Picturing Prosperity

This chapter examines the stereotypes associated with the fur trade and contends that, in the Ohio River valley, an Indian-controlled fur trade was associated with increased levels of prosperity. This chapter also analyzes the types of trade goods transported into the Ohio region and shows how cloth became the most desirable object of trade. Europeans wove cloth to meet specific Indian demands, and traders transmitted instructions detailing the color, style, and even the weave of cloth meant for Indian consumption. By the mid-eighteenth century, luxury goods became a crucial part of the trade, and when the Seven Years’ War ended, the fur trade entered an expansionary period. Detroit emerged as one of the most prosperous fur trade posts in the western Great Lakes. This chapter is filled with dramatic illustrations of how cloth was transformed into the increasingly elaborate dress that characterized the diverse Indigenous people who lived in this region.

Webs of Community

A network of Indian trading villages dominated the tributary rivers of the Ohio and fostered Indian control over the exchange process. The face-to-face exchange process that characterized these villages ushered in a golden age of Indigenous prosperity as Indian women sought new types of cloth, incorporated silks and calicoes into their wardrobes, and demanded silver ornaments to highlight and decorate their clothing. Kin-based networks controlled trade as well as social relations in the region. Traders who sought a share of this prosperity resided in these Indian trading villages and carefully observed Indigenous trade protocols. Those who failed to do so found themselves unwelcome in Indian villages. Change was ongoing: newcomers were incorporated, populations multiplied, and village life was defined by evolving kin relations. These changes occurred within the framework of an Indian world, one that was increasingly shaped by Miami hegemony over the Wabash region. Intermarriage blurred social borders and simultaneously created pathways to authority and power.

The Agrarian Village World of the Ohio Valley Indians

Explores Indian women’s involvement in environmentally shaping the agrarian landscape of the almost-thousand-mile-long Ohio River valley. Women planted their crops in riverway bottomlands and produced a surplus food supply that encouraged trade with nearby and distant villages. An extensive trading network preceded European arrival. Extensive cornfields, bountiful vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards characterized Indian villages along the Ohio’s tributary rivers. Indigenous women developed a stable, continuous cropping system that maintained the organic matter in the soils by not plowing, and this provided long-range village stability. Environmental abundance in the Ohio River valley sustained high population levels. Rivers and streams teemed with more than a hundred varieties of fish; lakes abounded with wildlife and 250 species of mussels. Villages were strategically located within landscape niches that ensured sedentism and increased village size. These niches, or openings, provided access to adjacent, fertile fields, rich wetlands with nutritional plants, and forests that supplied meat and furs. Numerous bison, elk, and deer herds populated the region. Wetlands food sources were breadbaskets, and even small wetland patches produced high yields of food resources.

Introduction

Indigenous people along the tributary rivers of the Ohio River created a functioning society that responded to their needs and was shaped by their cultural traditions. Indians engaged in rational and deliberate social action. Following contact with Europeans, the economic structure of the Ohio River region changed. The evolution of an Indian-controlled fur trade led to prosperity rather than decline. A complex, agrarian landscape created in great part by Indian women supported and sustained a village world where women controlled the food supply, processed furs, and influenced the fur trade exchange process. This prosperous village world was undermined in the 1780s and 1790s by the terrorizing and plunder of Indian villages, which disrupted agrarianism and the fur trade. Federal support for frontier violence and the kidnapping of Indian women threatened to undermine this world but simultaneously encouraged Indians to ban together in a Pan-Indian Confederacy and inflict two disastrous defeats on U.S. armed forces. The success of Indian resistance gave President Washington a reason to overcome public resistance against the creation of a large, standing army. Victory over Indigenous people finally took place at the Battle of at Fallen Timbers in 1794. However, this defeat did not signal demise, and western movement was only fully secured following the War of 1812.

Capturing Indian Women

Harmar’s Defeat enraged President Washington and shaped a new U.S. military policy driven by humiliation and infused with vengeance. Reversing his previous, half-hearted attempts to control the Kentucky militia, the president now empowered them. Washington used the Kentucky militia to invade Indian lands along the Wabash, targeting the agrarian and trading villages that stretched from Ouiatenon to Kethtippecanuck. The federal government fully equipped the Kentucky militia and ordered them to attack and destroy villages and crops—and to kidnap Indian women and children. Following two brutal raids, almost 100 Indian women and children were captured and held in a hastily erected prison at Fort Washington, now present-day Cincinnati. The women and children were imprisoned there for more than a year, in primitive, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. Indians retaliated for the abduction and for the repeated invasion of their homelands by handing the U.S. Army one of the worst defeats in its entire history under Arthur St. Clair. It was the suffering of Indian women that rallied Indian warriors under Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and Buckongahelas to victory.

Plunder and Massacre

This chapter examines the impact on Indian villages following George Rogers Clark’s seizure of Fort Vincennes from the British in 1779. Clark modeled how he expected his militia followers to deal with Indians. Rather than negotiate with them, Clark scorned, intimidated, brutalized, and killed Native people. He encouraged his men to loot prosperous Indian villages along the lower Wabash. Raiding and plundering thriving Indian communities became a profitable venture for Clark’s penniless militia and for the squatters who followed them onto Kentucky lands. Marauders made substantial profits from the Indian clothing, silver ornaments, and household goods stolen on these assaults. Auctions took place regularly along the Kentucky frontier as returning raiders sold the booty and then divided the profits among themselves. Indians who had signed peace treaties with the U.S. became easy targets. The frequent massacre of peaceful Indian leaders and their followers led to support for a Pan-Indian Confederacy. Determined to keep the Ohio River as the boundary line with U.S. lands, this confederacy dealt a humiliating defeat to the U.S. Army, led by General Harmar, and left President Washington resolved to seek revenge.

Reopening the Western Trade

Versailles had very little interest in the Ohio River valley until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when increased amounts of peltry found their way into English hands. Cadillac founded Detroit to divert the trade back to the French, but only when Detroit traders and merchants supplied what Indians most desired did this fort become a viable exchange post. The trade changed dramatically in the eighteenth century, as a large number of matrifocal households emerged along the western tributary rivers of the Ohio. These female-dominated households not only controlled the food supply but were the processors of peltry, thus allowing women to exert greater power over the exchange process. More than 70 percent of the trade goods shipped to Detroit consisted of cloth, and women’s work of transforming cloth into clothing transformed the dress and prosperity of the region. Although Detroit secured a greater share of the trade for New France, it intensified the conflict between France and England.

The Evolution of the Indian Fur Trade

Green Bay was an early center of a precontact Indian trading network that stretched throughout the western Great Lakes. In the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of Indian households were drawn to Green Bay from the Ohio River valley to trade with recently arrived French traders. Many Ohio Indians, especially the Miami, sent households to Green Bay to secure access to the manufactured trade goods available from the French. Movement was often voluntary, and not all Indians were driven west to seek refuge from the Iroquois. A brisk beaver trade led to an oversupply of furs in French warehouses, and Versailles reacted by closing the western trade. Without access to European goods, Indians returned to the Ohio River valley, where they began trading with the English and rapidly assumed control of the fur trade. For more than twenty years, the French trade remained closed, and the numerous Frenchmen who remained took up residence in Indian households, often marrying Indian women “in the manner of the country.” The fur trade ban encouraged Indian resettlement in the Ohio River valley, where Indians had access to highly desirable furs in the Black Swamp, The ban on the western trade refocused the fur trade to a region little explored by the French and controlled by Indians.

Aftermath

St. Clair’s defeat left Indians in control of the lands north of the Ohio River and interrupted the United States’ western movement. The president needed several years to reorganize, recruit, and intensively train a larger army that was capable of defeating the Pan-Indian Confederacy. Washington’s shift from confrontation to peace was political posturing, a way of playing it safe until a larger, well-trained army could ensure U.S. victory. Washington appointed Rufus Putnam to negotiate with Indians and to formulate a “peace policy.” To do so, Putnam released the Indian women from U.S. captivity and held a peace conference at Vincennes. The Vincennes treaty negotiations were unique because of the large number of Indian women who attended the conference. Women far outnumbered men. Despite their harsh year of imprisonment, these Indian women refused to cede any additional lands to the U.S. Orators reinforced their message, demanding that peace be secured by the U.S. and that the federal government ensure that the Ohio River remain the boundary line between the United States and Indian people. Speakers at this conference repeatedly linked women to the land, invoking the extreme grief, or “weeping,” associated with land loss.