The Plight and the Bounty: Squatters, War Profiteers, and the Transforming Hand of Sovereignty in Indian Country, 1750-1774 DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Melissah J. Pawlikowski Graduate Program in History The Ohio State University 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. John L. Brooke, Advisor Dr. Lucy Murphy Dr. Margaret Newell Copyright by Melissah J. Pawlikowski 2014 Abstract “The Plight and the Bounty: Squatters, War Profiteers & the Transforming Hand of Sovereignty in the Indian Country, 1750-1774” explores the creation of a European & Indian commons in the Ohio Valley as well as an in-depth examination of the network of interethnic communities and a secondary economic system created by refugee Euroamerican, Black, and Indian inhabitants. Six elements of creolization—the fusion of language, symbols, and legal codes; the adoption of material goods; and the exchange of labor and knowledge—resulted in ethnogenesis and a local culture marked by inclusivity, tolerance, and a period of peace. Finally this project details how, in the absence of traditional power brokers, Indians and Europeans created and exchanged geopolitical power between local Indians and Euroamericans as a method of legitimizing authority for their occupation of the Ohio Valley. ii Vita 2005 ............................................................... B.A., History, University of Pittsburgh 2007 ............................................................... M.A., History, Duquesne University 2009 to 2014 ................................................ Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of History, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: History Areas of study: Early American History, Primary field Latin American History, Secondary field Atlantic History, Minor field iii Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Vita……………………………………………………………………………………….iii List of Maps……………………………………………………………………………….v Maps……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………….3 Chapter 1: Settling & Unsettling the Susquehanna River Valley, Geopolitical Control and the European-Indian Struggles for Autonomy, 1750-1767………………………………41 Chapter 2: Regulating Social Order: Speculating, Segregating, and Controlling Settlement Patterns, 17501768….…………………………………………………….…72 Chapter 3: Migration into the Valley of the Dispossessed: Transformative Years on the Eastern Edges of the Ohio Valley, 1765-1769……………………………………..…..106 Chapter 4: Refugee Community-Building in the Ohio Valley Commons, 1768-1773…163 Chapter 5: “Peace & Quietness”: Creating a Culture of Collectivity and Absolution in the Eastern Ohio Valley, 1768-74…………………………………………...………..……236 Chapter 6: Living and Lobbying from the Ohio Valley, 1768-1774…………………...295 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...360 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………383 iv List of Maps Map 1. Warranted Settlers and Unwarranted Settlements in the Susquehanna Valley, 1750-1768………………...……………………………………………………………….1 Map 2. Euroamerican and Indian Settlements in the eastern Ohio Valley, 1768- 1774……………………………………………………………………………………….2 v Map by Jim DeGrand Map 1. Warranted Settlers and Unwarranted Settlements in the Susquehanna Valley, 1750-1768 1 Map by Jim DeGrand Map 2. Euroamerican and Indian Settlement in the eastern Ohio Valley, 1768-1773 2 Introduction While tilling his family’s western Pennsylvania land at the end of the nineteenth century, a young Francis Harbison turned up “[b]roken parts of table plates…a broken tumbler… the butt of an ancient riffle… rusted irons… a miscellaneous lot of broken glass…” and “flint arrow heads.” All around the Harbison farm, “relics” appeared as visual markers of the Euroamerican and Indian inhabitants of the eastern Ohio Valley between 1768 and 1773.1 The landscape between the western footholds of the Allegheny Mountains and the lush green shores of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania offered an expanse of previously cleared fields, orchards, and a penetrable brush-free forest— easily overlooked as the improvements of years gone by. The Harbison family, nineteenth-century landowners, cleared land by removing the ruins of a recent but forgotten past, “rotted log” foundations and remnant stone hearths. The vestiges of the valley’s “vanished” people begged Francis to ask, “Who were they? Where had they gone?” 2 Antiquarian historians writing during Francis’s life detailed the valley’s first people in a catalog of America’s early histories. Often local in character, writers recaptured county histories through information collected by the children and 1 I have specifically chosen the name inhabitants because this is the name that the 1768-1774 eastern Ohio Valley occupants adopted. The name inhabitants is also suggestive of important descriptive elements of this group as non- landowners and temporary occupants of land, topics addressed in this project. 2 Francis Roy Harbison, Flood Tides along the Allegheny (Pittsburgh: F. R. Harbison, 1941). 3 grandchildren of founding settlers. Intimately entangled in the stories they told, authors commonly used family names to reference eighteenth-century landmarks, such as cabins and mills, which were in decay by the time of their writing. County chronicles, like Boyd Crumrine’s 1004-page History of Washington County, Pennsylvania with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men, included such minute details as the eye and hair color, weight, height, and temperament of many of the first Euroamericans to occupy the eastern Ohio Valley.3 These works provided the names of settlers and accounts of their transatlantic migrations and successive North American settlements. Although definitively Eurocentric, eighteenth-century stories of the Ohio Valley, much like the flint arrowheads unearthed by a young Francis, unintentionally exposed the participation of American Indians, free Africans, and slaves in the 1770 settlement of the Ohio Valley. Writing during the mid- and late-nineteenth century, local historians used stories to connect their families, communities, and states to the American Revolution and to American exceptionalism—defining the history, development, and material success of the United States as often predestined and superior to that of other countries. With the push to create a distinctly American history, some of the first professional historians began writing national histories glorifying American exceptionalism. Exceptionalism simplified a complicated tale of diverse people to a triumphant “white” story that reinforced the country’s march westward to manifest its destiny. Frontier history went particularly unchanged until Frederick Jackson Turner’s 3 Boyd Crumrine, History of Washington County, Pennsylvania with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men (Philadelphia: H.L. Everts & Co, 1882). 4 1893 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” described early American history as a succession of frontier expansions. Turner contended that physical frontiers offered land and resources that equalized the socioeconomic opportunities for the common sort. Frontier histories continued to develop the twin ideas of meritocracy and the rise of the middle class through migration with books like Ray Allen Billington’s Western Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949), which focused on the low socioeconomic status of frontier migrants and ascribed a Protestant work ethic to the Revolution-era pioneers. According to early western histories, colonial and subsequent American expansion and capitalism drove a social revolution ongoing from the American Revolution through the early republic. With Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1975), historians departed from the triumphant and liberal-minded frontier model by incorporating the perspective of Indians and explicitly detailing the violence, displacement, and destruction of Indian communities and culture that resulted from colonial and later American expansion. Writing in the same vein, historians such as Eric Hinderaker and Patrick Griffin wrote influential frontier texts accounting for the white exploitation of Indians in western Pennsylvania and the greater Ohio Valley. Both Hinderaker’s Elusive Empires (1997) and Griffin’s American Leviathan (2007) focused on the relationship between Indian polities and the English, French, and Spanish empires. As imperial-focused studies, both Hinderaker and Griffin blamed Indian- Euroamerican settler discord and perpetual violence on the British government’s inability 5 to manage interethnic relations. Neither book addressed peaceable community-building or other cultural transformations that followed from frequent Indian and Euroamerican interactions. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have argued for the continuation of imperial history and the Indian-European case studies of foreign diplomacy detailed in “frontier histories.”4 Top-down histories add important insight into the policies and the institutional apparatuses within which Euroamerican and Indian settlers operated. Yet the tendency of imperial history to examine the decisions and actions of traditional power brokers has obscured how the application of policies like the Proclamation of 1763 actually affected the local Indian and Euroamerican populations. Imperial-focused books risk parsing out blanket roles to Euroamerican settlers as aggressors