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Teaching Native American History

We Live on Stolen Lands, Part IV: The Machinations of the Ogden Land Company

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No organization played so energetic a role in the efforts to remove and dispossess the New York Indians as the Ogden Land Company. The Ogden Company’s determination to remove the Seneca Indians would develop into a broader movement to effect the relocation of all the Iroquois from the state, and open their lands to settlement and development. Even as it called for Indian removal, however, the representatives of the Ogden Company recognized that they must pay attention to the requirements of federal law as embodied in the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts.

David A. Ogden

I find it troubling that students in New York schools learn about the “Cherokee Removal” in their American history classes, but they hear nothing about efforts to drive the Indigenous people of New York to new homes somewhere in the west. New York’s Indian removals began long before Andrew Jackson became President and continued after he left.  It is the story of a conspiracy of interests, as Laurence Hauptman put it, that brought together wealthy businessmen, avaricious politicians, and corruptible federal agents.  It is a truly sordid story, and some of it played out in Geneseo where I teach. The Wadsworth family, after whom an important building on campus was named, has mansions on both ends of Main Street. Their money came from Seneca land, and they were in at the ground floor in as Ogden Company investors.

David A. Ogden, the company’s founder and president, purchased from the Holland Land Company in 1810 the pre-emptive rights to the Seneca reservations remaining to the tribe after the Big Tree Treaty of 1797, nearly 200,000 acres for fifty cents an acre.  To pay his debt, Ogden created an association of extraordinarily well-connected investors. They moved quickly to exercise that right. They would clear the Senecas out of western New York, gobble up their reservations, and sell the lands to settlers.

Ogden and his associates, it is essential to point out, thoroughly understood the requirements of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, even if they wished the laws were not around to hinder their efforts. This is an important point: determined to drive out the Indians, the Ogden Company officials understood nonetheless that they must comply with federal laws. Robert Troup, one of the Company’s most active members, told the interpreter and federal agent Jasper Parrish in 1810 that the Company, in its attempt to acquire Seneca lands, would “leave everything in the hands of the Agents of the General Government, in full confidence that the Agents will do everything in their power, according to their instructions from the Government, to induce the Indians to accept of a grant of land to the west.” Nothing like friends in high places.

            The state of New York provided the Ogden Company with important assistance. In April of 1812, Governor Daniel Tompkins asked Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts “to cause a Superintendent to be appointed” for “holding a treaty with the native Indians for the purchase of their right in a part of the said [Holland Purchase] lands.” Two years later, Tompkins wrote to Secretary of War James Monroe, informing him that the Ogden Company requested the appointment of a federal commissioner. Tompkins told Monroe that “you will perceive that the State of New York is to have no agency in the contemplated treaty, & that the agent or Commissioner requested to be appointed by the United States is wanted for the purpose” of allowing the Ogden Company “to make a legal convention with the Seneca nation of Indians.”

            In March of 1818, Ogden told Governor DeWitt Clinton that Seneca opposition to removal resulted from the machinations of “designing men” who opposed his plan. Busy-body missionaries were getting in the way.  “The importance of obtaining a seat for our Indians to the west, and to which they may gradually retire,” Ogden wrote, “cannot be doubted.” If Clinton wondered why Ogden was contacting him, the land speculator pointed out “that the interest of the state of New York, in my opinion, is more deeply implicated in the removal of these Indians, than that of any individual interested in the preemption of their lands.” Might as well admit it, Ogden suggested: we all want to drive the Senecas from New York State.

            The Ogden Company wanted to remove the Senecas to some location in the west. Troup thought some spot west of the Mississippi, like Arkansas, would be best, but failing that someplace in the northwest, like the Michigan Territory “in the neighborhood of Green Bay,” would do. The Company called upon its allies for help.  With Company support, Parrish began the long trip to Washington early in 1817. Once there, he attempted to persuade the new Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, that removal was in the Indians’ best interest.  The Six Nations reservations in the state, Parrish said,

are more or less surrounded by Settlements of whites, in consequence of which there are frequent depredations, petty thefts, and trespasses committed between whites and Indians.  Most frequently on the part of the former. It causes the agents considerable time and trouble to settle with and  satisfy the injured person, so as to preserve our peace and friendship unbroken. Under these circumstances I think it would be for the interest of the United States, and also for the wellfare and the happiness of the Six Nations could they be persuaded to concentrate themselves.

It is an old story. Local settlers pressed upon Indians and their lands in defiance of the law. Parrish saw removal as a means to protect the Indians from the citizens of the state of New York, who encroached upon their lands, stole their possessions, and threatened the safety of all concerned. We needed to remove the Indians to save them. 

            The Company’s directors also called upon Lewis Cass, the territorial governor of Michigan, to help remove the Senecas.  Cass, in letters to federal agent Erastus Granger and Ogden, expressed a willingness to help, but suggested that if the Company were to succeed, it would need the support of federal officials in Washington.  Ogden, as well, asked Peter B. Porter, “one of the greatest promoters of the rise of western New York,” and an associate of the Company, to eliminate the problems caused by two unnamed white men who lived in the vicinity of Buffalo and who counseled the Senecas not to sell their lands.  If these men have influence, Ogden suggested, “it might possibly be advisable, to take means to quiet them.”

Ogden painted a bleak picture of the Senecas’ future.  The Senecas, Ogden reported, were unwilling to part with any of their lands, and this created a variety of problems.  “It has been the wise and constant policy of Government,” Ogden wrote in 1819,

to restrain the Indians from selling or leasing their lands to unauthorized individuals, and hence their reserved tracts remain principally uncleared.  The extensive forests operate as a barrier to the progress of improvement.  They are not subject to taxation and are made to contribute neither towards the expenses of roads or any other object of public utility. In proportion therefore as they can be withdrawn by proper means from the unprofitable occupation of the Natives and rendered acceptable to cultivation and settlement, they must add to the general prosperity and resources of the State.

The Senecas, he continued, based their resistance on the Canandaigua Treaty, a sophisticated notion that Ogden believed simple-minded Indians could not possibly have arrived at on their own.  The Senecas, he believed, incapable of thinking for themselves, had been duped by the deceptions of “designing” white men and those “intent on evangelizing this savage people.”

            An appeal to benevolence followed.  Removal of the Indians, Ogden argued, certainly would benefit the “Proprietors,” but it also would benefit the Indians.  “The History of every Indian tribe on the Atlantic Coast,” Ogden wrote, “proves that they cannot long exist in their savage character in the Neighborhood of civilized Society, that becoming partly Christian, partly Pagan, partly civilized, and partly savage, they are rendered more and more debased and degenerate and finally become extinct, without having rendered themselves capable of any national enjoyment, or having contributed in any degree, to the stock of the public good.”  Wiping away his crocodile tears, Ogden’s tone became increasingly urgent, and he hoped that the President would get his point: “The Savage,” Ogden said, “must and ought to yield to the civilized state, and that this change cannot be effected otherwise than by the Agency of the Government.” 

            Ogden found kindred spirits as well in the New York State Legislature.   Indeed, a committee of the New York State legislature reported early in 1819 that concentration was a desirable goal.  Alcohol ravaged the Indians, and squatters overran their lands, a problem “highly injurious to the interests of the State.” The conclusion was obvious: it was time for a change in policy. Regarding the Indians, the committee reported

 that their independence as a nation ought to cease, that they ought to yield to the public interest, and by a proper application of power they ought to be brought within the pale of civilization and law and if left to themselves will never reach that condition; that such bodies retaining such savage traits ought not to be in an independent condition and that our laws and manners ought to succeed theirs; suitable quantities of lands to be reserved for them.

The State Senate, shortly afterwards, requested that the governor “cooperate with the Government of the United States in such measures . . . to induce the several Indian tribes within this State to concentrate themselves in some suitable situation.”  The Senate, however, in a statement that aptly characterized the state’s approach to dealing with its Indians, insisted that the Governor take these actions “either with or without the cooperation of the government of the United States.”

            Rhetoric such as this from the New York State Legislature mirrored the arguments occurring at the same time in the southern states, where a states’ rights variant of constitutionalism developed and was nourished in disputes over federal Indian policy. As the federal government and its agents among the Creeks and Cherokees sought to protect the Indians from the aggression of their neighbors, and as missionaries and philanthropists sought their “civilization” and “improvement,” southern state legislatures and southern state courts argued that all who resided within a state, including Indians, must conform to its laws.  The Marshall Court, later, would reject this limited federalism, but southerners had the power to largely ignore officials of the national government. The resolution of 1819 shows that New York’s political leaders were developing a similar states’ rights ideology.

            After laying all the groundwork, Ogden requested of Secretary of War Calhoun “that a commissioner may be appointed to hold a treaty with all or any of the Tribes composing the Six Nations of Indians residing in this State.”  Calhoun appointed Morris Miller to serve as federal agent “in a treaty which the Proprietors of the Seneca Reservation in the State of New York wish to hold with that nation.”

John C. Calhoun

            Calhoun believed whole-heartedly in the philanthropic justifications for removal, but at the same time he believed that the practice of treating with Indians was a flawed and dated practice. The national government protected the Indians, Calhoun believed, and “is their best friend.” The Indians depended on the United States like a child relied upon its parents.  Calhoun believed that the Indians had not flourished in their homelands, and that they had picked up the vices, but none of the virtues, of the surrounding white population.  In this sense, removal seemed to Calhoun a logical solution to the new nation’s “Indian Problem.”  If Indians relocated to the western side of the Mississippi River they would distance themselves from the unsavory influence of frontier whites, and gain additional time to become “civilized.” He believed that the United States, rather than the tribes themselves, should decide what was in the Indians’ best interest.  He hoped that they would see the value of removal; at the same time, Calhoun believed strongly that removal could not be forced and that under law, the United States must oversee the process of Indian land sales. At least as long as it was convenient to do so.

            Aware that they had the support of the federal government, the Ogden associates played their cards carefully.  The object was limited: concentrate the Senecas at Allegany, and open their other lands to white settlement.  The best thing the Company could do, William Troup told Jasper Parrish, is “to be perfectly still, and to make no appearance whatever” at the Council, and “to leave everything entirely in the hands of the Commissioners of the General Government, in full confidence that the Agents will do every thing in their power, according to their instructions from the government, to induce the Indians to accept of a grant of land to the West.”

            Morris Miller, the United States agent, did try to persuade the Senecas to remove. He claimed to have the best interests of the Indians at heart. He told the Senecas that “I am not in any way instructed, pledged or interested to promote the views of the white men, where these views are prejudiciall to the rights of the red men.” Nonetheless, Morris’s boss, the Indians’ “Great Father,”

sees you scattered here and there, in small parcels everywhere, surrounded by white people. He sees that you are fast losing your national character, and are daily more and more exposed to the bad examples of your white Brothers, without the restraint of their laws  and religion. He sees that this frequent and uncontrolled intercourse, instead of doing good is doing injury to you and to them. Your great Father sees all these things, with grief and concern. He lays them much to heart; and thinks it impossible for you, under such circumstances, to retain the character of an independent nation.

The Great Father looked after his white children as well, Morris continued, and from them he heard of their dissatisfaction

at seeing the lands in your occupation remain wild and uncultivated; neither paying taxes, nor assisting to make roads and other improvements; nor in any way contributing to the public burthens, as white peoples’ lands do. Your Great Father has been further informed that you occupy more land  than you can advantageously till, or use for any valuable purpose; whilst at this same time the scarcity of game         prevents your engaging in those pursuits, to which your fathers were accustomed.

The solution was simple. The President, Morris told the Senecas, desires “that you should live at a greater distance from white people, so that you may be more secure in the enjoyment of your property. And that he can with greater convenience, and less expense cause you to be instructed in agriculture, and the useful arts; and your children to be taught to read and write, and that your nation may thus be rendered an industrious and happy people.”

            The Senecas, divided among traditionalists and those more willing to selectively adopt elements of white culture, rallied together to oppose cessions of Seneca land.  Quaker missionaries, too, supported the Senecas.  The Quakers argued that concentration at Allegheny would undermine the Friends’ efforts to Christianize and civilize the Senecas at Buffalo Creek, and that there was not an adequate supply of land at Allegheny to support all the Senecas.  The Quakers, in fact, long had opposed the Ogden Company’s agenda.  In 1817, for instance, the Society of Friends delivered a message “to the Chiefs and other Indians on the Allegany Reservation,” advising them that “the land on which you live is your own—and you know it to be good and some of it well-improved . . . It cannot be taken from you without your consent.”

            Timothy Pickering advised the Quakers on methods to help the Senecas hang on to their lands. “Knowing as I do,” he wrote,

the rapacity of some men among the Whites, I am not surprised at the attempts to seduce the Chiefs to sell the seats from under themselves, and their people. It is in the power of the government to defeat these attempts.  But artful men may apply to it for the  appointment of a commissioner to hold a treaty, and by false but plausible representations, and perhaps, too, aided by certificates of men apparently disinterested, obtain this request.

Pickering suggested to the Quakers that they have “the chiefs and all their people assemble in council, and enter into an agreement, never to sell their lands, or any part of them, without the assent of the warriors or grown men, as well as of the chiefs.” Further, Pickering reminded the Quakers that “by laws enacted from the year 1790 to 1802, no purchase of Indians’ land are valid, unless made at a treaty held under the authority of the United States.” Pickering’s statement shows that he understood that the federal government had a responsibility to protect Indian land from territorially aggressive interests in the states, and that stopping these forces, even with the support of the laws of the national government, would not be an easy task.

            Led by Red Jacket, the Senecas refused to sell to the Ogden Company in 1819, and their rejection “was so unqualified and so peremptory, as to forbid all reasonable expectation that any good purpose could be effected by adjourning the council,” Miller wrote, and so “it was therefore finally closed.”

            There can be no question that the United States gave aid and encouragement to the Ogden Land Company, those “artful men” so determined to acquire Seneca land in western New York.  The important point for our purposes, however, is that however reprehensible the practices of the Company, it recognized the rules of the game as spelled out in the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, and actively requested the involvement of the United States to ensure the legality of its purchases.  It is unfortunate that New York State did not exercise the same due diligence.

Native Americans, Treaty Rights

The Treaty of Big Tree–Let’s Follow the Money

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The anniversary of the “Treaty of Big Tree,” signed on the 15th of September in 1797, is approaching. According to a New York State historical marker, the agreement was negotiated on land that now provides parking for students who attend the college where I teach.  It is a big deal in Geneseo. It is the one, big, historical event that occurred within the town’s bounds.

One thing that I think a lot of non-historians do not realize is the amount of research we do that never sees the light of day. Although we require our students quite often to come up with some meaningful sort of research project during the short fifteen weeks of a semester, we spend plenty of time following interesting questions that lead to dead ends.  It happens all the time. We are curious. We ask questions and, sometimes, despite our best efforts, we cannot find an answer.

A couple of years back I was asked to do some research for the Seneca Nation of Indians about the history of the annuities that often were attached to the agreements they entered into with New York State and the United States.  In exchange for their lands, Senecas would receive an annual payment.

I often see this bumper sticker in and around Indian Country.  The Indian Country Today Media Network, now apparently on hiatus, spoke frequently of broken treaties.  But some treaties, it must be remembered, were little more than real estate transactions in which white people obtained a title to Indian lands in return for very little at all.

I have always done research on Big Tree, but I had never bothered to look at whether the United States had fulfilled its part of the bargain. Certainly it acquired a lot of land. But did it pay to the Senecas what they were owed?  I travel with footnotes.

I tell the story of the treaty at Big Tree in Native America.  It is an important moment in the history of the Senecas.  Robert Morris had acquired from earlier land speculators a right of preemption, or first purchase, to all the Seneca lands in New York state. He sold this right to the Holland Land Company in December of 1792.[1]  A well-financed syndicate of Dutch merchants and bankers, the Holland Land Company was much better equipped than Morris to oversee the actual opening up of the Seneca homeland to white invasion and settlement—a massive undertaking that involved administering an enormous territory, and absorbing the costs associated with surveying, building roads, and laying out towns.[2]  Before they would pay, however, the Holland investors insisted that Morris extinguish the Senecas’ title to the lands in question.

What did that mean? It meant holding a treaty, and negotiating with the Senecas.  In 1797 Morris began laying plans for a council.  Because Morris was ill and because he feared prosecution for debt should he leave his home in Philadelphia, his son Thomas traveled to Big Tree on the Genesee River to conduct the treaty. (The treaty was held, according to a New York State historical marker, near one of the parking lots on my campus).  The story of this sordid council, involving the use of alcohol at the treaty ground and the bribing of important Seneca leaders, has been told many times before. My treatment in Native America is inspired by the great books written by Anthony F. C. Wallace and Laurence Hauptman, which are required reading for those who wish to understand the Iroquois.[3]

Morris obeyed the letter, if not the spirit, of the federal Indian Trade and Intercourse Law, the statute which governed relations between natives and non-natives.  The law required that for a purchase of Indian lands to be legally valid, the purchase must be overseen by the United States, and the resulting agreement must be approved by the United States Senate.  Morris requested and obtained the appointment of a federal agent, and the Senate did ratify the agreement. And at Big Tree, on the campus where I offer my courses in Iroquois history, the Senecas parted with all of their land, that huge region from the Genesee River westward to the Great Lakes and the Niagara River, save for 200,000 acres distributed across eleven reservations.  In exchange for this massive cession, Morris agreed to pay “the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, to be by the said Robert Morris vested in the stock of the bank of the United States, and held in the name of the President of the United States, for the use and behoof of the said nation of Indians.”  The Senecas would receive as a payment, each year, the interest earned on this investment.[4] 

So let’s follow that money, as far as the sources allow.  That was easier said than done.  I am no accountant.

In March of 1798 the United States used the $100,000 it had received from Robert Morris to purchase 205 shares in stock of the Bank of the United States “to be held in trust” for the Senecas “by the President of the United States.”  The dividends on this investment averaged slightly more than seven thousand dollars a year, though some of the revenues that would otherwise have been delivered to the Senecas were withheld to purchase additional stock: 9 shares in 1804 at a cost of $5328.00, an additional share in 1806 for $522.00, and five more shares in 1807 for a sum of $2580.00.  With the exception of this combined amount of 8430 dollars, the increase produced by the Big Tree investment was delivered to the Senecas by federal agents.  The dividend, paid twice a year, amounted to a minimum of sixteen dollars per share between 1798 and 1802, or $3280 every six months.[5]

The Bank of the United States, part of Alexander Hamilton’s (Stop singing, please) ambitious but controversial program for developing the new nation’s economy, had received a twenty-year charter from Congress in 1791.  When the Bank ceased its operations in 1811, the stock was liquidated, producing a sum of $95,040. (This sum was less than the $100,000 initially invested owing to shifts in the value of the stock).  The War Department credited $1980.00 of this sum to fund its Indian appropriations account, while investing the remaining $93,060.00 in 6% stocks in the name of the President of the United States, to be held in trust for the Seneca Indians.

The Senecas watched closely these funds, and saw the annual dividend as essential to their survival.  They said this, in writing, time and again.  A large group of “Seneca chiefs” told Secretary of War William Eustis in 1811, after the expiration of the Bank’s charter, that “we are told the field where our Money was planted is become barren.”  What they hell, they seemed to be saying. This concerned the Senecas, the chiefs said, because “our money has heretofore been of great service to us.  It has helpt us to support our old People, and our Women and Children.”  The Senecas sought assurance that the Big Tree fund—the result of their leaders’ difficult decision to transform their lands in western New York into an annual payment—would continue to be paid.  “Brother,” the chiefs wrote to Eustis, “we do not understand your ways of doing business,” and “this think is heavy on our minds.”  The Senecas wanted to continue “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand, but this weight is heavy. We hope,” they concluded, that “you will remove it.”[6]

I am fairly certain that these Seneca chiefs understood more than they let on.  Signed by a large number of prominent Seneca leaders, the “Talk of the Seneca Chiefs” must have occasioned some alarm in the War Department.  With war with Great Britain looming, the chiefs suggested that if the United States did not uphold its part of the bargain and see to the continued payment of the dividends, they might then cease “to hold our White Brethren of the United States by the hand,” and instead embrace those other white brethren, who stood poised on the opposite side of the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, with whom they had aligned during American Revolution. Don’t mess with us. You need us to help secure the Niagara frontier.

The interest earned on the investment after 1811 produced only $5618 per year, but owing to the importance of the Senecas as allies while the United States muddled through its conflict with England, the sum of $6000 was paid to them from the general funds of the Indian department.  This fund, in turn, was credited with the dividend produced by the stock.  This arrangement continued until 1826 when the 6% stock was liquidated, producing $93,602.67, which the War Department invested in 3% stock.  The dividends, falling well short of the $6000 to which the Senecas had grown accustomed, posed a problem for the administration of John Quincy Adams.  To pay the usual $6000 would draw down the fund and perhaps force the sale of the stock from which the dividends derived.  In any case, the government would be expending more than the interest on the investment.  President Adams determined nonetheless “that the government would continue to pay” the Senecas six thousand dollars annually, “taking upon itself the protection of the fund.”  The United States, Adams believed, “was bound in good faith to do so.”[7]

Adams was willing to spend federal funds to uphold the honor of the United States.  His successor, Andrew Jackson, clearly did not share this view.  Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney disliked the idea of paying the $6000.00 when “the sum remitted” was “greater than the interest received on the Stock.”  Anticipating the new president’s views, McKenney decided to offer to the Senecas in 1829 nothing more than the divided, a sum of less than three thousand dollars by 1829.[8]

This unilateral decision angered the Senecas.  An elderly Cornplanter, writing from Kinzua, appealed to President Jackson.  The Senecas, Cornplanter wrote, had been well satisfied with the annual dividend of $6000, but now the news from Washington “fills our minds with concern that we cannot get our Money nor be informed why we should not receive [it] as in former years.”[9]  Writing less than three weeks after Congress enacted the Indian Removal Bill, surely Cornplanter recognized that he had directed his appeal to an ardent expansionist who coveted Indian land and wanted all eastern Indians relocated to new lands in the west. The Big Tree payment, Cornplanter continued, “was but a little but it enabled us to purchase Salt & some Blanketts and that would be a great help to those who are active & till their land.”  The Senecas could not accept anything less than the 6% to which they were accustomed.[10]

The President did not believe that any law existed which authorized him to pay to the Senecas a sum greater than the value produced by the stock.  Sticking to his rigid and self-serving code of constitutional interpretation, Jackson punted the question to Congress, which in the 1830s did things.  The resulting bill, introduced in the House of Representatives, would provide the Senecas with a permanent annuity of $6000, while whatever proceeds emerged from the stock would be credited to the United States.

Senator John Forsyth of Georgia, a determined advocate of the ethnic cleansing his state carried out against the Cherokees and the Creeks, opposed any measure that went beyond the strict language of the Big Tree treaty.  Nothing in that agreement, he believed, obligated the United States to pay to the Senecas 6% forever.  Paying the $6000 he said,

 

had already cost the Government a very considerable amount  over and above the product of the stock, and now the question arises, are we bound to do more, after doing all we have already gratuitously performed?  But it is said the Indians have been given to understand that the full amount of six thousand dollars should be paid to them. Who gave them to understand this? Who had a right to do so? And yet it was on such loose declarations that the whole merits of this claim seemed to rest.  It is contended that the Government is bound to realize to these Indians any expectations they may have been induced to entertain.  It is true, it is said that the late President of the United States [Adams], when the subject was before him, had given them these assurances. This, however, did not establish the justice of the demand.  He could see no sort of obligation on the part of the Government to pay them more than the amount produced by their stock.[11]

Forsyth’s argument failed to persuade a critical number of his colleagues, which is surprising given how they felt about Indians, and the bill became law in February of 1831.  Thereafter, the law read,

the proceeds of the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, being the amount placed in the hands of the President of the United States, in trust, for the Seneca tribe of Indians, situated in the State of New York, be hereafter passed to the credit of the Indian appropriation fund; and that the Secretary of War be authorized to receive, and pay over to the Seneca tribe of Indians, the sum of six thousand dollars annually, in the way and manner as heretofore practiced.

A subsequent act, signed into law in December of 1831, paid to the Senecas $2914.40, “that being the balance due on the annuity payable to said Indians for the year one thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine.”[12]

Congress did on a number of subsequent occasions revisit the Big Tree annuity.  An act passed in June of 1846 provided that “certain stocks, etc. held in trust for the Senecas should be cancelled and the funds deposited in the Treasury at 5 percent interest and the interest paid to the Senecas annually.”[13]  Fifty-three years later, in March of 1909, Congress directed the Secretary of the Treasury to place on the books of the Treasury Department “to the credit of the Seneca Indians of New York, the sum of $118,050, such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority of the act of June 27, 1846.”  Congress authorized the Treasury Secretary in 1909 to place on the books of the treasury department $118,050, “such sum to bear interest at 5 percent until withdrawn for the Indians, being the value of stocks held in trust for the Indians and taken by the United States and cancelled under the authority” of the 1846 act.  This sum, Congress decided, the Treasury secretary would pay  “per capita to the members of the tribe entitled thereto.”[14]

I am not sure what happened as we carry the story through the rest of the nineteenth century and into and through the twentieth. The records of congressional appropriations show that the Congress continued to appropriate the $6000 dollars each year to pay its obligations under the Big Tree treaty.  Seneca Nation records, however, suggest that these payments were not received until relatively recently. I still have work to do to be able to sort this out.

But here is the thing. Honor Indian Treaties.  But a lot of them were not honorable at all, and the terms of many of them were never written with Indians’ interests in mind. Students in my Native American Survey course has just finished reading Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, which says so much in such a breezy manner.  “Treaties,” King wrote, “were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land.” Rather, “they were vehicles for acquiring land.  Almost without fail, throughout the history of North America, every time Indians signed at reaty with Whites, Indians lost land.”

So let’s think about what we mean when we call upon the United States to honor its treaties. Certainly the government should keep its word. Certainly in the realm of Indian affairs it has behaved despicably and irresponsibly. Certainly treaties have been broken many times, with often devastating consequences. But, in many instances, native communities would have been better off if these treaties had never been negotiated, never signed, never ratified, and never proclaimed by the president.  So many of them were coerced, or fraudulent, or exploitative.  The colonization of this continent, and the dispossession of native peoples, to a great extent was achieved through the instrument of treaties.

 

[1] Charles E. Brooks, Frontier Settlement and the Market Revolution: The Holland Land Purchase, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 13-14.

[2] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-180.  The Holland Land Company Papers are located at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia.

[3] Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 179-183; Taylor, Divided Ground, 313-316; Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 91-92; Norman B. Wilkinson, “Robert Morris and the Treaty of Big Tree,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 40 (September 1953), 257-278.

[4] Kappler, comp., Treaties, 1028.

[5] LR OSW IA, 1: 0188.

[6] Talk of the Seneca Chiefs, 9 October 1811, LR OSW IA, 1: 714.

[7] Nourse Report, 18 March 1829, LR OIA-Seneca, Roll 808.

[8] McKenney to Secretary of War John H. Eaton, 17 March 1829, Ibid.

[9] John O’Bail (Cornplanter) to Andrew Jackson, 2 August 1830, Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress, 3 February 1831, p. 79.

[12] Available at the Library of Congress “Century of Lawmaking” website.

[13] “Compilation of Material Relating to the Indians of the United States, etc., by Subcommittee on Indian Affairs of the Committee of Public Lands, House of Representatives, Pursuant to H. Res. 66, 81st Congress, 2d. Sess., 13 June 1950, Serial No. 30,” in Paul G. Reilly Collection, Buffalo State College, Box 37, p. 12.

[14] Ibid., 13.