Rez Life. David Treuer
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 U.S. government officially stopped making treaties with tribes in 1871)—Indian tribes were considered nations, and though circumstances varied greatly, the U.S. government made treaties with Indians for two main reasons. First, the United States had to make treaties, because Indian tribes were powerful. They had command of routes of travel, many warriors, and plenty of resources when the United States had very little of any of these. The second reason was cynical: paper was cheaper than bullets. Despite the power of Indian tribes, it was often the case that the United States had no intention of honoring the treaties it made. Treaties were a way to reduce the power of tribes. Nonetheless, Indian tribes were so much on the mind of the revolutionaries that they included a special clause in the U.S. Constitution: only Congress had the power to regulate trade with Indian tribes and, furthermore, only the federal government (the president and the Senate) had the right to make treaties, as the “supreme law of the land,” with Indian tribes. In the 1870s, the House of Representatives, which felt left out of the treaty-making process, effectively put a stop to the process unless the representatives could be involved.
Treaties—between tribes and European colonial powers, and between tribes and the newly formed U.S. government, had long been the “law of the land,” but it wasn’t until the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 that the modern Indian reservation was born. At the time the U.S. government was in a quandary. It felt it needed room for the country to grow—and except for overseas colonial expansion, the only direction in which the country could grow was west—but Indians were in the way. All-out war with the tribes would be too costly, and the outcome—given the strength and position of many Indian tribes—would be far from certain. The U.S. government wanted to avoid the kind of conflict that had hurt the British so badly during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s War. To repeat, then: frontier wars were costly and bloody, and their outcome (since they are fought against shifting tribal alliances of Indians who knew and controlled the terrain, with extended supply lines, and with so many unprotected settlers at risk) was unclear. Until 1851 the U.S. government had used two conflicting policies—assimilation and removal. But with the Appropriations Act, the policy became removal and containment. Instead of large tracts of land positioned in the way of western expansion, smaller, contained parcels of Indian land were seen as the answer. The Indian Appropriations Act, the first step in this process, empowered the U.S. government to enter into treaties with Indian tribes and to set aside land, money, and supplies for their