A Longhouse Fragmented: Ohio Iroquois Autonomy in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter One: Place-Based Sandusky Histories

15 ONE Place-Based Sandusky Histories It is well known that the Iroquois made extensive use of the Ohio Territory for hunting and trade before the establishment of villages in the Allegheny drainage and permanent settlement in the Sandusky region. Abounding game and “unclaimed” land made the Ohio Territory an important resource for the colonial economies of Iroquois and Algonquian sociopolitical centers further east. However, not until the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries was the Ohio Territory inhabited year-round by Iroquois peoples.1 Overall, scholars see Iroquois migration, and in particular that of the Seneca, as “. . . part of an ongoing expansion since the end of the previous century . . . [and] . . . as a safe haven from problems at home.”2 Problems at home consisted of increased pressure to cede lands to white settlers and the infiltration of French and British politics into Six Nations politics. Expansion west by the Seneca, for example, also extended Six Nations’ political and economic policy by seeking cooperation with nearby tribes as well as attempting to manipulate the British and French through allegiances with groups such as the Delaware and Wyandotte.3 Scholarly conceptions of the Iroquois and their relationship to other peoples in the Ohio Territory vary, but tend toward an inherited interpretive provincialism preserving the geographic solidity of the Six Nations. Some see the Ohio Territory as “. . . a volatile land, a prize in a high-stakes game that pitted various British and French interests against Indians trying to preserve their sovereignty.”4 This line of argument tells us the Iroquois, as well as other groups, were attempting to 16 A Longhouse Fragmented establish their own tribal nation-style governments in the Ohio Territory during the eighteenth century, which were to have been deliberately politically and socially separate from the Six Nations. The Ohio Indian is thought to have sought a sociopolitical identity independent of the Iroquois, fashioned from frontier social relations and recognized by Euro-American governments and regional native populations. Frontier multiculturalism was to have produced native societies based on mutual self-interest. The “multicultural” Ohio Indian population is to have demonstrated their independence from the Confederacy and their European allies by defining “their interests locally” to the extent that foreign and colonial governments were dealing with these communities as individual polities.5 Other scholarly interpretations, however, see the “Ohio Country” as a “. . . region the Iroquois [Five Nations] laid claim to on the basis of ancient conquest . . . and the location on it of tribes politically dependent upon them” as evidenced by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768: “The immediate result of the impasse [fighting with the British over trade] was the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, by which the Iroquois surrendered their own and their tribal dependents’ claims to the lands south of the Ohio and Susquehanna rivers. The Ohio lands in particular were then used for hunting by, and occupied by villages of Mingo, Shawnee, and other dependents of the Six Nations. The Iroquois, claiming to represent all the occupants and users, negotiated the sale and kept all of the proceeds.”6 The image of the Ohio peoples as a nationally engaged political entity furthers the notion of a general Ohio Indian with its own hybrid sociopolitical organization under the multiethnic moniker of “Mingo,” according to Aquila: By 1747, the Five Nations also had to contend with a new political rival. Indians living on the Ohio River and its tributaries were emerging as a power bloc. Pennsylvania officials realized that the Iroquois Confederacy had no control over the Ohio Indians, a conglomeration of individuals from various tribes . . . The Five Nations, fearing that the Ohio Indians would take their place as Pennsylvania’s most favored Indian nation moved quickly to prevent a separate alliance between the Pennsylvania government and Ohio tribes.7 17 Place-Based Sandusky Histories Trappers, traders, military men, and later settlers used the term Mingo as a stand-in for Indian to designate the mixed native population moving into and out of the Ohio Valley, which included Iroquois hunters and translocated Shawnee and Delaware. Mingo, or the idea of a multiethnic sociopolitical power block of Ohio Indians, relies on prevailing academic interpretations of “. . . an identity linked to an emerging ‘Ohio Indian’ world” where Ohio Iroquois along with Algonquians had formed themselves into a socially and politically distinct unit through cross-tribal alliances.8 These cross-tribal alliances were to have superseded the local, and thus...