Rob Harper - Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors:
Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,
Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial,
revolutionary, and early national history and culture,
Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes
and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character,
and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600
to 1850, the series is published in partnership with
the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.

Violence and State Building
in the Ohio Valley

ROB HARPER

Copyright 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harper, Rob (Historian), author.

Title: Unsettling the West : violence and state building in the Ohio Valley / Rob Harper.

Other titles: Early American studies.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Early American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026858 | ISBN 9780812249644 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Ohio River ValleyHistory18th century. | Political violenceOhio River ValleyHistory18th century. | Indians of North AmericaPolitical activityOhio River Valley. | ColonistsPolitical activityOhio River Valley.

Classification: LCC F517 .H37 2018 | DDC 977/.01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026858

In late 1776, Cornstalk and Kee we Tom, both Shawnee, visited a Virginian outpost at the mouth of the Kanawha River. During their visit a third man arrived, a stranger to all. He presented a Virginian commander, Matthew Arbuckle, with a string of wampum, a sign of goodwill, but he spoke a language that none of the others could understand (per Great Lakes diplomatic norms, he likely assumed that his hosts would provide an interpreter). When Arbuckle pressed the Shawnees for an explanation, they disagreed: Cornstalk identified the stranger as a Wyandot, but Kee we Tom called him a G_d D_n Mingo. The words mattered. At the time, the Wyandot nation was divided on the question of war and might well have sent a diplomatic message to the Virginians. By contrast, the word Mingo, to Arbuckles ears, would have denoted the most militant of Ohio Indians: western Haudenosaunees who had recently killed several Virginians and exchanged gunfire with his garrison. Both Wyandots and Haudenosaunees spoke Iroquoian languages, which would have sounded similarand equally unintelligibleto both Shawnees and Virginians. Soon thereafter unknown Indians captured one of Arbuckles men; in retaliation he imprisoned the ethnically ambiguous stranger. A few weeks later, Cornstalk negotiated a prisoner exchange, bringing the crisis to a close. He had been correctthe man was Wyandotbut the confusion about what to call him might easily have ended in bloodshed.

Historians, like eighteenth-century diplomats, must choose our words carefully. Like painters mixing pigments, or composers blending sounds, we mix and match ingredients, and assemble them into a larger whole whose import, we hope, amounts to something greater than the inchoate heap we began with. If we choose words well, and deploy them with care, they may conjure up images, bring characters to life, navigate a marketplace of competing and complementary ideas, andabove alltell stories. It is delicate work, and unlike most storytellers, we must ever remind our audience of the evidence undergirding the stories we tell. Clio is an exacting mistress.

In wrestling our verbiage into some kind of sense, we must reckon with the powers and perils of naming. This is all the more true when contending with the history of colonialism, which functions, in part, by replacing indigenous languages, stories, and names with colonial ones. In the revolutionary Ohio Valley, any given person or place might be named in any number of ways, depending on both the namer and his or her audience. Haudenosaunee people traditionally refer to one Virginian colonist by the name Hanodagonyes, which translates roughly as town destroyer. His contemporaries variously referred to the same man as General, Excellency, Master, and more. But most English-language histories identify him as George Washingtonthe name he called himself, and the name by which most readers recognize him. According to some sources, the name of Guyasuta (or Kiashuta, or Kayaghshota), a Seneca leader who alternately befriended and fought against Hanodagonyes, translates as stands up (or sets up) the Cross, but if one visits the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, one finds it rendered as Standing Paddles. Perhaps some Anglophone chronicler, seeing Christian symbolism at every turn, heard a description of long, upright pieces of wood and imagined a cross. Similarly, Delaware people referred to one of their leading diplomats by a termvariably spelled Coquai,tah,ghai,tah, Koquethagechton, or Quequedegathathat means, by one account, the Man who keeps open the Correspondence between his own & all other Nations. Someone else took the name to mean man who keeps an eye on Europeans. Others simplified it still further. In consequence, in his own time and since, English speakers have referred to Coquai,tah,ghai,tah by the pseudo-translation White Eyes. But however bad the translation, White Eyes himself apparently accepted it during his lifetime, perhaps out of convenience: he knew who he was. Clear answers, and perfect translations, are elusive. In the pages that follow I refer to individuals by the names that readers are most likely to recognize. But as you read, keep in mind that such names often hide from view any number of other meanings, misunderstandings, and stories.

Additional problems arise with the names of peoples. The Haudenosaunee, including Guyasutas Senecas, referred to Washingtons people as Assaragoa, often translated as Long Knife, in reference to a cutlass that a

I refer to all such groups by the names with which they most commonly identify themselves to others, using the most widely recognized spellings: hence Virginians, Pennsylvanians, English, Irish, Haudenosaunees, Senecas, Delawares, Cherokees, Shawnees, Wyandots. As much as possible, I favor these specific terms to misleading generic ones. When referring generally to the indigenous peoples of the place Senecas call Hah-nu-Nah, or Turtle Islandknown to English speakers as North AmericaI regretfully fall back on Columbuss mistake: Indians.with the earlier version. Chronology presents another difficulty: in the midst of the revolutionary period, many Schwonnaks stopped calling themselves British and instead took up the name American. My text broadly follows this shift: I refer to Britons as Americans only after they themselves came to identify with a new confederation, and later republic, they called the United States of America.