Letters

Attend me closely now, child, if you would understand your heritage. To the simple it might appear that my grandparents’ ends would best be served by their doing all they could to ensure a French victory in North America. But so skillfully & harmoniously did the French get on with the Indians — advancing them guns & ammunition on credit against the hunting & trapping season, providing them free gunsmithing at every fort, plying them liberally with gifts of blankets, iron utensils, & brandy — the red men became insidiously dependent on the white man’s skills & manufactures, ever farther removed from their former self-reliance. They had also been decimated & re-decimated by the white man’s measles, influenza, & smallpox, against which they had no hereditary defences. And the survivors, for a hundred years already by 1750, were helpless drunkards. An immediate wholesale victory of the French over the British, my grandparents fear’d, would so extend this “benevolent” exploitation as to make impossible the forging of an independent, regenerated Indian nation: in another century, they believed, the French would be the real masters of the continent, the Indians their willing, rum-soak’d subordinates. What was needed (so they came to feel by the mid-1750’s) was a temporary British victory in America — especially under the puritanical Jeffrey Amherst, who did not believe in giving rum, or anything else, to the worthless savages. The Indian nations would then be obliged to unite for their own survival, so impossible were the Anglo-Saxons to deal with; and they would be freed of the curse of alcohol will-they nill-they. Once a genuine, sober confederacy had been forged among, say, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, the principal tribes of the Upper Great Lakes, & the nations of the Ohio Valley & the Illinois, the Indians could accept from a position of strength the assistance of the defeated French in driving out the British, whilst remaining masters in their own house.

Thus their strategy, to implement which my grandparents decided that Fort Niagara — controlling the very jugular of the Great Lakes and thus of the whole upper & central parts of the continent — must fall to the British! Lord Amherst’s campaign against the French had come, by 1759, to center on the taking of that fort: for the Indians he had only contempt, but his blockade of the St. Lawrence had had the incidental effect of cutting off the supply of cognac with which the French marinated their Indian diplomacy, and thus of driving the thirsty Senecas (in whose territory the Fort lay), and the Six Nations generally, into hopeful new alliances with the English. The force Amherst dispatcht against Niagara included, along with British regulars & colonial militiamen, some 1,900 of these Iroquois, among whom Andrew Cooke III moved easily under the nom de guerre of John Butler: it was the largest such force ever assembled on the side of the British. Their plan was not to take the fort by storm, but to besiege it, cut off the reinforcement of its garrison, and so force its surrender. The French relief force, sent up promptly from the Ohio Valley & Detroit to lift the siege, consisted of 1,600 Indians — Hurons, Mingoes, Shawnees — and 600 French: amongst the latter was Andrée, in the rôle of a half-breed habitant camp-follower.

By early July the French force was assembled at Presque Isle and ready to march up the shore of Lake Erie. Andrew slipt down from the British camp, Andrée up from the French, to a week-long tryst and strategy-conference on Chautauqua Lake, betwixt the two armies. There, as they embraced among the sugar maples & black willows which line that water, they workt out their tactics, not only for the battle to come, but for the larger campaign ahead. Andrew’s candidate to lead the projected Indian confederation was a young war-chief of the Senecas named Kyashuta: the Iroquois had long been the most politically advanced of Indians; they had 200 years of confederacy already under their belts, a confederacy so effective that Benjamin Franklin had proposed it as the model for a union of the British colonies in America. They were generally fear’d for their ferocity: they had never been much committed to either the French or the English; and their combination of matriarchy & patriarchy (the Sachems were all male, but the power of their nomination was reserved exclusively to a council of women) appeal’d to my grandparents. And the Senecas (in whose country they were trysting) were the fiercest, least “Eastern,” & most independent of the Iroquois.