Border-Making in Anglo-America, 1750--1800
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University of New Hampshire University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository Master's Theses and Capstones Student Scholarship Spring 2008 "The invisible lines between us": Border-making in Anglo-America, 1750--1800 Cameron B. Strang University of New Hampshire, Durham Follow this and additional works at: https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis Recommended Citation Strang, Cameron B., ""The invisible lines between us": Border-making in Anglo-America, 1750--1800" (2008). Master's Theses and Capstones. 82. https://scholars.unh.edu/thesis/82 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship at University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses and Capstones by an authorized administrator of University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE INVISIBLE LINES BETWEEN US": BORDER-MAKING IN ANGLO- AMERICA, 1750-1800 BY CAMERON B STRANG BA, McGill University, 2004 THESIS Submitted to the University of New Hampshire in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History May, 2008 UMI Number: 1455015 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 1455015 Copyright 2008 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway PO Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 This thesis has been examined and ap ^>^>3^ Cj^r^r^C—- Thesis Director, Eliga Gould, Associate Professor of History / Cynthia Van Zandt, Associate Professor of History Jan Golinski, Professor of History and Humanities */*/*/ Date 77 DEDICATION Doing history is in many ways a solitary, even lonely, activity, and one that is quite challenging. No novice historian could overcome either the psychological or practical obstacles of this (rather bizarre) life path without a lot of help. Luckily I have been blessed with professors, friends, and family that have made the experience of getting an MA and writing this thesis more than just doable—it has been a blast. As teachers, mentors, and thesis committee members, Cynthia Van Zandt and Jan Golinski have expected great things from me and thus pushed me to always try harder and never settle for mediocrity. Eliga Gould was as helpful and engaging a committee chair as anyone could ask for. He focused my vague ideas into a project that has been exciting, interesting, and (surprisingly) innovative, and I am very proud to have worked with him. The community of scholars outside of my committee has been equally important to my experience at UNH and, hopefully, a future working in the past. The attention and encouragement of Nicoletta Gullace and Jeff Bolster during my first semester here were invaluable; the confidence they gave me was perhaps the most significant contribution to my entire educational career. Julia Rodriguez helped me expand in new directions (and avoid bankruptcy) by trusting me with a leading role in her HOSLAC project and I am lucky to have been her RA and friend. My fellow graduate students, both in the history department and beyond, taught me how to succeed while enjoying myself along the way. Lastly, this is for Bill, Karol, and Tyson. The further I get in life the more I realize how impossible it would all be without a loving and supportive family. Thank you all. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION iii ABSTRACT v CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 I. "THIS VERY GROUND THAT IS UNDER ME": INDIAN-MADE MAPS AND TERRITORIAL POSSESSION 8 II. "WE HAVE ALTERED THE COURSE A LITTLE": OFFICIAL LAND SURVEYS AND INDIAN AGENCY 46 III. "BUT FOR THE INJURIES OF ONE MAN": MICHAEL CRESAP AND THE PROMULGATION OF THE SETTLER LAND ETHIC IN THE LATE COLONIAL ERA 86 CODA: BORDERING THE BORDERLANDS OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC 123 BIBLIOGRAPHY 144 IV ABSTRACT "THE INVISIBLE LINES BETWEEN US": BORDER-MAKING IN ANGLO- AMERICA, 1750-1800 by Cameron B Strang University of New Hampshire, May, 2008 This thesis explores how the boundary-making practices of white officials came to be the dominant way of dividing and claiming the American landscape. It argues that, in the late colonial era, neither Indians nor officials could actualize their desired boundaries. Indians' map-based boundaries were annulled by white officials while officials' land surveys were subject to onsite termination and manipulation by Indian groups. White frontier settlers, however, developed powerful ways to establish their land claims—namely informal delineations backed by actual settlement—that could not be prevented by officials or Indians. In the final years of the colonial era and the first decades of the independence period, officials co-opted settlers' extra-legal methods of claiming land and applied them on the large scale. This fusion of settler boundary- making practices with those of officials allowed the U.S. government to impose its own geographic ideals on America and its various cultural groups. v INTRODUCTION "This is America! You can't just come in here and steal our land!" -It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season II. In the modern United States, land is divided in standard ways. Dark lines demarcate national borders on maps and, at ground level, border-crossing stations or guarded fences are clear signs on the landscape that we have reached the limits of our own country. Buildings, modified landscapes, fences, and clearings are recognized as signifiers of owned space. The fact that U.S. citizens acknowledge a coherent system of delimiting American territory allows land disputes to be decided by a uniform set of laws. If, however, different groups within the country based their claims to land ownership on entirely different notions of space, land disputes would be chaotic.1 Not only would each group be unable or unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of other groups' boundaries, but claims would overlap without any mutually accepted way of resolving who actually has rights to that space. More than likely, conflict would ensue, and the most powerful group would either absorb aberrant systems into its own or force their standards onto weaker groups. 1 There is only one legally accepted spatial system in the U.S. on which claims are based, yet cultural (and even personal) concepts of space and place, and what landscapes mean to groups and individuals, are still highly varied throughout the country. As anthropologist Keith H. Basso points out, "place-making" involves far more than the border-making methods that bound an area. Landscapes are given meaning through "multiple acts of remembering and imagining" and can serve as sites where personal and social identities can be defined and constructed. Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 6-7. 1 This process of homogenizing spatial systems through accommodation and compulsion had been occurring in eastern British America since the arrival of European settlers and, by the mid eighteenth century, the three main cultural groups—Indians, white officials, and white settlers—shared much common ground (both geographically and conceptually). Yet the British victory in the Seven Years War and the subsequent white rush into the backcountry made questions of land rights more pertinent than ever, and Indians, officials, and settlers all made claims to this space with their own culturally- distinct systems. From about 1750 to 1770, Indians and white officials were able to keep each other's systems for claiming space (and thus right to own it) in check because both of their systems were based on mutually recognized formal geographic conventions and technologies. Thus Indians, who recognized that they were increasingly outnumbered, hoped to have their rights recognized through European-style maps. These boundaries, however, were only substantive if white officials agreed to sanction and respect them. Officials based their own spatial system on onsite land surveys, but Indians could alter or forestall these boundaries by coercing surveyors in the West. Chapters One and Two show how both of these groups' reliance on formal border-making systems prevented either of them from achieving their desired boundaries. Chapter Three demonstrates how white settlers, a cultural group that utilized informal and illegal ways of claiming space, were actually the most successful at taking up the West for themselves. The settler land ethic required only very basic technology to create physical marks of possession that were legitimized by the act of settlement itself. 2 Although neither Indians nor white officials considered their claims to be valid, they could not prevent the masses of squatters from overrunning the frontiers. In the last years of the colonial period and the early decades of the Republic, white officials successfully integrated settlers and the most efficient aspects of their land ethic into official policy. This new all-white racial alliance permitted officials to use extralegal violence to impose its own geographic system onto reluctant Indians. By the end of the eighteenth century, Indians' border-making powers were no longer recognized and official borders could no longer be manipulated. The stage was set for the transformation of the entire American landscape by and for white Americans. Scholars have written extensively on both border-making and the eighteenth century Anglo-American frontier, but they have overlooked how different border-making systems collided in this setting and why the geography of white officials ultimately triumphed to become the only recognized way of conceptualizing land.