Peoples of the Inland Sea. David Andrew Nichols
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. In 1752, the biracial trader Charles Langlade received French approval to attack La Demoiselle’s base at Pickawillany. Langlade, an Odawa relative by virtue of his Odawa mother, assembled two hundred Anishinaabe warriors and destroyed the Miami settlement. Other French-allied war parties attacked or threatened British traders in the Ohio country, forcing them to withdraw east of the Allegheny Mountains. The following year, Governor Duquesne led twenty-two hundred French soldiers to build a chain of forts from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. The undertaking proved costly in money and lives, but Duquesne and his superiors in the Ministry of Marine (France’s colonial bureaucracy) considered the forts essential to block English expansion and control the upper Ohio valley. For their part, the Ohio Indians initially regarded the French incursion as an opportunity rather than a threat. The previous winter had been a lean one, and the Delawares, Ohio Iroquois, and Shawnees were happy to feed the French soldiers and hire out their horses. This set the new pattern for French-Indian relations in the eastern Lakes country: not a sovereign-subject relationship but a marriage of convenience, which Native Americans would abandon once it became inconvenient.16
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