Revolution and Removal

Overview

Sometime in the winter of 1668-1669 in the French outpost of Montreal, Seneca traders described to the French explorer Rene La Salle a river that lay east and south of them that flowed south from the confluence of two other rivers before heading almost due west into the North American countryside. From there, the Seneca hinted, the great river widened and flowed south. While their descriptions fit both the Ohio, an Anglicization of the Iroquois “O-y-o,” and the Mississippi Rivers, La Salle was most interested by the idea that the waterways might take him, ultimately, to China, a trip he was keen to start.

In the summer of 1669, La Salle and a small group of men left Montreal, canoed down the St. Lawrence River away from Montreal and toward this new river. He left with nine canoes and approximately 25 European colonists, and they were accompanied by Seneca guides. After over a month of traveling, they landed in western New York, where they were greeted by a group of Algonquians. La Salle wanted to hire people from this group to act as guides for their journey inland, but he fell ill. When La Salle returned to good health, he went back to the French outpost at Ville Marie and the next recorded sighting of him put him some 700 miles northeast of the Ohio River. But it remains unclear if La Salle found the Ohio or the Mississippi.

Had he found the Ohio River and had he ventured into what became the Ohio territory, he would have likely found a once heavily-populated and well-farmed landscape largely empty. Where villages of upwards of 2,00 inhabitants had once dotted the territory, most of the people in those villages had disappeared by roughly 1600. It is likely that European diseases carried westward by other indigenous people depopulated most of the communities of Fort Ancient, Sandusky, Whittlesey before 1600. By 1620, smallpox and influenza had wiped out villages of indigenous people in New England and the Middle Atlantic. Some of those people likely traveled west along well-used trading routes and inadvertently carried those diseases with them.

In the century after LaSalle’s ill-fated and incomplete trip to the Ohio region, the region’s population changed in nearly every way. As British colonists pushed west from the Atlantic Ocean, French colonists moved north from the Gulf of Mexico and into the Mississippi Valley and south from the Great Lakes. By 1763, however, the British had defeated the French in the Seven Years’ War largely with the help of the Iroquois, who began moving into the Ohio Valley. Once there, the Iroquois met Myaami, Ottawa, Wyandot, Seneca-Cayuga, Lenape, and Shawnee, who all moved into the region too. Once the French admitted defeat, British colonists began moving west as well.

To be fair, hundreds of white colonists had already moved west by that time, and the British hoped to keep more colonists from moving west for two reasons. First, white colonists encountered indigenous people and sometimes their interactions turned into conflict. Those colonists then usually appealed to the British for military help. Second, the British simply lacked the resources to minimize those conflicts and Britain’s Parliament had no intention of raising taxes to provide that protection. Parliament found it easier and more cost effective to try to keep white colonists east of the Appalachian Mountains, and passed the Proclamation Line of 1763 to restrict colonial movement west and to avoid more violent encounters with indigenous people. The Proclamation was a dead letter because Europeans had already moved into the region, and their continued presence renewed conflicts during Lord Dunmore’s War (1774). Dunmore’s military pushed the Shawnee across the Ohio River into Ohio.

Readings

1. Please look through the site “Historic American Indian Tribes of Ohio,” before answering the questions.
2. Woody Holton’s article explores how indigenous people fought for their right to remain independent from Britain and the United States: www.jstor.org/stable/2210989.