chenussios used time-tested military and diplomatic techniques to strengthen their position. The Seneca attack at Devil's Hole made...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MICHIGAN ST UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1611860458
• ISBN 13: 9781611860450
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 223
• Herausgeber: Beatty-Medina Charles, Rinehart Melissa
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar