In the introduction to herAtlas of Great Lakes Indian History,historian and demographer Helen Hornbeck Tanner tells that her interest in Great Lakes Indian history began in 1963 when she was casually asked to find out what Indians had lived near her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That initial request began a period of protracted, original research that would eventually define much of her career, encompass the history of the entire Great Lakes region from about 1640 to 1820, and figure prominently in the work of the Indian Claims Commission. “Unwittingly,” she writes, “I had been drawn into the...

You can blame the conference and this book on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. His famousHistory of the Peloponnesian Warwritten in the fifth century B.C. is not only one of the great historical treatises, but also is one of the great commentaries on the nature of political power and the way state policies are made. This great war between Athenian and Spartan empires lasted from 431 to 404 B.C. It consisted of a series of subconflicts, interrupted by shaky peace, political intrigue, and policy decisions.

For me, the greatness of thePeloponnesian Waris not its exceptional narrative,...

This article is an attempt to view this part of the world through the eyes of the French, the British, their American colonists, and the Indian nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In 1663, Louis XIV decided to take control of the French colonies in North America into his own hands, out of the hands of the private companies that had been exploiting them. The man placed in charge of this endeavor was the minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. His plan was that the French should adopt England’s colonial policy. The French colonies would thus provide France with the...

On the afternoon of 5 August 1763, a four-hundred-man British force under the command of Colonel Henry Bouquet was on the march in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania. The Swiss colonel was bringing supplies and reinforcements to Fort Pitt, whose garrison had been under siege from hostile Indians since late June. Twenty-six miles from its objective, near Bushy Run, a large body of Native American warriors attacked Bouquet’s relief column. In the desperate, two-day firefight that ensued, Bouquet’s men succeeded in driving off their attackers—but not without heavy casualties. In one of his first letters written after the battle,...

Between 1755 and 1815 Britain and the United States took possession of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes region from its Native American inhabitants. That they were able to do so bears witness not only to American and European military superiority, but also to the population decline of the Indian peoples. During the “Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes” Indian populations declined precipitously.¹ This population decline was caused not primarily by warfare but by disease. Indeed, for North America as a whole, historian Russell Thornton has argued that “warfare . . . [was] not very significant overall in the...

In 1752, Governor Duquesne of New France described Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade (1729–circa 1801) as “very brave, to have much influence on the minds of the savages, and to be very zealous when ordered to do anything.” Thus, at age thirty-three, Langlade earned his first commendation for his crucial role as cultural intermediary between French imperial officials and many of the powerful Indian nations and villages of thepays d’en haut,or Great Lakes Region. After the British supplanted the French, he played the same role, and served at once as both Indian warrior and colonial soldier, for different...

Until recently, few historians bothered much with the history of the Ohio Indians. Older paradigms of writing Native American history focused on what scholars deemed to be “important tribes,” such as the Cherokees, the Sioux, or the Iroquois.¹ Looking into the Native American towns of the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley, these earlier researchers found a confusing medley of Indians scattered in multinational settlements and living in ways that appeared “disorganized” in comparison to the image of evidently larger, more geographically and politically “stable” Indian nations in the documentary records. Rather than analyze the evident chaos in the Ohio Valley, a previous...

French-speaking people played a vital role in the dynamic and often turbulent world of the western Great Lakes following the British conquest of Canada in 1760. Historians, however, have not always adequately analyzed the diversity of the French, who were anything but a homogeneous group. A full understanding of the complicated relationships between French and British requires an answer to the question—who were the “French”?¹ Only after determining who made up this group can we begin to comprehend how French-speaking and English-speaking people related to each other in the complicated society that revolved around the fur trade. This article...

England’s attempt to govern the western Great Lakes, following the conquest of Canada, proved far from successful. Neither Native people nor their French fur-trader kin were receptive to the English. Pontiac reminded England that the French, not the Indians, lost the recent war. Many English officers often displaced blame for the uprising on French fur traders and, consequently, believed that their ability to control the region rested on removal of the people they disparagingly called the Interior French. But the French were not removed and those English officers who sought the cooperation and assistance of the Interior French proved more...

Of the many places that figured in the Sixty Years’ War for the Great Lakes, none was more consistently near the epicenter of events than Detroit. Although the city is today more likely to be remembered for its significance to industrial, automotive or entertainment history, Detroit was a well-established agricultural and commercial center by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War. As such, it sheltered a military garrison and resident populations of European colonists and Native Americans that would actively participate in all the conflicts of the coming six decades. During these years, Detroit was controlled successively by France, Britain,...

In early 1782, the town of Pittsburgh and the garrison of Fort Pitt together formed one of the westernmost redoubts of the American Revolution. Although the October 1781 victory of General George Washington, Admiral the Count de Grasse, and General the Count de Rochambeau at Yorktown had all but ended the American War for Independence, the armed conflict still raged on the western slope of the Appalachian Mountains. Great Britain and its American Indian allies remained a formidable threat to the Pennsylvanians and Virginians who had settled in the Ohio Valley during the 1760s and 1770s. In response, the Continental...

In his 1827 memoir, Kentucky migrant and former militia captain Daniel Trabue described the treaty negotiations at Fort Greenville as an impressive and colorful affair. The summer of 1795 had brought together Major General Anthony Wayne and his United States Legion with members of the confederacy of western Indians they had defeated one year before at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Their parlay formally ended a long and bloody contest (1774–94) over the permanence of the Ohio River as a boundary between Indian and Anglo-American settlement. As part of the military posturing that went on at such ceremonial occasions,...

The most familiar political legacies of the American Revolution relate to the intertwined concepts of power and liberty. In the British monarchy of the eighteenth century, power theoretically flowed from the top of society downward, from God’s chosen regent the king, through his appointed noble authorities, until it finally settled in a residual form among established landowners of the realm. The Revolution, as we all know, reversed this conception of power. Revolutionary leaders assumed that power originally resided in the people—specifically, in the hands of all independent adult males. The Revolution also made guarantees of liberty a cornerstone of...

Far from home in the late summer 1803, Isaac Bonsall and the emissaries from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting stopped for supper on the banks of the Allegheny River. Their guides, Seneca Indians from the Allegany reservation, joined them as chocolate and chicken were prepared for eating, and even without the ability to communicate easily across the language barrier, things seemed to be proceeding smoothly. “We got the Indians to roast the fowls for us,” Bonsall recorded, “which they did by putting them on Sticks sharpened at each end sticking them in the Ground a little enclining to the fire.” But...

Two hundred years ago, New York State stood at the crossroads of westward migration; spanning the distance that separated the Atlantic Ocean from the Great Lakes. Across this interval passed innumerable merchants and settlers as the new nation took advantage of a natural gateway to the West in the decades following the American Revolution.

For many students of the early republic, the singular significance of this inland waterway in the history of North America is all but lost. For them the representative image of the pioneer, moving westward to occupy his wilderness homestead, is of a lonely man on horseback...

When historians study Aboriginal participation in the War of 1812, they usually focus on the people in the Old Northwest—the Shawnee, Ottawa, and others—who still exercised a considerable degree of independence from Euro-Americans, and who had not yet been forced off their lands or confined to reservations. Largely ignored is the story of the Six Nations Iroquois, most of whom lived well within the Euro-American side of the “frontier” and who, for the most part, occupied reservations and tracts after losing most of their territory in previous decades, mainly as a consequence of the Patriot victory in the...

After the War for American Independence, the Ohio Country lured men and women like the sirens of Greek mythology. Many were small-scale farmers who crossed the Ohio River as early as 1785, squatted on government land and hoped for the best, either to make their claims good through lawful purchase or to bide their time until the owners and the law required them to move. Some were large-scale speculators who had the political connections or the capital necessary to purchase considerable acreage from the government, such as the Ohio Company of Associates, or Nathaniel Massie or Duncan McArthur who acquired...

So began one of the few Canadian ballads from the War of 1812. It tells the story of the glorious Canadian victory at Detroit, of how “our brave commander, Sir Isaac Brock” together with a handful of eager, undaunted Canadian boys forced the Yankees to surrender.

Those Yankee hearts began to ache,

Their blood it did run cold,

To see us marching forward

So courageous and so bold.

Their general sent a flag to us,

For quarter he did call,

Saying “Stay your hand, brave British boys,”

“I fear you’ll slay us all.” The ballad, like many others of its...

For most historians, the association of Indian people with the War of 1812 conjures up images of Native American resistance. From Tippecanoe to the Thames, from Fort Mims to Horseshoe Bend, historians have concentrated upon this last, futile attempt by Native American people to solicit foreign assistance in defending their homelands east of the Mississippi. Indeed, within the past decade some scholarship has focused upon the emergence of religious and cultural revitalization as the core of this resistance, while other historians have argued that the tribespeople’s attempts to form a centralized confederacy during this period was just the final stage...

In the aftermath of General William Hull’s surrender at Detroit in August 1812, President James Madison reflected on the disaster that had befallen the United States:

As Hull’s army was lost, it is to be regretted that the misfortune did not take place a little earlier; and allow more time, of course, for repairing it, within the present season. This regret is particularly applicable to the Great Lakes. . . . The command of [the] lakes, by a superior force on the water, ought to have been a fundamental point in the national policy, from the moment peace took place...

Neither American popular culture nor American history has attached much significance to the Wars for the Great Lakes. While their importance seems obvious to scholars who devote themselves to studying various aspects of the long and episodic struggles among Indians, French, British, and Americans, most people ignore them. Even historians tend to view the wars as a series of raids and uprisings, which lead a self-contained life of their own. At best, general accounts of American History between 1754 and 1815 treat events in the Great Lakes area as precipitating factors in more important events in what Northwest Territory Governor...